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Ambiguity and the Absolute: Nietzsche and Merleau-Ponty on the Question of Truth

Frank Chouraqui

This book seeks to elucidate Nietzsche and Merleau-Ponty’s treatments of the question of truth by using each of their philosophies to shed light on the other. For both philosophers, the question of ... More

This book seeks to elucidate Nietzsche and Merleau-Ponty’s treatments of the question of truth by using each of their philosophies to shed light on the other. For both philosophers, the question of truth arises from the fact that even though truth is an illusion, it remains a meaningful concept. What authentic experience is truth an inauthentic expression of? By following the trajectory of this question in both authors’ works, this book demonstrates how this question structures both their philosophies and how its answer constitutes the systematic and intrinsic link between them: the concept of truth arises from the authentic experience of Being as an endless movement of falsification. For Being must be defined as the very movement whereby the world transforms itself into truths.Less

Apocalypse-Cinema: 2012 and Other Ends of the World

Peter Szendy

Apocalypse-cinema is not only the end of time that has so often been staged as spectacle in films like 2012, The Day After Tomorrow, and Terminator. By looking at blockbusters that play with general ... More

Apocalypse-cinema is not only the end of time that has so often been staged as spectacle in films like 2012, The Day After Tomorrow, and Terminator. By looking at blockbusters that play with general annihilation while also paying close attention to films like Melancholia, Cloverfield, Blade Runner, and Twelve Monkeys, this book suggests that in the apocalyptic genre, film gnaws at its own limit. Apocalypse-cinema is, at the same time and with the same double blow, the end of the world and the end of the film. It is the consummation and the (self)consumption of cinema, in the form of a cinema that Lyotard evoked as the nihilistic horizon of filmic economy. The innumerable countdowns, dazzling radiations, freeze-overs, seismic cracks, and crevices are but other names and pretexts for staging film itself, with its economy of time and its rewinds, its overexposed images and fades to white, its freeze frames and digital touch-ups. The apocalyptic genre is not just one genre among others: it plays with the very conditions of possibility of cinema. And it bears witness to the fact that, every time, in each and every film, what Jean-Luc Nancy called the cine-world is exposed on the verge of disappearing. In a postface specially written for the English edition, the book extends its argument into a debate with speculative materialism. Apocalypse-cinema, it argues, announces itself as cinders that question the “ultratestimonial” structure of the filmic gaze. The cine-eye, it argues, eludes the correlationism and anthropomorphic structure that speculative materialists have placed under critique, allowing only the ashes it bears to be heard.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

Bestial Traces: Race, Sexuality, Animality

Christopher Peterson

In contemporary race and sexuality studies, the topic of animality emerges almost exclusively in order to index the dehumanization that makes discrimination possible. Bestial Traces argues that a ... More

In contemporary race and sexuality studies, the topic of animality emerges almost exclusively in order to index the dehumanization that makes discrimination possible. Bestial Traces argues that a more fundamental disavowal of human animality conditions the bestialization of racial and sexual minorities. Hence, when conservative politicians equate homosexuality with bestiality, they betray an anxious effort to deny the animality inherent in all sexuality. Focusing on literary texts by Edgar Allan Poe, Joel Chandler Harris, Richard Wright, Philip Roth, and J. M. Coetzee, together with philosophical texts by Derrida, Heidegger, Agamben, Freud, and Nietzsche, Peterson maintains that the representation of social and political others as animals can be mitigated but never finally abolished. All forms of belonging inevitably exclude some others as “beasts.” Though one might argue that absolute political equality and inclusion remain desirable, even if ultimately unattainable, ideals, Bestial Traces shows that, by maintaining such principles, we exacerbate rather than ameliorate violence because we fail to confront how discrimination and exclusion condition all social relations.Less

Castoriadis's Ontology: Being and Creation

Suzi Adams

This book is the first systematic reconstruction of Castoriadis's philosophical trajectory, and pays particular attention to his dialogue with phenomenology. It critically interprets the shifts in ... More

This book is the first systematic reconstruction of Castoriadis's philosophical trajectory, and pays particular attention to his dialogue with phenomenology. It critically interprets the shifts in his ontology by reconsidering the ancient problematic of “human institution” (nomos) and “nature” (physis), on the one hand, and the question of “being” and “creation,” on the other. Unlike the order of physis, the order of nomos has played no substantial role in the development of Western thought. The first part of the book suggests that Castoriadis sought to remedy this by elucidating the social-historical as the region of being that eludes the determinist imaginary of inherited philosophy. This ontological turn was announced in his 1975 magnum opus, The Imaginary Institution of Society. With the aid of archival sources, the second half of the book reconstructs a second ontological shift in Castoriadis's thought that occurred during the 1980s. The book argues that Castoriadis extends his notion of “ontological creation” beyond the human realm and into nature. This move has implications for his overall ontology and signals a shift toward a general ontology of creative physis.Less

Committing the Future to Memory: History, Experience, Trauma

Sarah Clift

Committing the Future to Memory: History, Experience, Trauma seeks to rethink the relation between history and memory by revisiting the temporality of experience and its narrative representation. ... More

Committing the Future to Memory: History, Experience, Trauma seeks to rethink the relation between history and memory by revisiting the temporality of experience and its narrative representation. Whereas historical determinacy conceives the past to be a complex and unstable network of causalities, asks how history can be related to a more radical future. To pose that question, it does not reject determinacy outright but rather seeks to explore how it works. In examining what it means to be “determined” by history, it also asks what kind of openings there might be in our encounters with history for interruptions, re-readings and re-writings. Engaging texts spanning multiple genres and several centuries-from John Locke to Maurice Blanchot, from G. W. F. Hegel to Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin-this book looks at experiences of time that exceed the historical narration of experiences said to have occurred in time. It focuses on the co-existence of multiple temporalities and opens up the quintessentially modern notion of historical succession to other possibilities. The alternatives the book draws out include the mediations of language and narration, temporal leaps, oscillations and blockages, and the role played by contingency in representation. The book argues that such alternatives compel us to reassess the ways we understand history and identity in a traumatic, or indeed in a post-traumatic, age.Less

The Creolizing Subject: Race, Reason, and the Politics of Purity

Michael J. Monahan

How does our understanding of the reality (or lack thereof) of race as a category of being affect our understanding of racism as a social phenomenon, and vice versa? How should we envision the aims ... More

How does our understanding of the reality (or lack thereof) of race as a category of being affect our understanding of racism as a social phenomenon, and vice versa? How should we envision the aims and methods of our struggles against racism? Traditionally, the Western political and philosophical tradition held that true social justice points toward a race-less future — that racial categories are themselves inherently racist, and a sincere advocacy for social justice requires a commitment to the elimination or abolition of race altogether. This book focuses on the underlying assumptions that inform this view of race and racism, arguing that it is ultimately bound up in a politics of purity — an understanding of human agency, and reality itself, as requiring all-or-nothing categories with clear and unambiguous boundaries. Racism, being organized around a conception of whiteness as the purest manifestation of the human, thus demands a constant policing of the boundaries among racial categories. Drawing upon a close engagement with historical treatments of the development of racial categories and identities, the book argues that races should be understood not as clear and distinct categories of being but rather as ambiguous and indeterminate (yet importantly real) processes of social negotiation. The author takes seriously the way in which racial categories, in all of their variety and ambiguity, situate and condition our identity, while emphasizing our capacity, as agents, to engage in the ongoing contestation and negotiation of the meaning and significance of those very categories.Less

Debates in Continental Philosophy: Conversations with Contemporary Thinkers

Richard Kearney

For more than twenty years, the author of this book has been in conversation with leading philosophers, literary theorists, anthropologists, and religious scholars. ... More

For more than twenty years, the author of this book has been in conversation with leading philosophers, literary theorists, anthropologists, and religious scholars. This book brings together twenty-one originally published and extraordinary conversations—the author's 1984 collection Dialogues: The Phenomenological Heritage, his 1992 Visions of Europe: Conversations on the Legacy and Future of Europe, and his 1995 States of Mind: Dialogues with Contemporary Thinkers. Featured interviewees include Stanislas Breton, Umberto Eco, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Herbert Marcus, George Steiner, Julia Kristeva, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jean-François Lyotard. To this classic core, the book adds recent interviews, previously unpublished, with Paul Ricoeur, Jean-Luc Marion, Jacques Derrida, and Georges Dumézil, as well as six colloquies about the author's own work. These interviews provide a guide to the ideas, concerns, and personalities of thinkers who have shaped modern intellectual life.Less

The Early Heidegger's Philosophy of Life: Facticity, Being, and Language

Scott M. Campbell

In his early lecture courses, delivered at the University of Freiburg and the University of Marburg from 1919 to 1928, Martin Heidegger exhibited an abiding interest in human life. Focusing on the ... More

In his early lecture courses, delivered at the University of Freiburg and the University of Marburg from 1919 to 1928, Martin Heidegger exhibited an abiding interest in human life. Focusing on the facticity of living and speaking in the early lecture courses, this book traces the development of Heidegger's ideas about factical life through his interest in Greek thought and its concern with Being. Heidegger's existential concerns about human life and his ontological concerns about the meaning of Being crystallize in the notion of Dasein in Being and Time. Dasein is the Being of factical human life. Primarily through an examination of these early lecture courses, this book investigates the interconnected relationships human life has to science, religion, history, phenomenology, hermeneutics, and ontology, as well as language, sophistry, and rhetoric in the work of Plato and Aristotle. With an emphasis on the positive aspects of everydayness, this book explores the contexts of meaning embedded within life; the intensity of average, everyday life; the temporal immediacy of life in early Christianity; the hermeneutic pursuit of life's self-alienation; factical spatiality; the temporalizing of history within life; the richness of the world; and the facticity of speaking in Plato and Aristotle.Less

The End of the World and Other Teachable Moments: Jacques Derrida's Final Seminar

Michael Naas

This book follows the remarkable itinerary of Jacques Derrida's final seminar, “The Beast and the Sovereign” (2001–3), as the explicit themes of the seminar namely, sovereignty and the question of ... More

This book follows the remarkable itinerary of Jacques Derrida's final seminar, “The Beast and the Sovereign” (2001–3), as the explicit themes of the seminar namely, sovereignty and the question of the animal come to be supplemented and interrupted by questions of death, mourning, survival, the archive, and, especially, the end of the world. The book begins with Derrida's analyses, in the first year of the seminar, of the question of the animal in the context of his other published works on the same subject. It then follows Derrida through the second year of the seminar, presented in Paris from December 2002 to March 2003, as a very different tone begins to make itself heard, one that wavers between melancholy and an extraordinary lucidity with regard to the end. Focusing the entire year on just two works, Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Martin Heidegger's seminar of 1929–30, “The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics,”the seminar comes to be dominated by questions of the end of the world and of an ordinary violence that at once gives rise to and effaces all things. The text follows Derrida as he responds from week to week to these emerging questions, as well as to important events unfolding around him, both world events the aftermath of 9/11, the American invasion of Iraq and more personal ones, from the death of Maurice Blanchot to intimations of his own death less than two years away. All this, the book concludes, makes this final seminar an absolutely unique work in Derrida's corpus, one that both speaks of death as the end of the world and itself now testifies to that end just one, though hardly the least, of its many teachable moments.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

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: Through Phenomenology to Thought

William J. Richardson

This book belongs on any short list of classic studies of Continental philosophy. It explores the famous turn (Kehre) in Heidegger's thought after Being in Time and demonstrates how ... More

This book belongs on any short list of classic studies of Continental philosophy. It explores the famous turn (Kehre) in Heidegger's thought after Being in Time and demonstrates how this transformation was radical without amounting to a simple contradiction of his earlier views. In a full account of the evolution of Heidegger's work as a whole, the book illuminates both divergences and continuities in Heidegger's philosophy, especially in light of recently published works. It includes the letter Heidegger wrote to the author of this book and a new introduction.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

Heidegger's Technologies: Postphenomenological Perspectives

Don Ihde

Heidegger is the only thinker of his generation whose philosophy of technology is still widely read today. In it, he made three basic claims. First, he asserted that the essence of ... More

Heidegger is the only thinker of his generation whose philosophy of technology is still widely read today. In it, he made three basic claims. First, he asserted that the essence of technology is not technological — that technology is not a neutral instrumentality. Second, he claimed that there is a qualitative difference between modern and traditional technologies. Third and most interestingly, he claimed that technology is a metaphysical perspective, a paradigmatic view of the whole of nature. Although Martin Heidegger remains recognized as a founder of the philosophy of technology, in the past sixty years a whole new world of technologies has appeared — bio-, nano-, info-, and imaging. How adequate is Heidegger's thinking now for understanding today's technological advances? After an Introduction that places Heidegger within the thinking about technology typical of his time, this book reexamines Heidegger's positions from multiple perspectives — historical, pragmatic, anti-Romantic, and post phenomenological. Its critiques invert Heidegger's essentialism and the book phenomenologically analyzes Heidegger's favored and disfavored technologies. In conclusion, the book undertakes a concrete analysis of the technologies Heidegger used to produce his writing and discovers heretofore undiscussed and ironic results.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

Identity: Fragments, Frankness

Jean-Luc Nancy

Identity. Fragments, Frankness is a dense and powerful essay on the notion of identity and on how it plays in our contemporary world. In contrast with various attempts to cling to established ... More

Identity. Fragments, Frankness is a dense and powerful essay on the notion of identity and on how it plays in our contemporary world. In contrast with various attempts to cling to established identities, and to enclose identity within dubious agendas, Nancy shows that an identity is always open: to alterity and its transformations. Ultimately one does not have an identity but has to become what one is, without ever returning to a same but solely to difference and singularity. Jean-Luc Nancy shows the impasse of a certain conception of identity, as the “identity of the identifiable,” which always refers to some permanent, given, substantial identity, such as “the French.” To such identity, he opposes the identity of what identifies oneself, invents itself in an open process of exposure to others and internal difference.Less

Last Steps: Maurice Blanchot's Exilic Writing

Christopher Fynsk

This book provides close readings of a number of Maurice Blanchot's important post-war writings. It offers the most sustained reading of The Step Not Beyond available, and includes chapters on ... More

This book provides close readings of a number of Maurice Blanchot's important post-war writings. It offers the most sustained reading of The Step Not Beyond available, and includes chapters on Levinas and Blanchot's relation to Judaism. It attempts a form of reading that is responsive to the exorbitant challenge presented by the work of one of the most important writers and thinkers of the 20th century. It seeks to trace the possibility and lineaments of an affirmative turn that proceeds from a most trenchant refusal.Less

Love and Other Technologies: Retrofitting Eros for the Information Age

Dominic Pettman

Can love really be considered another form of technology? This book says it can, although not before carefully redefining technology as a cultural challenge to what we mean by the ... More

Can love really be considered another form of technology? This book says it can, although not before carefully redefining technology as a cultural challenge to what we mean by the “human” in the information age. Using the writings of such thinkers as Giorgio Agamben, Jean‐Luc Nancy, and Bernard Stiegler as a springboard, the book explores the “techtonic” movements of contemporary culture, specifically in relation to the language of eros. The highly ritualized expression of desire is love; in other words, love always reveals an era's attitude toward what it means to exist as a self among others. For this book, the articulation of love is a technique of belonging: a way of responding to the basic plurality of everyone's identity, a process that becomes increasingly complex as the forms of mediated communication, from cell phone and text messaging to the mass media, multiply and mesh together. Wresting the idea of love from the arthritic hands of Romanticism, the book demonstrates the ways in which this dynamic assemblage, “the stirrings of the soul”, has always been a matter of tools, devices, prosthetics, and media. Love is, after all, something we make. And, love, this book argues, is not eternal, but external.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