William Tilleczek
Biographic Data
| ID | 1693420 |
|---|---|
| NAME | William Tilleczek |
| GIVEN NAMES | William |
| FAMILY NAME | Tilleczek |
| SIGNATURE | TILLECZEK W |
| AFFILIATIONS | McGill University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8704-6308 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 8 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 8 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Self-and-other-determination
This essay reads Democracy and Empire as an intervention into contemporary debates regarding the fate of the Western left in the age of neoliberalism. The left often explains (figures like) Trump by pointing out that the ravages of neoliberalism – weakening of the welfare state, stagnating social mobility, concentration of wealth in ever fewer hands – have made it easy to mobilize white working-class voters by scapegoating racialized others. Hill…
The Asceticism of the Oppressed
Asceticism has a bad reputation in political and social theory—insofar as it has any reputation at all. If it is not ignored entirely, it tends to be aligned with either political elitism or political quietism. On the one hand, asceticism is often considered a special privilege of the aristocracy, which alone has the leisure to turn away from worldly affairs and cultivate the self as an aesthetic object, and thus to reproduce its dominant positio…
Practice or Product? Labour, Training, and the “Ethics” of AI
This essay interrogates the risks posed by artificial intelligence (AI) to intellectual labour and human skills and capacities. Employing insights from ethical philosophy, political theory, and the Marxist tradition in an engagement with recent manifestos calling for AI regulation, I adopt an interdisciplinary approach to the question of labour and technology, using translation work as a case study. Intentionally bracketing whether AI will be abl…
Rationalisation
The text translated here as “Rationalisation” is, to my knowledge, the first English version of a presentation given by Simone Weil in February 1937 and included in her complete works under the French title “Rationalisation.”
Human Being, Working Body, Working Day
Introduction to a translation of Simone Weil's text "Rationalisation"
Training the Philosopher King
This article offers a comparative study of Hannah Arendt’s and Michel Foucault’s “returns” to classical antiquity. I focus on their overlapping readings of Socrates as a “civilization trainer” and their divergent readings of Plato – who is for Foucault a trainer of kings and for Arendt a utopian engineer – to argue that both Arendt and Foucault draw from Greek antiquity a substantively underdetermined but politically choice worthy form of action:…
Self-Improvement
I think that it would be no exaggeration to say that 'self-improvement' has become a pressing ethical and political problem in the 21st century.Thankfully, it has also been problematized recently across numerous academic disciplines and in both specialist literature and popular writing.Mark Coeckelbergh's Self-Improvement, belonging somewhere between the latter two registers, addresses this serious and complex issue and strives to offer a clear a…
On the Ownership of the Means of Training
This article argues that asceticism—understood in the etymological sense of “training”—can productively be incorporated into analyses of politics. It is of particular use in thinking through questions of inequality and domination. I first theorize askesis as dynamogenic , that is, productive of (political and ethical) capacities. Using case studies of Ancient Athens and twentieth century India, I then analyze askesis as a tool for producing and r…
Self-and-other-determination
This essay reads Democracy and Empire as an intervention into contemporary debates regarding the fate of the Western left in the age of neoliberalism. The left often explains (figures like) Trump by pointing out that the ravages of neoliberalism – weakening of the welfare state, stagnating social mobility, concentration of wealth in ever fewer hands – have made it easy to mobilize white working-class voters by scapegoating racialized others. Hill…
Self-Improvement
I think that it would be no exaggeration to say that 'self-improvement' has become a pressing ethical and political problem in the 21st century.Thankfully, it has also been problematized recently across numerous academic disciplines and in both specialist literature and popular writing.Mark Coeckelbergh's Self-Improvement, belonging somewhere between the latter two registers, addresses this serious and complex issue and strives to offer a clear a…
On the Ownership of the Means of Training
This article argues that asceticism—understood in the etymological sense of “training”—can productively be incorporated into analyses of politics. It is of particular use in thinking through questions of inequality and domination. I first theorize askesis as dynamogenic , that is, productive of (political and ethical) capacities. Using case studies of Ancient Athens and twentieth century India, I then analyze askesis as a tool for producing and r…
Rationalisation
The text translated here as “Rationalisation” is, to my knowledge, the first English version of a presentation given by Simone Weil in February 1937 and included in her complete works under the French title “Rationalisation.”
Human Being, Working Body, Working Day
Introduction to a translation of Simone Weil's text "Rationalisation"
Training the Philosopher King
This article offers a comparative study of Hannah Arendt’s and Michel Foucault’s “returns” to classical antiquity. I focus on their overlapping readings of Socrates as a “civilization trainer” and their divergent readings of Plato – who is for Foucault a trainer of kings and for Arendt a utopian engineer – to argue that both Arendt and Foucault draw from Greek antiquity a substantively underdetermined but politically choice worthy form of action:…
Practice or Product? Labour, Training, and the “Ethics” of AI
This essay interrogates the risks posed by artificial intelligence (AI) to intellectual labour and human skills and capacities. Employing insights from ethical philosophy, political theory, and the Marxist tradition in an engagement with recent manifestos calling for AI regulation, I adopt an interdisciplinary approach to the question of labour and technology, using translation work as a case study. Intentionally bracketing whether AI will be abl…
Self-and-other-determination
This essay reads Democracy and Empire as an intervention into contemporary debates regarding the fate of the Western left in the age of neoliberalism. The left often explains (figures like) Trump by pointing out that the ravages of neoliberalism – weakening of the welfare state, stagnating social mobility, concentration of wealth in ever fewer hands – have made it easy to mobilize white working-class voters by scapegoating racialized others. Hill…
The Asceticism of the Oppressed
Asceticism has a bad reputation in political and social theory—insofar as it has any reputation at all. If it is not ignored entirely, it tends to be aligned with either political elitism or political quietism. On the one hand, asceticism is often considered a special privilege of the aristocracy, which alone has the leisure to turn away from worldly affairs and cultivate the self as an aesthetic object, and thus to reproduce its dominant positio…
Politics (5 works) · Philosophy (3 works) · Philosophy (3 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (2 works) · Asceticism (2 works) · Epistemology (2 works) · Law (2 works) · Law (2 works) · Mathematics (2 works) · Philosophy and Literary Analysis (2 works)