SUNY, Intersections: Philosophy and Critical Theory

At least since Aristotle's Peri hermeneias, there has been talk of the pathos of language, of language as "symbols of the affections in the soul." The way these affections are registered, however, suggests that they are themselves structured like language. For Aristotle and others, language is suffered before any sense can be voiced. The pathos of language thus becomes a question of how language affects the subject of speech and, in the last analysis, of how language could respond to these questions of language. Passive Voices (On the Subject of Phenomenology and Other Figures of Speech) approaches these questions, first, through readings of Augustine's investigations into language and mind and Edmund Husserl's descriptions of passive synthesis. It then traces the further resonance of Augustine's and Husserl's interventions in selected literary experiments by Georges Bataille, Franz Kafka, and Maurice Blanchot that recall Husserl and Augustine while exceeding the restrictive fictions of phenomenological "science." In drawing out the echoes that emerge across confessional, philosophical, and fictional writings, this book exposes the ways in which speech occurs in the passive voice and affects any claim to experience.

Reconsiders major thinkers and works of German Idealism and their legacy for our own restless times. From the longing in which Schelling based human freedom to the "restlessness of the negative" that Jean-Luc Nancy famously traced through Hegel's corpus, unrest centrally preoccupied many thinkers associated with German Idealism. Thinking Unrest gathers original essays from eight leading scholars to reopen the question of what moves thought both within German Idealism and among the movement's heirs. Through readings of Fichte, Hegel, Hölderlin, Novalis, and Schelling, as well as more contemporary writers such as Nicolas Abraham, Ernst Bloch, Antonio Gramsci, and Rainer Maria Rilke, contributors expose more broadly what it may mean for philosophy to be a matter of responding to that which provokes, troubles, and withdraws from thought. Drawing on various theoretical perspectives-poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, the history of science, political theory-the volume reconsiders the legacy of German Idealism for thinking unrest today.