Browse

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.

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.