Seven years before the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic, Tom Sorell considered the conditions under which freedom might be restricted in a state of emergency, from the point of view of a ‘sober Hobbesian approach‘: The neo-Hobbesian framework I am outlining gives people legal latitude to become very attached to costume, literature,…
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Signs and Democracy
In this post I argue that signs are necessarily democratic. My reasoning depends on the definition of process signs from A Process Philosophy of Signs. It expands the meaning of democratic beyond a narrow political sense, before returning to the interdependence of two types of democracy: democracy of intervention and…
Continue ReadingRevisiting Style in Literary and Cultural Studies
My chapter ‘Do Signs have Styles?’ is now published in the collection Revisiting Style in Literary and Cultural Studies edited by Jasmin Herrmann, Moritz Ingwersen, Björn Sonnenberg-Schrank and Olga Ludmila Tarapata. Their volume is a fascinating selection of recent academic work on style. You can find a draft of my…
Continue ReadingLanguage and Process: Words, Whitehead and the World by Michael Halewood
If you are interested in process philosophy and language, I recommend Michael Halewood’s new book on Language and Process. The book is the first in my new series as editor (with Jeffrey A. Bell and Paul Livingston) for Edinburgh University Press, Intersections in Continental and Analytic Philosophy. We have other…
Continue ReadingThe Nostalgic Sublime
There is a strong argument against the idea of the nostalgic sublime. If the sublime leads to a drive to act in new ways, due to the enthusiasm released by simultaneous feelings of terror and attraction to a strange and inexplicable event, then the backward looking and stultifying qualities of…
Continue ReadingMetaphysics: Deleuze│Spencer-Brown
Some philosophers, struck with the recent discovery that no one set of metaphysical assumptions is necessary to communication, have fallen into the fallacy of thinking that we can communicate without any metaphysics at all… It is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, of discoveries in 2000 years to…
Continue ReadingManifest Destiny and the Sublime – Part 3: Necessarily Dangerous
In this final blog on the sublime and manifest destiny I will argue that the sublime is always at risk of leading to the violence of manifest destiny. I’ll also give more precise definitions and respond to a series of objections, referring back to the connection of manifest destiny to…
Continue ReadingManifest Destiny and the Sublime – Part 2: Reversing Perspectives
Having made the case for the connection between the sublime, fascism and imperialism in Arnold Fanck’s film SOS Eisberg, Lill-Ann Körber reverses perspectives and considers ‘sublime icebergs today’ in the Greenlandic film Nuummioq. These icebergs do not fit the conventional sublime of overawing size and power, sought out by the…
Continue ReadingManifest Destiny and the Sublime – Part 1: Manifest Destiny Returns
Following Donald Trump’s bluster about buying Greenland, the idea of manifest destiny had another resurrection: ‘There we get a sense of motion, as in…Manifest Destiny. Admittedly, Manifest Destiny is not a PC phrase. Yet trendy pieties aside, it’s hard to argue with the long-term logic of national expansion as key…
Continue ReadingMessi is not sublime (nor is Ronaldo)
My book on the egalitarian sublime has almost no sport in it. I avoid it for political and philosophical reasons. Politically, as entertainment, sports are the bread and circuses of our age, culminating in the sportswashing beloved of kleptocrats, monopolies and repressive governments. The problem with sport runs deeper than…
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