Continental Philosophy

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

Click here to read the articles

FEATURES

Cinema as a Democratic Emblem
Alain Badiou, translated by Alex Ling and Aurélien Mondon

The Desert Island and the Missing People
Vanessa Brito, translated by Justin Clemens

Althusser and the concept of the spontaneous philosophy of scientists
Pierre Macherey, translated by Robin Mackay

68 + 1: Lacan’s année érotique
Jean-Michel Rabaté

ESSAYS

The Nihilistic Affirmation of Life: Biopower and Biopolitics in The Will to Knowledge
Keith Crome

In the Middle
Sean Gaston

REVIEWS

Martin Hägglund, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life
Danielle Sands

‘Without wanting to push the analysis further …’: Jean-Michel Rabaté and the Materialities of Theory
Pieter Vermeulen

Phenomenology did not begin as a religious philosophy, but recently several prominent European phenomenologists have asked whether a coherent phenomenology of human experience must find its fulfillment in religion.

Christian phenomenologists such as Jean-Luc Marion, Michel Henry, and Jean-Louis Chrétien have all pressed an incisive and provocative question to modern secular philosophy: do our lived human experiences of self, other and world finally make sense only when we see them as founded on God’s creative act? By answering this question affirmatively, these thinkers have asserted that a rigorous philosophical account of human experience must also involve a philosophy of God. Human experience, precisely in order to be true to itself, must include practices of religious gratitude and praise. As a corollary, philosophy must include theological analysis.

The Silverman Center’s 2009 Symposium on phenomenology and the theological turn will therefore investigate sympathetically and critically this radical turn to religion in phenomenology. We hope you will join us for what is sure to be a spirited conversation about a matter that is of far more than just theoretical interest.
Speakers

Jean-Luc Marion, University of Chicago and University of Paris-Sorbonne
“On the Foundation of the Distinction Between Theology and Philosophy”

Richard Kearney, Boston College
“Returning to God After God: Levinas, Derrida, Ricoeur”

Edith Wyschogrod, Rice University
“Confessional Memoirs: The Phenomenology of Telling It All”

Jay Lampert, University of Guelph
“Do the Arguments for Saturated Phenomena Prove That They Are Necessary or That They Are Possible? Time to Decide”

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1.  Editorial: In this Issue of KRITIKE: An Online Journal of Philosophy – The Editor

Featured Essay:

2. To Build or to Destroy?  The Philippine Experience with Walls and a Southeast Asian Perspective – Ranhilio Callangan Aquino

Articles:

3. Some Useful Lessons from Richard Rorty’s Political Philosophy for Philippine Postcolonialism – F. P. A. Demeterio

4. Adorno, Obama, and Empire: Reflections on the U.S. Presidential Election and the Next President – Lukas Kaelin

5. Heidegger, Hegel, Marx: Marcuse and the Theory of Historicity – Jeffry V. Ocay

6. Derrida’s Turn to Franciscan Philosophy – Marko Zlomislic

7. Deconstruction and the Transformation of Husserlian Phenomenology – Chung Chin-Yi

8. Toward a Return to Plurality in Arendtian Judgment – Jack E. Marsh Jr.

9. Mistaking Judgments of the Agreeable and Judgments of Taste – Francis Raven

10. The Limits of Misogyny: Schopenhauer, “On Women” – Thomas Grimwood

11. Haecceitas and the Question of Being: Heidegger and Duns Scotus – Philip Tonner

12. Kong Zi on Good Governance – Moses Aaron T. Angeles

13. The Problem of the Inefficacy of Knowledge in Early Buddhist Soteriology – Ryan Showler

A review of Derrida and Legal Philosophy

This book brings together fifteen essays on Jacques Derrida’s approach to justice, law, and politics. It succeeds in demonstrating that Derrida, who died from pancreatic cancer in October of 2004, was not a political nihilist. In fact, he spent much of the last two decades of his life writing about law and justice, and he was deeply concerned about persons who were disempowered and marginalized. This concern was evidenced in his theoretical writings and in his personal commitment to progressive causes. Derrida is not widely considered a major figure in the philosophy of law, but he has definitely impacted the field in two ways. First, during the 1980s, his “deconstructive” strategy for textual analysis was picked up by scholars associated with the critical legal studies movement. Second, a small but devoted group of scholars was profoundly influenced by his 1989 lecture at Cardozo Law School entitled “Force of Law,” as well as subsequent books on Marxism, forgiveness, friendship, gifts, and international politics. Therefore a compendium of essays on Derrida’s legal philosophy is a laudable project, and this book will be useful for those who are interested in, or already committed to, Derrida’s position.

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Delving into the nuances and gradations of conceptual constructions while also recalling the far horizons of philosophical reflections — from Aristotle to Derrida and friends — Derrida on Time moves between intricate detailed readings and expansive historical overview. The text invokes the mutual readings that Hodge also identifies as the friendship of ‘Blanchot, Levinas, [and] Derrida and their continuing points of reference: Aristotle, Augustine, Nietzsche; Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger’ (92) not to mention Kant, Freud, Nancy, Marion, among many others. While explicating the transformations articulated across and between these various textual engagements, Hodge traces these theorists’ reflections on temporality and time. This book demands an oscillating reading that returns back and forth between chapters, paragraphs, concepts, and phrases creating a disrupted and repeated engagement. There is a clearly discernable trajectory but there is also a looping return such that later insights recall, re-signify and rearticulate earlier observations. This returning is not a restating but a retrospective materializing of that which had already emerged: what the reader might have overlooked earlier attains a new significance in the context of later explications. This encourages or demands a non-linear reading so that later sections invite, even require, a revisiting of the earlier.

Rest of the review

Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics)

Description from the publisher’s website:

Radical Atheism presents a profound new reading of the influential French philosopher Jacques Derrida. Against the prevalent notion that there was an ethical or religious “turn” in Derrida’s thinking, Hägglund argues that a radical atheism informs Derrida’s work from beginning to end. Proceeding from Derrida’s insight into the constitution of time, Hägglund demonstrates how Derrida rethinks the condition of identity, ethics, religion, and political emancipation in accordance with the logic of radical atheism. Hägglund challenges other major interpreters of Derrida’s work and offers a compelling account of Derrida’s thinking on life and death, good and evil, self and other. Furthermore, Hägglund does not only explicate Derrida’s position but also develops his arguments, fortifies his logic, and pursues its implications. The result is a groundbreaking deconstruction of the perennial philosophical themes of time and desire as well as pressing contemporary issues of sovereignty and democracy.

Derrida – The politics of friendship

(h/t: aadken)

Edited by Francois Raffoul and David Pettigrew, French Interpretations of Heidegger: An Exceptional Reception

From the publisher’s site:

French Interpretations of Heidegger undertakes a philosophical engagement with the work of the most significant and creative figures involved in the reception of Heidegger in France. The essays address those thinkers who have been influenced by Heidegger’s thought and have interpreted it in remarkable ways, including Levinas, Beaufret, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Nancy, Lacoue-Labarthe, Irigaray, Zarader, Greisch, and Dastur. The volume explores the extraordinary impact that Heidegger’s thought has had on contemporary French philosophy, including such movements as existentialism, deconstruction, feminist theory, post-structuralism, and hermeneutics, and illustrates its impact on the American continental scene as well.

Click here for Table of Contents

Colin Koopman
University of California, Santa Cruz

PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL CRITICISM, Forthcoming

Abstract:
I propose a major reassessment of Foucault’s philosophico-historical account of the basic problems of modernity. I revise our understanding of Foucault by countering the misinterpretations proffered by influential European critics such as Habermas and Derrida. Central to Foucault’s account of modern was his work on two crucial concept pairs: freedom/power and reason/madness. I argue against the view of Habermas and Derrida that Foucault understood modern power and reason as straightforwardly opposed to modern freedom and madness. I show that Foucault held a much more complex view of these pairs, a view encapsulated in his term “reciprocal incompatibility.” By revising our interpretation of Foucault’s work on modernity in this way, we open the way to much more effective deployments of his critical apparatus.

Keywords: Foucault, Habermas, Derrida, Modernity, Discipline

Link

It’s my pleasure to post about my friend Andrea Hurst’s book,Derrida Vis-à-vis Lacan: Interweaving Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis (Perspectives in Continental Philosophy)

From the publisher’s site:

Derrida and Lacan have long been viewed as proponents of two opposing schools of thought. This book argues, however, that the logical structure underpinning Lacanian psychoanalytic theory is a complex, paradoxical relationality that corresponds to Derrida’s “plural logic of the aporia.”

Andrea Hurst begins by linking this logic to a strand of thinking (in which Freud plays a part) that unsettles philosophy’s transcendental tradition. She then shows that Derrida is just as serious and careful a reader of Freud’s texts as Lacan. Interweaving the two thinkers, she argues that the Lacanian Real is another name for Derrida’s différance and shows how Derrida’s writings on Heidegger and Nietzsche embody an attitude toward sexual difference and feminine sexuality that matches Lacanian insights.

Attempting to heal a long-standing divide between Derrideans and Lacanians, she brings out a deep theoretical accord between thinkers who both recognize the power of psychoanalysis to address contemporary political and ethical issues.

Recommended by Joan Copjec:

“Hurst brokers the relationship between Derrida and Lacan with great delicacy. Through patient, sympathetic, and often eye-opening readings of both, she maintains the separateness of these titans of French thought even as she draws them convincingly close together.”

Perspectives on Heidegger

MATHESON RUSSELL: Phenomenological Reductionin Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit: A New Proposal

KRZYSZTOF ZIAREK: The Return to Philosophy? Or:Heidegger and the Task of Thinking

JANET DONOHOE: The Place of Tradition: Heidegger and Benjamin on Technology and Art

LIN MA: The Mysterious Relations to the East

TANJA STAEHLER: Unambiguous Calling? Authenticity and Ethics in Heidegger’s Being and Time

PATRICK O’CONNOR: There is no World Without End (Salut):Derrida’s Phenomenology of the Extra-Mundane

The Domestication of Derrida: Rorty, Pragmatism and Deconstruction (Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy)

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A review of French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States

There is a central question that provides a guiding thread through François Cusset’s far ranging and intellectually challenging investigation into the reception of “French Theory” in the United States: how is it that “around the beginning of the 1980s, right when the works of Foucault, Deleuze, Lyotard, and Derrida were being put to work on American campuses and in some alternative communities as the theoretical foundation for a new type of politics, those very names were being demonized in France as the epitome of an outdated ‘libidinal’ and leftist type of politics”? (XVIII) His study unfolds, examining the chronological periods before and after this crucial decade, casting back to roughly 1966 and then moving forward up until 2004, in an attempt to answer this question and explain the American phenomenon he terms French Theory.

Link to the review

A review of Dante and Derrida: Face to Face (S U N Y Series in Theology and Continental Thought)

A challenge all interpreters face is finding a language in which to mediate understanding between the author they are interpreting and a contemporary audience. Erich Auerbach accomplished this by recovering and expounding the idea and practice of figura, which became the basis for path-breaking interpretations of Dante. Similarly, many scholars have brought forward passages in Thomas Aquinas that Dante echoes or likely had in mind and used them to explain the poem’s theological and philosophical grounding. Another example is the careful reconstruction of the cosmology of the Commedia, used to organize the entire structure of the Pardiso as well as for smaller functions like marking the passage of time or to convey a variety of other meanings. The advantage of such scholarly recoveries is that these are languages Dante himself spoke fluently. The disadvantage is that they may be so remote that they actually widen the distance of the contemporary reader from Dante. The more we understand Dante, the more we realize his thought presupposes ideas we may no longer believe and cannot share. One can try to relegate such erudition to footnotes where the ordinary reader can ignore it, but it is disconcerting to think that the more precisely one understands Dante, the more he seems so much of his time, the less he has to say to us.

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Browsing the French edition

Special issue of the South African Journal of Philosophy (2007)

Todd, Cain (2007) Aesthetic, Ethical, and Cognitive Value.

Schoeman, Marinus (2007) Generosity as a central virtue in Nietzsche’s ethics.

Olivier, Bert (2007) Nietzsche, immortality, singularity and eternal recurrence.

Kotzee, Ben (2007) Our Vision and our Mission: Bullshit, Assertion and Belief.

Tännsjö, Torbjörn (2007) Social Psychology and the Paradox of Revolution.

Hurst, Andrea (2007) Supposing Truth is a Woman – What Then?