Matthew Sharpe
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 3635152 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Matthew Sharpe |
| NOMBRES | Matthew |
| APELLIDO | Sharpe |
| FIRMA | SHARPE M |
| AFILIACIONES | Deakin University |
| VERIFICADO | No |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 37 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 13 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 35 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 3 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2002 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 2 |
Western Marxism, from Totalitarianism to Biopower
In Western Marxism, Domenico Losurdo identifies the antithetical and sometimes hostile positions expressed on anti-colonial struggles as the salient feature of the “Western Marxist” tradition of radical European theory. As Losurdo shows, the formation of such positions, which dispense with an essential component of the Marxist theory of class struggles, is a result of a prevalence of theoretical concepts and tendencies within the Western Marxist …
On the Misery of Left Nietzscheanism, or Philosophy as Irrationalist Ideology
Matthew Sharpe discusses Aymeric Monville's Misère du nietzschéisme de gauche (The Misery of Left Nietzscheanism), an exploration of how Nietzsche's popularity on the left co-opts truly radical energy in favor of authoritarianism and elitism. "If Monville is right," Sharpe concludes, "Nietzcheanism has acted as a kind of ideological 'useful idiot
Philosophy, Theory or Way of Life? Controversies in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance
Spiritual Exercises and the Question of Religion in the Work of Pierre Hadot
This paper addresses John M. Cooper's critique, and related critiques, of Pierre Hadot's conception of philosophy as a way of life for collapsing the distinction between philosophy and religion, via the category of "spiritual exercises". The paper has two parts. Part 1, a pars destruens, will show how Hadot presents three cogent rebuttals of these charges, with which he was familiar as early as the 1980s, following the publication of the first ed…
Of Cartesianism and Spiritual Exercises
This article challenges the recurrent critique that Pierre Hadot’s identification of ancient philosophy with the practice of spiritual exercises introduces a non- or irrational dimension into metaphilosophy. The occasion to do this is provided by Kerem Eksen’s recent reading of Descartes’s Meditations as consisting of solely intellectual, rather than spiritual, exercises—since the latter, Eksen claims, involve extrarational means and ends. Part 2…
Wittgenstein’s Unglauben
Jacques Lacan devoted one of the sessions of his important Seminar XVII, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s classic work Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Despite Lacan’s and Wittgenstein’s huge influence across academic disciplines (and the analytic–continental divide in philosophy), there has been no scholarly attempt to examine Lacan’s claims concerning Wittgenstein in this seminar. This paper sets out to redress this gap…
Pierre Hadot, Albert Camus and the orphic view of nature
Between too Intellectualist and not Intellectualist Enough
Solitaire/Solidaire
Albert Camus’s short story “Jonas, or The Artist at Work” was originally drafted in 1953 as “La Vie d’artiste.”1 The published story, included in 1957’s Exile and the Kingdom, dramatizes the rise and fall of a Parisian painter. Both the story’s title and its biblical epitaph recall the book of Jonah. Having had success with early paintings, Jonas buys a small Parisian apartment with large vertical windows, suggesting the ribs of Jonah’s whale, wh…
On Politics, Irony, and Plato's Socrates as Derrida's Pharmakon
This paper challenges the reading of Derridean deconstruction as a necessarily antiauthoritarian version of “hermeneutics as politics.” It does so by critically rereading Derrida's 1968 essay “Plato's Pharmacy.” Part 1 reconstructs Derrida's key claims in “Plato's Pharmacy,” turning on the ambiguous signifier “pharmakon” and the treatment of writing in the Phaedrus . Part 2 examines Derrida's three claims in “Plato's Pharmacy” concerning the poli…
Philosophy As a Way of Life
The idea of philosophy as a 'way of life' is not a new one. From the first recorded philosophy by Plato, there has been a tradition of thinking about philosophy as pointing us towards the good life, happiness and an ethical existence. But where does this notion that philosophy has anything to offer in terms of guiding us in how to live and live well come from? In this first ever introduction to philosophy as a way of life, Matthew Sharpe and Mich…
A disturbance of vision on the Capitol
A disturbance of vision on the Capitol: philosophy and the Far-Right – towards an interdisciplinary inquiry
Golden calf
This paper examines how Gilles Deleuze addresses, and fail to address, the darker strata in Nietzsche's work which has enabled his work to be claimed by almost every far-right European political movement since the 1890s to the Alt-Right today. Part I argues that four rhetorical strategies are present which serve to domesticate Nietzsche's ideas concerning class and caste, race and sexuality, and his opposition to forms of liberalism, democracy, f…
Brill's Companion to Camus
Following the premature death of Albert Camus in a car accident in January 1960, Andre Malraux paid tribute to lifelong concern for the moral question, emphasizing that “for more than twenty years, the work of Albert Camus was inseparable from an obsession with justice.” Today, nearly sixty years after the writer’s death, the ideal of “Camus Le Juste” continues to reverberate, and critics have rightly highlighted the importance of the notion of j…
Effort and Grace
Philosophy and theology have long harboured contradictory views on spiritual practice. While philosophy advocates the therapeutic benefits of daily meditation, the theology of grace promotes an ideal of happiness bestowed with little effort. As such, the historical juxtaposition of effort and grace grounding modern spiritual exercise can be seen as the essential tension between the secular and sacred
Brill's Companion to Camus
Killing the father, Parmenides
Towards a Phenomenology Ofsagesse
This paper starts from the contention that Pierre Hadot's unusually divided reception reflects the different dimensions of Hadot's own scholarly profile. Hadot's largely favourable reception amongst historians of ideas responds to the philological dimension of his work, but misses the implicit normativity involved in his recovery of the sense of ancient philosophy as a way of life. Analytic critics have registered but contested this normativity i…
Traversing the Fantasy
Slavoj Zizek is one of the most provocative and important thinkers writing in contemporary philosophy. This book is an engaged debate with Zizek. It contains a series of specially commissioned critical essays from an impressive collection of contributors covering the full extent of his oeuvre. Essays examine Zizek on cultural theory, film studies, ethics, political theory, social theory, Kant and Lacanian psychoanalysis. In the spirit of Zizek‘s …
On Roland Boer's Marxism and theology
This piece aims to provide a synoptic introduction to Boer's claims in the five volumes of Marxism and Theology. Obviously, such an account must miss many important nuances across the host of critical readings Boer assembles, guided by his broadly Jamesonian manner of reading the texts with a view to their biblical and theological claims. Nevertheless, by aiming at a synoptic view of a truly compendious contribution to scholarship, it is hoped th…
The plague and the Panopticon
Albert Camus's 1947 novel La Peste and 1948 drama L'État de Siège, allegories of totalitarian power using the figure of the plague (Part I), remarkably anticipate Foucault's celebrated genealogical analyses of modern power (Part II). Indeed, reading Foucault after Camus highlights a fact little-remarked in Discipline and Punish: namely, that the famous chapter on the 'Panopticon' begins by analysing the measures taken in early modern Vincennes fo…
“Not for personal gratification, or for contention, or to look down on others, or for convenience, reputation, or power”
This paper examines the apology for the life of the mind Francis Bacon gives in Book I of his 1605 text The Advancement of Learning. Like recent work on Bacon led by the ground-breaking studies of Corneanu, Harrison and Gaukroger, I argue that Bacon’s conception and defence of intellectual inquiry in this extraordinary text is framed by reference to the classical model, which had conceived and justified philosophising as a way of life or means to…
Cicero, Voltaire, and the Philosophes in the French Enlightenment
Cicero, Voltaire, and the philosophes in the French enlightenment
In joy we prepare our lessons’
Nobel Prize winning author Albert Camus situates his meditations in both the opening and closing essays in his 1937 collection Noces by referring to the classical Eleusinian mysteries centring around the myths of Dionysus and the goddesses Demeter and Persephone. Noces ’ closing piece ‘The Desert’ directly evokes the two levels of initiation involved in the classical Eleusinian cult in a way which prompts us to reframe the preceding essays beginn…
Secularisations and Their Debates
Critique' as Technology of the Self
This inquiry is situated at the intersection of two enigmas. The first is the enigma of the status of Kant's practice of critique, which has been the subject of heated debate since shortly after the publication of the first edition of The Critique of Pure Reason. The second enigma is that of Foucault's apparent later 'turn' to Kant, and the label of 'critique', to describe his own theoretical practice. I argue that Kant's practice of 'critique' s…
The Aesthetics of Ideology, or ‘The Critique of Ideological Judgment’ in Eagleton and Zizek
The notions of ‘ideology’ and ‘critique of ideology’ have been criticised in manyways. This essay examines theworks of two contemporary theorists who defend this theoretical category. Interestingly, both do this through pivotal recourse to categories drawn from modern aesthetic theory, and in particular Kant's third Critique. In thisway, they reanimate a theoretical concern with the intersection of politics and aesthetics that goes as far back as…
Spiritual Exercises and the Question of Religion in the Work of Pierre Hadot
This paper addresses John M. Cooper's critique, and related critiques, of Pierre Hadot's conception of philosophy as a way of life for collapsing the distinction between philosophy and religion, via the category of "spiritual exercises". The paper has two parts. Part 1, a pars destruens, will show how Hadot presents three cogent rebuttals of these charges, with which he was familiar as early as the 1980s, following the publication of the first ed…
Golden calf
This paper examines how Gilles Deleuze addresses, and fail to address, the darker strata in Nietzsche's work which has enabled his work to be claimed by almost every far-right European political movement since the 1890s to the Alt-Right today. Part I argues that four rhetorical strategies are present which serve to domesticate Nietzsche's ideas concerning class and caste, race and sexuality, and his opposition to forms of liberalism, democracy, f…
A Few Good Men
The descent of the doves
This essay is a critique of Derrida’s ethical works, using Camus’s last novella The Fall as a critical sounding board. It argues that a danger pertains to any such highly self-reflexive position as Derrida’s: a danger that Camus identified in The Fall, and staged in his character, Jean-Baptiste Clamence. Clamence is a successful Parisian lawyer, on top of his personal and professional life, whose equanimity is troubled after he is the unwitting p…
The descent of the doves
This essay is a critique of Derrida’s ethical works, using Camus’s last novella The Fall as a critical sounding board. It argues that a danger pertains to any such highly self-reflexive position as Derrida’s: a danger that Camus identified in The Fall, and staged in his character, Jean-Baptiste Clamence. Clamence is a successful Parisian lawyer, on top of his personal and professional life, whose equanimity is troubled after he is the unwitting p…
Slavoj Zizek
A Few Good Men
Critique' as Technology of the Self
This inquiry is situated at the intersection of two enigmas. The first is the enigma of the status of Kant's practice of critique, which has been the subject of heated debate since shortly after the publication of the first edition of The Critique of Pure Reason. The second enigma is that of Foucault's apparent later 'turn' to Kant, and the label of 'critique', to describe his own theoretical practice. I argue that Kant's practice of 'critique' s…
The Aesthetics of Ideology, or ‘The Critique of Ideological Judgment’ in Eagleton and Zizek
The notions of ‘ideology’ and ‘critique of ideology’ have been criticised in manyways. This essay examines theworks of two contemporary theorists who defend this theoretical category. Interestingly, both do this through pivotal recourse to categories drawn from modern aesthetic theory, and in particular Kant's third Critique. In thisway, they reanimate a theoretical concern with the intersection of politics and aesthetics that goes as far back as…
Only Agamben can save us?
In this paper, I offer a strong criticism of Giorgio Agamben’s recent political texts. I argue that these texts bring to fruition a larger, contentious trend in the theoretical academy coupling one-dimensional, pessimistic accounts of modernity with strands of messianism. Since the political prospects of messianism, as Agamben’s analyses show, are very thin indeed, I reflectively question the presuppositions that lead him to this prescriptive jun…
Hunting Plato'sAgalmata
In this essay I argue that to understand Plato's philosophy, we must understand why Plato presented this philosophy as dialogues: namely, works of literature. Plato's writing of philosophy corresponds to his understanding of philosophy as a transformative way of life, which must nevertheless present itself politically, to different types of people. As a model, I examine Lacan's famous reading of Plato's Symposium in his seminar of transference lo…
When the logics of the world collapse – Žižek with and against Arendt on ‘totalitarianism’
Financial Crisis, Social Pathologies and 'Generalised Perversion'
Slavoj Zizek's work has been highly influential in the formulation of an emerging consensus among Lacanian social researchers, that we live in a society of generalised perversion whose initial fruits are the corrosion of democracy and the recent financial crisis. This position rests upon a notion of modern subjectivity that connects ‘commodity fetishism’ with clinical perversion in a pathological configuration, so that social theoretical identifi…
Secularisations And Their Debates Perspectives On The Return Of Religion In The Contemporary West
Secularisations and Their Debates
The Poetic Presentation of Philosophy
This essay undertakes a close analysis of Leo Strauss’s remarkable but undertreated Leo Strauss on Plato’s “Symposium,” reading it as opening a privileged purview of his own (and his students’) wider understandings of philosophy, poetry, and politics. The essay begins by drawing out Strauss’s three framing justifications for his manner of reading the Symposium as a document in the “ancient quarrel” of philosophy and poetry concerning which of the…
Secularisations and Their Debates
A just judgement? Considerations on Ronald Srigley's Camus' Critique of Modernity
This paper responds critically to Ronald Srigley's groundbreaking 2011 study Albert Camus' Critique of Modernity. Srigley's book reasserts Camus' credentials as a deeply serious thinker, whose literary and philosophical oeuvre was dedicated to rethinking modernity on the basis of critical reassessments of the West's entire premodern heritage. Yet we challenge whether Camus was ever, even in his final writings, so uncompromisingly anti-modern as S…
“Not for personal gratification, or for contention, or to look down on others, or for convenience, reputation, or power”
This paper examines the apology for the life of the mind Francis Bacon gives in Book I of his 1605 text The Advancement of Learning. Like recent work on Bacon led by the ground-breaking studies of Corneanu, Harrison and Gaukroger, I argue that Bacon’s conception and defence of intellectual inquiry in this extraordinary text is framed by reference to the classical model, which had conceived and justified philosophising as a way of life or means to…
Cicero, Voltaire, and the Philosophes in the French Enlightenment
Cicero, Voltaire, and the philosophes in the French enlightenment
In joy we prepare our lessons’
Nobel Prize winning author Albert Camus situates his meditations in both the opening and closing essays in his 1937 collection Noces by referring to the classical Eleusinian mysteries centring around the myths of Dionysus and the goddesses Demeter and Persephone. Noces ’ closing piece ‘The Desert’ directly evokes the two levels of initiation involved in the classical Eleusinian cult in a way which prompts us to reframe the preceding essays beginn…
On Roland Boer's Marxism and theology
This piece aims to provide a synoptic introduction to Boer's claims in the five volumes of Marxism and Theology. Obviously, such an account must miss many important nuances across the host of critical readings Boer assembles, guided by his broadly Jamesonian manner of reading the texts with a view to their biblical and theological claims. Nevertheless, by aiming at a synoptic view of a truly compendious contribution to scholarship, it is hoped th…
The plague and the Panopticon
Albert Camus's 1947 novel La Peste and 1948 drama L'État de Siège, allegories of totalitarian power using the figure of the plague (Part I), remarkably anticipate Foucault's celebrated genealogical analyses of modern power (Part II). Indeed, reading Foucault after Camus highlights a fact little-remarked in Discipline and Punish: namely, that the famous chapter on the 'Panopticon' begins by analysing the measures taken in early modern Vincennes fo…
Traversing the Fantasy
Slavoj Zizek is one of the most provocative and important thinkers writing in contemporary philosophy. This book is an engaged debate with Zizek. It contains a series of specially commissioned critical essays from an impressive collection of contributors covering the full extent of his oeuvre. Essays examine Zizek on cultural theory, film studies, ethics, political theory, social theory, Kant and Lacanian psychoanalysis. In the spirit of Zizek‘s …
Towards a Phenomenology Ofsagesse
This paper starts from the contention that Pierre Hadot's unusually divided reception reflects the different dimensions of Hadot's own scholarly profile. Hadot's largely favourable reception amongst historians of ideas responds to the philological dimension of his work, but misses the implicit normativity involved in his recovery of the sense of ancient philosophy as a way of life. Analytic critics have registered but contested this normativity i…
Killing the father, Parmenides
Brill's Companion to Camus
Following the premature death of Albert Camus in a car accident in January 1960, Andre Malraux paid tribute to lifelong concern for the moral question, emphasizing that “for more than twenty years, the work of Albert Camus was inseparable from an obsession with justice.” Today, nearly sixty years after the writer’s death, the ideal of “Camus Le Juste” continues to reverberate, and critics have rightly highlighted the importance of the notion of j…
Effort and Grace
Philosophy and theology have long harboured contradictory views on spiritual practice. While philosophy advocates the therapeutic benefits of daily meditation, the theology of grace promotes an ideal of happiness bestowed with little effort. As such, the historical juxtaposition of effort and grace grounding modern spiritual exercise can be seen as the essential tension between the secular and sacred
Brill's Companion to Camus
Philosophy (29 obras) · Epistemology (24 obras) · Law (20 obras) · Sociology (16 obras) · Political science (14 obras) · Politics (14 obras) · Psychology (13 obras) · Art (11 obras) · Literature (11 obras) · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism (10 obras)