Crossings, Hybrids, Genres I: Editor’s Introduction

The articles in this (and the next) issue of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy address a cluster of related philosophical themes: crossings, hybrids, and genres. These themes have many related aspects. Some of them are metaphilosophical. They concern the nature of philosophy itself and the nature of philosophical transgression and transformation; the relation of philosophy to other disciplines, genres, and practices; the value of philosophy at both individual and societal levels; the multiple forms of different philosophies; the conditions that make possible originality and new forms of expression; and the roles within philosophy of narrative and fact, imagination and experiment, and personal modes of expression.

In other aspects, the themes of crossings, hybrids, and genres raise issues that are at once psychological and ontological. These include issues concerning identity and difference; destabilizations and amalgamations; pluralism, heterogeneity, homogeneity, and community; demands for self-improvement; and health and illness.

Yet other aspects of crossings, hybrids, and genres are centrally political. They focus on topics of national, political, and regional boundaries and borders; immigration, exile, diasporas, and home; cosmopolitanism; new forms of social oppression and control; laws, customs, moral codes, fears, and ethoi; and relations between philosophical self-understanding and political regimes.

Finally, issues of crossings, hybrids, and genres also include concerns that are explicitly artistic and aesthetic. These include artistic issues concerning techniques, styles, materials, designs, and their economies; aesthetic matters of form and content, the nature of creativity, new modes of communication and transmission, and criticism and appreciation; and lineages of expression in different traditions of philosophy.

Thus, in this issue of the journal, Eduardo Mendieta considers the nature and significance of the diaries, notebooks, and letters of philosophers. Steven Brence argues for the philosophical significance of film, focusing on a case study concerning cosmopolitanism and Casablanca. Megan Craig sets forth an account of philosophy as storytelling, highlighting the role of ethical imagination. Jessica Wahman develops an account of drama as a philosophical genre, stressing the ways in which theater contributes to pluralistically inclined philosophies by rendering theoretic commitments embodied and contextual. Mary Magada-Ward, critically applying insights from Charles Peirce to the feminist work of Donna Haraway, argues that accounts of philosophy as narrative must not collapse distinctions between science and myth and between fact and fiction. Talia Welsh outlines an “ambivalent” account of personal self-transformation illuminated by the realities of social dependencies. Karmen MacKendrick outlines a material and carnal turn—rather than the familiar “linguistic turn” in philosophy—and considers the meaning, in both philosophy and religion, of the word made flesh. John Lysaker develops an account of philosophical writing as praxis, a practice rooted in a demand that the world be different. Drawing on Adorno, Arendt, and Kant, Marcia Morgan explores the aesthetic, ethical, and political consequences of ungrounded discursive self-dislocation for pluralistic dialogic-aesthetic communities.

The subsequent issue of this journal will include articles on this same cluster of themes by Vincent Colapietro, Brendan Hogan, Robert E. Innis, José Jorge Mendoza, Charles E. Scott, Scott R. Stroud, Eric Thomas Weber, Emily Zakin, and me.