*]:pointer-events-auto [content-visibility:auto] supports-[content-visibility:auto]:[contain-intrinsic-size:auto_100lvh] scroll-mt-[calc(var(--header-height)+min(200px,max(70px,20svh)))]" dir="auto" tabindex="-1" data-turn-id="ceb65aa8-5000-4f4b-94d0-141444f6264e" data-testid="conversation-turn-2" data-scroll-anchor="true" data-turn="assistant"> Tábano is the semiannual publication of the Center for Philosophical Studies of the Pontifical Catholic University of Argentina, aimed at a specialized academic readership in Philosophy. It aspires to be a true reflection of the philosophical concerns of our Faculty, without being constrained by any particular area, topic, or school of thought, and seeking to engage in dialogue with the international philosophical community. Drawing on tradition, it aims to open itself to the most diverse philosophical currents until it becomes a living meeting place, a home for those who today dare to think beyond: to think the human being, his world, and his God.
Pontificia Universidad Católica Argentina. Centro de Estudiantes de Filosofía
Rancière, J. (2023). El tiempo del paisaje: Los orígenes de la revolución estética (F. López Martín, Trad.). Akal
Rancière nos tiene acostumbrados a trabajos de filosofía política, estética, historia, literatura o cine. En este ensayo nos presenta una investigación original sobre el arte del paisaje y provoca diversas preguntas que nos formulamos en relación con la naturaleza y su categorización dentro de la estética o filosofía del arte. El tiempo del paisaje es uno de sus últimos trabajos traducidos al castellano.
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Grassi, M. (2023). Phármakon: desalojos del deseo y la escritura. Sb Editorial, 160 pp. ISBN 978-631-6503-73-2.
En la orilla. Esta reseña —la escritura de esta reseña— comienza, como el primer capítulo de Phármakon: desalojos del deseo y la escritura, de Martín Grassi, en la orilla, “en ese espacio movedizo en el que el agua afirma la tierra; allí, donde la tierra estanca al agua” (p. 13). No podía comenzar en otro lado, porque mar adentro, el agua no se deja cortar; y tierra adentro, la arena se desplaza: en ambos casos, “no hay forma de trazar nada” (p. 13). En cambio, en la orilla, “allí donde la arena está empapada y el mar contenido; allí, solo allí, en el limen, en la frontera, en el espacio de contaminación; allí, solo allí, sí, la escritura” (p. 13).
University is the place where every discipline is acknowledged as a participant in the process of knowledge. Its “border” nature, however, makes the University a conflictive territory in between national economic and political interests and its calling to a universal search for truth. This conflict expresses itself in the double purpose of preparing professionals for the job market and of preparing the grounds for a system of knowledge. However, since University depends on economic and political interests, the logic of division of labor is transposed into the space of knowledge and produces a disciplinary specialization that loses any possibility of a system of knowledge. Interdisciplinary work is seen today as a way to heal this fracture within science, in the supposition that interdisciplinarity is something to be gained. However, in this essay, I argue that interdisciplinarity is the very nature of every discipline. Disciplines are not closed and self-sufficient totalities, but the result of an interaction between all discourses. The notion of singular plural knowledge expresses this relational nature of knowledge. Humanities help to stress this common belonging of every discourse in a number of ways: they root every discourse in the lived human experience, they also emphasize the symbolic articulation of every discipline, and, finally, they make it clear that every knowledge has a pragmatic motivation. In this way, they also invite every discourse to acknowledge itself as a contingent expression within a certain historical system of knowledge. University should, then, be seen as cenobium, a space in which all disciplines are congregated, and where the relational life of discourses can flourish.
Dossier: Are the Humanities (Un)Useful in the 21st Century?
The article aims to highlight the utility of fictions, particularly literary ones, for human life. The approach we propose is amphibious since it seeks to address this utility from both a philosophical perspective and, on the other hand, from the neuroscience of narrative. The presentation is divided into two main sections. The first explores the concept of fiction and explicitly addresses the need for human beings to create fictions in order to survive and form communities. The second provides an explanation of the primary function of imitation, incorporating the concept of mirror neurons, and lists the most relevant utilities of fictions for human life, such as: mental training to face real-life situations, the promotion of social cohesion, prosocial behaviors, social cognition, the internalization of moral norms, the consolidation of community identity, and the formation of personal identity.
Copyright (c) 2025 Martín Buceta https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
An Infinite Conversation: Philosophy and Literary Theory
This paper examines the interventions of philosophy in the programs of Communication Theory and Theory and Analysis of Literary Discourse, two subjects belonging to the Literature degree (Faculty of Philosophy and Letters, UCA). Specifically, three thematic cores are reviewed (the discursive construction of otherness, hermeneutics and deconstruction as reading practices and the delimitation of the boundaries between fiction and reality) that arise in literary studies and demand philosophical responses, establishing a back and forth movement between both disciplines. Finally, we postulate the close relationship between poetry and the philosophy developed by authors such as Derrida, Agamben and Lacoue-Labarthe at the turn of the 20th to the 21st century.
This paper reflects on the humanities. Among other things, it considers their current situation and the need to rethink their social role, as well as some challenges for the future. The impact of the working conditions of humanists on the results obtained as well as on the determination of their role in relation to society is addressed. Finally, the need to reestablish some of the basic characteristics of the humanities, such as the critical attitude of challenging the status quo, is analyzed.
The hemlock has gained its fame as the executioner of the legendary Socrates, whose death was a symbol of the importance and, at the same time, the danger of philosophy in a polis. Today, in a world governed by a utilitarian and productivist logic, the hemlock has become more subtle and less theatrical, though no less deadly. In contemporary states, philosophy and the humanities are branded as “useless”, compared to other fields of knowledge capable of providing tangible and marketable results. For these reasons, the humanities have been suffering from cutbacks and defunding in different parts of the world. But is philosophy as useless as the philosophers themselves tend to repeat, and are we not, by repeating this classic mantra, digging our own grave? My thesis is that the futility of philosophy is useless. Futility is nothing more than a refuge, a disguise. As Nietzsche denounced, philosophy for centuries disguised itself as useless and as an ascetic, indifferent to the mundane, in order to legitimize its own work. Paradoxically, its disguise today achieves the opposite effect: the attire that once generated respect and fear before others is today the reason why it is marked as something disposable.
Copyright (c) 2025 Mateo Belgrano https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Gilles Deleuze: Schizo-analysis vs. Dialectical Materialism. Part I.
This monographic study (which is divided into two articles that will be published consecutively in this Journal) is dedicated to studying the way in which Gilles Deleuze approached the psycho-political problem of male domination and male psycho-sex-political violence. To do so, it will be necessary to start from the question that questions the genetic relationship that the Patriarchy (as a mega-network of male alliances of sex-power) has with the State (as a way of organizing human sociability) and with Capitalism (as a way of organizing human productivity). Around this genetic relationship, Deleuze will postulate, following the Marxist sinologist Ferenc Tökei, that the ‘freed slave’ (ancestor of the modern proletarian) was the key male social personification in the patriarchal genesis of Capitalism by the State, with the psycho-sexual exploitation of women (prostitution) being a first-order enterprise for the understanding of this genesis. According to Schizo-analysis, psycho-sexual and libidinal exploitation is the ratio of economic exploitation and class domination. Therefore, we cannot address this genetic relationship between Patriarchy, State and Capital (regarding male violence) without addressing, in this “Part I”, the Deleuze/Guattari’s critiques to Marx/Engels: acratic schizo-analysis (as an analysis of machine processes) versus dialectical materialism (as an analysis of dialectical processes). Now, is dialectical materialism operative (in the Critic and in the Clinic) when it comes to understanding and characterizing (and fighting against) male psycho-sexual violence, such as prostitution? How did Marx, Engels, Bebel and Riazánov characterize (from dialectical materialism) the prostitution, the prostitute, and the trick/john? Don’t they end up incurring in an economic and exchanger reductionism (in sexual matters) that turns invisible the patriarchal causes of male domination and violence, even becoming its unsuspected guarantor “from the left”? This will be the central problem of “Part II”. Our social concept of ‘Mental Health’ depends directly on the way of characterizing these psycho-sexual political problems.
Dossier Gilles Deleuze: 100 Years Since His Birth, 30 Years Since His Death
“The cosmic artisan: a homemade atomic bomb”
For Deleuze and Guattari, art is a bomb, and the artist is a revolutionary, creating incendiary devices that explode beyond our expectations, our regulations, and our representative norms. But what is this art explosion? It is the raw force of sensation, a sensation that goes beyond the limits of our ability to represent it, something that is always new and undetermined by our physical, conscious or historical conditions. This overwhelming sensation emerges from Deleuze’s fascination with Kant’s sublime, which in a significantly altered form emerges in Difference and Repetition as the key to Deleuze’s own aesthetic, which is founded on the discord of the faculties. Deleuze’s revisionist reading of the sublime opens Kant’s system to new possibilities, ones even Kant himself was not aware of. The sublime continues to be the principle of Deleuze’s aesthetic in his later work, in particular in the Cinema books, and Logic of Sensation, Francis Bacon.
This work aims to analyse Alain Badiou’s critique of Gilles Deleuze’s Logic of Sense and theory of the event in Logics of Worlds. This is done under the hypothesis that Badiou axiomatizes Deleuze to mathematically scrutinize the mainframe of Logic of Sense and finally break away with the empiricist approach towards the appearance of the bodies. In doing so, Badiou is able to formalize the resurgence of multiplicities per operation of the inconsistent multiple. Henceforth, this work focuses on Badiou’s employment of Deleuzian transcendentalism as an argumentative device to purport the formal condition of the appearance of bodies or multiplicities, as the vitalist analytic of the undifferentiated bodies is considered refuted.
An immanent and relational ethics based on Gilles Deleuze's joint interpretation of Nietzsche and Spinoza.
For Deleuze, ethics is an experimental knowledge: it is about composing relations, testing whether a new connection increases the body’s potency or its depotency. This article pursues a central objective: to show the elements necessary for the construction of an immanent and relational ethics that is not based on the model of moral judgment, but rather as an experimental praxis based on Deleuze’s interpretation of Spinoza’s ethics and Nietzsche’s philosophy.
The deleuzo-guattarian concept of agencement and its reception in Manuel DeLanda
In this paper, we trace the concept of agencement in the work of Deleuze and Guattari, following its adjustments and modifications from The Anti-Oedipus (1972) to A Thousand Plateaus (1980), passing through Kafka, for a minor literature (1975). Next, we will present the concept of assemblage in Manuel DeLanda, attending to its minimal and extended versions and trying to make explicit its points of contact and tension with the French thinkers. Throughout this overview, we will try to show the genealogy of the concept taken up by DeLanda, as well as the difference between the concerns to which agencements respond and those to which assemblages respond. The transformation of the concept, in this sense, shows a displacement of the centrality of language in favor of an ontology articulated with the empirical and formal sciences, in which the notion of emergence will be central.
This essay, presented at the SPEP 2024 conference in Rochester, NY (USA), complements Alan Schrift’s talk on “Deleuze Universitaire” (linking Deleuze’s books to topics in courses he taught and especially to annual subjects required for preparing the French national agrégation examination) by studying the experimental side of Deleuze’s teaching in the deliberately experimental university, Vincennes, created in 1968-69. Given the importance of Vincennes itself as an educational experiment, Deleuze’s teaching there develops a particular kind of pedagogy that I trace, both while at Vincennes (until 1980), then at St. Denis-Paris 8 up to his retirement (1987). Finally, I consider how the work he pursued in these seminars constitutes the bases for several project in the “beyond” of Deleuze’s retirement.
Presentation: Gilles Deleuze: at 100 years of his birth, 30 of his death
This year at Tábano we have prepared a special issue that wishes to highlight a significant moment in the field of philosophy and critical theory: the 30th anniversary of the death of Gilles Deleuze and the 100th anniversary of his birth. As a philosopher whose work continues to shape contemporary thought, Deleuze’s legacy is one that invites continual exploration and reinterpretation. This issue is dedicated to two primary aims: first, to delve deeply into the concepts that Deleuze developed throughout his extensive body of work, and second, to scrutinize how his thought is being recuperated, reinterpreted, and applied by contemporary philosophers.
SAVIGNANO, A. (2022) El problema de los otros en Jean-Paul Sartre: magia, conflicto y generosidad. Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires: Sb Editorial, 304 pp. ISBN 978-987-8918-42-6.
Este libro consiste en un recorrido por la teoría de la intersubjetividad de Jean-Paul Sartre, desde la década de 1930 hasta los Cahiers pour une moral, escritos entre 1947 y 1948, aún no traducidos al castellano. Alan Savignano reconstruye las etapas del pensamiento sartriano relevando los conceptos fundamentales de la obra y sus cambios y matices. El ensayo ofrece a la comunidad una exposición crítica del proyecto de emancipación moral y social que Sartre prometió en El ser y la nada y que desarrolló en los Cahiers, póstumamente publicados. El autor se propone corregir la interpretación hegemónica de la teoría de la intersubjetividad sartriana, según la cual las relaciones humanas serían exclusivamente conflictivas y que sugeriría un individualismo pesimista. Pero un balance íntegro sobre la teoría de la intersubjetividad en Sartre demanda un estudio detallado de los Cahiers, tarea que el autor de este libro satisface con creces.
The intersubjective dimension of hope in Gabriel Marcel
This article develops Marcel's understanding of hope as a result of an experience of intersubjective communion. In such a way that hope opens up a new horizon of meaning for the life itinerary, already announcing an imperishable intersubjective plenitude. Thus, we will be able to recognize a source of personal and community renewal in the experience of intersubjectivity, as a metaphysical condition of personal existence that responds to man's deep demand for transcendence.
Merleau-Ponty against the project of a universal grammar: logic and language
Throughout a variety of texts, Merleau-Ponty criticized the Husserlian project which he alternatively called a “universal grammar” and an “eidetics of language”, and to which he associated a series of consequences: the claim that universal grammar entails (I) the prior knowability of universal “forms” with respect to natural languages; (II) the univocity with which words in natural languages would be related to their meanings, and the transparency which this univocal relation would present to consciousness; (III) the secondariness of language with respect to thought, and (IV) universal intertranslatability. The French author rejects these consequences and therefore questions the plausibility of the universalistic project in question. However, it is not clear that these alleged consequences are actually entailed by the proposal Merleau-Ponty is discussing, or that, if obtained, they take the specific form necessary for the criticism to succeed. We will try to show that such a criticism ultimately fails.
Building on my previous exploration of the role of dance in the contemporary French political philosopher Jacques Rancière’s Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art, first published in French in 2011, the present essay turns to another book originally published in the same year, The Intervals of Cinema. Having previously established that the core of Rancière’s philosophical method is an analysis of philosophical homonyms into figurative dancing conceptual partners, I begin by applying that method to the first chapter of Intervals, “Cinematic Vertigo: Hitchcock to Vertov and Back”. There I identify two series of such dancing partners, as follows: Hitchcock’s image-controlling, capitalist vertiginous fall, and Vertov’s movement-equalizing, communist balanced dance. I then critique the implicit marginalizing of women and female bodies in the films and chapter, including Hitchcock’s protagonist’s best friend and ex-fiancé, and Vertov’s cosmetologists and switchboard operators. Finally, I offer a corrective from the proto-feminist life of my grandmother, a onetime cosmetologist, switchboard operator, and Glamour Shots amateur model, my grandmother, Louise Nunnelley, or “Mamaw. .Such are the unacknowledged material basis of Rancière’s radical democratic philosophy, the specifically-embodied and positioned female dancers who continue to get lost in his figurative dance.
We would like to live “under the sun of God” (Eccl 8:15), but we find ourselves Under the Sun of Satan. Nobody has seen this, and also known this, better than Bernanos –for literature reaches what neither philosophy nor theology can say, in particular when it comes to the torment of evil. Hidden under the appearance of the “Picardy horse dealer,” and therefore of an ordinary man, the devil does not let himself be seen; he loves, rather, to disguise himself. We do not find evil on one side and good on the other in Bernanos, but rather “evil under the appearance of good.” This is the devil’s supreme ruse, and his surest way of seeing right through us. Blurring the boundaries, making himself pass for no one when he is someone, preferring the “Cold” of ice to the heat of flames, and lying (down) with Father Donissan to rob him of his breath, Satan is always lying in wait for us –less to show himself than to trap us. A “philosophical reading” of these searing pages of Under the Sun of Satan (Father Donissan’s encounter with the Picardy horse dealer) will elevate Bernanos to the rank of one of the greatest Catholic thinkers. Nobody doubted this. But reading him, and rereading him, permits us to confirm it.
Copyright (c) 2024 Emmanuel Falque; Francisco Novoa-Rojas https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Heidegger on Gaining a Free Relation to Technology
According to Hubert L. Dreyfus, Heidegger was not concerned with the problem of human control of technology that preoccupies the technology-as-ideology theorists. In his text, Dreyfus argues that the issue is rather the understanding of being as mere raw material projected in the technological worldview of the modern West. Only by realizing that being itself commands this dispensation can we begin to distance ourselves from that worldview. Ultimately, technology is not a political matter but a mode of givenness specific to the modern age. This realization places us beyond a purely technological outlook on life and opens us to a different relation to technology. What is needed is a new sense of reality that privileges the non-technological facets of experience and community. In that context, technology would continue to exist and do its work but would no longer form the horizon of being and understanding.
Francisco Leocata and his interpretation of the cogito
This article analyzes Leocata’s vision of the Cartesian cogito. His reading of the sum from the act of being of St. Thomas’ creationism and its greater evidence for the human intellect is highlighted, as well as a new version of the “idea of infinite being” that leads to a new reconsideration of Descartes’ ontological argument. It concludes with a call for debate on this re-reading.
Francisco Leocata and the history of Christian philosophy in Argentina
This paper proposes, through an analysis of Francisco Leocata's works on the history of philosophical ideas in Argentina, to distinguish three lines of force or three ways of doing in philosophy in harmony with the Christian faith. Two of these have been present since the beginning of the colonial period and are progressively entering into dispute, while a third is emerging within the framework of what is known as Latin American thought. To achieve this, it will be necessary to first elucidate two presuppositions: what the author understands by Christian philosophy and why it is important to distinguish modernity from the Enlightenment. Following this, there will be a critical historical review of Argentine thinkers, more or less related to Christianity, who will be classified based on their rejection or support for the ideas of modernity/enlightenment. Finally, it is suggested to recognize, as a derivative of these reflections, a third position in the thought of Juan Carlos Scannone.
The article tries to make a synthesis of the question of freedom and values, its ethical sense and its onto-anthropological anchoring in order to point out the broad context in which it is located in the thought of Francisco Leocata. One of the main objectives of Leocata’s work has been to strengthen the concept of person, its rationality and its metaphysical roots in response to contemporary philosophical currents that endanger the consistency and destiny of human existence.
The vital reduction and the interdisciplinary vocation of phenomenology
Francisco Leocata finds a new phenomenological reduction, which he calls vital reduction. This reduction aims at naming the centrality of the subject’s incarnation, that is, the fundamental situation of being pierced by history and by our fellow subjects as the very point of departure of our knowledge. This vital reduction enables a promisory dialogue between the different sciences, phenomenology, and metaphysics, in order to reflect upon human condition. Although Leocata prefered the trascendental phenomenology of Edmund Husserl in order to build his philosophy of person, in this paper we will argue that a dialogue with Merleau-Ponty is more promising, for he was the one who stressed the interdisciplinary nature of phenomenology.
Francisco Leocata’s Bibliographical Index
Índice bibliográfico de Francisco Leocata
The present writing, dated July 2018, was made available to those interested in the work of Francesco Leocata through the mediation of Gabriel Zanotti. It is a general reconsideration of his philosophical works making explicit his motivations and contributions on the following topics: Christian philosophy, the reading of Descartes, the distinction between philosophical modernity and enlightenment, the attention given to Husserl's phenomenology, the relationship between the historical and the theoretical in his writings, and the history of philosophical thought in Argentina. Some references are included in the text to facilitate bibliographical consultation.
History of Argentine Philosophical Thought
Copyright (c) 2025 Francisco Leocata † https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Copyright (c) 2025 Mauro Nicolás Guerrero https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
The vitality of the sea in Albert Camus: An analysis of The Plague, The State of Siege and The First Man
This article elucidates the figure and place of the sea in part of Camus' literary work, in particular, The Plague, The State of Siege and The First Man. To this end, two possible interpretations are taken as a starting point. First, the sea is approached as a reflection of the vital state of human existence and, more precisely, of the citizens of Oran and Cadiz, and of the children of Argel. Secondly, it attempts to understand human existence as a reflection of the freedom and vitality of the sea, an indifferent divinity that accompanies and protects man. From the analysis of these interpretations, the paper attempts to demonstrate how the sea is, for Camus, a means to symbolize and find the value of life.
Copyright (c) 2025 Clara Noguer https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
“Tolle, lege!” Textual Ambivalence in Augustine of Hippo’s Confessions
Abstract: The history Augustine of Hippo tells of himself in his Confessions makes us aware of the essential ambivalence of language and textuality. On the one hand, texts make human beings to get lost in vane things and also help to nurture pride. On the other hand, texts were paramount for the Christian conversion of Augustine: Cicero, Plotinus, and, mainly, the Sacred Scriptures, led the way towards God. However, the ambivalence of language is shown in that it is the same text, the Bible, which, at the same time, turns Augustine against God and also calls for his conversion. The ambivalence of texts, then, is only resolved in the way the reader makes use of it, in the way the reader appropriates and is appropriated by it. Confessions are the history of a rhetoric, a man of letters, the drama of a reader that is losing himself in texts or that finds his way to God through them.
Copyright (c) 2025 Martín Grassi https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
In this essay I consider the relationship between Heidegger’s famous “turn” (Kehre) and realism. I begin with Heidegger’s critique of the problem of an external world, and I describe how this critique anticipates New Realism. I then provide a reconstruction of Heidegger’s self-critique of Being and Time, showing how this work (written before the turn) exhibits a higher-order antirealism. Next, I show how Heidegger’s turn is motivated by the inadequacy of this earlier anti-realism. In his philosophy of the event he moves towards a realist ontology by developing concepts such as “destiny” (Geschick), which he understands to be independent of human attitudes. Nevertheless, Heidegger ultimately falls back into an anti-realism, because Being still remains dependent upon the involvement of human beings. I therefore conclude this essay by briefly arguing for my own version of New Realism, according to which objects are meaningful in a way that is independent of our attitudes towards them.
Copyright (c) 2025 Markus Gabriel; Mateo Belgrano https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0