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This project is a convergence of environmental philosophy and variant strains of continental philosophy. The aim is to make the familiar a bit unfamiliar, partly by understanding the road as an event, and partly by experimentally downplaying the significance of human intentions, particularly given that originary tracks were frequently the result of simple useage. We humans are always on the road, which in a fundamental sense is going nowhere or, alternatively, is possibly heading toward a dead-end.

This article attempts to articulate the different reasons for needing to be diligent and rigorous regarding land claims. Many progressives are inclined to assert that there are multiple perspectives to everything. And, such a position may very well be, in fact, accurate (true). But it may also prove to be not very useful toward considering the complex and multi-layered story of indigenous land claims. What this article highlights is one particular story, the history of a “differend.”

The word “power” tends toward divergent formations, and this paper is prompted by the intersection of two of them. The first form taken up here is power as control, while the second form is material power as fuel. The typical modern configuration of the first form implies an understanding of the second form as subordinate. But what I argue here is that insofar as fuel is a condition of the possibility of being human, the identity of the human being has always been embedded in an assemblage consisting of fuel-subject/intersubject.

That we find ourselves running to, fleeing from or otherwise commuting between here and there poses problems that most philosophers have so far and for the most part seemed to neglect. We, however, are moved by this reality, one in which the distinction between nomadism and globalism, and between choice and necessity becomes somewhat obscure, if still clearly determined while arguably equally clearly indeterminate, whether an expression of the postmodern condition or the consequence of modernity, or the extended, and typically gratuitous and vicious, exigencies of race, class, and gender.

While the motif of the double serves a prominent role in Freud’s writings from early on, this essay is an examination of the determinative power of the double in two key texts, texts in which specific, new sets doubles emerge for the first time in Freud’s career. Totem and Taboo features a double that manifests itself primarily in the form of ambivalence. Beyond the Pleasure Principle features a double that manifests itself primarily in the form of a very peculiar conflict that also entails complicity.

This chapter situates the problem of the double in, primarily, Plato and Kant—supplemented by aspects of Deleuze and Derrida—using them to represent the necessity of the work of the double in the history of philosophy. I set up my approach with reference to doubles in the philosophy of Sartre, and then focus here on splits and divides in Plato, both in the divided line and the allegory of the cave, but most distinctively in his attempt to define the identity of the philosopher in contrast with the elusive sophist. Finally, I turn to the sharp divisions that for Kant characterize his Copernican Revolution.

This chapter takes up the determinative power of the double in the psychoanalytic theory of Sigmund Freud, which in its further extensions is anticipated by the distinction between the conscious and the unconscious. As a transition from the previous chapter, I begin with Freud’s essay on Dostoevsky. But the focus here is primarily on the characteristics of the primal horde depicted in the essays that comprise Totem and Taboo, which focuses on the fundamental ambivalence toward the totem animal, which is both worshipped and then killed and eaten, a literary setup for the actual killing of the father. Finally, I take up the fundamentally conflicted relation between the erotic instincts and the death instincts.

Against the backdrop of nineteenth- and twentieth-century representations of the double, the Epilogue considers emergent forms of the double in the twenty-first century.

This chapter examines some of the ways that the motif of the double fuels the fiction of Dostoevsky. On the one hand, there is the story, The Double, which features the appearance of the main character’s double, possibly a Doppelganger. Beyond the appearance of the Doppelganger, the story is peppered with images of doubles. Most of my energy in this chapter, however, focuses on Crime and Punishment, which is saturated and driven by a variety of doubles. My intention here is to articulate a second narrative—a story of doubles—that provides something like an animated armature for the main narrative.

This chapter takes up the problem of the double in the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. In Cartesian Meditations, and through his commitment to the transcendental Ego, Husserl has created an aporia. On the one hand, he has devoted himself to the axiomatic thought that all sense arises from the Ego’s intentional life, effectively constructing a fundamental solipsism. On the other hand, and in order to obtain his aim of confirming an objective world, he knows he must establish an other, that is, in order to have objectivity, he must work out intersubjectivity. I show that this project is a failure. Without a double, Husserl is locked inside of himself, and his commitment to the Ego confirms this to the very end. Finally, I return to the theme of intersubjectivity in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, which I had touched on in Chap. 2.

This chapter introduces the dynamic motif of the double and its relation to intersubjectivity by visiting aspects of political representation, which is intrinsically doubled, whether in the form of origin or establishing narratives or in the form of representative government. I take up early modern English political philosophy, fortified by the backdrop of the King’s Two Bodies, and informing the meaning of political representation. Then, I look at the doubles that drive Haudenosaunee political culture. Next, I look at doubled icons that represent, broadly speaking, government or political power, which leads to a meditation on certain features of Marxism, of the Bolshevik Revolution, and then on aspects of Engels’ philosophy.

Foucault is typically seen as having rebelled against the previous generation of French philosophy, which was dominated by existential phenomenology, and by Sartre in particular. However, the relationship between these two generations and between these two philosophers is more complex than one of simple opposition. Through a refracted focus on Foucault’s late work on Greco-Roman philosophy and on the themes of the practice of the care of the self and the freedom associated with that practice, I argue that Foucault—whose philosophy is centered around the problematization of site-specific processes of subjectification— is closer to existentialism than he seems.

Heidegger's representation of Dasein's death relation in Division Two of Being and Time remains a singularly prominent reflection on death in the canon of twentieth century continental philosophy. At the same time, though, it is a representation whose limitations have been established by commitments made in Division One, specifically in Heideggers's account of being-with. My interests in this paper are in the intimate relation between intersubectivity and death, and I engage in a comparative phenomenology in order to free things up. More specifically, I provide a critique of certain key aspects of Heidegger's account of Dasein, and then I contrast this with the radically different way that the Iroquois practice and experience the connection between intersubjecivity and death. The Iroquois tribe establish their connection between themselves through formal condolences rituals. As I articulate in the paper, for the Iroquois, the relationship to the dead is the source of my relations with those who ar...

In this chapter, Brian Seitz argues that many of the traditional boundaries with which we understand the world and our relation to the nonhuman have collapsed in modernity. Seitz argues that this development is literally embodied in the mutation of wildlife habitat; in the New World things have gone fundamentally haywire. In relation to this mutation Seitz considers the ambiguous and continually shifting dynamic between the rural and the urban. This dynamic might be linked to the distinction between Old World and New World, provided this distinction refers to differing configurations of bioregionality, addressed in terms of history and evolving culture/nature.

Education has come to mean the transmission of information, rather than the intimate awareness not just of things but of the learner's relation to things. Whereas the practice of paideia associated with modem philosophy has involved an effort to isolate the human in opposition to and contradistinction from that which is non-human, the metapaideia in question here is a practice of self-education, which is not "about the self"---not a given self—-so much as it is about the constitution of the self through dialogue with all that is other than self. That is, metapaideia follows from the question, "Where am I?," a question open to all possibilities, not, that is, to a universal as such, but to a universal dialogue or to a dialogue with the universe, an exchange with every aspect of the subject's situation.

99%? The numbers just don’t add up, since the complementary figure is far less than 1%, which leaves a lot more slop than any legitimate accountant might expect or be willing to sign off on. But since we’ve experienced a crisis that illuminates the material discrepancy of these percentages, let’s revisit some historical constellation points to help provide context.

1. Mask Behind a Mask. . . Nietzsche's power extends itself into all sorts of curious places in philosophy, and this seems to be the case more in France than anywhere else. It is not necessary to recount the conscious and unconscious transvaluations of Nietzsche we see in philosophers as diverse as Foucault, Deleuze, Cixous, and Derrida. But it may be timely to make some remarks about Nietzsche's usefulness in understanding Sartre, and this may in turn strengthen Sartre's familial connections with the philosophers just named, at least with Foucault, despite Foucault's oedipal protests. The motivation may be predominantly archival rather than more strictly philosophical; to help complicate Sartre's position in the history of philosophy as we near the end of the twentieth century, and to complicate it not by overcoming Sartre but by pointing to traces of Sartre's overcoming of his own reactivity, the vehicle for which is Marx, but the contours of which link him to the less conceptually confining Nietzsche. As an individual writer, Sartre's personal project dissolved at his death, but his writing remains in all of its positivity to be rewritten, which is to say that traces of"Sartre" can be turned to his advantage, or to ours. More specifically, I would like to suggest that the later Sartre provides resources for transvaluing the earlier Sartre, by which I mean not that the later Sartre is an improvement over the earlier-on the contrary-but that, through Nietzsche, the Critique of Dialectical Reason offers tools for opening up or problematizing the prominent existential confines of Being and Nothingness. If there is a justification for this maneuver, it is that in the long run, Being and Nothingness had far more determinative effects on the formation of French philosophy after Sartre than did the Critique. Put differently-simplistically, strategically-Nietzsche has won out over Heuel and Marx. So, rather than getting caught up in a debate about the differences between the early existential Sartre and the later Marxist Sartre, I would like to begin grafting aspects of both Sartres in order to suggest a different composite. Working backwards, then, the integrity of the Sartrean text might suffer as a result of this Nietzschean imposition, but that is the cost of Sartre's overcoming. In fabricating an account of its own disciplinary heritage-in constructing an account of the history of modern philosophy-academic philosophy links Nietzsche with existentialism, and thus with Sartre; along with Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky, Nietzsche's name enhances the existentialist pedigree, and thus Sartre's. The material for this linkage is there for the taking, even if competing dimensions of the mad professor Nietzeche clearly clash with it.l Here, the obvious existential emphasis would have to do with freedom, individualism and, perhaps, absurdity, and this linkage is familiar enough that I need say no more about it: However, and beyond existentialism-an official signifier with which Sartre himself became increasingly less comfortable2-there are other aspects of Sartre that may be illuminated through reference to Nietzsche, reference that might be tougher to make or at least seem more obscure, particularly given Sartre's unhesitant faith in dialectics, the logic in which the constitution of identity seems to be embedded both in Being and Nothingness and in the Critique of Dialectical Reason. The reference to dialectics is not a stray example in the context of positioning Sartre historically, either, particularly since dialectics is a formal philosophical technique for addressing and disciplining power, from a Foucauldian standpoint nothing other than a way of forcing meaning through a domestication of conflict, an historically cast prejudice that is ironically unhistorical. Or, as Nietzsche writes, "Dialectic and faith in reason still rest on moral principles."3 "Intoxication by dialectic: as the consciousness of exercising mastery over oneself by means of it-as a tool of the will to power. …