The Ruse of Techne

Dimitris Vardoulakis is Professor of Philosophy at Western Sydney University. He is the author of Spinoza, the Epicurean: Authority and Utility in Materialism (2020), Stasis Before the State: Nine Thesis on Agonistic Democracy (2018), Freedom from the Free Will: On Kafka’s Laughter (2016), Sovereignty and its Other: Toward the Dejustification of Violence (2013), and The Doppelgänger: Literature’s Philosophy (2010).

Exordium



Acknowledgements



Preamble:

The Ineffectual and the Instrumental

1. The ineffectual

2. The instrumental

1. Introduction:

What is the Ruse of Techne?

3. The ruse of techne

4. Metaphysical materialism (the metaphysics of morals)

5. The reception of Heidegger and the ruse of techne

6. The repression of instrumentality

7. The underground current of a materialism of instrumentality

8. Effects of the ruse of techne (or, why the repression of instrumentality still matters today)

9. On method



2. The Problematic of Action within a Single, Unified Being:

Monism in Heidegger’s Thought

10. Heidegger’s other path

11. The first problem: How to be a different materialist?

12. The second problem: How is action possible within a monist ontology?

13. The third problem: Can monism provide qualitative distinctions between actions?

14. Two kinds of monist materialism

15. Two historical difficulties arising from Heidegger’s solution to the problematic of action in monism

16. The double bind of the repression of instrumentality: Between the vacuous and the self-contradictory

17. Why Heidegger’s solution to the problematic of action in monism matters

3. The Conflation of Causality and Instrumentality:

Phronesis and the Genesis of the Ruse of Techne

18. Heidegger’s bildungsroman

19. The truth of phronesis as the combination of calculation, emotion and situatedness

20. The two ends of action in Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics 1139a)

21. Techne and phronesis distinguished through their ends

22. The distinction between final and instrumental ends and the problematic of action in monism

23. A Greek hating philhellene

24. The context of Heidegger’s interpretation of phronesis

25. Heidegger’s mistranslations of the hou heneka

26. Heidegger’ contrast between hou heneka and heneka tinos: The repression of instrumentality

27. The genesis of the ruse of techne: sophia as the virtue of techne

28. Teleocracy

29. Phronesis, resoluteness and temporality: The “either/or”

Excursus:

Through the Looking Glass of the Distinction between Causality and Instrumentality

30. Acting and the other: The politics of instrumentality

31. The repression of instrumentality in metaphysics

32. Causal and instrumental ends in monist materialism

4. The Concealment of Instrumentality:

The Conception of Action in Being and Time

33. The reason for focusing on the examples of action in Being and Time

34. The epigraph and the problem of action in the Sophist

35. Destruction and monism

36. Inauthentic, indifferent, and authentic action

37. Hammering and the concealing of instrumentality (Being and Time §15)

38. The breakdown of ends (Being and Time §16)

39. Sign and reference, understanding and interpretation (Being and Time §17)

40. Dictatorship

41. The temporality of death and the myth of Care

42. Techne as the virtue of theory

43. Subjectum absconditum

5. The Ontology of Conflict:

Conjuring Authority

44. The “turn” and action

45. Authority as the means to repress instrumentality

46. Conflict and the three senses of techne

47. The subjectivism authority (Prometheus)

48. The problem of the metaphysico-political conflict

49. The historical decision and phusis (Oedipus Rex)

50. Apolis and the spontaneous creation of authority (Antigone 1)

51. The human as deinon and the repression of instrumentality (Antigone 2)

52. A politics without reaction or an agonistic politics

53. The preservers and the magical founding of the city

6. The Ontology of the Ineffectual:

The Purloined Letter of Instrumentality

54. The reversal of the critique of monism

55. The turn, the return, and the other turn (the critique of Sartre as self-critique)

56. Transformations of the ruse of techne

57. Instrumentality incorporated into causality (the first sense of techne)

58. The ambivalence of the calculable and enframing (the second sense of techne)

59. The killing power of the saving power (the third sense of techne)

60. Metaphysical or materialist monism?

61. The French appropriation of the repression of instrumentality

62. The new Kantianism

63. Technophobia and the repression of instrumentality

64. The paradox of the final end

Peroratio

Bibliography