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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 book examines an encounter recurring throughout the modern philosophical tradition: that between philosophy and journalism. It focuses on the images of reporters and newspaper readers, messengers and town criers, and announcements and rumors punctuating the work of three thinkers who understood themselves to be writing at the limits of this tradition: Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Benjamin. As this book argues, the preoccupation with journalism of these three thinkers cannot be separated from their philosophy “proper” but plays a pivotal role in their philosophical work, where it marks the nexus between their theories of history, time, and language. Journalism, for Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Benjamin alike, figures before anything else as a cipher of the time in which they understood themselves to be writing. If the journalist and newspaper reader characterize what Kierkegaard calls “the present age,” it does so by marking it as a present marked by the crisis of the philosophy of history. But journalism does not simply mark the end of history as a philosophizable concept; for Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Benjamin, journalism takes on an exemplary role in the attempt to think time and history in the wake of this demise. As this book shows, the concepts around which these attempts crystallize—Kierkegaard’s “instant” (Øieblik), Nietzsche’s “untimeliness” (das Unzeitgemäße), Benjamin’s “actuality” (Aktualität)—all emerge from the philosophical confrontation with journalism and its characteristic temporalities.

The Singular Voice of Being: John Duns Scotus and Ultimate Difference reconsiders John Duns Scotus’s well-covered theory of the univocity of being in light of his less explored discussions of ultimate difference. Ultimate difference is a notion introduced by Aristotle and known by the Aristotelian tradition, but one that, the book argues, Scotus radically retrofits to buttress his doctrine of univocity. Ultimate difference for Aristotle meant the last difference in a line of specific differences whereby all the preceding differences would be united into a single substance rather than remain a heapish multiplicity. Scotus both broadens and deepens the term such that, in the end, it comes to resemble its Aristotelian ancestor more in name than in substance. This is because Scotus broadens ultimate difference to include not only specific differences, but also intrinsic modes of being (e.g., finite/infinite) and principles of individuation (i.e., haecceitates). Furthermore, he deepens it by divorcing it from anything with categorial classification, such as substantial form. Rather, by linking ultimate difference to primary diversity irreducible to opposition, privation, or contradiction, Scotus responds to the long-standing Parmenidean arguments against the division of being. Differentiation is not a fall from the perfect unity of being. Rather, ultimate difference divides being by perfective determination of this otherwise indifferent concept. The division of being culminates in individuation as the final degree of perfection, which constitutes indivisible (i.e., singular) degrees of being.