Political Philosophy

Although intergenerational family transfers of private wealth should be limited on grounds of intergenerational justice, these same grounds can provide states with pro tanto reasons to support intergenerational charitable transfers of private wealth. This is because, given their distinctive governance structure and ability to exist over long time horizons, philanthropic institutions, unlike the nuclear family, can and should play three distinctive roles in helping a society fulfill its intergenerational obligations. First, they can be harnessed to counteract the short-termism and presentism of the democratic process, in a way that promotes the long-term interests of future generations. Second, they can supplement political institutions in fulfilling the ultimate purpose of the just savings principle, in circumstances where a regression from the steady-stage state to the accumulation stage is possible but highly unlikely. Third, they can complement political institutions in securing the reproduction of a particular form of capital—social capital—over time.

A partir dos usos necropolíticos da memória escrava no Brasil pós-abolição, este ensaio analisa a figura do escravo como um ponto de singularização e acúmulo de uma série de tecnologias de poder (soberanas, pré, proto e ultradisciplinares, bio e necropolíticas) que poderiam oferecer uma grade de inteligibilidade para compreender a governamentalidade colonial e suas relações paradoxais com a abolição e a liberdade. Convocando as relações entre memória, história e intempestivo, e por meio da articulação entre textos do pensamento político ocidental antigo, moderno e contemporâneo, propomos descrever de forma interdisciplinar as relações entre o escravo e o fundamento da autoridade política como lógica de necropoder subterrânea que atravessa as figuras aparentemente díspares do escravo, do imigrante europeu, do trabalhador livre e do empresário de si neoliberal. Conclui-se que o desaparecimento da forma-escravo antiga e colonial não determina o fim da lógica escravista, mas sua difusão generalizada na figura de um escravo informe a que os trabalhadores livres, empresários de si mesmos e imigrantes dão consistência hoje.

This essay introduces and theorizes the central concerns of this special issue, “Economies of Dispossession: Indigeneity, Race, Capitalism.” Financialization, debt, and the accelerated concentration of wealth today work through social relations already configured and disposed by imperial conquest and racial capitalism. In the Americas broadly and the United States specifically, colonization and transatlantic slavery set in motion the dynamics and differential racialized valuations that continue to underwrite particular forms of subjection, property, commerce, and territoriality. The conception of economies of dispossession introduced in this essay draws attention to the overriding importance of rationalities of abstraction and commensurability for racial capitalism. The essay problematizes the ways in which dispossession is conventionally treated as a self-evident and circumscribed practice of unjust taking and subtractive action. Instead, working across the lethal confluences of imperial conquest and racial capitalist predation, this essay critically situates the logic of propriation that organizes and underwrites predatory value in the historical present. Against the commensurabilities and rationalities of debt and finance capitalism, conditioned through the proprietary logics of settler colonialism and racial capitalism, the essay gestures toward alternative frameworks for building collective capacities for what the authors describe as a grounded relationality.

Katerina Kolozova is a Macedonian philosopher whose publications from last two decades aim to analyze various topics using François Laruelle’s “non-philosophy” or “non-standard philosophy.” Non-philosophy could be roughly described as radicalized deconstruction:
Laruelle claims that not everything can be grasped by a philosophy: for Laruelle, “philosophy is too serious an affair to be left to the philosophers alone.”1  Non-philosophy opposes the “principle of sufficient philosophy” through which philosophy determines and decides
what is real. According to Laruelle, the ultimate limit of philosophical thought and its self-proclaimed sufficiency lies in its inherent tendency to close itself in a transcendental system of autofetishist conceptions, which presume that one can grasp the Real (“The Real is neither capable of being known or even ‘thought,’ but can be described in axioms. [...]
Even ‘immanence’ only serves to name the Real which tolerates nothing but axiomatic descriptions or formulations.”) by a philosophical thought, or that the Real could be mediated only through human thought. Laruelle criticizes this tendency of philosophy, which is usually expressing itself through the structure of “philosophical Decision.” (“To philosophize is to decide Reality and the thoughts that result from this, i.e. to believe to
be able to order them in the universal order of the Principle of Reason [Logos].”) Katerina Kolozova use Laruelle’s non-philosophy to explore more explicitly political topics. In the Cut Of Th e Real (2014),  she criticized certain dogmatism of poststructuralist philosophy and feminist theory, namely their symptomatic rejection of the Real and the
One. In Toward a Radical Metaphysics of Socialism (2015) and The Lived Revolution (2016) Kolozova presented a rereading of Marx, whose work she found relevant for the critique of speculative philosophical dimension of the capitalist economy, embodied in the 2008 global finance crisis, and in the latter book, she explored the possibility of a new political solidarity, based on “bodies in pain.” Kolozova doesn’t call to philosophically reconstruct Marx’s thought for the current situation, but she goes back to Marx with the help of Laruelle’s non-Marxism, contrary to the usual approach of Marxist philosophers, who often
try to create certain philosophical system of Marx’s work. Together with Eileen A. Joy,  Kolozova edited the anthology After the “Speculative Turn” (2016),  which addressed recent realist and materialist tendencies in feminist philosophy. In her most recent book, Capitalism’s Holocaust of Animals (2019),  Kolozova aimed to explore broader philosophical foundations of neoliberal capitalism, and its dealing with nonhuman animals and their suffering. According to Kolozova, “We have to start by coming to terms with what we did to the animals in the constitutive act of philosophy and via proxy to all those dehumanised that belong to the species of man ‘by courtesy’ only.”