Dead Letters to Nietzsche examines how writing shapes subjectivity through the example of Nietzsche’s reception by his readers, including Stanley Rosen, David Farrell Krell, Georges Bataille, Laurence Lampert, Pierre Klossowski, and Sarah Kofman. More precisely, Joanne Faulkner finds that the personal identification that these readers form with Nietzsche’s texts is an enactment of the kind of identity-formation described in Lacanian and Kleinian psychoanalysis. This investment of their subjectivity guides their understanding of Nietzsche’s project, the revaluation of values.

Not only does this work make a provocative contribution to Nietzsche scholarship, but it also opens in an original way broader philosophical questions about how readers come to be invested in a philosophical project and how such investment alters their subjectivity.

An original contribution to a continental philosophy of ethics
“Raffoul shows that philosophers in the continental lineage have persistently concerned themselves with issues of responsibility and provided original ways to rethink the meaning of ethics, choice, freedom, accountability, and moral normativity.” —Charles E. Scott, Vanderbilt University

“This landmark study of responsibility offers novel readings of existing theories from Kant to Levinas and Derrida while giving its own original view of what makes up responsible action. Written with unusual incisiveness, it contains bold insights into how and why human beings are capable of responsibility at every level of their lives.” —Edward S. Casey, Stony Brook University
François Raffoul approaches the concept of responsibility in a manner that is distinct from its traditional interpretation as accountability of the willful subject. Exploring responsibility in the works of Nietzsche, Sartre, Levinas, Heidegger, and Derrida, Raffoul identifies decisive moments in the development of the concept, retrieves its origins, and explores new reflections on it. For Raffoul, responsibility is less about a sovereign subject establishing a sphere of power and control than about exposure to an event that does not come from us and yet calls to us. These original and thoughtful investigations of the post-metaphysical senses of responsibility chart new directions for ethics in the continental tradition.

François Raffoul is Professor of Philosophy at Louisiana State University. He is author of Heidegger and the Subject and is translator (with Andrew Mitchell) of Martin Heidegger’s Four Seminars (IUP, 2003).

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This is the tenth volume by Nietzsche in the Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy series, giving him the most books in the series (followed by Kant with seven volumes). Like all the other Nietzsche volumes, Writings from the Early Notebooks contains an Introduction followed by suggestions for further reading, together with bibliographical notes on the texts and notes on the translation. The texts are presented in a new translation. Added to them is an impressive number of very informative footnotes that provide the biographical, historical and intellectual background without which a lot of the material would be barely comprehensible. All these features make this volume, like many others in the series, very helpful for both students and researchers.

via Friedrich Nietzsche, Raymond Geuss (ed.), Alexander Nehamas (ed.) – Writings from the Early Notebooks – Reviewed by Rolf-Peter Horstmann, Humboldt Universität – Philosophical Reviews – University of Notre Dame.

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

After Montinari: On Nietzsche Philology, Werner Stegmaier and Lisa Marie Anderson

Nietzsche’s Critique of Democracy (1870–1886), H. W. Siemens

Freud and Nietzsche on Sublimation, Ken Gemes

Nietzsche’s Free Spirit Trilogy and Stoic Therapy, Michael Ure

St Hildas’ College, Oxford April 3 – 5

The full programme and registration forms are available from the BSP web-site: http://www.britishphenomenology.com.

If you have any queries, please contact David Webb: d.a.webb@staffs.ac.uk

Ullrich Haase (Manchester Metropolitan University)

‘History: Heidegger on Nietzsche’s 2nd Untimely Meditation’

David Krell (Depaul University)

‘Nietzsche in Derrida’s Politiques de l’amitié’

Will McNeill (Depaul University)

‘The Descent of Philosophy: On the Nietzschean Legacy in Heidegger’s Phenomenology’

Graham Parkes (University College Cork)

‘Nietzsche on Experiencing the Natural World – As It Really Is?’

Andrea Rehberg (Bilkent University)

‘Nietzsche and Merleau-Ponty: Physiology, Body, Flesh’

John Sallis (Boston College)

‘Perspectives on Shining: Nietzsche and Beyond’

Jim Urpeth (Greenwich University)

‘The Phenomenology of Religious Life; Nietzsche and Bergson’

Book Discussion Session

Prof Douglas Burnham (Staffordshire University) & Joanna Hodge will discuss Jill Marsden’s book After Nietzsche: Notes Towards a Philosophy of Ecstasy (Palgrave)

Jill Marsden (University of Bolton) will respond.

Nietzsche’s Political Skepticism (hereafter NPS) is a serious, learned, and novel contribution to the literature on Nietzsche’s relevance to political theory. Against the two dominant strands in the secondary literature — one attributing to Nietzsche a kind of flat-footed commitment to aristocratic forms of social ordering, the other denying that Nietzsche has any political philosophy at all — Shaw stakes out a new and surprising position: namely, that Nietzsche was very much concerned with the familiar question of the moral or normative legitimacy of state power, but was skeptical that with the demise of religion, it would be possible to achieve a practically effective normative consensus about such legitimacy that was untainted by the exercise of state power itself. Although, as I will argue below, there are reasons to be quite skeptical that Nietzsche was interested in anything like these questions, Shaw has laid down a clear and invigorating challenge to existing scholarship on Nietzsche’s politics, and it is one worth meeting.

Shaw’s project is animated by interest in the following issue about political authority in the modern era: namely, how can states in practice have legitimate normative or moral authority when religion is no longer available to secure a consensus on the ‘correct’ or ‘true’ normative criteria? The problem is compounded by the fact that states need to be perceived as legitimate, and thus will use their considerable powers to produce a perception of legitimacy. Against the power of the state to produce the appearance of legitimacy, the rational insight of philosophers into the genuine moral foundations of legitimacy is no match. That, I take it, is the structure of the problem that animates Shaw’s reading of Nietzsche. But is Nietzsche really worried about these issues?

Continue reading the review

Reviewed by Peter Poellner, University of Warwick

The last decade has seen a flurry of publications on Nietzsche’s ethics and specifically on his critique of “morality” put forward in On the Genealogy of Morality. In addition to a host of journal articles and essay collections, there have been book-length studies of the subject by, among others, Aaron Ridley (Nietzsche’s Conscience, 1998), Simon May (Nietzsche’s Ethics and his War on “Morality”, 1999), Brian Leiter (Nietzsche on Morality, 2002), and Chris Janaway (Beyond Selflessness: Reading Nietzsche’s Genealogy, 2007). David Owen’s book is the latest addition to this growing literature. It is plausible to think that this surge of interest reflects a growing acknowledgement among philosophers in the English-speaking world that Nietzsche’s ideas on ethics and morality are of continuing relevance for contemporary thought. But while there has been increasing willingness to engage with Nietzsche among philosophers trained in the analytic tradition, there continues to be fierce disagreement on the merits and precise significance of his contribution, and indeed on its content. Much effort has been expended in recent years on clarifying or reconstructing Nietzsche’s challenge, and on excavating the argumentative structures beneath his polemics, while also making sense of the rhetorical idiosyncrasies of his distinctive philosophical style. As a result, we now have a much clearer and more detailed picture of the various interpretive options and are in a correspondingly better position than a few decades ago to assess the merits of the philosophical positions to which Nietzsche may plausibly be thought to be committed.

Owen’s valuable book offers a sustained, clear, crisply argued reconstruction of Nietzsche’s central arguments in On the Genealogy of Morality as well as some thoughtful explanatory ideas on Nietzsche’s incendiary style in this text, situating both in the context of the development of his thought on morality following his break with his early ethics of heroic love and self-sacrifice (inspired partly by Schopenhauer and Wagner) in Human, All-Too-Human. In Owen’s account of this development, Nietzsche’s point of departure since Daybreak is the “death of God”, the loss of belief in the Christian God among the cultured classes dramatized as the urbane atheism of the people in the marketplace in §125 of The Gay Science. The people in the marketplace consider the loss of authority of the metaphysical beliefs associated with Christianity to be a process that need have no implications for their practical orientation in life, an orientation that remains structured by a certain conception of morality continuous with “Christian” morality. For Nietzsche, by contrast, morality thus understood is rationally dependent on the truth of those now widely abandoned metaphysical beliefs: “When one gives up Christian belief one thereby deprives oneself of the right to Christian morality” (TI, “Expeditions of an Untimely Man”, §5). Nietzsche’s task, as he conceives of it from The Gay Science onwards, is therefore threefold: he needs to provide a broadly naturalistic explanation of the hold that “morality” continues to have — irrationally, by his lights — even on unbelievers; he needs to come up with an adequate evaluative framework permitting him to determine the “value of morality” as a self-standing practice deprived of its metaphysical trappings; and he needs to tell us something about the criteria for assessing evaluative commitments. The last requirement is particularly challenging for him as he is committed to “perspectivism”, a view which Owen interprets as the epistemological claim that justification is necessarily relative to practical perspectives constituted by specific, contingent interests and purposes — and that the idea of a practical justification valid for all rational beings merely qua rational beings is incoherent.

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Scapegoats and sacrifices – Rene Girard

Download Audio – 15112008

Have you ever found that you didn’t want something until you noticed that somebody else wanted it? Were you picked on at school, or were you one of the pickers on? Welcome to the world of the French thinker Rene Girard, who claims that desire needs to be learned and that, once learned, it leads to the finding of scapegoats. And what do we do with scapegoats? We sacrifice them.

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In French, on Nietzsche’s correspondence.