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Decreation and the Ethical Bind: Simone Weil and the Claim of the Other

Yoon Sook Cha

Decreation and the Ethical Bind identifies a decreative ethics, whereby self-dispossession underwrites an ethical obligation to preserve the other from harm. The author shows how obligation emerges ... More

Decreation and the Ethical Bind identifies a decreative ethics, whereby self-dispossession underwrites an ethical obligation to preserve the other from harm. The author shows how obligation emerges at the conjuncture of competing claims: between the other’s subject affirmation and one’s own dislocation, between what one has and what one has to give, between a demand that asks for too much and the extraordinary demand of asking nothing. In the unfolding and reiteration of themes issuing from the other’s claim upon oneself develops a complex picture of the tensions that sustain the scene of ethical relationality. Just how these tensions both subtend and undercut an other-centered ethics of preservation is the question this book tarries with. By proposing a way to read the distinct ethical charge of the other’s claim not to be harmed, Decreation and the Ethical Bind offers a novel treatment of the concept of decreation in the thought of Simone Weil, putting her work in dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Blanchot and Judith Butler. In examining themes of ethical obligation, vulnerability and the force of weak speech, the present study places Weil within a continental tradition of literary theory in which writing and speech are bound up with questions of ethical appeal. It contributes a new and critical voice to the current conversation in theory and criticism that addresses a difficult form of ethics that isn’t grounded in subjective agency and narrative fruition, but in the risks taken to fulfill the claims it makes.Less

The Future Life of Trauma: Partitions, Borders, Repetition

Jennifer Yusin (ed.)

The Future Life of Trauma elaborates a transformation in the concepts of trauma and event by situating a ground-breaking encounter between psychoanalytic and postcolonial discourses. It unfolds a new ... More

The Future Life of Trauma elaborates a transformation in the concepts of trauma and event by situating a ground-breaking encounter between psychoanalytic and postcolonial discourses. It unfolds a new materialism that asserts the coincidence between the symbolic and empirical domains of life. Proceeding from the formation of psychical life as it is presented in the Freudian metapsychology, Future Life thinks anew the relation between temporality and the traumatized subjectivity, demonstrating how the psychic event, understood as a traumatic event, is a material reality that alters the determining character of the structure of repetition. It comprises two major sections. The first elucidates how the case of the psychoanalytic concept of trauma discloses the self-transformative tendency of life as the movement immanent to the real. Through a focus on the role of borders in the history of the 1947 Partition of British India and the politics of memorialization in post-genocide Rwanda, the second brings to light the implications of trauma as a material event in pressing contemporary issues of nation-formation, sovereignty, and geopolitical violence. In showing how the form of the psyche changes in the encounter, Future Life presents a challenge to the category of difference in the condition of identity. The epilogue pushes toward a new approach to ethical and political responsibility that breaks the deconstructive loops perpetuated by the idea of promise. The result is the formation of a form of life that elaborates a new relation to destruction and finitude by asserting its innate power to transform itself.Less

Kant on the Frontier: Philosophy, Politics, and the Ends of the Earth

Geoffrey Bennington

Frontier: the border between two countries; the limits of civilization; the bounds of established knowledge; a new field of activity. At a time when all frontiers (borders, boundaries, margins, ... More

Frontier: the border between two countries; the limits of civilization; the bounds of established knowledge; a new field of activity. At a time when all frontiers (borders, boundaries, margins, limits) are being—often violently—challenged, erased or reinforced, it might be a matter of urgency to take up and rethink the very concept of frontier itself. But is there even such a concept, to be found or constructed? That is what this book begins to cast into doubt, on the basis of a reading of Kant, for whom the frontier turns out to be both the very element of his thought and the permanent frustration of his conceptuality. Following what Kant himself would call this “guiding thread,” first in the “political” writings and then in the still little-read “Critique of teleological judgment,” I try to bring out a complex, abyssal, fractal structure, which always leaves a residue of nature—violence—in every frontier (including conceptual frontiers), and which complicates Kant’s most explicit, most rational arguments (which always tend towards cosmopolitanism and so-called perpetual peace) by adding to them an element of reticence or interruption. As it turns out that there can be perpetual peace only in death, we must interrupt the teleological movement that always might take us there, we must maintain some frontiers (and therefore a certain violence) in the very place where everything led us to believe that we should hope for their pacific disappearance, if only in the infinite perspective of the Idea of Reason. Neither critique of Kant nor return to Kant, this book also proposes a new reflection on philosophical reading, for which thinking the frontier is both an essential resource and the recurrent, fruitful, interruption.Less

Phenomenologies of Scripture

Adam Y. Wells (ed.)

This collection of essays by eminent phenomenologists and biblical scholars explores phenomenological approaches to the Bible. The specific goals of this collection are two-fold: first, it advances ... More

This collection of essays by eminent phenomenologists and biblical scholars explores phenomenological approaches to the Bible. The specific goals of this collection are two-fold: first, it advances the recent “theological turn” in phenomenology by turning to scripture. Second, it resolves some of the philosophical and theological difficulties raised by modern biblical interpretation. More generally, the volume re-establishes a rapport between philosophy, theology, and biblical studies. Contributors include Jeffrey Bloechl, Walter Brueggemann, Jean-Louis Chrétien, Kevin Hart, Robyn Horner, Emmanuel Housset, Jean-Yves Lacoste, Jean-Luc Marion, Dale Martin, and Robert Sokolowski.Less

The Possibility of a World: Conversations with Pierre-Philippe Jandin

Jean-Luc Nancy and Pierre-Philippe Jandin

In this series of interviews, Jean-Luc Nancy is invited to review his life’s work with Pierre-Philippe Jandin. But like Schlegel’s historian—“a prophet facing backwards”—Nancy takes this opportunity ... More

In this series of interviews, Jean-Luc Nancy is invited to review his life’s work with Pierre-Philippe Jandin. But like Schlegel’s historian—“a prophet facing backwards”—Nancy takes this opportunity to rummage through the history of art, philosophy, religion, and politics in search of new possibilities that “remain to be thought.” This history of Nancy’s thought is interspersed with places and events and deeply personal details. The result is at once unpretentious and encyclopedic: concepts are described with remarkable nuance and specificity, but in a language that comes close to everyday life. As Nancy surveys his work, he thinks anew about democracy, community, jouissance, love, Christianity, and the arts. In the end, this is a book about the possibility of a world—a world that must be greeted because it is, as Nancy says, already here.Less

Questions of Phenomenology: Language, Alterity, Temporality, Finitude

Françoise Dastur

This book guides the reader through a series of phenomenological questions—language and logic, self and other, temporality and history, finitude and mortality—that also call phenomenology itself into ... More

This book guides the reader through a series of phenomenological questions—language and logic, self and other, temporality and history, finitude and mortality—that also call phenomenology itself into question, testing its limits and pushing it in new directions. The author sees phenomenology not as a doctrine, a catalogue of concepts and catchphrases authored by a single thinker, but as a movement in which several thinkers participate, each inflecting the movement in unique ways. In this regard, this book is both one of the clearest guides to phenomenology and the author one of its ablest practitioners.Less

Resistance of the Sensible World: An Introduction to Merleau-Ponty

Emmanuel Alloa

A philosophy that was prematurely cut short by the death of its author cannot be criticized for being inconclusive. But there has often been too great a tendency to see the suspension of Maurice ... More

A philosophy that was prematurely cut short by the death of its author cannot be criticized for being inconclusive. But there has often been too great a tendency to see the suspension of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s oeuvre as the ultimate expression of a mode of thought whose strength would lie entirely in its incompletion. Rather than treating it as a kind of open-air quarry, from which concepts and arguments could be extracted to one’s liking, this book aims at reconstructing the organic trajectory of a living thought. Drawing both on published works and unpublished manuscripts, Emmanuel Alloa suggests a completely novel approach, that accounts for both the evolution and the internal coherence of an ongoing interrogation: what does it mean for a world to be a sensible world? Highlighting the importance of the so far underestimated ‘middle phase’, The Resistance of the Sensible World provides both a refreshing new look at a modern classic as well as a guide for the perplexed. While showing how Merleau-Ponty’s oeuvre foreshadows some of the crucial openings of contemporary philosophy, the book also argues why sense ever only exists for sensible beings, i.e. for embodied, entangled, situated beings. “Emmanuel Alloa reads Merleau-Ponty as if for the first time, as if nothing of what has been repeated again and again could be taken for granted.” (Renaud Barbaras)Less

The Rigor of Things: Conversations with Dan Arbib

Jean-Luc Marion and Dan Arbib

This book provides an introduction to the life and work of philosopher and theologian Jean-Luc Marion through a set of interviews, discussing his educational career, his work on Descartes, his ... More

This book provides an introduction to the life and work of philosopher and theologian Jean-Luc Marion through a set of interviews, discussing his educational career, his work on Descartes, his phenomenology, his theology, his philosophical methodology, and his views on the future of Catholicism in France. It presents all of his major ideas in fluid dialogue and conversational tone with his former student Dan Arbib. At the same time, it provides an account of French intellectual life, especially in regard to philosophy and theology, in the late twentieth century. Marion also reflects on the relationship of philosophy to history, theology, aesthetics, and literature. The dialogues include discussions of all of his books and present their central arguments in easily comprehensible fashion. They show the overall unity of his work in terms of its focus on giveness, the gift, and the event.Less

Wilderness in America: Philosophical Writings

Henry Bugbee

David W. Rodick (ed.)

The philosophy of Henry Bugbee defies traditional academic categorization. Calvin O. Schrag, Professor Emeritus of Purdue University, once lamented that Bugbee was one of the more marginalized ... More

The philosophy of Henry Bugbee defies traditional academic categorization. Calvin O. Schrag, Professor Emeritus of Purdue University, once lamented that Bugbee was one of the more marginalized philosophers of the twentieth century, while the late Willard van Orman Quine of Harvard University, world-renown analytic philosopher and logician, described him as the ultimate exemplar of the examined life. Bugbee’s most recognized work, The Inward Morning: A Philosophical Exploration in Journal Form, consists of sequences of journal entries. Bugbee’s writings are remarkably different than most anything written in twentieth-century American philosophy. As an undergraduate, already aware of the need to overcome the limitations of formal philosophical writing, Bugbee acknowledged: “Certainly anyone who throws his entire personality into his work must to some extent adopt an aesthetic attitude and medium.” The purpose of this book is to remove the philosophical writings of Henry Bugbee from relative obscurity, making them more accessible to the wider public. Beginning with an introductory account of Bugbee’s “experiential naturalism,” the development of his thought is traced from his student writings in Part One to some select published writings in Part Two, followed by heretofore unpublished writings in Part Three. Part Four consists of an in-depth interview conducted during the twilight years of his life. The book concludes with a rich collection of appendices that are intended to shed light upon the unique person Bugbee in fact was. The end-in-view throughout has been to allow Bugbee the opportunity to speak in his own words and, when appropriate, through the words of others: those both familiar with the man as well as his philosophy.Less