By Ryan J. Johnson
Since our days in graduate school at Duquesne University, my dear friend Jacob Greenstine and I have had many conversations about how continental philosophy re-reads, revives and re-casts ancient metaphysical thinking in new and exciting ways. The study of ancient philosophy is a well-worn path, to be sure, but we have long sensed a line of flight leading in a different direction.
So, we schemed a book.
Following Gilles Deleuze’s declaration of himself as a ‘pure metaphysician,’ we invited leading and emerging continental thinkers to depict various encounters that generate a sort of thinking that pushes thought to its limits and beyond, often far beyond. The result was Contemporary Encounters with Ancient Metaphysics, which Edinburgh UP published in 2017.
When it came out, we were proud and thought we were done – but we weren’t.
Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that that line of flight was not done with us.
As we were finalizing Contemporary Encounters with Ancient Metaphysics, we noticed more encounters emerge, ones that pulled us in yet another direction – not toward theory, but toward practice.
We shared this all with another old Duquesne classmate, Dave Mesing, and invited him to co-edit a second volume.
It would be, in a way, a sequel.
But rather than metaphysical encounters, we would stage encounters with practice.
Because it grew from the same expansive vision of continental philosophy as the first volume, we called it Contemporary Encounters with Ancient Practice.
This sequel volume focuses on sites of subject formation, forces of experience, the joy and fragility of community, and forms of philosophy cast as existential exercises. Practice – both conceptually and in actu – is the means we gave for harnessing the force and diversity of a new set of contemporary encounters with mostly Greek and Roman antiquity.
When we say ‘practice,’ however, we mean something much broader and deeper than what the discipline usually has in mind. More than merely ethical and political philosophy, we are interested in the great diversity of concrete ways of living, acting, reflecting, and being with others found in or inspired by antiquity. Our contributors, for example, write about practices such as mathematics, tragedy, comedy, education, music, dance, image-making, grammar, and poetry.
In that sense, then, it is not a sequel. For turning from metaphysics to practice brings a new dimension.
More than simply a volume about practice, we wanted it to be a practice, to practice what it portrays.
Contemporary Encounters with Ancient Practice must itself practice.
Rather than simply theorise practice, then, we asked contributors to engage practice in truly practical ways, to embody the materiality of living and real relations in and through their contributions.
And they delivered.
Alongside long-form scholarly essays, readers will find short occasional pieces and poetic memoirs; experiments in thinking images and images that think; mathematical meditations and prompts for bodily movement; some will ask you to stand up and to move in some specific way; another tells readers to listen to music while reading. One contribution suggests taking mild hallucinogens.
Even in the more traditional essays, many include non-expository or non-argumentative practical elements, such as exhortative or didactic elements that tell the reader to do something specific, to perform social or physical experiments, to try reflective writing exercises, to go on walking meditations.
And to ensure we were not restricted by disciplinary habits, we encouraged collaborations between artists, students, bookmakers, dancers, photographers, and other practitioners outside or alongside academia.
This expansive and insurgent sense of practice even informed the order of things. While Contemporary Encounters with Ancient Metaphysics was organized chronologically – from Plato to Plotinus – this sequel is more rhizomatic (so Deleuze never really left us). Part I gathers eight chapters that enact forms of ‘Encountering Ancient Practice’ – contemporary reflections on ancient practical ideas and texts; and it subdivides into two sections: ‘Situations’ and ‘Conjunctions.’ Part II collects eight chapters that consider ‘Practices of Encountering Antiquity’ – contemporary practical engagements with ancient reflections and traces. It is also subdivided into two sections: ‘Fragments’ and ‘Accumulations.’
Creating a book about practice that is also practicable, we wanted to defamiliarise and re-think our understanding of and relationship to both the history of philosophy and to the contemporary world. Thinking and practicing practice in this way, we hope, might help others resist the temptation to impose lifeless categories while simultaneously focusing the habits, exercises, activities, philosophies, and lives of today’s readers in light of ancient history.
In the end, if we allow practice to act as a sort of hinge between the contemporary and antiquity, we might begin to see how practice both shapes and grounds philosophical theory. Even pure metaphysics, after all, is a practice.
In this sense, Contemporary Encounters with Ancient Practice might not be a sequel at all.
Maybe it’s a prequel.
Whatever it is, or whenever it comes, we hope it is truly a practice.
About the author
Ryan J. Johnson is Associate Professor and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Elon University. Edinburgh University Press has published five of Ryan’s eight books: Deleuze, A Stoic (2020), The Deleuze-Lucretius Encounter (2016), Phenomenology of Black Spirit (co-written with Biko Mandela Gray, 2022), Contemporary Encounters with Ancient Metaphysics (Edinburgh UP, 2017), and Contemporary Encounters with Ancient Practice (2024). Edinburgh University Press will also publish his co-translation (with Jared Bly) of Émile Bréhier’s The Theory of Incorporeals in Ancient Stoicism in 2025. Right now, he is working on a pair of books that philosophically improvise John Coltrane – one called The John Brown Suite, the other called A Love Spinoza. All his classes occur outside, and he loves trains.
About the book
This volume collects written and visual works that engage with opportunities of ancient practice from within the continental tradition.
More than surveying ancient ethical or political ideas, the chapters develop divergent yet resonant approaches to concrete ways of living, acting, reflecting, and being with others found in antiquity and its reception. The practices involve the habits, exercises, activities, philosophies, and lives of today’s readers; and so most chapters encourage the reader to do something, to put the ideas into practice.
Find out more about Contemporary Encounters with Ancient Practice.
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