Jan Patočka holds that both the Husserlian and the Heideggerian descriptions of history remain abstract because they lack an authentic reflection on historical sense’s appearing, which presupposes a description of the transition from the nonhistorical and prehistorical states of humanity to its final historical state. Nevertheless, it seems that Patočka would confront an internal aporia here because, even if he sought to think the continuity of these three movements, he tends to affirm the rupture between them. To overcome that aporia, (...) it becomes necessary to formulate the hypothesis according to which the prehistorical is characterized by a repression of sense’s problematic character, whereas the historical as such is characterized by a conversion of consciousness toward this problematic character. Justifying this hypothesis requires exploring Patočka’s anthropology, confronting it with Arendt’s anthropology, and formulating metaphysical perspectives. (shrink)

This paper has three interwoven aims: to demonstrate the constitutive role of style in deconstruction, which, when not entirely misconstrued, has yet to be rigorously appreciated; to develop the notion of ‘de-distancing’ as a necessary but overlooked notion for understanding not only the ontological stakes of Dasein in Being in Time but also Derrida’s intervention in the relation between Heidegger, Nietzsche, and the limits of metaphysics; to demonstrate that Derrida’s recourse to de-distancing as the spatiality of woman in Spurs punctures (...) the horizon within which Heidegger attempts to situate the notion for essential reasons and, in the same stroke, instances the constitutive role of style in deconstruction. (shrink)

This paper has three interwoven aims: (1) to demonstrate the constitutive role of style in deconstruction, which, when not entirely misconstrued, has yet to be rigorously appreciated; (2) to develop the notion of ‘de-distancing’ (Ent-fernung, é-loignement) as a necessary but overlooked notion for understanding not only the ontological stakes of Dasein in Being in Time but also Derrida’s intervention in the relation between Heidegger, Nietzsche, and the limits of metaphysics; (3) to demonstrate that Derrida’s recourse to de-distancing as the spatiality (...) of woman in Spurs punctures the horizon within which Heidegger attempts to situate the notion for essential reasons and, in the same stroke, instances the constitutive role of style in deconstruction. (shrink)

According to What Is Philosophy?, all disciplines combat opinion, but art fights most effectively because art and opinion both pertain to sensibility. Yet, this common provenance also makes the line dividing art and opinion porous. The stakes of this porosity are perhaps most visible in the relation of art to life. Although art must avoid two forms of death, ‘chaos’ and ‘opinion’, Deleuze and Guattari don't treat chaos and opinion equally. The fundamental distinction between good death and bad death, between (...) death by chaos and death by opinion, has a number of problematic consequences. Perhaps the most consequential: opinion is deadlier than death itself. (shrink)

This article analyzes the complex relation of phenomenology and literature in the work of Husserl and Derrida. In the first part, I show that the limited ideality of the literary object necessarily situates it in a derivative region of phenomenology. In the second part, however, I problematize the regional status of literature by elaborating a brief but important footnote in which Husserl broadens the concept of literature to embrace all cultural products whatsoever. Yet, because even this broadened concept of literature (...) ultimately remains secondary for the phenomenologist, it only redoubles and ratifies the submission of literature to the more ideal objectivities of mathematical disciplines like geometry. The third part, finally, mobilizes Derrida’s notion of “dissemination,” prepared in and unintelligible apart from his early engagement with Husserlian phenomenology, in order to broach a notion of literature that the phenomenologist can neither circumscribe nor describe. (shrink)

This essay situates “singularity” at the heart of the power dynamics operative in contemporary pedagogy and the system supporting it. More than merely academic learning, indeed, “school” here denotes not only the range of disciplinary authorities at work within the classroom and the educational system at large but also discursive obedience to knowledge. Supported by close readings of Arendt and Derrida, this paper thus argues that nothing less than the formation of identity is at stake in “school.” What are the (...) boundaries, limits, and conditions of possibility for a student’s invention of his or her own singularity within an institution and curriculum that, at the same time, demands obedience to authority? This paradoxical formation of identity within the constrictive demands of authority constitutes the primary task of thinking the “invention of singularity” at the heart of schooling in conjunction with democracy, language, vocation, and ideology. (shrink)