ABSTRACT Revered and feared during his lifetime, Richard McKeon left a rich and ambiguous intellectual legacy. The architect and practitioner of a cosmopolitan and expansive, historically and philosophically self-reflexive interdisciplinarity who reimagined liberal arts education for an era of transformation delighted in transcending boundaries and destabilizing assumptions and in demonstrating the relativity of every foundation to a particular constellation of ideas and methods. This essay explores the uncanny legacy of McKeon’s simultaneously visionary and old-fashioned style of thought, meditating on the timeliness, at this moment of crisis in and beyond the university, of a philosophical pluralism that embraces multiplicity, ambiguity, and difference without abandoning the commitment to critique.

ABSTRACT This essay meditates on the entanglement of history and memory with forgetfulness, with silencing, with what is before or outside speech. Recalling along the way a few of the manifold varieties of the unthinkable made manifest in recent events, it notes the same mute iteration that led Freud to the death drive, only to be troubled once again by the very same repetitions enfolded in the diagnosis of cultural malaise Freud built upon his insight. Turning to Georg Simmel’s Philosophy of Money for an alternative, non-psychoanalytic account of unconscious purpose as a trans-individual, cultural phenomenon, it arrives once again at the hypertrophic life-technologies of the modern—and at Simmel’s account of money as the ultimate being without qualities, “the most extreme … configuration of Geist” itself, which so thoroughly underpins ways of living that, obscuring dimensions of value that cannot be quantified, silently hum on in the face of catastrophe.

ABSTRACT Walter Benjamin's warning against unphilosophical “astonishment that the things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible” has new urgency in the face of real estate developer and reality-show host Donald Trump's surprise victory in the presidential election of 2016. Philosopher, sociologist, and cultural theorist Georg Simmel's 1900 magnum opus, the Philosophy of Money, provides valuable orientation at a moment when the expectation that public discourse must be oriented by norms of truth and accuracy is under siege—not least by those who ascended to power openly denigrating the value of expertise and the specialized knowledge long regarded as essential to modern government. Trump has an instinctive grasp of Simmel's decisive insight that “money is the strongest and most immediate symbol” of the cynical truism that “the only absolute is the relativity of things.” Situating philosophy at the limits of disciplinary ways of knowing, the Philosophy of Money develops a modernist, performative strategy of thought that turns relativity into a philosophical resource. It can help us to counter the dissolution of the ideal of veracity in an era of absolutized marketing by disentangling thought from narratives of rational progress that obscure its opposite and interrogating the limitations of the professionalized ordering of knowledge practices in which expertise continues to be produced and maintained. Simmel's strategy for embracing the fragmentation, multiplicity, and uncertainty of human experience may thereby help us address the complexity and ambiguity of a historical situation growing increasingly surreal as techno-scientific progress goes hand in hand with post-truth politics.