Post-Kantian European Philosophy Seminar (Tuesday - Week 6, MT25)

Abstract: This paper compares the approaches to history and temporality that can be found in the work of Guy Debord and Gillian Rose. Although it is often assumed to be a work of media theory, Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle (1967) is in fact a Hegelian-Marxist account of a society that has become separated from its own historical agency: the state of alienated ‘spectatorship’ that it diagnoses concerns not just the consumption of media images, but rather a kind of existential poverty, engendered by that separation. It contains two seldom-discussed chapters on time, and an ambitious philosophy of history. Rose’s social philosophy also involves a somewhat neglected concern with time and history, and it too draws on Hegel. For Rose, as in Debord, current social problems and divisions are to be rectified through finding collective political orientation to the future. Yet where Debord advocated militant revolution, Rose called for a ‘phenomenological’ work of ‘mourning’, wherein such orientation is to be found from reading the present in the light of its connections and complicities with the political failures of the past. In placing the two writers alongside one another, I discuss their relative merits, and I argue that Rose’s work is well suited to addressing some of the problems posed by Debord’s commitment to an almost messianic vision of revolution. In making this case, I propose that the way in which her work affords this suggests a novel argument for a critical approach to political and intellectual history.

Post-Kantian European Philosophy Seminar Convenors: Jack Wearing, Joseph Schear, Kate Kirkpatrick and Mark Wrathall.