Public lecture by Dimitris Vardoulakis

ZRC SAZU, Institute of Philosophy

invites you to a public lecture by

Dimitris Vardoulakis (Western Sydney University)

Friedman’s Pencil: Agonism and the Repression of Instrumentality

The lecture will take place on Tuesday, 18 June at 17:00 in the Four Seasons Hall, ZRC SAZU, Novi trg 4, 2nd floor. It will be held in English.

Friedman’s Pencil: Agonism and the Repression of Instrumentality

When in the 19th century Jacob Burckhardt invents the neologism “agonism” to denote the aristocratic politics of the Greek archaic period, he also provided agonism with its key feature: it was opposed, he said, to the instrumentality of both tyranny and democracy because it denoted a useless activity outside means and ends. Ever since, conflictual politics has been central in conceptions of non-representational political action marked by the critique of instrumental reason. This, I hold, evidences the repression of instrumentality that, at least since Heidegger, is determinative of philosophy’s unconscious.

And yet, a new look at Greek thought reveals that agonism is embedded in the conception of the good as the end of action, and hence instrumental through and through. My aim here is not so much to “refute” the modern conception of agonism, since one cannot negate the repressed without thereby reaffirming it. Rather, I would like to work through the repression of instrumentality by highlighting the profound contemporary relevance of the Greek foregrounding of instrumentality in agonism. I will do so with reference to Milton Friedman’s example of the production of a pencil, which I will argue exemplifies the capitalist repression of instrumentality.

Dimitris Vardoulakis was the inaugural chair of Philosophy at Western Sydney University. Some of his books are Freedom from the Free Will: On Kafka’s Laughter (2016); Stasis Before the State: Nine Theses on Agonistic Democracy (2018); Spinoza, the Epicurean: Authority and Utility in Materialism (2020); The Ruse of Techne: Heidegger’s Magical Materialism (2024); and The Agonistic Condition (2025). He is the co-editor of the book series “Incitements” (Edinburgh University Press) and the journal Philosophy, Politics and Critique. He is currently serving as the chair of the Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy (ASCP) and Vice President of the Council of the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (CHASS).