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All Ears: The Aesthetics of Espionage

Peter Szendy

The world of international politics has been recently rocked by a seemingly endless series of scandals that are all tied to various practices of auditory surveillance: the NSA’s warrantless ... More

The world of international politics has been recently rocked by a seemingly endless series of scandals that are all tied to various practices of auditory surveillance: the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping, Edward Snowden’s revelations, and the “News of the World” scandal are just the most sensational examples of what appears to be a universal practice today. What is the source of this unceasing battle of different forms of listening? Whence this generalized principle of eavesdropping? Peter Szendy’s All Ears: The Aesthetics of Espionage answers these questions by tracing the long history of moles from the Bible, through Jeremy Bentham’s “panacoustic” project, all the way to the intelligence gathering network called “Echelon.” This archeology of auditory surveillance runs parallel with the analysis of its representations in literature (Sophocles, Shakespeare, Joyce, Kafka, Borges), opera (Monteverdi, Mozart, Berg), and film (Lang, Hitchcock, Coppola, De Palma). Following in the footsteps of Orpheus, the book proposes a new concept of “overhearing” that connects the act of spying to an excessive intensification of listening. Relying on the works of Freud, Deleuze, Foucault, Adorno, and Derrida, Szendy’s work attempts to locate at the heart of listening the ear of the Other that manifests itself as the originary division of a “split-hearing” that turns the drive for mastery and surveillance into the death drive.Less

Heidegger, Philosophy, and Politics: The Heidelberg Conference

Jacques Derrida, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe

Mireille Calle-Gruber (ed.)

In February of 1988, philosophers Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jacques Derrida, and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe came together in Heidelberg before a large audience to discuss the philosophical and political ... More

In February of 1988, philosophers Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jacques Derrida, and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe came together in Heidelberg before a large audience to discuss the philosophical and political implications of Martin Heidegger’s thought. This event took place in the very amphitheater in which, more than fifty years earlier, Heidegger, as Rector of the University of Freiburg and a member of the Nazi Party, had given a speech entitled “The University in the New Reich.” Heidegger’s involvement in Nazism has always been, and will remain, an indelible scandal, but what is its real relation to his work and thought? And what are the responsibilities of those who read this work, who analyze and elaborate this thought? Conversely, what is at stake in the wholesale dismissal of this important but compromised twentieth-century philosopher? In 1988, in the wake of the publication of Victor Farias’s Heidegger and Nazism, and of the heated debates that ensued, these questions had become more pressing than ever. The reflections presented by three of the most prominent of Heidegger’s readers, improvised in French and transcribed here, were an attempt to approach these questions before a broad public, but with a depth of knowledge and a complex sense of the questions at issue that were often lacking in the press at the time.Less

Levinas and the Night of Being: A Guide to Totality and Infinity

Raoul Moati

Can we truly claim that metaphysics is over? That we are living, as the post-phenomenological trend claims, in the epoch of the “end of metaphysics”? Through a close reading of Levinas’s masterpiece, ... More

Can we truly claim that metaphysics is over? That we are living, as the post-phenomenological trend claims, in the epoch of the “end of metaphysics”? Through a close reading of Levinas’s masterpiece, Totality and Infinity, Raoul Moati tries to show that things are in fact much more complicated. Contrary to a certain common understanding of Levinas’s work, Totality and Infinity proposes not so much an alternative to Heidegger’s ontology, but a deeper elucidation of the meaning of “Being,” beyond Heidegger’s fundamental ontology. For this reason, the metaphor of the night becomes crucial to the exploration of a nocturnal face of the events of Being, beyond their ontological reduction to the understanding of Being. The deployment of being beyond its intentional or ontological reduction coincides with what Levinas calls “nocturnal events.” Insofar as the light of understanding hides them, it is only through the de-formalization of the traditional phenomenological approach of phenomena, that Levinas, Moati shows, leads us to their exploration and their systematic and mutual implications. Moati then elaborates, following Levinas, the possibility of what he calls a “metaphysics of society,” which cannot, in any way, be integrated into the deconstructive grasp of the so-called “metaphysics of presence.” In that sense, Moati’s philosophical inquiry constitutes an impressive meditation on the meaning and the possibility of a revival of metaphysics after the epoch of the “end of metaphysics.”Less

Lovecidal: Walking with the Disappeared

Trinh T. Minh-ha

This book offers a lyrical, philosophical meditation on the global state of endless war and the violence inflicted by the imperial need to claim victory. It discusses the rise of the police state as ... More

This book offers a lyrical, philosophical meditation on the global state of endless war and the violence inflicted by the imperial need to claim victory. It discusses the rise of the police state as linked, for example, to U.S. military intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan, or to China's occupation of Tibet, examining legacies of earlier campaigns and the residual effects of the war on terror. The book also takes up the shifting dynamics of peoples' resistance to acts of militarism and surveillance as well as social media and its capacity to inform and mobilize citizens around the world. At once an engaging treatise and a creative gesture, the book probes the physical and psychic conditions of the world and shows us a society that is profoundly heartsick. Taking up with those who march both as and for the oppressed—who walk with the disappeared to help carry them forward—the text engages the spiritual and affective dimensions of a civilization organized around the rubrics of nonstop governmental subjugation, economic austerity, and highly technologized military conflict. In doing so, it clears a path for us to walk upon. Along with our every step, the world of the disappeared lives on.Less

Transcendence and the Concrete: Selected Writings

Jean Wahl

Alan D. Schrift and Ian Alexander Moore (eds)

Jean Wahl’s influence on French philosophical thought can hardly be overestimated. About him, Emmanuel Levinas wrote that “during over a half century of teaching and research, [Jean Wahl] was the ... More

Jean Wahl’s influence on French philosophical thought can hardly be overestimated. About him, Emmanuel Levinas wrote that “during over a half century of teaching and research, [Jean Wahl] was the life force of the academic, extra-academic, and even, to a degree anti-academic philosophy necessary to a great culture.” And Gilles Deleuze, for his part, commented that “Apart from Sartre, who remained caught none the less in the trap of the verb to be, the most important philosopher in France was Jean Wahl.” As professor at the Sorbonne for over three decades, president of the Société Française de Philosophie (1960–74), editor of the Revue de métaphysique et de morale(1950–74), and founder and director of the Collège Philosophique, Wahl was in dialogue with some of the most prominent and well-known French philosophers and intellectuals of the twentieth century, including Bataille, Bergson, Beauvoir, Butor, Deleuze, Derrida, Lévi-Strauss, Marcel, Lacan, Levinas, Maritain, Sartre, and Weil, impacting several of them greatly. Wahl also played a significant role, in some cases almost singlehandedly, in introducing French philosophy to movements like phenomenology, existentialism, American pragmatism and literature, and British empiricism. And Wahl was an original philosopher and poet in his own right. The goal of this volume of selections from Jean Wahl’s philosophical writings is to reintroduce Wahl to the English-speaking philosophical community, and to show the enormous influence he had through introducing the work of Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Jaspers to several generations of French philosophers.Less

The Wedding Feast of the Lamb: Eros, the Body, and the Eucharist

Emmanuel Falque

This book links philosophy and theology in an original fashion that allows us to see the full effect of theology's “backlash” against philosophy. By attending closely to the incarnation and the ... More

This book links philosophy and theology in an original fashion that allows us to see the full effect of theology's “backlash” against philosophy. By attending closely to the incarnation and the eucharist, the text develops a new concept of the body and of love: By avoiding the common mistake of “angelism”—consciousness without body—it considers the depths to which our humanity reflects animality, or body without consciousness. It shows the continued relevance of the question “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” (John 6:52), especially to philosophy. We need to question the meaning of “this is my body” in “a way that responds to the needs of our time” (Vatican II). Because of the ways that “Hoc est corpus meum” has shaped our culture and our modernity, this is a problem both for religious belief and for culture.Less

Words Fail: Theology, Poetry, and the Challenge of Representation

Colby Dickinson

This book is concerned with matters of representation and failure, especially insofar as they indicate deep and often startling truths about the nature of spiritual and theological reflection. This ... More

This book is concerned with matters of representation and failure, especially insofar as they indicate deep and often startling truths about the nature of spiritual and theological reflection. This volume turns to poets such as Celan, Wallace Stevens, Adrienne Rich, Giovanni Pascoli and Giorgio Caproni because they are all poets who sought directly to enter into the struggle with oppression that takes place within language. They illuminate the tensions present within the failures of representation in a profound manner. The path this study of poetic struggle against oppression and representation takes is one that links these tensions with various contemporary continental thinkers whose work continues to highlight the vast philosophical and theological stakes at play within these poetic endeavors. There has been much philosophical speculation on the potential failure of language as well as the search for a presentation of the “thing itself” beyond representation. Here, the book pursues the writings of a trio of philosophers, Jacques Derrida, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Giorgio Agamben—very much in that order—as prime examples of how modern poetry presents us with a profitable vantage point from which to survey these ongoing struggles of living in a highly fragmented (post)modern world. Alongside these thinkers, this book looks specifically at the form of ‘spirituality’ that is given shape by this intersecting of poetics and theological-philosophical reflection. Such a focal point takes shape in the author’s reflections on how poets’ and philosophers’ understanding of poetics and religious identity were offering rich suggestions about our “spiritual” nature.Less