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Aims & Scope

The name of our journal is due to the expression “new thought”, which gives title to a booklet by Franz Rosenzweig of 1925 and with which the author characterizes his own thought, as he has expressed it in his masterpiece The Star of Redemption of 1921. Rosenzweig (1925/2005), summarizes his intention with three mutually assumed characteristics: “this new thought is given, no longer in thinking itself, but in speaking [...], in the need for the other or, what is the same, in taking time seriously” (p. 34). Both the alterity of the Other and the unprecedented event of time, as well as the concern for language characterize the new thought. In “negative” terms, Rosenzweig's new thought carries out a de-centering with respect to the transcendental Ego, a de-formalization of the aprioris and a de-discovery of dialogue as an original dimension of language and meaning. In other words: it carries out a new “turn” with respect to the Copernican turn (Kant), characteristic of Modernity —and which in turn had shifted the focus from “substance” to “subject”—. With this, Rosenzweig joins contemporary philosophy and approaches other philosophical languages that can also be seen as responses to the “self-absolutization of the subject” and can be described with the metaphor of the “turn”. [1] Specifically, we refer to the linguistic turn, whose origins date back to anti-Hegelian reactions that culminated, at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, in the “analytic” philosophy of Frege and the “phenomenological” philosophy of Husserl. This turn would later crystallize as a “linguistic-pragmatic” turn (supported by the “second” Wittgenstein) and as a “linguistic-hermeneutic” turn (supported by Heidegger's Being and Time). And we also refer to the change of orientation in thought (die Wendung im Denken) that Heidegger himself carried out in the 1930s, from a (crypto-)“transcendental” perspective to one centered on the “history of being” (seinsgeschichtlich). [2] Despite the break that the second critical turn marks —the linguistic pragmatic/hermeneutic—, with the first —the Kantian one—, it is possible to identify a “millennial patriarchal, repressive, transcendental, racist and phallocentric narrative that runs like a red thread through the history of the West, from St. Paul to Marx, Husserl, Heidegger and beyond” (Danowski and Viveiros de Castro, 2015/2019, p. 109), from which Rosenzweig himself also seems to be sometimes trapped. Part of the problem is that the second wave of turns —although renewing the critical character— has not managed to overcome a certain proposal of “emancipation” that the thought of the Enlightenment already promised, based on a more or less determined model of “humanity” and built on a series of “privileges”: of sex, gender and sexual orientation, ethnicity, nationality, caste, color, class and religion, but also geopolitical, biopolitical, linguistic, of capabilities, of training “credentials”, of age, of physical appearance, etc. In this sense, it is imperative to critically question the thought of the second critical wave as well, from a new critical radicalization. This “third” criticality, in part, has nothing “new”: it has been active in various ways since always, in different practices —and not necessarily “within” what has come to be called “philosophy”—. But, on the other hand, it is always “new”, since it is never part of what is “already given”, of what is “established”. Seen from the perspective of “emancipation” (which, moreover, is not the only one), the third criticality questions the more or less hidden, more or less evident privileges that lie behind the modern and contemporary emancipatory ideal, broadening the focus to a multiplicity of intersecting axes. In this sense, different “turns” can be seen, which place the “critical” emphasis on one issue or another and seek, from there, “emancipation”. In any case, emancipation remains an endless task: there will always be privileges to expose, common senses to denaturalize, ingrained prejudices that need to be deconstructed. For this very reason, emancipation perhaps does not only take the form of a “process of liberation” (liberation from), but rather that of a “practice of freedom”. The challenge is to collectively and fundamentally invent “new practices of imagination, resistance, revolt, repair and mourning, as well as of living and dying well” (Haraway, 2016/2019, p. 89). It is characteristic of this third turn that it is not merely a theoretical undertaking, restricted to academic or enlightened spheres, but a project focused on the practical, where the conceptual advances proposed by philosophy are in tune with popular demands. If the “linguistic-pragmatic/hermeneutic turn” occurred within the framework of a society and a lifeworld that were still “ilu

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