Martin Gak - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Martin Gak
martingale.com, 2023
I have discovered in my catalogue of faith, a hidden conviction that has nourished many of my int... more I have discovered in my catalogue of faith, a hidden conviction that has nourished many of my intellectual proclivities and aspirations for as long as I can remember and even if for a period of time (especially about my doctoral studies), a certain democratic impetus guided my desire to vindicate the then very fashionable elevations of translation and its dignities to the same parnassus in which original works and their authors dwelled in eternity, I could not but continue to hold translation to be no more and no less than a hopelessly inadequate device meant to amend the intellectual deficiencies of the reader and never to be taken as a legitimate expression of the original.
Rumores
O presente artigo se concentra nas questões ideológicas da vigilância digital, examinando exemplo... more O presente artigo se concentra nas questões ideológicas da vigilância digital, examinando exemplos empíricos específicos retirados de reportagens publicadas sobre o caso Snowden, com o objetivo de matizar o lugar da política, da ética, dos valores e afetos mobilizados por governos e pela elite corporativa justificando a prática de coleta de dados pessoais numa associação entre três das redes globais de “segurança”. Analisa-se a constituição de um espaço político como esfera de atuação que emerge em contraposição ao que estamos nomeando como mecanismos “quase-totalitários”, baseados na ideia de alinhamento, conluio e imbricamento das três redes de segurança. Os diferentes aspectos desse quase-totalitarismo incluem: o monopólio do planejamento digital em relação à vigilância e a comunicação secreta entre governos, a elite corporativa e, algumas vezes, ONGs; o papel das ONGs na sociedade civil como forma de contornar processos democráticos; as políticas de associação entre empresas que...
The battles aroudn the content of moral judgments and, thus, of their object that find their ope... more The battles aroudn the content of moral judgments and, thus, of their object that find their opening salvoe in Hume's famous challenge, demand the fairly strict drawing of moral cartographies aroudn to territories, the external where these moral objects belong in the world and internal where they are the product of psychologies.
In Plato’s Doctrine of Truth, Heidegger revisits one of the best-known tales of the Western canon... more In Plato’s Doctrine of Truth, Heidegger revisits one of the best-known tales of the Western canon. Indeed, Heidegger’s treatment of Plato allegory of the cave has as its central concern the question about the relation between truth and education.
The Public Sphere: Migration of Normative Principles and the Digital Construction of Transnationa... more The Public Sphere: Migration of Normative Principles and the Digital Construction of Transnational Ethics "I consider you very fortunate in having been able to go so methodically to work with your pupils. If your very little ones run about with their dolls, and stitch together a few petticoats for them ; if the elder sisters will then take care of the younger, and the whole household know how to supply its own wants, and one member of it help the others, the further step into life will not then be great, and such a girl will find in her husband what she has lost in her parents. Goethe, Elective Affinities The public sphere as a distinct horizon within which to place the political practices of the public was first articulated by Habermas in 1962. Most certainly, his account of the topology of political transactions can be traced back to philosophical times immemorial but, by and large, it is the conjugation of kantian, hegelian and marxist elements that first coalesce in a fairly integral model of public socio-political practices in The Structural Transformation of Public Sphere. 1 Habermas seminal account of the public sphere is, by and large, not normative. Rather, the book, describes the constitutive mechanics of the space in which the rational deliberation coalesces to affect the governance of the res publica. Habermas' model of normativity is to be found elsewhere, namely in his Theory of Communicative Action. Following a fregean formulation, we may say that while the 1962 book describes the physics of public political deliberation, the 1981 book presents its laws. As he himself has pointed out in responding to his critics, the account of the public sphere in the The Structural Transformation of Public Sphere, was the articulation of a paradigm for understanding the space of political deliberation and not a model of what the domain of political deliberation ought to be. This distinction between a description of constitutive features and prescriptions is critical if easy to miss. What the public sphere is not Partly due to poor reading habits and partly due to political and professional agendas, the conflation of descriptive and normative accounts of public deliberation have resulted in the staggering misunderstanding of the concept of public sphere especially among semi-specialized academics in the various subfields of political sociology. Few expressions have become such obvious telltales of the misunderstanding of the category as the idea that a public sphere 'must 1 Perhaps the most significant direct predecessor of Habermas' work is Dewey's The Public and its Problems. Dewey has an instrumental account of public association that is defined along the lines of social contract dynamics mostly arranged to advance the needs of individuals intended in affecting the transactions of the state. See J. Dewey, The Public and its Problems , Chicago, MA, Gateway Books, 1946, pp. 15.
Toilets in modern water closets rise up from the floor like water lilies. The architect does all ... more Toilets in modern water closets rise up from the floor like water lilies. The architect does all he can to make the body forget how paltry it is, and to make man ignore what happens to his intestinal wastes after the water from the tank flushes them down the drain. Even though the sewer pipelines reach far into our houses with their tentacles, they are carefully hidden from view, and we are happily ignorant of the invisible Venice of shit underlying our bathrooms, bedrooms, dance halls, and parliaments. Milan Kundera in The Unbearable Lightness of Being All is designed A cursory look at our surroundings should suffice to show that our lives are carried out in the depth of a designed environment. So prevalent is the presence of design in our experience that the fact that our environment is designed has become transparent and in this transparency, invisible. Sheltered in the inconspicuousness and normalcy of daily use, the normative might of the rules that issue from the objects of our use determining our customary doings becomes lost from view. Virtually all our doings—both voluntary and, more remarkably, involuntary actions—are framed, determined, oriented and guided by our interactions with objects of human invention and manufacture. Nature, our own and around us, has been counterfeited. This, however, is not necessarily a bad thing. The park, the animal, the field, the sky and the mountain, all those things that we insist in calling 'nature' are little more than impostors. By design, nature has receded out of sight and the often-heard political summon of its proverbial purity expressing naturalist appeals to biological authenticity are politically suspect. We are not in nature and the traces of nature that remain with us are the product of our invention. By design,
Levinas' attack on the putative primordiality of ontology has spawned among some of his readers a... more Levinas' attack on the putative primordiality of ontology has spawned among some of his readers a curious form of Manichaeism, which associates ethics with the good and ontology—in broad strokes—with a deviation from some presumably dutiful deference to the priority of the Other. This reading assumes, first, that 'ethics', for Levinas, is synonymous with goodness and, second, that to act ethically is nothing more and nothing less than to 'respect the alterity of the other' by suspending totalization. The advocates of this pious Levinas seem to take his entire metaphysical project to be the philosophical scaffolding to just one normative principle: thou shall not totalize. Thus, questions about what one ought to do seem reasonably easy to resolve: actions are 'ethical' when they defer to the mysterious infinity of the other and bad when they reify it in ontological categories. These readers take the critique advanced in the pages of Totality and Infinity ( TI) and of Otherwise than Being ( OB) to be nothing but a complete and final rejection of ontology. However, the substantive normative claims entailed in this apparent vilification of ontology as a cognitive drive, attribute to Levinas a moral theory that is, at best, hard to pinpoint in his work and at worst in direct conflict with the radical priority of ethics which is normally taken—often, even by those same readers—to anchor the entire Levinasian project. Indeed if we take seriously the claim that ethics is constitutive
It has been often pointed out that one problem, perhaps the furthest reaching problem, of the con... more It has been often pointed out that one problem, perhaps the furthest reaching problem, of the constitutive primordiality of the manner in which Levinas uses the term ethics is the apparent impossibility of formulating a theory of action. If all is ethics, what is unethical? However, the author has a number of works in which he discusses the nature of prescription and its substantive contents at some length, these are his Talmudic Readings. In this paper, I will try to build a conceptual bridge between the apparently inert metaphysical primacy of ethics in the major works and the elucidation of norms and prescriptions in Levinas' account of the uptake of the law. In the next few pages, I will argue that it is possible to find in Levinas' account of what I shall call the performative uptake 1 of the law, the conditions necessary for the formulation of a theory of action-guiding principles without thus providing a substantive account of those principles. That is to say, we can infer from Levinas' account of the law, an account of the manner in which principles of adjudication and action-guidance take hold without thus committing to a substantive account of laws, that is of what the specific principles, in one or other system of law actually are. In arguing this position, I will make a few substantive claims. The first one is that according to Levinas the acceptance of law—not of any one law in particular but rather a primordial susceptibility to law—is the most radical expression of the constitutive primacy of ethics and that this acceptance is not deliberate but rather insurmountable and perhaps natural. The second one is that it is precisely within the scope of the articulation of this insurmountable susceptibility to law that the deliberate adjudication of particular laws and 1 The term uptake I borrow from J.L. Austin, who makes this form of active receptivity a central mechanism of his account of linguistic praxis in How to Do Things with Words.
This article was a short contribution to the book Jenseits der Ironie, Dialoge der Barmherzigkeit... more This article was a short contribution to the book Jenseits der Ironie, Dialoge der Barmherzigkeit (Beyond Irony, Dialogues over Mercy) and attempts to give a non-religious and political account of the concept of mercy, which has become a central concern to the papacy of Francis and which was the theme of the Special Jubilee Year (205 – 2ß16). What mysterious good is transacted in mercy? What is the mysterious good—merces-that the merciful heart dispenses? Mercy may be the most secular of all religious constitutive values. Of course, for the three great monotheistic religions, mercy is an attribute of the divine. But the mercy of men is first expressed among men. Mercy makes itself visible, first and foremost, among those with hearts. It is, indeed, those with a heart whose veins can be opened and thus turned into dust. Their limbs can be shattered and left to rot. The warmth of their blood can be diluted into the harshness of the soil on which it is spilled to be washed away by centuries of rains. Mercy is the lot of those who can tatter at the edge of no longer being. Mercy postpones the inexorable night of fragile existence and prevents the heart being just tissue, the bone becoming stone, the breath just oxygen or oxidized carbon. Mercy is called to negate a loss. The loss of life and limb. The loss of keen and kith. The loss of blood and heart and so on and so forth. The nature of the merces is most visible when one takes stock of the object of anguish. The Bar requested—what is being asked—becomes visible in the consumed face or paltry chest of hunger where the bones begins to take sole possession of the skin and give birth to a skeleton from the diminishing substance of man. It is visible in the broken will of the one who has lost everything and in the contorted gestures of pain of the one wounded. It is visible in the ghostly moaning of the ill or in the expression of panic of the one who's feet fail him and refuse the approach to the gallows and begs for his life. The merces is nourishment in the face of hunger, roof in the face of dispossession, the hand in the hour of failure, the shoulder in the wake of devastating loss, relief from the the pain that flows from the wound, cure for the illness, emancipation for the sorrow and spare for one's life. The prostrate, bowed and fractured body, the open hands exposing their emptiness and need, the glaring eyes filled with an inexhaustible loss and pray and the voice that punctuates the need with the demand of mercy, with the nakedness of the miserable please. The nourishing bread, the holding hand, the steadfast shoulder, the balsam and the bandage, the cure and the clemency restitute man to his identity and an identity to man. Irrespective of its particular form, all acts of mercy address the loss integrity of the one who has not eaten, of the one who is
Books by Martin Gak
martingale.com, 2023
I have discovered in my catalogue of faith, a hidden conviction that has nourished many of my int... more I have discovered in my catalogue of faith, a hidden conviction that has nourished many of my intellectual proclivities and aspirations for as long as I can remember and even if for a period of time (especially about my doctoral studies), a certain democratic impetus guided my desire to vindicate the then very fashionable elevations of translation and its dignities to the same parnassus in which original works and their authors dwelled in eternity, I could not but continue to hold translation to be no more and no less than a hopelessly inadequate device meant to amend the intellectual deficiencies of the reader and never to be taken as a legitimate expression of the original.
Rumores
O presente artigo se concentra nas questões ideológicas da vigilância digital, examinando exemplo... more O presente artigo se concentra nas questões ideológicas da vigilância digital, examinando exemplos empíricos específicos retirados de reportagens publicadas sobre o caso Snowden, com o objetivo de matizar o lugar da política, da ética, dos valores e afetos mobilizados por governos e pela elite corporativa justificando a prática de coleta de dados pessoais numa associação entre três das redes globais de “segurança”. Analisa-se a constituição de um espaço político como esfera de atuação que emerge em contraposição ao que estamos nomeando como mecanismos “quase-totalitários”, baseados na ideia de alinhamento, conluio e imbricamento das três redes de segurança. Os diferentes aspectos desse quase-totalitarismo incluem: o monopólio do planejamento digital em relação à vigilância e a comunicação secreta entre governos, a elite corporativa e, algumas vezes, ONGs; o papel das ONGs na sociedade civil como forma de contornar processos democráticos; as políticas de associação entre empresas que...
The battles aroudn the content of moral judgments and, thus, of their object that find their ope... more The battles aroudn the content of moral judgments and, thus, of their object that find their opening salvoe in Hume's famous challenge, demand the fairly strict drawing of moral cartographies aroudn to territories, the external where these moral objects belong in the world and internal where they are the product of psychologies.
In Plato’s Doctrine of Truth, Heidegger revisits one of the best-known tales of the Western canon... more In Plato’s Doctrine of Truth, Heidegger revisits one of the best-known tales of the Western canon. Indeed, Heidegger’s treatment of Plato allegory of the cave has as its central concern the question about the relation between truth and education.
The Public Sphere: Migration of Normative Principles and the Digital Construction of Transnationa... more The Public Sphere: Migration of Normative Principles and the Digital Construction of Transnational Ethics "I consider you very fortunate in having been able to go so methodically to work with your pupils. If your very little ones run about with their dolls, and stitch together a few petticoats for them ; if the elder sisters will then take care of the younger, and the whole household know how to supply its own wants, and one member of it help the others, the further step into life will not then be great, and such a girl will find in her husband what she has lost in her parents. Goethe, Elective Affinities The public sphere as a distinct horizon within which to place the political practices of the public was first articulated by Habermas in 1962. Most certainly, his account of the topology of political transactions can be traced back to philosophical times immemorial but, by and large, it is the conjugation of kantian, hegelian and marxist elements that first coalesce in a fairly integral model of public socio-political practices in The Structural Transformation of Public Sphere. 1 Habermas seminal account of the public sphere is, by and large, not normative. Rather, the book, describes the constitutive mechanics of the space in which the rational deliberation coalesces to affect the governance of the res publica. Habermas' model of normativity is to be found elsewhere, namely in his Theory of Communicative Action. Following a fregean formulation, we may say that while the 1962 book describes the physics of public political deliberation, the 1981 book presents its laws. As he himself has pointed out in responding to his critics, the account of the public sphere in the The Structural Transformation of Public Sphere, was the articulation of a paradigm for understanding the space of political deliberation and not a model of what the domain of political deliberation ought to be. This distinction between a description of constitutive features and prescriptions is critical if easy to miss. What the public sphere is not Partly due to poor reading habits and partly due to political and professional agendas, the conflation of descriptive and normative accounts of public deliberation have resulted in the staggering misunderstanding of the concept of public sphere especially among semi-specialized academics in the various subfields of political sociology. Few expressions have become such obvious telltales of the misunderstanding of the category as the idea that a public sphere 'must 1 Perhaps the most significant direct predecessor of Habermas' work is Dewey's The Public and its Problems. Dewey has an instrumental account of public association that is defined along the lines of social contract dynamics mostly arranged to advance the needs of individuals intended in affecting the transactions of the state. See J. Dewey, The Public and its Problems , Chicago, MA, Gateway Books, 1946, pp. 15.
Toilets in modern water closets rise up from the floor like water lilies. The architect does all ... more Toilets in modern water closets rise up from the floor like water lilies. The architect does all he can to make the body forget how paltry it is, and to make man ignore what happens to his intestinal wastes after the water from the tank flushes them down the drain. Even though the sewer pipelines reach far into our houses with their tentacles, they are carefully hidden from view, and we are happily ignorant of the invisible Venice of shit underlying our bathrooms, bedrooms, dance halls, and parliaments. Milan Kundera in The Unbearable Lightness of Being All is designed A cursory look at our surroundings should suffice to show that our lives are carried out in the depth of a designed environment. So prevalent is the presence of design in our experience that the fact that our environment is designed has become transparent and in this transparency, invisible. Sheltered in the inconspicuousness and normalcy of daily use, the normative might of the rules that issue from the objects of our use determining our customary doings becomes lost from view. Virtually all our doings—both voluntary and, more remarkably, involuntary actions—are framed, determined, oriented and guided by our interactions with objects of human invention and manufacture. Nature, our own and around us, has been counterfeited. This, however, is not necessarily a bad thing. The park, the animal, the field, the sky and the mountain, all those things that we insist in calling 'nature' are little more than impostors. By design, nature has receded out of sight and the often-heard political summon of its proverbial purity expressing naturalist appeals to biological authenticity are politically suspect. We are not in nature and the traces of nature that remain with us are the product of our invention. By design,
Levinas' attack on the putative primordiality of ontology has spawned among some of his readers a... more Levinas' attack on the putative primordiality of ontology has spawned among some of his readers a curious form of Manichaeism, which associates ethics with the good and ontology—in broad strokes—with a deviation from some presumably dutiful deference to the priority of the Other. This reading assumes, first, that 'ethics', for Levinas, is synonymous with goodness and, second, that to act ethically is nothing more and nothing less than to 'respect the alterity of the other' by suspending totalization. The advocates of this pious Levinas seem to take his entire metaphysical project to be the philosophical scaffolding to just one normative principle: thou shall not totalize. Thus, questions about what one ought to do seem reasonably easy to resolve: actions are 'ethical' when they defer to the mysterious infinity of the other and bad when they reify it in ontological categories. These readers take the critique advanced in the pages of Totality and Infinity ( TI) and of Otherwise than Being ( OB) to be nothing but a complete and final rejection of ontology. However, the substantive normative claims entailed in this apparent vilification of ontology as a cognitive drive, attribute to Levinas a moral theory that is, at best, hard to pinpoint in his work and at worst in direct conflict with the radical priority of ethics which is normally taken—often, even by those same readers—to anchor the entire Levinasian project. Indeed if we take seriously the claim that ethics is constitutive
It has been often pointed out that one problem, perhaps the furthest reaching problem, of the con... more It has been often pointed out that one problem, perhaps the furthest reaching problem, of the constitutive primordiality of the manner in which Levinas uses the term ethics is the apparent impossibility of formulating a theory of action. If all is ethics, what is unethical? However, the author has a number of works in which he discusses the nature of prescription and its substantive contents at some length, these are his Talmudic Readings. In this paper, I will try to build a conceptual bridge between the apparently inert metaphysical primacy of ethics in the major works and the elucidation of norms and prescriptions in Levinas' account of the uptake of the law. In the next few pages, I will argue that it is possible to find in Levinas' account of what I shall call the performative uptake 1 of the law, the conditions necessary for the formulation of a theory of action-guiding principles without thus providing a substantive account of those principles. That is to say, we can infer from Levinas' account of the law, an account of the manner in which principles of adjudication and action-guidance take hold without thus committing to a substantive account of laws, that is of what the specific principles, in one or other system of law actually are. In arguing this position, I will make a few substantive claims. The first one is that according to Levinas the acceptance of law—not of any one law in particular but rather a primordial susceptibility to law—is the most radical expression of the constitutive primacy of ethics and that this acceptance is not deliberate but rather insurmountable and perhaps natural. The second one is that it is precisely within the scope of the articulation of this insurmountable susceptibility to law that the deliberate adjudication of particular laws and 1 The term uptake I borrow from J.L. Austin, who makes this form of active receptivity a central mechanism of his account of linguistic praxis in How to Do Things with Words.
This article was a short contribution to the book Jenseits der Ironie, Dialoge der Barmherzigkeit... more This article was a short contribution to the book Jenseits der Ironie, Dialoge der Barmherzigkeit (Beyond Irony, Dialogues over Mercy) and attempts to give a non-religious and political account of the concept of mercy, which has become a central concern to the papacy of Francis and which was the theme of the Special Jubilee Year (205 – 2ß16). What mysterious good is transacted in mercy? What is the mysterious good—merces-that the merciful heart dispenses? Mercy may be the most secular of all religious constitutive values. Of course, for the three great monotheistic religions, mercy is an attribute of the divine. But the mercy of men is first expressed among men. Mercy makes itself visible, first and foremost, among those with hearts. It is, indeed, those with a heart whose veins can be opened and thus turned into dust. Their limbs can be shattered and left to rot. The warmth of their blood can be diluted into the harshness of the soil on which it is spilled to be washed away by centuries of rains. Mercy is the lot of those who can tatter at the edge of no longer being. Mercy postpones the inexorable night of fragile existence and prevents the heart being just tissue, the bone becoming stone, the breath just oxygen or oxidized carbon. Mercy is called to negate a loss. The loss of life and limb. The loss of keen and kith. The loss of blood and heart and so on and so forth. The nature of the merces is most visible when one takes stock of the object of anguish. The Bar requested—what is being asked—becomes visible in the consumed face or paltry chest of hunger where the bones begins to take sole possession of the skin and give birth to a skeleton from the diminishing substance of man. It is visible in the broken will of the one who has lost everything and in the contorted gestures of pain of the one wounded. It is visible in the ghostly moaning of the ill or in the expression of panic of the one who's feet fail him and refuse the approach to the gallows and begs for his life. The merces is nourishment in the face of hunger, roof in the face of dispossession, the hand in the hour of failure, the shoulder in the wake of devastating loss, relief from the the pain that flows from the wound, cure for the illness, emancipation for the sorrow and spare for one's life. The prostrate, bowed and fractured body, the open hands exposing their emptiness and need, the glaring eyes filled with an inexhaustible loss and pray and the voice that punctuates the need with the demand of mercy, with the nakedness of the miserable please. The nourishing bread, the holding hand, the steadfast shoulder, the balsam and the bandage, the cure and the clemency restitute man to his identity and an identity to man. Irrespective of its particular form, all acts of mercy address the loss integrity of the one who has not eaten, of the one who is