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Adoration: The Deconstruction of Christianity II

Jean-Luc Nancy

This second volume in The Deconstruction of Christianity explores the stance or bearing that would be appropriate for us now, in the wake of the dis-enclosure of religion and the retreat of God: that ... More

This second volume in The Deconstruction of Christianity explores the stance or bearing that would be appropriate for us now, in the wake of the dis-enclosure of religion and the retreat of God: that of adoration. Adoration is stretched out toward things, but without phenomenological intention. In our present historical time, we have come to see relation itself as the divine. The address and exclamation—the salut!—that constitutes adoration celebrates this relation: both the relation among all beings that the world is and what is beyond relation, the outside of the world that opens in the midst of the world. This book clarifies and builds upon not only dis-enclosure, the first volume in this project, but also other previous writings on sense, the world, and the singular plurality of being.Less

Apophatic Bodies: Negative Theology, Incarnation, and Relationality

Chris Boesel and Catherine Keller (eds)

The ancient doctrine of negative theology or apophasis—the attempt to describe God by speaking only of what cannot be said about the divine perfection and goodness—has taken on new ... More

The ancient doctrine of negative theology or apophasis—the attempt to describe God by speaking only of what cannot be said about the divine perfection and goodness—has taken on new life in the concern with language and its limits that preoccupies much post-modern philosophy, theology, and related disciplines. How does this mystical tradition intersect with the concern with material bodies that is simultaneously a focus in these areas? This volume pursues the unlikely conjunction of apophasis and the body, not for the cachet of the “cutting edge” but rather out of an ethical passion for the integrity of all creaturely bodies as they are caught up in various ideological mechanisms—religious, theological, political, economic—that threaten their dignity and material well-being. The book rethinks the relationship between the concrete tradition of negative theology and apophatic discourses widely construed. It further endeavors to link these to the theological theme of incarnation and more general issues of embodiment, sexuality, and cosmology. Along the way, the book engages and deploys the resources of contextual and liberation theology, post-structuralism, postcolonialism, process thought, and feminism. The result not only recasts the nature and possibilities of theological discourse but explores the possibilities of academic discussion across and beyond disciplines in concrete engagement with the well-being of bodies, both organic and inorganic. The volume interrogates the complex capacities of religious discourse both to threaten and positively to draw upon the material well-being of creation.Less

Apparitions—Of Derrida's Other

Kas Saghafi

The chapters of this book revolve around the notion of the other in Jacques Derrida's work. How does Derrida write of and on the other? Arguing that Derrida offers the most attentive ... More

The chapters of this book revolve around the notion of the other in Jacques Derrida's work. How does Derrida write of and on the other? Arguing that Derrida offers the most attentive and responsible thinking about “the undeniable experience of the alterity of the other”, this book examines exemplary instances of the relation to the other, e.g. the relation of Moses to God, Derrida's friendship with Jean-Luc Nancy, and Derrida's relation to a recently departed actress caught on video, to demonstrate how Derrida forces us to reconceive who or what the other may be. For Derrida, the singularity of the other, always written in the lower case, includes not only the formal or logical sense of alterity, the otherness of the human other, but also the otherness of the nonliving, the no longer living, or the not yet alive. The book explores welcoming and hospitality, salutation and greeting, “approaching”, and mourning as constitutive facets of the relation to these others. Addressing Derrida's readings of Husserl, Levinas, Barthes, Blanchot, and Nancy, among other thinkers, and ranging across a number of disciplines, including art, literature, philosophy, and religion, this book explores the apparitions of the other by attending to the mode of appearing or coming on the scene, the phenomenality and visibility of the other. Analyzing some of Derrida's essays on the visual arts, the book also demonstrates that video and photography display an intimate relation to “spectrality”, as well as a structural relation to the absolute singularity of the other.Less

Between Chora and the Good: Metaphor's Metaphysical Neighborhood

Charles P. Bigger

Plato's chora as developed in the Timaeus is a creative matrix in which things arise and stand out in response to the lure of the Good. Chora is paired with the Good, its polar ... More

Plato's chora as developed in the Timaeus is a creative matrix in which things arise and stand out in response to the lure of the Good. Chora is paired with the Good, its polar opposite; both are “beyond being” and the metaphors hitherto thought to disclose the transcendent. They underlie Plato's distinction of a procreative gap between being and becoming. The chiasmus between the Good and chora makes possible their mutual participation in one another. This gap makes possible both phenomenological and cosmological interpretations of Plato. Metaphor is restricted to beings as they appear in this gap through the crossing of metaphor's terms, terms that dwell with, rather than subulate, one another. Hermeneutically, through its“is”we can see something being engendered or determined by that crossing. The book's larger goal is to align the primacy of the Good in Plato and Christian Neoplatonism with the creator God of Genesis and the God of love in the New Testament.Less

Crossover Queries: Dwelling with Negatives, Embodying Philosophy's Others

Edith Wyschogrod

Exploring the risks, ambiguities, and unstable conceptual worlds of contemporary thought, this book brings together the wide-ranging writings, across twenty years, of one of our most ... More

Exploring the risks, ambiguities, and unstable conceptual worlds of contemporary thought, this book brings together the wide-ranging writings, across twenty years, of one of our most important philosophers. Ranging from 20th-century European philosophy—the thought of Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, Levinas, Janicaud, and others—to novels and artworks, music and dance, from traditional Jewish thought to Jain and Buddhist metaphysics, this book opens radically new vistas while remaining mindful that the philosopher stands within and is responsible to a philosophical legacy conditioned by the negative. Rather than point to a Hegelian dialectic of overcoming negation or to a postmetaphysical exhaustion, the book treats negative moments as opening novel spaces for thought. It probes both the desire for God and an ethics grounded in the interests of the other person, seeing these as moments both of crossing over and of negation. Alert to the catastrophes that have marked our times, it exposes the underlying logical structures of nihilatory forces that have been exerted to exterminate whole peoples. Analyzing the negations of biological research and cultural images of mechanized and robotic bodies, it shows how they contest the body as lived in ordinary experience.Less

Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida, With a New Introduction

Jacques Derrida

John D. Caputo (ed.)

This volume, now with a substantial new Introduction, represents one of the most lucid, compact and reliable introductions to Derrida and deconstruction available in any language. Responding to ... More

This volume, now with a substantial new Introduction, represents one of the most lucid, compact and reliable introductions to Derrida and deconstruction available in any language. Responding to questions put to him at a roundtable held at Villanova University in 1994, Jacques Derrida leads the reader through an illuminating discussion of the central themes of deconstruction. Speaking in English and extemporaneously, Derrida takes up such topics as the task of philosophy, the Greeks, justice, responsibility, the gift, community, and the messianic. Derrida refutes the charges of relativism that are often leveled at deconstruction by its critics and sets forth the profoundly affirmative and ethico-political thrust of his work. The roundtable is marked by an unusual clarity that continues into the second part of the book, in which one of Derrida's most influential readers elaborates upon Derrida's comments and supplies material for further discussion. The new Introduction discusses the original context of the book and traces the development of deconstruction since Derrida's death in 2004, from the rise of new materialisms to return to religion. Long one of the most lucid and reliable introductions to Derrida and deconstruction available in any language, and an ideal volume for students, the book will also prove illuminating for those already familiar with Derrida's work.Less

The Discipline of Philosophy and the Invention of Modern Jewish Thought

Willi Goetschel

Exploring the subject of Jewish philosophy as a controversial construction site of the project of modernity, this book examines the implications of the different and often conflicting notions that ... More

Exploring the subject of Jewish philosophy as a controversial construction site of the project of modernity, this book examines the implications of the different and often conflicting notions that drive the debate on the question of what Jewish philosophy is or could be. The idea of Jewish philosophy begs the question of philosophy as such. But “Jewish philosophy” does not just reflect what “philosophy” lacks. Rather, it challenges the project of philosophy itself. Examining the thought of Spinoza, Moses Mendelssohn, Heinrich Heine, Hermann Cohen Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, Margarete Susman, Hermann Levin Goldschmidt, and others, the book highlights how the most philosophic moments of their works are those in which specific concerns of their “Jewish questions” inform the rethinking of philosophy's disciplinarity in principal terms. The overdue recognition of the modernity that informs the critical trajectories of Jewish philosophers from Spinoza and Mendelssohn to the present emancipates not just “Jewish philosophy” from an infelicitous pigeonhole these philosophers so pointedly sought to reject but, more important, emancipates philosophy from its false claims to universalism.Less

Divine Enticement: Theological Seductions

Karmen Mackendrick

Divine Enticement takes as its central claims that the meanings of theological concepts are not so much propositional—whether those propositions are affirmative or negative—as they are seductive; and ... More

Divine Enticement takes as its central claims that the meanings of theological concepts are not so much propositional—whether those propositions are affirmative or negative—as they are seductive; and that in fact our relation to the divine, the sacred, that which we name by "God" is one of an infinite seduction. The use of language in such conceptualization evokes more than it designates. This is not a flaw nor a result of vagueness or imprecision in theological language, but rather marks the correspondence of such language to its subject, understood here not as a being but as that which, outside of or at the limit of our thought, draws us as an enticement to desire, not least to intellectual desire. Several characteristics of signs, such as their sensory character, their incomplete referentiality, and their power to draw in various ways, are relevant. Thus a number of rather traditional notions in Christian theology are conceived here as enticements, modes of drawing the desires of both body and mind. Central to the text is the strange semiotics of divine naming, naming as a call on that for which there cannot be a referent. Likewise central is the value of the possible, which I argue is essential to enticement as the space in which a seduction may draw us always further. Finally, the entanglement of sign and body, not least in interpretations of the Christian incarnation, both grounds and complicates the theological abstractions.Less

The Exorbitant: Emmanuel Levinas Between Jews and Christians

Kevin Hart and Michael A. Signer (eds)

We are exorbitant, and rightly so, when we cut any link we may have to cosmological powers. Levinas invites us to be exorbitant by distancing ourselves from visions of metaphysics, ... More

We are exorbitant, and rightly so, when we cut any link we may have to cosmological powers. Levinas invites us to be exorbitant by distancing ourselves from visions of metaphysics, epistemology, and theology. We begin to listen well to Levinas when we hear him inviting us to break completely with the pagan world in which the gods are simply the highest beings in the cosmos and learn to practice an adult religion in which God is outside cosmology and ontology. God comes to mind neither in our attempts to think him as the creator of the cosmos nor in moments of ecstasy but in acts of genuine holiness, such as sharing a piece of bread with someone in a time of desperate need. Levinas, in short, enjoins us to be exorbitant in our dealings with one another. This book asks how the “between” of Levinas's thinking facilitates a dialogue between Jews and Christians. In one sense, Levinas stands exactly between Jews and Christians: ethics, as he conceives it, is a space in which religious traditions can meet. At the same time, his position seems profoundly ambivalent. No one can read a page of his writings without hearing a Jewish voice as well a philosophical one. Yet his talk of substitution seems to resonate with Christological themes. On occasion, Levinas himself sharply distinguishes Judaism from Christianity—but to what extent can his thinking become the basis for a dialogue between Christians and Jews? This book explores these questions, thereby providing a snapshot of the current state of Jewish-Christian dialogue.Less

Futurity in Phenomenology: Promise and Method in Husserl, Levinas, and Derrida

Neal DeRoo

The future figures prominently in much phenomenological work, but the methodological significance of the future for the discipline of phenomenology is rarely (if ever) the subject of direct inquiry. ... More

The future figures prominently in much phenomenological work, but the methodological significance of the future for the discipline of phenomenology is rarely (if ever) the subject of direct inquiry. This book seeks to remedy that by showing the key role that futurity (the subject’s relation to the future) plays in two key elements of the phenomenological method: constitution and intentionality. It begins by examining the role that the future plays in Husserl’s phenomenological account of the meaning- and world-constituting function of consciousness. It then shows thatLevinas’ critique of this account of phenomenology is based on a distinct account of futurity: eschatology. This notion of eschatology is essential to Levinas’s attempt to reimagine phenomenology as an essentially intentional and ethical enterprise. Finally, the book explores Derrida’s reconciliation of the phenomenologies of Husserl and Levinas in a “phenomenology of tension” that is characteristic of deconstruction. Central to this project is the role of the future, especially as it manifests itself in the notions of differance and the messianic. By highlighting the role of the future in the phenomenological method, this book reveals the necessary intertwining of intentionality and constitution at the heart of phenomenology: the subject is always constituted and constituting. This two-fold sense of phenomenology is best understood via the notion of the promise, thereby establishing phenomenology as the essentially promissory discipline.Less

The Gleam of Light: Moral Perfectionism and Education in Dewey and Emerson

Naoko Saito

In the name of efficiency, the practice of education has come to be dominated by neoliberal ideology and procedures of standardization and quantification. Such attempts to make all ... More

In the name of efficiency, the practice of education has come to be dominated by neoliberal ideology and procedures of standardization and quantification. Such attempts to make all aspects of practice transparent and subject to systematic accounting lack sensitivity to the invisible and the silent, to something in the human condition that cannot readily be expressed in an either-or form. Seeking alternatives to such trends, the book reads Dewey's idea of progressive education through the lens of Emersonian moral perfectionism (to borrow a term coined by Stanley Cavell). It elucidates a spiritual and aesthetic dimension to Dewey's notion of growth, one considerably richer than what Dewey alone presents in his typically scientific terminology.Less

The God Who Deconstructs Himself: Sovereignty and Subjectivity Between Freud, Bataille, and Derrida

Nick Mansfield

No topic has caused more discussion in recent philosophy and political theory than sovereignty. From late Foucault to Agamben, and from Guantanamo Bay to the “war on terror,” the issue of the extent ... More

No topic has caused more discussion in recent philosophy and political theory than sovereignty. From late Foucault to Agamben, and from Guantanamo Bay to the “war on terror,” the issue of the extent and nature of the sovereign has given theoretical debates their currency and urgency. New thinking on sovereignty has always imagined the styles of human selfhood that each regime involves. Each denomination of sovereignty requires a specific mode of subjectivity to explain its meaning and facilitate its operation. The aim of this book is to help outline Jacques Derrida's thinking on sovereignty—a theme which increasingly attracted Derrida towards the end of his career—in its relationship to subjectivity. It investigates the late work Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, as not only Derrida's fullest statement of his thinking on sovereignty, but also as the destination of his career-long interest in questions of politics and self-identity. The book argues that in Derrida's thinking of the relationship between sovereignty and subjectivity—and the related themes of unconditionality and ipseity—we can detect the outline of Bataille's adaptation of Freud. Freud completed his “metapsychology,” by defining the “economic” nature of subjectivity. In Bataille's hands, this economic theory became a key to the nature of inter-relationship in general, specifically the complex and shifting relationship between subjectivity and power. In playing with Bataille's legacy, Derrida connects not only with the irrepressibly outrageous thinking of philosophy's most self-consciously transgressive thinker, but with the early twentieth century scientific revolution through which “energy” became ontology.Less

The Guide to Gethsemane: Anxiety, Suffering, Death

Emmanuel Falque

Already widely debated upon its publication in French, this book offers a provocative account of Christ’s Passion in terms not of faith but of a “credible Christianity” that can remain meaningful to ... More

Already widely debated upon its publication in French, this book offers a provocative account of Christ’s Passion in terms not of faith but of a “credible Christianity” that can remain meaningful to nonbelievers. For Falque, anxiety, suffering, and death are not simply the “ills” of our society but the essential horizon of what we confront as humans. Doubtful of Heidegger’s famous statement that the notion of salvation renders Christians unable authentically to experience anxiety in the face of death, Falque explores the Passion with a radical emphasis on the physicality and corporeality of Christ’s suffering and death, and on continuities with the mortality of our bodies. Written in the wake of a friend’s death, Falques’s study is theologically and philosophically rigorous, yet engagingly written and deeply humane.Less

The Implications of Immanence: Toward a New Concept of Life

Leonard Lawlor

This book develops a philosophy of life in opposition to the notion of “bio-power,” which reduces the human to the question of power over what Giorgio Agamben terms “bare life,” mere ... More

This book develops a philosophy of life in opposition to the notion of “bio-power,” which reduces the human to the question of power over what Giorgio Agamben terms “bare life,” mere biological existence. Breaking with all biologism or vitalism, the book attends to the dispersion of death at the heart of life, in the “minuscule hiatus” that divides the living present, separating lived experience from the living body and, crucially for phenomenology, inserting a blind spot into a visual field. This book charts a post-phenomenological French philosophy. What lies beyond phenomenology is “life-ism,” the positive working out of the effects of the “minuscule hiatus” in a thinking that takes place on a “plane of immanence,” whose implications cannot be predicted. Life-ism means thinking life and death together, thinking death as dispersed throughout life. The book sets out the surpassing of phenomenology and the advent of life-ism in Merleau–Ponty, Derrida, and Foucault, with careful attention to the writings by Husserl and Heidegger to which these thinkers refer. A philosophy of life has direct implications for present-day political and medical issues. The book takes its point of departure from the current genocide in Darfur and provides conceptual tools for intervening in such issues as the AIDS epidemic and life-support for the infirm. Indeed, the investigations contained in this book are designed to help us emerge once and for all out of the epoch of bio-power.Less

Interpreting Excess: Jean-Luc Marion, Saturated Phenomena, and Hermeneutics

Shane Mackinlay

Jean-Luc Marion's theory of saturated phenomena is one of the most exciting developments in phenomenology in recent decades. It opens up new possibilities for understanding phenomena ... More

Jean-Luc Marion's theory of saturated phenomena is one of the most exciting developments in phenomenology in recent decades. It opens up new possibilities for understanding phenomena by beginning from rich and complex examples such as revelation and works of art. Rather than being curiosities or exceptions, these “excessive” or “saturated” phenomena are, in Marion's view, paradigms. He understands more straightforward phenomena, such as the objects of the natural sciences, as reduced and impoverished versions of the excess given in saturated phenomena. This book is a systematic and comprehensive study of Marion's texts on saturated phenomena and their place in his wider phenomenology of givenness, tracing both his theory and his examples across a wide range of texts spanning three decades. The author argues that a rich hermeneutics is implicit in Marion's examples of saturated phenomena, but is not set out in his theory. This hermeneutics makes clear that attempts to overthrow the much-criticized sovereignty of the Cartesian ego will remain unsuccessful if they simply reverse the subject-object relation by speaking of phenomena imposing themselves with an overwhelming givenness on a recipient. Instead, phenomena should be understood as appearing in a hermeneutic space already opened by a subject's active reception. Thus, a phenomenon's appearing depends not only on its givenness, but also on the way it is interpreted by the receiving subject. All phenomenology is, therefore, necessarily hermeneutic.Less

Is Nothing Sacred?: The Non-Realist Philosophy of Religion: Selected Essays

Don Cupitt

This book's author is best known for developing a non-realistic interpretation of Christian doctrine and an ever-more radically antirealist position in philosophy. This book seeks to go beyond ... More

This book's author is best known for developing a non-realistic interpretation of Christian doctrine and an ever-more radically antirealist position in philosophy. This book seeks to go beyond ecclesiastical religion to a purely this-worldly humanistic religion of life: it argues for a “kingdom” version of Christianity that will bring it closer to the original Jewish Jesus. This book contains chapters written over twenty years that appear in book form for the first time.Less

Language, Eros, Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and Poetic Imagination

Elliot R. Wolfson

This study — a blend of philosophy, poetry, and philology — draws on theories of sexuality, phenomenology, comparative religion, philological writings on Kabbalah, Russian formalism, ... More

This study — a blend of philosophy, poetry, and philology — draws on theories of sexuality, phenomenology, comparative religion, philological writings on Kabbalah, Russian formalism, Wittgenstein, Rosenzweig, William Blake, and the very physics of the time-space continuum to establish a high water mark in work on Kabbalah. Not only a study of texts, this book provides a full confrontation of the body in Jewish studies, and also in religious studies as a whole. The book explores the complex gender symbolism that permeates Kabbalistic literature. Focusing on the nexus of asceticism and eroticism, it seeks to define the role of symbolic and poetically-charged language in the erotically configured visionary imagination of the medieval Kabbalists. It demonstrates that the traditional Kabbalistic view of gender was a monolithic and andocentric one, in which the feminine was conceived as being derived from the masculine. The book does not shrink from the negative implications of this doctrine, but seeks to make an honest acknowledgment of it as the first step toward the redemption of an ancient wisdom. Comparisons with other mystical traditions — including those in Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam — are a feature throughout the book.Less

The Logic of the Trinity: Augustine to Ockham

Paul Thom

The doctrine of the Holy Trinity requires the joint truth of the statements that there is a unique and simple God, and that there are three distinct Persons each of which is God. Saint Augustine ... More

The doctrine of the Holy Trinity requires the joint truth of the statements that there is a unique and simple God, and that there are three distinct Persons each of which is God. Saint Augustine posed the question what entities would have to exist, and how would they have to be related, in order for this doctrine to be internally consistent. The present book examines the attempts by ten leading philosophers (Augustine himself, Boethius, Abelard, Gilbert, Lombard, Bonaventure, Albert, Aquinas, Scotus and Ockham) to answer Augustine's question. Subsidiary questions include the nature of divine simplicity, the divine perfections, the personal relations and their associated properties, and the interrelation between the abstract and the concrete within the Godhead. Each one of the historical theories of the Trinity is presented as a semantic model postulating a domain that, as needed, comprises a number of substances and non-substances. In each case, the theory's terms (e.g. the names of the Persons, and of the divine perfections, etc.) are assigned to elements in the domain. The elements to which the names apply essentially are designated as such. As needed, the abstracts of the names are also assigned elements in the domain. Various pairs of elements in the domain are connected as correlatives, or as abstract and concrete, or by way of substantial predication. These models allow for comparisons between different theories, and provide a means of checking a theory's consistency.Less

Martin Buber's Journey to Presence

Phil Huston

What does Martin Buber mean, in I and Thou, by the claim that the one thing that matters is full acceptance of presence? In a journey of exploration through Buber's early writings, ... More

What does Martin Buber mean, in I and Thou, by the claim that the one thing that matters is full acceptance of presence? In a journey of exploration through Buber's early writings, especially his first major philosophical work, Daniel: Dialogues in Realization, this book seeks to clarify Buber's predialogical concept of God. Buber's desire for presence, it finds, began with an overwhelming experience of absence, a search for a presence that will not let him down, that will not be a “mis-encounter.” This book is an invaluable guide to Buber's early writings. It aims to foster an understanding of the rich depth and many layers of thought in Buber's masterpiece, I and Thou, and an appreciation of the radical change that took place in Buber's concept of God prior to its publication in 1923.Less

Miracle and Machine: Jacques Derrida and the Two Sources of Religion, Science, and the Media

Michael Naas

Miracle & Machine is, in a first moment, a sort of “reader’s guide” to Jacques Derrida’s 1994–5 essay “Faith and Knowledge,” Derrida’s most important work on the nature of religion in general and on ... More

Miracle & Machine is, in a first moment, a sort of “reader’s guide” to Jacques Derrida’s 1994–5 essay “Faith and Knowledge,” Derrida’s most important work on the nature of religion in general and on the unprecedented forms it is taking today through science and the media. It thus provides essential background for understanding Derrida’s essay, commentary on its unique style and its central figures (e.g., Kant, Hegel, Bergson, and Heidegger), and assessment of its principal philosophical claims about the fundamental duplicity of religion and the ineluctably autoimmune relationship between religion, science, and the media. Along the way it offers in-depth analysis of Derrida’s treatment of everything from the nature of religious revelation, faith, prayer, sacrifice, testimony, messianicity, fundamentalism, and secularism, to the way religion is today being transformed by globalization, technoscience, and worldwide telecommunications networks. But Miracle & Machine is much more than a commentary on a single Derrida text. Through references to scores of other Derrida texts, both early and late, it also provides a unique introduction to Derrida’s work in general. Finally, Miracle & Machine attempts to put Derrida’s ideas about religion to the test by reading alongside “Faith and Knowledge” an already classic work of American fiction that is more or less contemporaneous with it, Don DeLillo’s 1997 Underworld, a novel that explores the very same relationship between faith and knowledge, religion and science, religious revelation and the world wide web, messianicity and weapons of mass destruction, in a word, the miracle and the machine.Less