We are pleased to release the June 2008 Issue of KRITIKE: An Online Journal of Philosophy

The journal website: http://www.kritike.org
Current issue: http://www.kritike.org/Current_Issue.html
Call for papers: http://www.kritike.org/Call_for_Papers.html

KRITIKE VOLUME TWO NUMBER ONE (JUNE 2008)

1. Editorial: Marking the First Year of KRITIKE: An Online Journal of Philosophy - The Editor

Articles:

2. Interruptions: Derrida and Hospitality - Mark W. Westmoreland

3. Iris Murdoch’s The Bell: Tragedy, Love, and Religion - Kenneth Masong

4. ‘To Philosophize is to Learn How to Die?’ - Saitya Brata Das

5. A Comparative Study on the Theme of Human Existence in the Novels of Albert Camus and F. Sionil Jose - F. P. A. Demeterio

6. The War on Concepts: The Thought of Jan Patocka and the War on Terror - Katy Scrogin

7. Mass Mentality, Culture Industry, Fascism - Saladdin Said Ahmed

8. The Causal Relevance and Heterogeneity of Program Explanations in the Face of Explanatory Exclusion - Wilson Cooper

9. A Freewheeling Defense of Kant’s Resolution of the Third Antinomy - Todd D. Janke

10. The Structures of Perception: An Ecological Perspective - Michael James Braund

Book Reviews :

11. Powell, Jason, Jacques Derrida: A Biography - Marko Zlomislic

12. Evans, C. Stephen, Kierkegaard on Faith and the Self: Collected Essays - Robert C. Cheeks

13. Drake, David, Sartre and Bernasconi, Robert, How to Read Sartre - Marella Ada Mancenido

Derrida’s Dissemination.
Merleau-Ponty’s Le visible and l’invisible
And some Wittgenstein and Jean-Luc Nancy

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

A review of Philosophy of Derrida

The Philosophy of Derrida is the latest installment in McGill-Queen's Continental European Philosophy series — a line of books that aims to furnish accessible introductions to the work of influential European thinkers, all the while "combin[ing] clarity with depth, introducing fresh insights and wider perspectives" and "providing a comprehensive survey of each thinker's philosophical ideas." It goes without saying that producing an introduction to Derrida that is at once clear, deep, original, and synoptic is a tall order to fill.

Dooley and Kavanagh succeed in a number of important respects. They offer a brisk but wide-ranging rendition of the increasingly popular narrative in which the seemingly disparate emphases of Derrida's "early" and "later" work are unified by an underlying continuity. Highlights along the way include an informative take on Derrida's relationships to Freud, Husserl, and Heidegger, and a more insightful and even-handed treatment of Rorty's interpretation of Derrida than is typical. Accompanying these strengths, however, are a number of problems that, according to reviewers, have also challenged other recent introductions to Derrida. Such problems include the taking of a somewhat insular approach that hesitates to subject Derrida's guiding assumptions to critical scrutiny, an underdeveloped assessment of alleged points of contact between "Derrida and analytic philosophy," and an account of Derrida on "ethics" and "politics" that leaves these central terms ill-defined and pays insufficient attention to the difference between doing ethical or political philosophy and inquiring into the conditions of possibility for doing ethical or political philosophy.[1]

Link

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.

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The Spirit of the Age: Hegel and the Fate of Thinking

(Click here to read the articles)

Table of Contents

The Spirit of The Age and the Fate of Philosophical Thinking — Paul Ashton, Toula Nicolacopoulos, George Vassilacopoulos
Would Hegel Be A ‘Hegelian’ Today? — H. S. Harris
Hegel, Idealism and God: Philosophy as the Self-Correcting Appropriation of the Norms of Life and Thought — Paul Redding
Hegel, Derrida and the Subject — Simon Lumsden
Hegel’s Science of Logic and the “Sociality of Reason” — Jorge Armando Reyes
The Ego as World: Speculative Justification and the Role of the Thinker in Hegel’s Philosophy — Toula Nicolacopoulos, George Vassilacopoulos
Hegel Today: Towards a Tragic Conception of Intercultural Conflicts — Karin G de Boer
Sein und Geist: Heidegger’s Confrontation with Hegel’s Phenomenology — Robert Sixto Sinnerbrink
Hegel, Recognition And Rights: ‘Anerkennung’ As A Gridline Of The Philosophy Of Rights — Jürgen Lawrenz
Hegel’s Theory of Moral Action, its Place in his System and the ‘Highest’ Right of the Subject — David Rose
Being and Implication: On Hegel and the Greeks — Andrew Haas
The Relevance of Hegel’s Logic — John W Burbidge
Agamben, Hegel, and the State of Exception — Wendell Kisner
Gathering and Dispersing: The Absolute Spirit in Hegel’s Philosophy — George Vassilacopoulos
Hegel and the Becoming of Essence — David Gray Carlson
Dialectical Reason and Necessary Conflict—Understanding and the Nature of Terror — Angelica Nuzzo
The Spirit (of our Time) is and is not a Bone. — Johan Vandycke
The Beginning Before the Beginning: Hegel and the Activation of Philosophy — Paul Ashton
Kierkegaard’s Ethical Stage In Hegel’s Logical Categories: Actual Possibility, Reality And Necessity — María J. Binetti
El estadio ético de Kierkegaard en las categorías lógicas de Hegel: posibilidad, realidad y necesidad actuales – María J. Binetti

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

DERRIDA’s LEGACIES
A conference hosted by the Forum for European Philosophy

Saturday 1 March, 10:00 am - 6:15 pm
Hong Kong Theatre, LSE
Admission FREE

For full and updated information visit:www.philosophy-forum.org

Organisers: Danielle Sands, Nemonie Craven and Shahidha Bari

Marking the release of the new collection, “Derrida’s Legacies: Philosophy and Literature”, this conference will present the work of a new generation of Derrida scholars. Bringing together recent thinking across disciplines, it will explore what it means to be thinking with, through, and alongside Derrida’s work today - addressing the questions of Derrida’s legacies and possible futures for his work. The event will explore Derrida’s influence, current trends and debates in Derrida scholarship, and will focus on particular texts. Following the Forum for European Philosophy’s development of innovative presentational formats, the conference will provide an opportunity for young researchers (graduate students and recently PhDs) to present their work beyond the confines of a traditional academic ‘paper’ and to lend their ideas to a more open-ended and informal discussion. An architect will also introduce their work, as a ‘provocation’ to Derrida’s legacies of thought.

For further information please contact:
Juliana Cardinale
j.cardinale@lse.ac.uk
+ 44 (0)20 7955 7539

WEBSITE:
http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/forumForEuropeanPhilosophy/events/conferences/Default.htm

Articles are available for download here

TOC:

'The Merchant of Venice' Through the Lens of Continental Philosophy — Oona Eisenstadt, Pomona College.

Shylock After Auschwitz: 'The Merchant of Venice' on the Post-Holocaust Stage–Subversion, Confrontation, and Provocation — Arthur Horowitz, Pomona College.

Reading the 'Merchant of Venice' through Adorno — Zdravko Planinc.

Shylock Between Exception and Emancipation: Shakespeare, Schmitt, Arendt — Julia Reinhard Lupton, University of California, Irvine.

Avoiding Tragedy in the 'Merchant of Venice' — Paul A. Kottman, New School University.

Shylock: The Knight of Faith? — Ken Jackson, Wayne State University.

Heart's Blood: Derrida and Portia on Translation — Oona Eisenstadt, Pomona College.

Unfinished Business: A Response to the Symposium "The Merchant of Venice and Contemporary Theory" –  J. Aaron Kunin, Pomona College.