Niklas Toivakainen | Alienation/s

Thursday, September 28th, Lily Novy Glass Hall, Cankar Center
From alienation to responsibility - or alienation as responsibility
I begin my talk by putting forth the notion that philosophy itself constitutes an acknowledgement of alienation, that is, of alienation as undividedly comprising a three- step movement of departure, discovery as rediscovery or recollection, and return. Placing particular emphasis on the middle phase of this movement, I then continue by following the suggestion that the fate and sense of this movement must be sought in the question of signification and its (essential) tie to recognition. Wittgenstein’s ‘later’ philosophy, particularly defining elements that I come to identify in the opening or primal scene of his Philosophical Investigations, will guide us here, and bring us to Lacan’s analysis of the (subject of the) signifier as such. The decisive suggestion I want to put forth, is that (pace Lacan?) signification involves, or is conditioned on, the impossibility of not receiving fundamental, unconditional, recognition. An impossibility, that is, which issues an indefinite call to owe up to, to redeem, the stakes of subjectivity.
Niklas Toivakainen is a researcher at the University of Helsinki and Åbo Akademi University. He is the author of Self, Other, and the Weight of Desire (Palgrave, 2023) and co-editor of Moral Foundations of Philosophy of Mind (Palgrave, 2019).
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