Continental Philosophy

SYMPOSIUM
Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy
Revue canadienne de philosophie continentale

Volume 13 Issue Number 2 Fall 2009
Volume 13 Numéro 2 Automne 2009

Table of Contents/Table des matières

Articles

Foucault et Taylor sur la vérité, la liberté et l’identité subjective. Le vouloir-dire-vrai dans la parrêsia, VALÉRIE DAOUST

Deleuze’s Post-Critical Metaphysics, ALISTAIR WELCHMAN

Nietzsche as a Reader of Wilhelm Roux, or the Physiology of History, LUKAS SODERSTROM

Hume et Bergson, une pratique de la méthode chez Deleuze. Réflexions pour une éthique de la lecture, RENÉ LEMIEUX

The Threat of Givenness in Jean-Luc Marion: Toward a New Phenomenology of Psychosis, JOSEPH CAREW

Book Panel/Table-ronde

Bernhard Radloff’s Heidegger and the Question of National Socialism: Disclosure and Gestalt, GRAEME NICHOLSON, TOM ROCKMORE AND BERNHARD RADLOFF
Étude critique/Review Essay

Michel Foucault : Le Gouvernement de soi et des autres et Le Courage de la vérité, ALAIN BEAULIEU

Diacritics 38.1-2 Derrida and Democracy
Eds. Jonathan Culler and Phillip E. Lewis

Derrida and Democracy
Jonathan Culler

Part One
“The Most Interesting Thing in the World”
Jonathan Culler

Passionate Secrets and Democratic Dissidence
David Wills

Signed Paine, or Panic in Literature
Peggy Kamuf

Pulsations of Respect, or Winged Impossibility: Literature with Deconstruction
Henry Sussman

Spectral Gatherings: Derrida, Celan, and the Covenant of the Word
Michael G. Levine

Part Two
For Better and for Worse (There Again . . .)
Geoffrey Bennington

Rogue Democracy
Samuel Weber

A Genealogy of Violence, from Light to the Autoimmune
Samir Haddad

Nondialectical Materialism
Pheng Cheah

Untread and Untried: Nietzsche Reads Derridemocracy
Avital Ronell

Knowledge of the Future: Future Fables
Richard Klein

Part Three
Is Radical Atheism a Good Name for Deconstruction?
Ernesto Laclau

Time, Desire, Politics: A Reply to Ernesto Laclau
Martin Hägglund

Lucid and rigorous in equal measure, Watkin’s Phenomenology and Deconstruction is both a timely intervention and a critical introduction to a vital current in contemporary European thought. It is also an essential reconfiguration of the intellectual landscape as concerns phenomenology, giving us back the bodies we need, but stranger and richer. –Prof. Patrick ffrench, Department of French, King’s College, London

Description
Phenomenology or Deconstruction? challenges traditional understandings of the relationship between phenomenology and deconstruction through new readings of the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Paul Ricoeur and Jean-Luc Nancy. A constant dialogue with Jacques Derrida’s engagement with phenomenological themes provides the impetus to establishing a new understanding of ‘being’ and ‘presence’ that exposes significant blindspots inherent in traditional readings of both phenomenology and deconstruction. In reproducing neither a stock phenomenological reaction to deconstruction nor the routine deconstructive reading of phenomenology, Christopher Watkin provides a fresh assessment of the possibilities for the future of phenomenology, along with a new reading of the deconstructive legacy. Through detailed studies of the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, Ricoeur and Nancy, he shows how a phenomenological tradition much wider and richer than Husserlian or Heideggerean thought alone can take account of Derrida’s critique of ontology and yet still hold a commitment to the ontological.This new reading of being and presence fundamentally re-draws our understanding of the relation of deconstruction and phenomenology, and provides the first sustained discussion of the possibilities and problems for any future ‘deconstructive phenomenology’.

Christopher Watkin is a Junior Research Fellow at Magdalene College, Cambridge. He is currently working on atheism and the death of God in Nancy, Badiou, Zizek and Meillassoux.

Link

NB: CFP FOR VOLUME 20 IS EXTENDED TO SEP 30

Volume 19: Sense and Nonsense
ISBN 1 897646 15 1

This volume is currently available. For ways to buy this issue click here

Sense and Nonsense

The Expression of Meaning in Deleuze’s Ontological Proposition: RAY BRASSIER
Expression and Immanence: MIGUEL DE BEISTEGUI
Nonsense and Mysticism in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: ANGELA BREITENBACH
Epistemology and the Civil Union of Sense and Self-Contradiction: A Co-ordinated Solution to the Shared Problems of Political and Mainstream Epistemology: JEREMY BARRIS
Presuppositionless Scepticism: IOANNIS TRISOKKAS

Varia

Essay on Transcendental Philosophy: A Short Overview of the Whole Work; On the Categories; Antinomies. Ideas.: SALOMON MAIMON
Conflicted Matter: Jacques Lacan and the Challenge of Secularising Materialism: ADRIAN O. JOHNSON
Alain Badiou: Truth, Mathematics, and the Claim of Reason: CHRISTOPHER NORRIS
On the Horrors of Realism: An Interview with Graham Harman: TOM SPARROW

From New York Times:

It was in sometime in the ’80s when I heard someone on the radio talking about Clint Eastwood’s 1980 movie “Bronco Billy.” It is, he said, a “nice little film in which Eastwood deconstructs his ‘Dirty Harry’ image.”

That was probably not the first time the verb “deconstruct” was used casually to describe a piece of pop culture, but it was the first time I had encountered it, and I remember thinking that the age of theory was surely over now that one of its key terms had been appropriated, domesticated and commodified. It had also been used with some precision. What the radio critic meant was that the flinty masculine realism of the “Dirty Harry” movies — it’s a hard world and it takes a hard man to deal with its evils — is affectionately parodied in the story of a former New Jersey shoe salesman who dresses and talks like a tough cowboy, but is the good-hearted proprietor of a traveling Wild West show aimed at little children. It’s all an act , a confected fable, but so is Dirty Harry; so is everything. If deconstruction was something that an American male icon performed, there was no reason to fear it; truth, reason and the American way were safe.

Continue reading here

One day, the gods retreated. On their own, they retreated from their divinity, that is to say, from their presence. What remains of their presence is what remains of all presence when it absents itself: what remains is what one can say about it. What can be said about it is what remains when one can no longer address it: neither speak to it, nor touch it, nor see it, nor give it a present.

(One might even say that the gods retreated because one no longer gives a present to their presence: no more sacrifice, no more oblation, except by way of custom or imitation. One has other things to do: write, for example, calculate, do business, legislate. Deprived of presents, presence has retreated.)

Continue reading

Via

Interviews with Spivak, entitled The Post-Colonial Critic.

Link

Adam Thurschwell’s review of Simon Critchley’s Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance

This is a brief review of Simon Critchley’s recent book, Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance. In it, he argues that the overriding political-philosophical problem of late modernity is the problem of political motivation. Critchley’s book is both an analysis and critique of how that problem has been resolved by ethical and political philosophers since Kant and a defense of his own solution, which he derives primarily from the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas and which issues in a call for a form of ethical anarchism. In this review I summarize his arguments and raise some critical questions about his solution, while agreeing with him about the essential nature of the problem of motivation that his book highlights.

Link

A review of Beckett, Derrida, and the Event of Literature (Cultural Memory in the Present):

If there is no such thing as literature — i.e., self-identity of the literary thing — if what is announced or promised as literature never gives itself as such, that means, among other things, that a literature that talked only about literature or a work that was purely self-referential would immediately be annulled. You'll say that that's maybe what's happening. In which case it is this experience of the nothing-ing of nothing that interests our desire under the name of literature. Experience of Being, nothing less, nothing more, on the edge of metaphysics, literature perhaps stands on the edge of everything, almost beyond everything, including itself. It's the most interesting thing in the world, maybe more interesting than the world, and this is why, if it has no definition, what is heralded and refused under the name of literature cannot be identified with any other discourse. It will never be scientific, philosophical, conversational.

 

– Jacques Derrida, "'This Strange Institution Called Literature': An Interview with Jacques Derrida"[1]

 

Over the years there have been various efforts to engage Jacques Derrida's conception of literature.[2] I think it is widely acknowledged now that there is (or was) no concept or theory of any sort but instead an ongoing attraction to forms of language that make certain works of writing peculiar enough to trouble the ways in which we make sense of things. Anyhow here is what I think we think we know about Derrida's thinking with respect to literature:

 the rest of the review

Via cross-x forum

Adieu — Jacques Derrida; Pascale-Anne Brault; Michael Naas
Critical Inquiry, Vol. 23, No. 1. (Autumn, 1996), pp. 1-10.
Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=009…3E2.0.CO%3B2-R

Link

Emergent Village Podcast

* Jack Caputo
* Richard Kearney
* 50 minutes

Here’s the mp3 file for download

(H/t: Michael O’Rourk)

Derrida parle pour l’amour




Also the text of Dissemination via Wood’s Lot

Continuing from the previous story on Derrida and the UCI affair: From the comments here is a link of interest: http://www.jacques-derrida.org/UCI%20Affair.html

More Rorty articles:

From the New York Times

From Slate (H/t: Carrie Golden) 

A review of my colleague Jin Park’s edited collection, entitled Buddhisms and Deconstructions:

This book contains a number of fascinating articles dealing with a comparison between two systems of thought, one a longstanding tradition from the East and the other a contemporary movement in the West, that have in common an emphasis on a main philosophical element–the interconnectedness of phenomena characterized as emptiness in Mahayana Buddhism, and “difference” or différance in the works of Derrida.[1] Other forms of modern Western thought such as existentialism, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and pragmatism have come close to and are often compared with Buddhism for the way they advocate going beyond egocentrism and substantive notions of selfhood to realize a dynamic and holistic understanding of reality. However, according to this volume, it is deconstructionism that is the best approximation in seeking to overthrow logocentrism in all its manifestations, overt and hidden, and to surpass onto-theology (a term first coined by Heidegger to capture the Western metaphysical and theological traditions both based on substantive ontology).

The rest of the review

TOC 

Symposium

Revolutionary Politics — Jeremy Elkins

Cynicism, Skepticism and the Politics of Truth — Andrew Norris

Truth and Politics — Linda Zerilli

Truth, Truthfulness and Politics: Brief Comments Concerning Elkins, Norris and Zerilli — Richard Flathman

Truth and Consequences: or, Whateer Happened to Post-modernism? — Tracy Strong

Reply to Flathman and Strong — Jeremy Elkins

Reply to Flathman and Strong — Andrew Norris

Reply to Flathman and Strong — Linda Zerilli

Essays

Funeral Rites, Queer Politics — Roy Wagner

War and Its Other: Between Bataille and Derrida — Nick Mansfield

Human Needs and the Crisis of the Subject — Andrew Biro

From Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Len Lawlor's entry on Derrida is up:

Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) was the founder of “deconstruction,” a way of criticizing not only both literary and philosophical texts but also political institutions. Although Derrida at times expressed regret concerning the fate of the word “deconstruction,” its popularity indicates the wide-ranging influence of his thought, in philosophy, in literary criticism and theory, in art and, in particular, architectural theory, and in political theory. Indeed, Derrida's fame nearly reached the status of a media star, with hundreds of people filling auditoriums to hear him speak, with films and televisions programs devoted to him, with countless books and articles devoted to his thinking. Beside critique, Derridean deconstruction consists in an attempt to re-conceive the difference that divides self-reflection (or self-consciousness). But even more than the re-conception of difference, and perhaps more importantly, deconstruction works towards preventing the worst violence. It attempts to render justice. Indeed, deconstruction is relentless in this pursuit since justice is impossible to achieve.

The rest

"Derrida offered extended audio comments regarding his unique, somewhat Kierkegaardian notion of prayer (as recounted in his 1991 work 'Circumfession') at the 2002 Toronto conference, 'Other Testaments'… Prayer, Derrida contends, is an 'absolutely secret' act though it also involves 'common ritual (and) coded gestures' … it is fundamentally 'childish' and God is regarded as both a 'harsh, just' father and a 'forgiving' mother… prayer must also embody a sceptical 'suspension of belief and certainty' as epitomized by Kierkegaard and, in another way, by Nietzsche; the realization that the object of prayer is indeterminable is another key notion in this unusual position…"

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Part Three:

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From: Multiple Meaning.
Techno: An Artistic and Political Laboratory of the Present
Michel Gaillot
Éditions Dis Voir
Paris
1998 

Just a passage (and the rest):

The constant movement through which the 'spectacle' does indeed absorb and reabsorb its own 'edges' and marginals (and its critique, too, of course: all you have to do is to look at the present-day consumption of Situationism on the intellectual and journalistic scene) is also the movement through which other 'edges' endlessly form (and deform). As is attested by what you yourself told me about the evolution and transformation of techno. It is a kind of expanding universe that endlessly folds and unfolds new edges and extremities. In one sense, of course, one could say that it all cancels itself out in commodity-spectacular monotony. In another sense, why don't we just say everything is made more acute in the impossibility of holding to received oppositions – authentic vs. alienated, original vs. simulacrum, inventive vs. repetitive? The entire fabric unravels un our fingers, and we have no higher point of view from which to judge the value and significance of what is happening. This doesn't mean it's all a matter of indifference, but that only a closer look at this unraveling allows us to detect a few threads in the process of forming new knots.

Colonialism was committed to the education of a certain class. It was interested in the seemingly permanent operation of an altered normality. Paradoxically, human rights and ‘‘development’’ work today cannot claim this self-empowerment that high colonialism could. Yet, some of the best products of high colonialism, descendants of the colonial middle class, become human rights advocates in the countries of the South.

Here is the PDF file of the article, which appeared in South Atlantic Quarterly (2004)