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The Reproduction of Life Death: Derrida's La vie la mort

Dawne McCance

During the 1975–76 academic year, Jacques Derrida delivered a seminar, La vie la mort, at the Paris ENS. Based on archival translations of this as-yet untapped seminar, McCance’s The Reproduction of ... More

During the 1975–76 academic year, Jacques Derrida delivered a seminar, La vie la mort, at the Paris ENS. Based on archival translations of this as-yet untapped seminar, McCance’s The Reproduction of Life Death offers an unprecedented study of Derrida’s engagement with molecular biology and genetics, particularly François Jacob’s interpretation of DNA reproduction in his 1970 book La Logique du vivant (The Logic of the Living). Structured on an itinerary of “three rings,” each departing from and coming back to Nietzsche, Derrida’s seminar ties Jacob’s logocentric account of reproduction to the reproductive program of teaching that characterizes the academic institution, challenging this mode of teaching as auto-reproduction along with the concept of academic freedom on which it is based. McCance’s The Reproduction of Life Death makes another decisive contribution in bringing together Derrida’s critique of Jacob’s theory of auto-reproduction with his reading of reproductivity, the tendency to repeat-reproduce, that is theorized and enacted in Freud’s “speculative” Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The book includes Derrida’s analyses of life death in relation to autobiography and the signature. The book will be of interest to all theorists and disciplines concerned with the question of life.Less

Thinking with Adorno: The Uncoercive Gaze

Gerhard Richter

What Theodor W. Adorno says cannot be separated from how he says it. By the same token, what he thinks cannot be isolated from how he thinks it. The central aim of Thinking with Adorno: The ... More

What Theodor W. Adorno says cannot be separated from how he says it. By the same token, what he thinks cannot be isolated from how he thinks it. The central aim of Thinking with Adorno: The Uncoervice Gaze is to examine how these basic yet far-reaching assumptions teach us to think with Adorno—which is to say, both alongside him and in relation to his diverse contexts and constellations. These contexts and constellations range from aesthetic theory to political critique, from the problem of judgment to the difficulty of inheriting a tradition, from one’s orientation in the work of art and the question of how to lead a right life within a wrong one to the primacy of the object and beyond. Along the way, the book makes vivid the notion that Adorno can best be understood through the lens of his highly suggestive—yet often overlooked—concept of the “uncoercive gaze.” This gaze designates a specific kind of comportment in relation to an object of critical analysis: it moves close to the object and tarries with it while struggling to decipher the singularities and non-identities that are lodged within it. As this book also shows, Adorno is best understood as a thinker in dialogue, whether with long-deceased historical predecessors in the German tradition such as Kant and Hegel, with writers such as Kafka, with contemporaries such as Benjamin and Arendt, or with philosophical voices that succeeded him, such as those of Derrida and Agamben.Less

Husserl: German Perspectives

John J. Drummond and Otfried Höffe (eds)

Edmund Husserl, generally regarded as the founding figure of the philosophical movement of phenomenology—or, more precisely, transcendental phenomenology—exerted an enormous influence on the course ... More

Edmund Husserl, generally regarded as the founding figure of the philosophical movement of phenomenology—or, more precisely, transcendental phenomenology—exerted an enormous influence on the course of twentieth- and twenty-first-century philosophy. This influence was both positive and negative. The subsequent developments of existentialism, hermeneutics, deconstruction, and so on were defined in part by how they both assimilated and departed from Husserlian views. The course of what has come to be called “continental philosophy” cannot be described without reference to this assimilation and departure, and, among the many successor approaches, phenomenology remains a viable alternative. In addition, problems addressed by Husserl—most notably, intentionality, consciousness, the emotions, and ethics—are of central concern in so-called analytic philosophy. Husserl’s views remain central to many contemporary philosophical discussions. This volume collects and translates previously untranslated articles written by important German-speaking commentators on Husserl. These German perspectives not only detail Husserl’s phenomenology but point toward his confrontation with other significant German philosophers, both ancestors and heirs. The articles focus primarily on three problematics within phenomenology: the nature and method of phenomenology; intentionality—the “main theme of phenomenology”—along with its attendant problems of temporality and subjectivity; and intersubjectivity and culture. The commentators selected for inclusion in the volume range over a time span encompassing both Husserl’s contemporaries and our own.Less

Poetics of History: Rousseau and the Theater of Originary Mimesis

Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe

This book opens with a philosophical scene: in the context of a reading of Hölderlin, Heidegger dismisses Rousseau as irrelevant to the true concerns of philosophy, and thus shows his own blindness ... More

This book opens with a philosophical scene: in the context of a reading of Hölderlin, Heidegger dismisses Rousseau as irrelevant to the true concerns of philosophy, and thus shows his own blindness to Rousseau’s very evident influence. This dismissal is motivated in part by Heidegger’s pro-German posture, but also by a disregard of Rousseau’s thinking, particularly his thinking of mimêsis. In what follows, Lacoue-Labarthe’s task is, first, to show that Rousseau articulates a genuine transcendental thinking of origins, one that will be read and retained by the major philosophers who follow him (notably Kant). This demonstration is carried out with reference especially to Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, in which, in the wake of readings by Jacques Derrida and Jean Starobinski, Lacoue-Labarthe locates a thinking of technê (as a supplement of nature) that is properly transcendental and originary. Lacoue-Labarthe calls this Rousseau’s “onto-technology,” showing that it is linked with a scene, and therefore with the theater, in a broad sense. The second task, then, is to show that in his discourse on the theater, especially in the Letter to d’Alembert, Rousseau thinks in specifically philosophical terms, and that, despite an apparently conventional reading of Aristotle’s Poetics, he actually articulates a more genuine understanding of mimêsis and katharsis that is more faithful to Aristotle’s text. Katharsis becomes a form of speculative sublation, an Aufhebung, and Rousseau’s apparently reactionary interpretation of theater places him at a crucial initiating point of modern philosophy in the grips of a paradoxical dialectic.Less

Maurice Blanchot: A Critical Biography

Christophe Bident

Maurice Blanchot (1907–2003) was one of the most important writers of the French twentieth century. His novels, shorter narratives, literary criticism, and fragmentary texts exercised great influence ... More

Maurice Blanchot (1907–2003) was one of the most important writers of the French twentieth century. His novels, shorter narratives, literary criticism, and fragmentary texts exercised great influence over writers, artists, and philosophers. As a journalist and political activist, he had a public side that matched his secret and mysterious side as someone who refused to be interviewed or photographed. Maurice Blanchot: A Critical Biography, the only full-length account of Blanchot’s itinerary, therefore attempts to carry out an impossible bio-graphy. It does so by drawing on unpublished letters and on interviews with the writer’s very close friends. Beyond this, it is a theoretical work that follows the genealogy of a thinking that is at once imaginative and speculative, at once aligned with literary modernity and a close companion and friend of philosophy. It is a historical work, unpacking the ‘transformation of convictions’ of an author who moved from the far-right in the 1930s to the far-left in the 1950s and after. And it is of course a biography, showing the strong links between the author’s life and an œuvre which nonetheless aspires to anonymity. In these ways, this book claims that Blanchot’s is a life that has become the œuvre, become a literature that bears the traces of that life secretly, even if they are what drives it. Blanchot’s œuvre is reconstituted in all its contexts, at a time when the critics who attack it, just like those who elevate it in unthinking fascination, often produce one-dimensional readings.Less

The Forgiveness to Come: The Holocaust and the Hyper-Ethical

Peter Banki

The book addresses the difficulties posed by the Holocaust for a thinking of forgiveness inherited from the Abrahamic (i.e., monotheistic) tradition. As a way to approach these difficulties, it ... More

The book addresses the difficulties posed by the Holocaust for a thinking of forgiveness inherited from the Abrahamic (i.e., monotheistic) tradition. As a way to approach these difficulties, it explores the often radically divergent positions in the debate on forgiveness in the literature of Holocaust survivors. Forgiveness is sometimes understood as a means of self-empowerment (Eva Mozes Kor); part of the inevitable process of historical normalization and amnesia (Jean Améry); or otherwise as an unresolved question, that will survive all trials and remain contemporary when the crimes of the Nazis belong to the distant past (Simon Wiesenthal). On the basis of an examination of Jacques Derrida’s concept of forgiveness (as forgiveness of the unforgivable) and its elaboration in relation to the juridical concept of Crimes Against Humanity, the book undertakes close readings of Simon Wiesenthal’s The Sunflower (Die Sonnenblume (1969)), Jean Améry’s At the Mind’s Limits (Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne (1966)), Vladimir Jankélévitch’s Forgiveness (Le Pardon (1967)), and Robert Antelme’s The Human Race (L’espèce humaine (1947)). In addition, it analyses the documentary film Forgiving Doctor Mengele (2006) on Eva Mozes Kor. Each of these works bears witness to “aporias,” or unsolvable impasses, of forgiveness, justice and responsibility in relation to the Holocaust. The book argues that Derrida’s concept of forgiveness has the capacity to transform the debate about forgiveness and the Holocaust and open new ways to read the literature, which turns around this question.Less

Atopias: Manifesto for a Radical Existentialism

Frédéric Neyrat

Atopias argues for a transcendence that is a relation between thought and the world, rather than an object or a substance that escapes the world. In doing so, Atopies intervenes within the fields of ... More

Atopias argues for a transcendence that is a relation between thought and the world, rather than an object or a substance that escapes the world. In doing so, Atopies intervenes within the fields of object-oriented ontology and speculative realism, as well as classical philosophy, psychoanalysis, structuralism, poststructuralism, ecology, and global studies. The book posits that existence must be thought prior to being. Neyrat’s radical existentialism becomes the basis for a new theory of being, understood as the self-differentiation of the existent. Such self-differentiation, or spacing, is fundamentally different than the “Grand Divides” that postructuralist theories have critiqued. The first part of the book develops a critique of saturated immanence, or a world that attempts to immunize itself by rejecting forms of transcendence. From here the book turns to an internal divergence at the heart of philosophy, offering a new reading of Socrates. The second part of the book is a theory of the “trans-ject,” or an existing living being that is formed from the outside. The third section of the book examines the creation of metaphysical propositions through the transgression of the law of the excluded middle. Elaborating a politics of existence, Atopias calls us to defend the eccentricity of the living against that which prevents the living from existing.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

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

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