Derrida: Phenomenology

Jacques Derrida’s “Signature Event Context” is one of the most famous papers in literary theory, but there are aspects of it which, in my experience, are not commented on. Why are there no commas in the title? I present a puzzle, but there is a solution which I presume many will quickly go for.

In his work through the early 1930’s, Heidegger determines what it means to be an authentic self through fundamental attunements such as anxiety, boredom, uncanniness and guilt, and equi-primordially via understanding and thrown projection. The way that attunement and understanding structure authentic disclosure of being involves paradoxical gestures juxtaposing meaning and meaninglessness, presence and absence, affirmation and negation, possibility and reality, holism and individuation, normativity and own-ness. The key to navigating and unifying this tangle of contradictory moments, as Heidegger reminds (...) his readers, is in understanding the dynamics of temporality. In this paper I discuss common ways that contemporary readers of Heidegger render authenticity inauthentic by interpreting such tropes as anxiety, the self and the nothing by reference to what Heidegger calls the ordinary conception of time, the sequential emerging, lingering and passing away of beings. Thought via ordinary time, nothingness opposes itself to presence, making authentic anxiety appear similar to depression as the breakdown of possibilities. I contrast these readings with my interpretation of authentic temporality, and explain how my reading of time changes the way the authentic self, attunement and projective understanding disclose themselves. In choosing the particular authors that I cite in support of my representation of inauthentic interpretations of authenticity, I do not mean to imply that these writers are united in their approaches to Heidegger. On the contrary, they differ amongst themselves concerning many aspects of his thinking. My purpose is to highlight what I take to be key points of intersection among their differing accounts. (shrink)

Deleuze is prominent among those philosophers who pronounce that difference must be understood as ontologically prior to identity. He teaches that identity is a surface effect of difference, so to understand the basis of logico-mathematical idealities we must uncover their genesis in the fecundity of differentiation. Deleuze wants to offer a foundation of number and mathematics as a subversive, creative force, an affirmation of Nietzsche’s eternal return as the ‘roll of the dice’. But he begins too late. For Deleuze, virtual (...) intensities (Eternal Return) generate the logical , conceptual, theoretical, lawful principles for empirical domains, and then are held steady in the background, beyond the reach of the conceptual and logical patterns, which cancel them by freezing and isolating them. Applying Heidegger’s deconstruction of Nietzschean subjectivity to Deleuze’s project reveals intensities to function as subjective enframings of the species and parts that develop from them. Intensive processes posit , set in place and represent the qualities that steadily remain throughout the calculation of difference in degree. Deleuze does not appear to recognize that the iteration of extensive quantity is devoid of meaningful sense. His failure to make this distinction leads him to confuse mathematical with non-mathematical idealities and prevents him from locating the fundamental sense of extensive duration. What Husserl, and Heidegger after him, recognized is that numeration never counts anything but its own self-iteration, devoid of sense and meaning outside of the empty ‘same thing, different time’. To experience an object as meaningful beyond this ‘how much’ is to no longer attend to it as calculative, countable iteration, as persisting self-identical presence. What holds only for intensities in Deleuze’s understanding of the structure of time, that every change in degree is simultaneously a difference in kind, constitutes the irreducible, absolute essence of all duration. (shrink)

Phenomenology and ancient Greek philosophy. The title of this book, indicating these topics as its two main subjects, could give the impression that the subjects are held together by a circumstantial “and.” The title would then indicate a connection between phenomenology and a topic, ancient Greek philosophy, the way titles such as Art and Phenomenology, Phenomenology and Psychological Research, Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics do. This impression would be wrong. First, ancient Greek philosophers take pride of place in the dialogues initiated (...) by many phenomenologists with various figures from the history of philosophy. Second, this is not just because phenomenological philosophers have tended to regard ancient Greek philosophy as the revered beginning of Western thought, reflection upon which may help illuminate any topic modern human beings wish to inquire into or give it a kind of historical dignity. It is first and foremost because ancient Greek philosophy, understood as the scientific attempt to understand the world, ourselves, and our place in the world, in the phenomenological tradition is regarded as one important origin of contemporary Western philosophy and science, even if contemporary philosophy and science is also determined by a new ideal of philosophy that emerges in early modernity. Indeed, for most phenomenologists, Greek philosophy can be regarded as the roots supporting this new ideal—even if these roots are sometimes hidden from sight or forgotten. The main rationale for confronting ancient Greek philosophy phenomenologically is accordingly the attempt to bring to light in its full radicality the phenomenon “philosophy.” Unearthing philosophy as it was originally understood by Greek thinkers may, according to many phenomenologists at least, help us understand what philosophy in the full sense of the word was, has been, and may be again, but also what it has become or even degenerated into in modern times, for instance positivism. It is this way of approaching ancient Greek philosophy that we wish to concentrate on in this book, in the hope that the volume will prove instructive both to people who have an interest in ancient Greek philosophy and wish to know more about the phenomenological approach to it and to people who work within phenomenology and wish to know more about the various approaches to ancient Greek philosophy characterizing the phenomenological movement. We have therefore sought to make the introduction and the individual chapters accessible to non-experts, for instance by transliterating all Greek text, and confining quotes in other languages than English to footnotes and glosses. (shrink)

This paper explores the relationship of mourning and the gift in the work of Jacques Derrida. I argue that mourning is not a Derridean gift, but mourning does open us to the gift. Reading the works of Aristotle, Cicero, and Kierkegaard on friendship and love to the dead in the wake of Derrida’s Politics of Friendship makes this relation among mourning and the gift apparent for he presents mourning as the opening to a democracy to-come whose logic is the gift. (...) Through these accounts, I maintain that in preparing us for the gift, mourning the dead other can help us to relate better with the living other in ethical, political, and ontological terms. (shrink)

Proper attention to the theme of corporeality is crucial for understanding Derrida’s analysis of Hegel in “The Pit and the Pyramid.” This article argues that Derrida’s essay compels us to face the impossibility of giving a wholly coherent account of embodiment. The _Aufhebung_ supposedly unites the exteriority of the corporeal with interiority in a higher unity that cancels and preserves them both; Hegel’s own text reveals, however, that meaning is primordially absent from the body that was thought to incarnate it. (...) And it is this absence of ideal meaning that is originary: Differance conditions the body as it conditions speech, rendering the body other than itself such that it is not categorizable as flesh that is the self or as an object that is not the self. I am and am not my body because the dichotomy between interiority and exteriority breaks down even at the level of the body. Indeed, I am and am not my self; the embodied self is disrupted from the start, never self-contained. Thus embodiment always already testifies to the other. (shrink)

The primary focus of this project is the silent and subvocal speech-recognition interface unveiled in 2018 as an ambulatory device wearable on the neck that detects a myoelectrical signature by electrodes worn on the surface of the face, throat, and neck. These emerge from an alleged “intending to speak” by the wearer silently-saying-something-to-oneself. This inner voice is believed to occur while one reads in silence or mentally talks to oneself. The artifice does not require spoken sounds, opening the mouth, or (...) any explicit or external movement of the lips. The essay then considers such subvocal “speech” as a mode of writing or saying and the interior of the mouth or oral cavity as its writing surface. It briefly revisits discussions of telepathy to recontextualize Heidegger’s warning against enframing language exclusively within calculative technics and physiology, which he suggests is detrimental to Mundarten (mouth-modes of regional dialects). It closes in reconsideration of Husserl’s phenomenology of language and meaning in Ideas as it might apply to subvocal speech-recognition interfaces. It suggests ways by which the electrophysiology that the device detects and deciphers (as an alleged intention of a presumed natural language unspoken vocally or aloud) might supplement Husserl’s insinuation of the Leiblichkeit of language through a self-stamping extraction of an extension of meaning. (shrink)

This project begins with the selective sensory experience suggested by lngarden followed by an insensitivity he insinuates to digestive processes. This is juxtaposed with an oenological explanation of phenomenal sedimentation offered by Jean-Luc Marion. It compares the dynamics of time in the former with the those of wine in the latter. Emphasis is given to lngarden's insinuation of time as fluid, liquid, or aquatic. It revisits Ingarden's physiological explanations of partially-open systems by way of the bilateral excretion and absorption of (...) semi-permeable cellular membranes. The importance he eventually grants to inner secretion is considered alongside perspiration and salivation collateral to skin and membranes. It suggests that Ingarden's interest in thermoregulation, partial permeation, and secretion invites alternative conceptions of temporal consciousness in physiological experiences, beyond sequential and linear clock-time and/or Kantian intuition. Temporality experienced as temperance becomes discernible at a permeable point in which the sedimentation of Husserl, the maturation of Marion, and the fluidity and secretion of Ingarden mix and mingle into the taste of time. (shrink)

A eulogy on the late Bernard Stiegler, reflecting on Ekin Erkan's friendship with Stiegler and Stiegler's influence on the philosophical study of technology, stoking a comparative review between Stiegler and other thinkers in analytic and continental traditions.

Mass shootings constitute a recurrent and most violent phenomenon in the U.S. and elsewhere. This paper challenges the ready-made, solipsistically contained metanarratives on offer by mainstream media and formal institutions with regard to the psychological antecedents of the perpetrating social actors, while theorizing mass shootings as acts of violence that are systemically inscribed in the foundations of communities. These foundations abide by the logic of sacrifice which is propagated in instances of collective traumatism. It is argued that the cultural trauma (...) that emanates from events of mass shootings, inasmuch as the commemorative events that are performed on regular occasions, constitute re-enactments of the death drive that sustains communities. The cultural analytic deploys against a CDA reading of longitudinal studies on mass shootings, coupled with psychoanalytic discourse analysis, prior to submitting mass shootings to a deconstructive line of reasoning as systemically necessary transcendental violence. Ultimately, it is shown that the intertextual institutional chain that informs the mediatized representation of this social phenomenon merely attains to obliterate and, hence, to propagate cultural traumatism and the sacrificial logic that underpins it. The terms micrometanarrative, parafunction and expropriating ipseity are introduced and operationalized in this context. (shrink)

"[O]ther contributors argue that taste has a clear epistemic function. Brower cites Agamben as claiming that taste is a priveleged locus for knowledge...A phenomenology of taste, then, is no mere trivial or personal matter, but one with wide-ranging consequences. And some of these conseqences are ethical...[D]oes the debasement of taste indeed breed xenophobic oppression, as Brower is sure that it does? [sic:)] These are contentious claims. Surely a person of exemplary aesthetics and gustatory taste can still be a moral monster...aesthetic (...) delicacy does not entail ethical virtue. It has been a long time since beauty was associated with moral good, yet the connection persists...It has been a long time since beauty was associated with truth, as well, and yet, again, the conection endures..." (Eds' Preface, ix-x). (shrink)

This monograph uses deconstruction—a philosophical movement originated by Jacques Derrida—to read the most authoritative book in Judaism: the Talmud. Examining deconstruction in comparison with Kant’s and Hegel’s philosophies, the volume argues that the movement opens an innovative debate on Jewish Law. -/- First, the monograph interprets deconstruction within the major streams of continental philosophy; then, it criticizes many aspects of Foucault’s and Agamben’s philosophy, rejecting their notion of law. On these premises, the research delivers a close examination of many fundamental (...) aspects of the Talmud. Consequently, it provides a short history of Rabbinic literature, a history of the dissemination of the Talmud from Babylon to Northern France, and an analysis of Talmudic vocabulary from a deconstructive perspective. Each key concept of the Talmud is analysed according to the deconstructive dialectics between orality and writing. Closing with a comparison between the Talmud and Derrida’s most enigmatic text, Glas, the study argues that deconstruction dismantles the traditional notion of the Talmud to outline a new approach to Jewish Law. -/- Reading the Talmud through deconstruction, this new angle makes the volume an essential resource for students and scholars interested in Jewish studies, continental philosophy, and the Middle East. (shrink)

In this 2004 interview — translated into English and published in its entirety for the first time — Jacques Derrida reflects upon his practices of writing and teaching, about the community of his readers, and explores questions related to corporeity and textuality, sexual difference, desire, politics, Marxism, violence, truth, interpretation, and translation. In the course of the interview, Derrida discusses the work of Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Maurice Blanchot, Hélène Cixous, Jean Genet, Paul Celan, and many others.

From its earliest origins in the Dao De Jing, Daoism has been known as a movement that is skeptical of the ability of language to fully express the truth. While many scholars have compared the earliest works of Daoism to language-skeptical movements in twentieth-century European philosophy and have debated to what degree early Daoism does or does not resemble these recent movements, Daniel Fried breaks new ground by examining a much broader array of Daoist materials from ancient and medieval China (...) and showing how these works influenced ideas about language in medieval religion, literature, and politics. Through an extended comparison with a broad sample of European philosophical works, the book explores how ideas about language grow out of a given historical moment and advances a larger argument about how philosophical and religious ideas cannot be divided into "content" and "context.". (shrink)

Derrida’s thought on “trace,” “différance,” “writing,” and “supplement” is always thought the breaking of logocentrism, the essence, the positive meaning, and the closure of the metaphysics of presence; this thinking is accordingly regarded the thinking with the fundamental structure of difference and openness. By tracking back to Saussure, Husserl and Levinas, this fundamental difference breaks the myth of ideal meaning as well as the illusion of the absolute open; its lack of ideality and absoluteness contains the fundamental difference within itself (...) and thus has the structure of open. However, from a broader perspective, I will re-ask the question “Whether or not Derrida’s ‘trace,’ ‘différance,’ ‘writing,’ and ‘supplement’ have a structure of open.” When the web of differences encompasses everything even its own “exit,” this “open” thus conceals and denies other modes of thinking. With the impossibility of going out of this mode of thinking, the structure of différance is closed. (shrink)

Beginning with Jacques Derrida’s Beast and the Sovereign, I identify two forms of curiosity: 1) scientific curiosity, which proceeds through objective dissection and 2) therapeutic curiosity, which proceeds through observational confinement. Through an analysis of Derrida’s treatment of both sorts of curiosity, I notice and develop a third, deconstructive form of curiosity. Through repeated turn to the work of Sarah Kofman, I characterize this third curiosity as, by turns, linguistic, animal, and critical. As linguistic, this curiosity is a penchant for (...) wordplay and a keenness for the unsteady reservoirs of signification, resisting any clean dissection of meaning or the confinement of terms. As animal, it tracks a scent, regularly suspending its paw, as if to emphasize the meandering and precarious quality of knowledge. And as critical, it combats the illusions of pure revelation and instead draws attention to the conjuring trick, the systematic substitution of signs, undergirding it. Finally, I consider in what way Derrida’s resistance to philosophy may be read on the grounds not of a singular wonder but of multiple curiosities. (shrink)

The various ways whereby spatial conditions afford to monumentalize culture and to appropriate geographically demarcated places in terms of individual and collective meaning structures has been amply documented in urban cultural studies. However, considerably less attention has been paid to how cultural identity is produced against the background of musical temporality. By way of a phenomenological inquiry into the staged spectacle of James Corden’s (the host of CBS Network’s Late Late Show) Carpool Karaoke, this paper addresses the issues of directly (...) lived experience and authenticity as facets of cultural identity. By critically discussing the assumptions of self-presence and auto-affectivity while singing and listening to one’s sung voice against the background of pre-recorded songs, the notion of directly lived musical experience is put to the test. Furthermore, by examining the dramaturgical scaffolding of Carpool Karaoke, the analysis points to wider implications for post-modern cultural studies in terms of an identified ironic reversal of modernist universal criteria of legitimacy in favor of a celebration of postmodern being-with inauthentically. The analysis of the selected Carpool Karaoke corpus utilizes a resourceful blend of phenomenological method, semiotics and interpretive videography while challenging embedded orthodoxies in the extant literature. (shrink)

This article raises the critical issue as to why there has been assumed to be a boundary to legal knowledge. In response to such an issue I focus upon the works of Jacques Derrida who, amongst other things, was concerned with the boundary of the disciplines of Literature, Philosophy and Law. The article argues that the boundary delimits the law as if the inside of a boundary to territorial-like legal space in legal consciousness. Such a space is not possible without (...) the boundary. Derrida’s most insightful essay in this regard is his study of Franz Kafka’s untitled parable in The Trial. The parable represents a man who waits for an invitation to enter the Law until he nears his end. Derrida responds to the parable in his essay, “Before the Law.” This article uses the parable and Derrida’s response to it as a starting-off point for a reconsideration of the boundary of legal knowledge. In this context, Derrida asks this question: “why is Kafka’s parable categorized as Literature or Law?” Such an issue depends upon the boundary of a discipline, according to Derrida. And that focus, in turn, asks whether the boundary pre-exists any text which is represented as “Literature” or “Law” or “Philosophy.” This article claims, however, that Derrida’s theory presupposes that law, as a discipline, encloses a territorial-like space in legal consciousness. Each discipline possesses such a space. So too does the state and the university. Inside this bounded space, officials of the Law are free to consciously deliberate, reflect, and render decisions about the context of the Law. Analytically and phenomenologically before the boundary is taken for granted in an academic discipline, however, there is an unbounded non-law. The aporia of Derrida’s theory of the boundary of the Law is that the official or expert knower of the official language inside the boundary cannot assume the imagined boundary of legal knowledge without implicitly claiming to know the exteriority to the boundary. And yet, officials and expert knowers cannot know such an exterior extra-legality because, by virtue of the boundary as encircling a territorial-like space, knowledge is considered legal only when it exists inside the boundary. “The Law” is the consequence of the imagination of the expert knowers of the language as well as of the non-expert who believes in the bounded territorial-like space. (shrink)

According to Jacques Derrida, the tradition of metaphysics is dominated by a basic distinction between presence and absence that plays a fundamental role in Husserl’s theory of meaning and contaminates the core of his phenomenological project. If Husserl’s distinction between indication and expression in the 1st Logical Investigation is credited for opening a ‘phenomenological breakthrough’, his account of the entwinement between the indicative and expressive functions of linguistic signs is accused of restoring and maintaining the metaphysical primacy of presence. In (...) the last chapters of Voice and Phenomenon, Derrida focuses especially on the cases of indexical or ‘essentially occasional’ expressions, whose concrete meaning is a function of the occasion of their use and which rely on the indicative function of meaning. According to Derrida’s reading, Husserl holds that such indexical meanings like ‘I’, ‘here’ or ‘now’, are necessarily always fulfilled and cannot lack of intuitive fulfilment. Consequently Derrida takes Husserl’s account of the meaning of ‘I’ as an obvious symptom of his inability to move away from the myth of pure expressivity, bringing phenomenology back into the history of metaphysics. Husserl would have failed to acknowledge that indexical meanings, like ideal or objective meanings, can remain unfulfilled and deprived of intuition. This article demonstrates that Derrida’s critique misses the most important point in Husserl’s analysis of the meaning of ‘I’, and argues that indexical or subjective expressions are somehow insensitive to the prospect of intuitive presencing and fulfilment. (shrink)

There is a lot to like in Neal DeRoo’s Futurityin Phenomenology. In it, he canvases his three titular authors’ treatments of time , and his scholarship on all three is impressive. He shows himself familiar with their most decisive texts on this subject, as well as with much of the relevant secondary literature. His treatment of Husserl is especially noteworthy. DeRoo’s treatment of this subject, which in part draws on his previous publications, equals, if not surpasses, especially in its scope (...) and detail, all others in English that bring Husserl’s work on time together with French “post-Husserlians,” such as Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida.Along with generally sound presentations of difficult texts, DeRoo also often wrestles admirably with the things themselves. On a number of occasions, having seemingly completed an argument or arrived at a conclusion, he turns around and calls it into question. (Thus, having associated futurity with ethicality, he repeated .. (shrink)

This paper draws on the deconstruction(ist) toolbox and specifically on the textual unweaving tactics of supplementarity, exemplarity, and parergonality, with a view to critically assessing institutional (UNESCO’s) and ordinary tourists’ claims to authenticity as regards artifacts and sites of ‘cultural heritage’. Through the ‘destru[k]tion’ of claims to ‘originality’ and ‘myths of origin’, that function as preservatives for canning such artifacts and sites, the cultural arche-writing that forces signifiers to piously bow before a limited string of ‘transcendental signifieds’ is brought to (...) full view. The stench of the aeons is thus forced to evaporate through a post-transcendentalist opening towards originary myths’ original doubles. (shrink)

While Heidegger's earlier phenomenological writings inform much contemporary discourse in the continental philosophy of religion, his 1927 essay on ‘Phenomenology and Theology’ offers a largely uncontested distinction between philosophy and theology on the basis of their possibilities as sciences following ontological difference. This paper reconsiders Heidegger's distinction by invoking spirit and wonder, concepts Jacques Derrida and Mary-Jane Rubenstein have more recently emphasized as central to thought that is open to that which ruptures metaphysical schemas. I contend Heidegger's use of ontological (...) difference as a formal distinction between philosophy and theology distances us from the wonder, spirit, and truth (alētheia) that undoes the binaries behind which we take shelter. However, I temper this critique with the recognition that Heidegger, Derrida, and Rubenstein equally recognize an inescapable repetition of metaphysical thinking in the philosophy of religion. (shrink)

In this paper I offer some existential-phenomenological reflections on the interrelationships among the forms of love, loss, and human finitude. I claim that authentic Being-toward-death entails owning up not only to one’s own finitude, but also to the finitude of all those we love. Hence, authentic Being-toward-death always includes Being-toward-loss as a central constituent. Just as, existentially, we are “always dying already,” so too are we always already grieving. Death and loss are existentially equiprimordial. I extend these claims to a (...) discussion of the four forms of love identified by the ancient Greeks, contending that the nature of a loss experience will depend complexly on the forms or dimensions of love that had constituted the lost relationship. I argue that authentic solicitude can be shown to entail one of the constitutive dimensions of deep human bonding, in which we value the alterity of the other as it is manifested in his or her own distinctive affectivity, in particular, in those painful emotional states disclosive of authentic existing. Lastly, I explore the ethical implications of these claims. (shrink)

The reflection elaborated in these pages, fleeing all submission to the now abused rhetoric of the prevailing economism, traces in the works of René Girard - the most serious pretender to the legacy of the masters of suspicion - and Jacques Derrida - the last great philosopher of the twentieth century - the constituent elements of a critical paradigm with which to interpret the present time. The volume investigates the multiple correspondences between the different legacies of deconstruction and the most (...) recent developments of mimetic theory through the articulated reconstruction of the reflections, still little known in Italy, of some of the most brilliant contemporary exponents of those traditions. Formulating the features of an ontology of actuality hinged on the notions of mimesis and trace, the author proposes a philosophical diagnosis that recognizes in our time an age in the grip of panic. (shrink)

In Memoirs of the Blind, Derrida not only makes repeated references to anamnēsis in Plato’s texts, but writes the text in a way that follows from the discussions found in Plato’s Meno. Focusing on the account of recollection given in Plato’s Meno reveals a passive structure that is also found in Plato and Derrida’s use of hypothesis. Following Derrida, these insights are applied to self-representation, which is revealed to have a similar structure to the structure found in the logic of (...) hypothesis and recollection. These texts provide an argument for the hypothetical nature of self-representation and the limited knowledge one can claim to have of the self. (shrink)

Questo lavoro si pone sulla via della questione dell’origine attraverso un confronto tra Hegel e Derrida. In particolare, abbiamo individuato nella Scienza della logica il punto centrale a partire dal quale le istanze teoretiche dei due filosofi esibiscono la loro vicinanza e la loro distanza; sollecitando a questo modo la trama del testo metafisico che con Hegel si compie, ci siamo posti con Derrida ai suoi margini frequentandone l'apertura ed il rilancio come consegna a un pensiero in agguato sulla soglia (...) dell'avvenire. Così avanzando, la questione dell’origine non si è innanzitutto configurata come un problema temporale: il tempo stesso e il suo ritardo sull’origine hanno lasciato il campo a una questione logico-semiotica. (shrink)

One of the controversial issues in the development of Heidegger’s thought is the problem of the will. Th e communis opinio is that Heidegger embraced the concept of the will in a non-critical manner at the beginning of the thirties and , in particular, he employed it in his political speeches of 1933–1934. Jacques Derrida for instance speaks about a “massive voluntarism” in relation to Heidegger’s thought in this period. Also Brett Davis discerns a period of “existential voluntarism” in 1930–1934, (...) in which Heidegger takes over a notion of the will in a non-critical manner. In this article, this interpretation is challenged and a stronger interpretation of Heidegger’s concern with the will is developed. Our hypothesis is that Heidegger’s concern with the will at the onset of the thirties is brought about by his confrontation (Auseinandersetzung) with the concept of the will. Based on his lecture courses from 1930 and 1936/37 and his Rectoral Address from 1933, enables us to discern three main characteristics of Heidegger’s destructed concept of the will in the early thirties. (shrink)

This book offers the first sustained reflection on the significance of futurity for the phenomenological method itself.

Everything you need to understand both Laruelle's critique of difference and his project of non-philosophyGilles Deleuze described Laruelle's thought as 'one of the most interesting undertakings of contemporary philosophy'. Now, Rocco Gangle - who translated Laruelle's philosophy into English - takes you through Laruelle's trailblazing book Philosophies of Difference, helping you to understand both Laruelle's critique of Difference and his project of non-philosophy, which has become one of the most intriguing avenues in contemporary thought. He explains the context within which (...) Laruelle's thought developed and takes you through the challenging argument and conceptual scaffolding of 'Philosophies of Difference'. (shrink)

Sebbah’s noteworthy book is perhaps the first sustained inquiry into the relationship between three thinkers in the French phenomenological tradition, two of whom are well known in the Anglophone world (Levinas, Derrida) and one of whom (Henry) is gradually better understood by English-speaking audiences. That all three are arrayed together in this study makes it a pioneering enterprise and one that allows the English reader to apprise the worthiness of Henry’s association with his better-known compatriots.The strongest and most extensive portions (...) of the text focus on the three named figures in its subtitle, and in Part I Sebbah justifies his focus on these three in terms of a “family resemblance” (6–7) that they bear: Each in his own way practices phenomenology in the mode of excess, an excess that not only emerges in the style of each man’s writing but more fundamentally betrays a testing “of the limit, the limit through whose transgression alone excess can be what it is” (4). Rather. (shrink)

In this article, using the recent work by Charles Taylor in A Secular Age as my point of departure, I will argue that Jean-Luc Nancy enables us to think past the competing binary of atheistic and religious experience and allows us to surpass the present narratives of secularism. In A Secular Age, Taylor himself seeks a middle ground between atheism and religion, arguing that it is possible to open ourselves to the cross-pressures of modern existence that find us caught between (...) scientific atheism and a need for spiritual and religious guidance. Here, Taylor finds a way of picturing ourselves within a secular age, remaining faithful to scientific rationalism, but still open to religion and a sense of a higher good. However, as I shall demonstrate, in his thesis Taylor misrepresents the Continental philosophical tradition (particularly Nietzsche and post-structuralism) that has itself sought to understand these cross-pressures of existence. Taking this misrepresentation, and specifically his reductive and colloquial analysis of Nietzsche, Camus, and Derrida, as my point of departure, I provide an alternative manner of thinking through the work of these writers, one that leads to a detailed analysis of Jean-Luc Nancy and his project the deconstruction of Christianity. In this analysis I argue that Nancy provides a manner of thinking that remains open and allows an experience of freedom, without seeking to close that sense of openness with explanation, nor maintaining that sense of openness with a conception of the divine. (shrink)

Masculinity? This book attempts to answer this one-word question by revisiting key philosophical concepts in the construction of masculinity, not in order to re-write or debunk them again, but in order to provide a radically new departure to what masculinity means today. This new departure focuses on an understanding of sexuality and gender that is neither structured in oppositional terms nor in performative terms, but in a perpendicular relation akin to that which brings space and time together. In doing so, (...) this book doesn’t aim to establish yet another theory within the field of masculism or men’s studies, but to put forward a personal account of how a revised understanding of the relationship between space, time, and gender can thoroughly alter concepts of masculinity. virility and patriarchy. (shrink)

This paper analyses the opposing accounts of ‘the ordinary’ given by Jacques Derrida and Stanley Cavell, beginning with their competing interpretations of J. L. Austin¹s thought on ordinary language. These accounts are presented as mutually critiquing: Derrida¹s deconstructive method poses an effective challenge to Cavell¹s claim that the ordinary is irreducible by further philosophical analysis, while, conversely, Cavell¹s valorisation of the human draws attention to a residual humanity in Derrida¹s text which Derrida cannot account for. The two philosophers’ approaches are, (...) in fact, predicated on each other like the famous Gestalt-image of a vase and two faces: they cannot come into focus at the same time, but one cannot appear without the other to furnish its background. (shrink)

A história intelectual do século XX tem sido escrita ao longo de um cenário que vê, na morte de Merleau-Ponty em 1961, a linha de divisória entre uma geração existencial e fenomenológica e o evento do estruturalismo imediatamente subsequente. A publicação das notas de leitura de Merleau-Ponty sobre o texto A origem da geometria, de Edmund Husserl, tem mostrado quão frágeis são os alicerces desta leitura simplificadora. Na verdade, enquanto a tradução e introdução de Derrida ao texto de Husserl, de (...) 1962, tornavam-se um texto fundamentador para a geração estruturalista, introduzindo uma reflexão sobre a historicidade e a materialidade da idealidade, foi apenas em 1998, com a publicação das notas da conferência de Merleau-Ponty no Collège de France, em 1959, sobre o mesmo tópico, que se tornou claro quão próximo está o primeiro Derrida do último Merleau-Ponty. Assim como Derrida, Merleau-Ponty identificou, na tensão husserliana entre arqueologia e teleologia, o problema básico da fenomenologia, introduzindo a questão da história e a do meio de transmissão cultural. Comparar tais leituras em seu contexto específico não apenas permite um retrato mais complexo dos debates intelectuais da época, mas também mostra como, com a interpretação de Merleau-Ponty sobre A origem da geometria, a "diferença" de Derrida antecede-se e admite outra genealogia. (shrink)

In exploring the nature of excess relative to a phenomenology of the limit, _Testing the Limit _ claims that phenomenology itself is an exploration of excess. What does it mean that "the self" is "given"? Should we see it as originary; or rather, in what way is the self engendered from textual practices that transgress—or hover around and therefore within—the threshold of phenomenologial discourse? This is the first book to include Michel Henry in a triangulation with Derrida and Levinas and (...) the first to critique Levinas on the basis of his interpolation of philosophy and religion. Sebbah claims that the textual origins of phenomenology determine, in their temporal rhythms, the nature of the subjectivation on which they focus. He situates these considerations within the broader picture of the state of contemporary French phenomenology, in order to show that these three thinkers share a certain "family resemblance," the identification of which reveals something about the traces of other phenomenological families. It is by testing the limit within the context of traditional phenomenological concerns about the appearance of subjectivity and ipseity that Derrida, Henry, and Levinas radically reconsider phenomenology and that French phenomenology assumes its present form. (shrink)

This collection of more than two dozen essays by philosophy scholars of international repute traces the profound impact exerted by Husserl’s Meisterwerk, known in its shortened title as Ideen, whose first book was released in 1913. Published to coincide with the centenary of its original appearance, and fifty years after the second book went to print in 1952, the contributors offer a comprehensive array of perspectives on the ways in which Husserl’s concept of phenomenology influenced leading figures and movements of (...) the last century, including, among others, Ortega y Gassett, Edith Stein, Martin Heidegger, Aron Gurwitsch, Ludwig Landgrebe, Dorion Cairns, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jacques Derrida and Giles Deleuze. -/- In addition to its documentation and analysis of the historical reception of these works, this volume also illustrates the ongoing relevance of the Ideen, offering scholarly discussion of the issues raised by his ideas as well as by the figures who took part in critical phenomenological dialogue with them. Among the topics discussed are autism, empathy, the nature of the emotions, the method and practice of phenomenology, the foundations of ethics, naturalism, intentionality, and human rights, to name but a few. Taken together, these specially commissioned original essays offer an unrivaled overview of the reception of Husserl‘s Ideen, and the expanding phenomenological enterprise it initiated. They show that the critical discussion of issues by phenomenologists continues to be relevant for the 21st century. (shrink)

Following Derrida’s late analysis of the multifarious concept of resistance, this article aims at detecting the motives that lead him to install from the start a tension between two methods of analysis of consciousness (phenomenological and psychoanalytical), that many would have considered, if not affectively unbearable, at least logically unsustainable. Yet this general logical and affective attitude remains describable, and in order to do so, the author proposesto delve into some underestimated and hence underexploited resources of transcendental phenomenology, particularly those (...) related to the analysis of affectivesyntaxes of consciousness, which are part of the “realm of positionality”. (shrink)

Material Difference: Modernism and the Allegories of Discourse argues that deconstruction can be employed in conjunction with the historically-oriented approach to cultural experience that is favored by Critical Theory. The two discourses that inform this comparative study situate Modernism between evolving traditions that begin with Hegel and Nietzsche, leading on to Adorno's commitment to philosophical aesthetics and Derrida's concern for writing (écriture). Interrelated discussions of eight major authors, working in four different languages, are presented to show how allegorical Modernism foreshadows (...) the possibility of cultural history. Joyce, Kafka, Malraux, Rilke, and Stevens are among the authors discussed in this book. The notion of material difference allows literature to be redefined in semiotic terms and demonstrates how the allegorical imagination mediates between art and time. (shrink)

In exploring the nature of excess relative to a phenomenology of the limit, Testing the Limit claims that phenomenology itself is an exploration of excess. What does it mean that "the self" is "given"? Should we see it as originary; or rather, in what way is the self engendered from textual practices that transgress—or hover around and therefore within—the threshold of phenomenologial discourse? This is the first book to include Michel Henry in a triangulation with Derrida and Levinas and the (...) first to critique Levinas on the basis of his interpolation of philosophy and religion. Sebbah claims that the textual origins of phenomenology determine, in their temporal rhythms, the nature of the subjectivation on which they focus. He situates these considerations within the broader picture of the state of contemporary French phenomenology (chiefly the legacy of Merleau-Ponty), in order to show that these three thinkers share a certain "family resemblance," the identification of which reveals something about the traces of other phenomenological families. It is by testing the limit within the context of traditional phenomenological concerns about the appearance of subjectivity and ipseity that Derrida, Henry, and Levinas radically reconsider phenomenology and that French phenomenology assumes its present form. (shrink)

In exploring the nature of excess relative to a phenomenology of the limit, Testing the Limit claims that phenomenology itself is an exploration of excess. What does it mean that "the self" is "given"? Should we see it as originary; or rather, in what way is the self engendered from textual practices that transgress—or hover around and therefore within—the threshold of phenomenologial discourse? This is the first book to include Michel Henry in a triangulation with Derrida and Levinas and the (...) first to critique Levinas on the basis of his interpolation of philosophy and religion. Sebbah claims that the textual origins of phenomenology determine, in their temporal rhythms, the nature of the subjectivation on which they focus. He situates these considerations within the broader picture of the state of contemporary French phenomenology (chiefly the legacy of Merleau-Ponty), in order to show that these three thinkers share a certain "family resemblance," the identification of which reveals something about the traces of other phenomenological families. It is by testing the limit within the context of traditional phenomenological concerns about the appearance of subjectivity and ipseity that Derrida, Henry, and Levinas radically reconsider phenomenology and that French phenomenology assumes its present form. (shrink)

Burt Hopkins provides a reading of the development of Husserl’s phenomenology, framing it with an account of its relation to Platonic and Aristotelian theories of unity-in-multiplicity, on the one hand, and the criticisms of Husserl found in Heidegger and Derrida, on the other. Here I introduce a further approach to the problem of unity-in-multiplicity – one based on normative ideality, drawing on Plato’s Idea of the Good -- and investigate three crucial aspects of phenomenological philosophy as Hopkins presents it: the (...) method of reflection, the nature of absolute consciousness, and the status of the ego. I take issue with Husserl’s idea that consciousness can be the sufficient ground of that “meaning” which, for both Hopkins and for me, is the specific topic of phenomenology. (shrink)

Translator's introduction: The germinal structure of Derrida's thought -- Translator's note -- Introduction -- Sign and signs -- The reduction of indication -- Meaning as soliloquy -- Meaning and representation -- The sign and the blink of an eye -- The voice that keeps silent -- The originative supplement.

Phenomenology was one of the twentieth century’s major philosophical movements and continues to be a vibrant and widely studied subject today. _The Routledge Companion to Phenomenology_ is an outstanding guide and reference source to the key philosophers, topics and themes in this exciting subject, and essential reading for any student or scholar of phenomenology. Comprising over fifty chapters by a team of international contributors, the _Companion_ is divided into five clear parts: main figures in the phenomenological movement, from Brentano to (...) Derrida main topics in phenomenology phenomenological contributions to philosophy phenomenological intersections historical postscript. Close attention is paid to the core topics in phenomenology such as intentionality, perception, subjectivity, the self, the body, being and phenomenological method. An important feature of the _Companion_ is its examination of how phenomenology has contributed to central disciplines in philosophy such as metaphysics, philosophy of mind, moral philosophy, aesthetics and philosophy of religion as well as disciplines beyond philosophy such as race, cognitive science, psychiatry, literary criticism and psychoanalysis. (shrink)

Burt Hopkins's The Philosophy of Husserl presents a challenging and thoughtful elucidation of Husserl's phenomenology that pays special attention to important methodological aspects of Husserl's philosophy, and, thereby, to Husserl's characterization of phenomenology as a pure and transcendental philosophy. Unlike other texts that attempt to elucidate Husserl's philosophy, Hopkins carries out his project in an unusual fashion, by beginning with a consideration of the conflict between Plato and Aristotle regarding the meaning and status of the eide, and ending with a (...) systematic critique of two of Husserl's most fierce opponents, Heidegger and Derrida. This review essay gives an overview of Hopkins's book and offers some critical remarks. (shrink)