HPhil Seminar: October 23, 2025

The HPhil (History of Philosophy) Research Group of the Centre of Philosophy of the University of Lisbon announces the 2025/26 edition of its permanent seminar on the history of philosophy, devoted to the presentation of conferences by renowned specialists while also creating opportunities to emerging scholars, aiming to promote advanced studies in groundbreaking debates and the permanent training of its academic community.

In this session of the seminar, Sjoerd van Tuinen (University of Roterdam) will present a work of his, entitled “From Possession to Use: Deleuze’s and Agamben’s Critique of Husserl’s Appropriation of Leibniz in the Cartesian Meditations”. (abstract below)

The session will take place on October 23, 2025 at 5 p.m., in the Room 201.J (Room Mattos Romão, Department of Philosophy). Admission is free

Abstract

In his Cartesian Meditations (1929), Edmund Husserl proposes a monadological solution to the epistemological problem of transcendental solipsism. At the basis of intersubjectivity lies the lived body (Leib), the ‘non-originary originarity’ of the body proper. After the bracketing of the empirical validity of experience, Leibniz is invoked for a second reduction, meant to determine the sphere of appurtenances that originally belongs to each subject and that accounts for communication with the Other. Husserl thus grounds the constitutive lifeworld in body integrity and possessive individualism. I will present two critiques of this use of Leibniz, both of which emphasize the disjunctive syntheses that Leibniz allows for at the level of for example composite substances, and hence also between body and soul. For Deleuze, the problem of the other refers to a micropolitics of mobile and non-localizable captures rather than individual closures, such that intersubjective monadology is inseparable from an animal monadology with its twin components of animism and totemism. For Agamben, the impropriety of the body demands us to rethink what it means to have/be a body in terms of ‘use.’ For both, what the Leibnizian theory of the body offers is a theory of transindividuality rather than intersubjectivity.