I hesitated calling this post ‘the everyday sublime’. The sublime I want to recommend doesn’t occur every day in the same way. On the contrary, it is an event interrupting daily repetition. It pulls new values into the everyday. Nonetheless, this sublime is everyday in the sense of within our…
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Risky Signs: Philosophy and Covid-19
In an earlier post, I discussed the politics of the restrictions of freedom during the Covid-19 pandemic in Tom Sorell’s new interpretation of Hobbes. Here, I consider the risks involved in the use of signs during the pandemic. Communication about Covid-19 and political responses to the pandemic have been dominated…
Continue ReadingDemocracy and Emergencies: Philosophy and Covid-19
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,…
Continue ReadingSigns 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 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 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 ReadingTruth as the fullest: on journalism in the age of fake news
This paper on truth and process philosophy follows from my talk at The Politics of (Post) Truth conference at Cumberland Lodge in October 2018 https://www.jamesrwilliams.net/the-politics-of-post-truth/ It is also a reflection on truth and the process philosophy of signs. Truth as the fullest: on journalism in the age of fake news
Continue ReadingCull the One Percent
Cull the one percent (a suggested process against inequality) ‘Under the Company’s beneficent influence, our customs are now steeped in chance.’ With the recent report from Oxfam confirming the obscene and growing inequalities of our current societies, I wonder whether it is time to institute a solution inspired by Borges’s…
Continue ReadingDeleuze and the Sublime
Deleuze and the sublime January 29, 2019 PHI research group, Deakin University Deakin Downtown. Level 12 Tower 2 – 727 Collins Street Melbourne 3008 Australia Details 11am. James Williams (Deakin). The end of all universal values: an anarchist takedown of the sublime 12pm. Lunch 1pm. Tim Deane-Freeman (Deakin). A murmuring place: the…
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