Those Other Specters. The “Western” Subject between History, Culture, and Philosophy.
Winter 2026 Issue
Palantir Technologies is a leading software company specializing in big data analytics, artificial intelligence, and decision-making platforms. Founded in 2003, it initially developed tools for U.S. intelligence agencies, providing advanced data integration to combat terrorism and fraud.
Known for its cutting-edge AI and machine-learning capabilities, Palantir remains a dominant force in national security, enterprise analytics, and digital transformation, working with institutions from the U.S. Department of Defense to Fortune 500 companies. Despite its reputation for secrecy, its impact is undeniable: reshaping how data is leveraged for intelligence and efficiency worldwide.
Alexander Caedmon Karp becomes CEO of Palantir Technologies in 2005, twenty years ago. It is this February 3rd, 2025, when he publishes on Palantir’s website a letter to the shareholders. The focus is on positive performance, future strategies and, most important, on the role of technological progress for Western society. Karp closes the letter as follows:
«As Samuel Huntington has written, the rise of the West was not made possible “by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion … but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence.” He continued: “Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.”»
Huntington’s remark is peculiarly relevant—especially when considered in conjunction with Karp’s open endorsement of Palantir’s military purpose. On a recent investor call, Karp did not hesitate to declare: “Palantir is here to disrupt and make the institutions we partner with the very best in the world, and when it’s necessary to scare our enemies and, on occasion, kill them.” The company’s growing involvement with the U.S. Department of Defense, particularly through the Project Maven contract—recently expanded to over $1.2 billion—demonstrates a concrete realization of this mission: the delivery of artificial-intelligence platforms that use reams of classified intelligence to automate life-or-death decisions about which targets to strike.
Karp’s invocation of Huntington functions like a Roko’s Basilisk—a philosophical thought experiment in which a hypothetical future AI punishes those who did not help bring it into existence. The very knowledge of the AI’s potential becomes a coercive structure: now that you know, you must serve it—or suffer. Similarly, if, as Huntington says, non-Westerners never forget the West’s organized violence, then the West, knowing it will never be forgotten, must forever prepare to be attacked—or strike first. The mere fact of historical memory is weaponized into a logic of preemptive escalation. The result is a civilizational self-image that casts itself into a permanent state of war: not merely a geopolitical war, but a temporal and epistemological one, where memory itself demands militarization.
This shift in tone—toward open corporate celebration of lethality—reveals something fundamental about the ideological posture of both the company and its CEO. Karp, who describes himself as a “progressive warrior” and once joked about spraying his critics with “light fentanyl-laced urine,” holds a doctorate in neoclassical social theory and frequently invokes a civilizational frame for Palantir’s work: to “power the West to its obvious, innate superiority.”
All turns, then, around an historico-epistemological evaluation of relations from the point of view of that Thing, that phantasm––which can aptly be described as the specular opposite of Derrida’s specters of Marx, and which orders and structures these very relations. Huntington’s statement is laconic: there has been only one mode of relation that ties the West to its Other—or, one may argue, to the Other. This mode is violence.
On the other hand, as Jean Baudrillard suggests in The Transparency of Evil: “The very scale of the efforts made to exterminate the Other is testimony to the Other’s indestructibility, and by extension to the indestructible totality of Otherness … Radical otherness survives everything.” Violence’s effectivity is thus not only limited, but—at a deeper level—delusional.
The provocation of this call lies precisely here. Rather than offering a ready-made moral posture, we ask contributors to suspend the reflex of easy dismissal. Karp, with his militant loyalty to a civilizational narrative, functions as a contemporary Other to the academic Left: a figure who forces philosophy to confront its own universalist ambitions, its complacent appeals to “decentering,” and its decolonial “imperialism of caresses.” If accelerationist rhetoric now circulates as a performative politics of arbitrary recuperation—a Renaissance of organized violence—what does philosophical responsibility look like when the ground itself is shifting beneath our feet?
It is exactly here that Huntington’s statement becomes ambiguously interpretable, like oracular sapience: non-Westerners never forget the violence that the West imposed on them. To Karp, the enigma speaks the tongue of war: embrace the genealogy of imperial violence and push it forward. Baudrillard would instead read Huntington in the opposite sense: the destruction of the Other is strictu sensu a logical impossibility, a sci-fi delusion that fantasizes a world without the ultimate Alterity—death.
This Issue of GCAS Journal is centered around the question of responsibility and appropriation: the question of inheritance. It is not primarily concerned with rehearsing the familiar litany—violence, domination, struggle, exclusion—as moral verdicts. Instead, we invite an anatomopathological gaze upon the very image of the West that is today culturally performative. What would it mean to take Western culture seriously—if this seriousness entails a history of organized violence? What would it mean to acknowledge the full depth and width of that history without a judgment that pre-defines, and therefore pre-symbolizes, its content? If there has been a question around the specters of Marx, what about the specters of Schmitt, or Evola –– or even of those haunting Fukuyama (Kant, Hegel, Kojeve)?
In other words: How should one think about Alex Karp’s posture of “we must take responsibility for what we are, and be what we are”? Can tolerance of incompletion—philosophy’s own unresolved task—still speak when confronted with an executive ethos that celebrates algorithmic lethality? Or must philosophy abandon the language of universal care and adopt a more militant loyalty to its own incompleteness?
We welcome submissions that dissect these tensions with the cold curiosity of the anatomist rather than the prosecutorial certainty of the judge—papers that explore, without prior alignment, the performative recuperations of “the West,” the algorithmic acceleration of organized violence, and the paradox of seeking justice from within the very structures that negate it.
Possible Lines of Inquiry
Possible lines of inquiry include, but are not limited to:
Technologies of Organized Violence: How do companies like Palantir actualize Huntington’s notion of “organized violence” in contemporary infrastructures of decision-making? What does it mean for AI to inherit the historical function of violence
The Return of Civilizational Rhetoric: What is the function of affectively-charged appeals to “the West” in Karp’s discourse? How do such invocations operate in the post-critical climate of geopolitical re-mythologization?
Epistemologies of the Algorithm: How does the epistemic authority of AI models relate to classical forms of Western metaphysical order? Is the algorithmic subject a continuation or a rupture of Enlightenment rationality?
Roko’s Basilisk and the Temporal Politics of Memory: If Huntington’s quote, deployed by Karp, operates like a Roko’s Basilisk, what does it mean to be structurally coerced by the Other’s memory of Western violence? Can historical guilt become a cybernetic compulsion?
The Politics of Neutrality and Refusal: What is the philosophical cost of refusing to take sides in a culture war that increasingly resembles a militarized semiotic conflict? Can neutrality itself become a form of loyalty—to thought, to incompletion, to philosophy as such?
Accusation and Caress: How does liberal decentering—anthropological, psychoanalytic, therapeutic—fail to account for the performative recuperation of cultural identity by techno-imperial agents? What comes after critique, when critique becomes co-optable?
Submission Guidelines
We invite original articles (5.000–10.000 words) and critical reviews that engage any of the axes above. Interdisciplinary approaches—drawing from philosophy, critical theory, STS, security studies, psychoanalysis, or political economy—are strongly encouraged.
Please follow Chicago author-date style.
Abstracts (200–400 words) should be submitted by: November 1, 2025
Notifications of acceptance: November 10, 2025
Final submissions due: January 10, 2026
Publication target: March 2026
For inquiries and submissions, please contact: [email protected]
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