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Jean-Luc Nancy provides an analysis of the anti-Semitic aspects of Heidegger’s recently published Black Notebooks. Referring to Hannah Arendt’s notion of the “banality of evil,” Nancy offers an analysis of the philosophical or “historial” anti-Semitism found in the Black Notebooks. He notes especially that this anti-Semitism is marked by the “banality” of ordinary anti-Semitism pervading Europe. He does this by linking Heidegger’s remarks to the well-known anti-Semitic forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, whose terms are strikingly similar. Heidegger’s thought is also placed in the broader context of Western thought and culture, particularly in relation to the notion of a “decline” and to the sense of crisis pervading Europe in the first half of the twentieth century, to which anti-Semitism was a frequent response. Nancy critiques Heidegger’s continual evocation of a “beginning,” to be found solely in Greek thought, that has been covered over but whose destiny must be renewed in “another beginning,” and he links this to the impulse in European thought, and especially in Christianity, toward ever more initial foundations of “self.” The rejection of Judaism by Christianity, in its very foundation, is compared with Heidegger’s insistence on “another beginning.” Nancy finds in this complex ensemble a hatred of self at the heart of the West.

This is a collection of articles written over the space of twenty years on various subjects connected to the rationality of faith and its presentation in the contemporary world. Marion discusses the role of the intellectual in the church, the rationality of faith, the infinite worth and incomprehensibility of the human, the phenomenality of the sacraments, and the phenomenological nature of miracles and of revelation more broadly. Throughout he stresses that faith has its own rationality, which is one of love, gift, and givenness, which can be outlined phenomenologically and hence expressed with philosophical rigor. He also criticizes various movements within Catholicism to intellectualize the role of the laity and instead argues for the simple responsibility of the baptized as church of Christ in need of the sacraments and unfolding their particular rigor and “logic.” Marion outlines the gift-character of faith and sacraments and their essential phenomenality of giveness, which calls forth a response of love and devotion in the sense of kenotic abandon. He ends with an analysis of sanctity.

Coming is a lyrical, erudite examination of the French notion of jouissance. How did jouissance evolve from referring to the pleasure of possessing a material thing (property, wealth) to the pleasure of orgasm, from appropriation to dis-appropriation, from consumption to consummation? The philosophers Adèle van Reeth and Jean-Luc Nancy engage in a lively dialogue touching on authors as varied as Spinoza, Hegel, Saint Augustine, the Marquis de Sade, Marguerite Duras, and Henry Miller, and on subjects ranging from consumerism to video games to mysticism. Four additional essays were added to the American edition: “The Body of Pleasure,” a philosophical examination of the body and the senses; “Rühren, Berühren, Aufruhr (Moving, Touching, Uprising),” on the nature of touch; “Neither Seeing Nor Having,” an essay on the philosopher Gérard Granel’s meditations on the obsessive love of Paolo and Francesca in Canto V of Dante’s Inferno; and finally a lyrical and evocative prose-poem called “Nude Enumerated.”

The notion that human thought is structured like a language, with a precise syntax and semantics, has been pivotal in recent philosophy of mind. Yet it is not a new idea: it was systematically explored in the fourteenth century by William of Ockham and became central in late medieval philosophy. This book examines the background of Ockham's innovation by tracing the history of the mental language theme in ancient and medieval thought. It shows the various contexts in which the idea was developed, the different uses it was put to, and the networks through which it was transmitted. Two ancient traditions are identified as relevant: one philosophical, stemming from Plato and Aristotle, which led to the emergence of a technical notion of ‘internal discourse’ in later Greek philosophy; and the other theological, rooted in the Fathers of the Christian Church and reaching its apogee in Augustine in the fifth century A.D. The study then focuses on the merging of the two traditions in the Middle Ages, as they gave rise to detailed discussions over the structure of human thought and its relations with signs and language. And it finally stresses the originality and significance of Ockham's doctrine of the 'oratio mentalis' (mental discourse) and the strong impression it made upon his immediate successors.