Continental Philosophy

UPDATE: Google has cleared the site. I am grateful for the encouraging emails, offering technical support as well as expressed sympathies. I am particularly grateful to Brian Leiter for bringing more attention to the problem. The site should be back to its full form shortly. There are many preventative measures left to implement. Thank you for your patience.

I am terribly sorry that there have not been updates for the past few days.

I had mentioned a while back that this site had been hacked and to the best of my abilities I fixed the problems. For the past few days however, a new set of problems have emerged. If you google “continental philosophy” you can see my site as the second hit (behind wikipedia). But you can also see that google does not allow anyone to visit the site from their search engine. According to google the site is infected.

Let me first say that whatever this may mean, by visiting the site your computer is not at risk. The site still receives thousands of visitors per day and no one seems to encounter any problem.

It seems as though one of the hackers has left a certain code behind that is on the black-list of google. I am doing my best to fix this and have spent too many hours on it as it is. My knowledge of Sartrean phenomenology and Ricoeurian hermeneutics does not help in this case! And google has been remarkably unhelpful. The entire experience has been quite kafkaesque as the site is on trial. (At least I can understand the existentialist angst of the whole process!)

If any expert among the readers is willing to help, please email me.

I hope that this will be resolved shortly. My apologies for the delay.

For the third issue of ‘Footprint’ we are calling for papers that take account of current discussions in philosophy and architecture on phenomenology with respect to space, place, location. Papers which deal with the late work on ‘topology’ in Heidegger, and the issue of perception and ‘inner spatiality’ in the work of Merleau-Ponty are of immediate interest. We hope also to have papers which deal with Brentano’s work on space. A further topic of special interest is the critique, provided by Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, of Descartes, and of functionalism in general. The re-reading of Aristotle by Heidegger with regard to public space, and the development of this in the work of Arendt is also of interest. Papers are welcome on the work of architects who have deployed insights from the philosophical area of research for their work. Examinations of the research of Casey, Malpas, Dreyfus and others including Ihde would be a welcome addition to the issue, either in the form of short notices or reviews. Articles will be peer reviewed, and the issue is expected to be available at the beginning of October. All papers and correspondence should be sent to the editors, Patrick Healy, Brendan O’Byrne, e-mail P.E.Healy[at]tudelft.nl (replace the [at] with a @) and marked issue no.3. The deadline for submissions is the 15th of June 2008.

The rest of the videos

A review of Badiou and Derrida: Politics, Events and Their Time (Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy)

A decade ago, Richard Beardsworth stated in his introduction to Derrida and the Political: “the twenty-first century approaches, and it is clear that our political concepts, and, therefore, the fields in which these concepts are discursively organized, acquire meaning and operate, need to be reinvented”.[1] A seism of unheard of proportions has shaken the space of the political, a field whose conceptual system has been elaborated throughout a long history as the effect of a complex and stratified legacy: Greek, Roman, and Judeo-Christian. Yet, ten years on, the reinvention of the category of the political still remains an imperative and unavoidable task. Today our political space appears overdetermined by a set of notions: the crisis of the nation-state, of the concepts of citizenship and sovereignty, the omnipresence of globalization and empire, the dangerous appeal to a permanent state of exception, and finally, the pressing impact of biopolitics. However, instead of providing a useful map with which to orient and to intervene in an active transformation of the political space, this constellation of notions marks a limit, an impasse, and signals a difficulty of orientation for political theories or philosophies that still depend on the sovereign One.

Continue reading the review

Many of his essays, especially on Nietzsche, are available on his site.

Link

Slavoj Žižek is less a philosopher than a phenomenon. The son of Slovenian Communists, and the representative on earth (so to speak) of the late French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, Žižek has been travelling the globe like an intellectual rock star for the past twenty years, gathering as he goes an immense fan club. He is outrageous, provocative and entertaining. He was, he tells us, tempted to suggest for the dust jacket of one of his books: “In his free time, Žižek likes to surf the internet for child pornography and teach his small son how to pull the legs off spiders”.

Continue reading

Link

Glossator publishes original commentaries, editions and translations of commentaries, and essays and articles relating to the theory and history of commentary, glossing, and marginalia. The journal aims to encourage the practice of commentary as a creative form of intellectual work and to provide a forum for dialogue and reflection on the past, present, and future of this ancient genre of writing. By aligning itself, not with any particular discipline, but with a particular mode of production, Glossator gives expression to the fact that praxis founds theory.

Glossator is an peer-reviewed open-access journal, sponsored by The Graduate Center, CUNY. It is available online at http://glossator.org.

Editors: Nicola Masciandaro (Brooklyn College, CUNY), Karl Steel (Brooklyn College, CUNY), Ryan Dobran (Brooklyn College, CUNY).

Section Editors: Erik Butler (Emory University), Mary Ann Caws (Graduate Center, CUNY), Alan Clinton (Georgia Institute of Technology), David Greetham (Graduate Center, CUNY), Bruno Gullí (Long Island University), Daniel Heller-Roazen (Princeton University), Jason Houston (University of Oklahoma), Eileen A. Joy (Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville), Sean McCarthy (Lehman College, CUNY), Sherry Roush (Penn State University), Michael Sargent (Graduate Center, CUNY), Michael Stone-Richards (College for Creative Studies), Frans van Liere (Calvin College), Jesús R. Velasco (UC Berkeley), Yoshihisa Yamamoto (Chiba University).

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

The Editors invite submissions for the first volume of Glossator, to be published in 2009.

Glossator welcomes work from all disciplines, but especially from fields with strong affiliations with the commentary genre: philosophy, literary theory and criticism, textual and manuscript studies, hermeneutics, exegesis, et al.

What is commentary? While the distinction between commentary and other forms of writing is not an absolute one, the following may serve as guidelines for distinguishing between what is and is not a commentary:

1. A commentary focuses on a single object (text, image, event, etc.) or portion thereof.
2. A commentary does not displace but rather shapes itself to and preserves the integrity, structure, and presence of its object.
3. The relationship of a commentary to its object may be described as both parallel and perpendicular. Commentary is parallel to its object in that it moves with or runs alongside it, following the flow of reading it. Commentary is perpendicular to its object in that it pauses or breaks from reading it in order to comment on it. The combination of these dimensions gives commentary a structure of continuing discontinuity, which allows it to be consulted or read intermittently rather than start to finish.
4. Commentary tends to maintain a certain quantitative proportion of itself vis-à-vis its object. This tendency corresponds to the practice of “filling up the margins” of a text.
5. Commentary, as a form of discourse, tends to favor and allow for the multiplication of meanings, ideas, and references. Commentary need not, and generally does not, have an explicit thesis or argument. This tendency gives commentary a ludic or auto-teleological potential.

Possible submissions include: critical, philological, and/or bibliographic commentaries on texts, art, music, events, and other kinds of objects. Editions and translations of commentaries, glosses, annotation, and marginalia. Historical, theoretical, and/or critical articles and essays on commentary and commentary traditions. Experimental and/or fictional commentaries and self-commentaries.

Submission Deadline: October 31, 2008

Questions, queries may be directed to Nicola Masciandaro: nicolam@brooklyn.cuny.edu

Nous ne faisons que nous entregloser— Montaigne

The conference Be[comi]ng Dutch has posted a number of great videos, including ones with Mouffe and Spivak.

Link