Perspectives in Continental Philosophy
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Questions of Phenomenology
Language, Alterity, Temporality, Finitude
by Françoise Dastur
Part of the Perspectives in Continental Philosophy series
Dastur is well respected in France and Europe for her mastery of phenomenology as a movement and her clear and cogent explications of phenomenology in movement. These qualities are on display in this remarkable volume. The book is organized into four areas of inquiry: "Language and Logic," "The Self and the Other," "Temporality and History," and "Finitude and Mortality." In each, Dastur guides the reader through a series of phenomenological questions that also serve to call phenomenology itself into question, testing its limits and pushing it in new directions. Taking a cue from Merleau-Ponty, Dastur sees phenomenology not as a doctrine, a catalogue of concepts and catchphrases authored by a single thinker, but rather as a movement in which several thinkers participate, each contributing to and inflecting the movement in unique ways. Through her critical and productive dialogue with multiple phenomenological thinkers, Dastur concisely shows each thinker's debts to and departures from others, as well as each thinker's innovations and limitations. She does this judiciously, without choosing sides because, for her, phenomenology is above all a way of thinking through a problem and practicing a method. The fecundity of the movement is appreciated only by participating in it-phenomenology has always thought of itself as philosophical research undertaken by and through a community of thinkers who share certain fundamental questions and ways of approaching those questions, even if their responses to these questions often differ. In this regard, Dastur is both one of the clearest guides to phenomenology and one of its ablest practitioners.
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Corpus
by Jean-Luc Nancy
Part of the Perspectives in Continental Philosophy series
How have we thought "the body"? How can we think it anew? The body of mortal creatures, the body politic, the body of letters and of laws, the "mystical body of Christ"-all these (and others) are incorporated in the word Corpus, the title and topic of Jean-Luc Nancy's masterwork. Corpus is a work of literary force at once phenomenological, sociological, theological, and philosophical in its multiple orientations and approaches. In thirty-six brief sections, Nancy offers us at once an encyclopedia and a polemical program-reviewing classical takes on the "corpus" from Plato, Aristotle, and Saint Paul to Descartes, Hegel, Husserl, and Freud, while demonstrating that the mutations (technological, biological, and political) of our own culture have given rise to the need for a new understanding of the body. He not only tells the story of this cultural change but also explores the promise and responsibilities that such a new understanding entails. The long-awaited English translation is a bold, bravura rendering. To the title essay are added five closely related recent pieces-including a commentary by Antonia Birnbaum-dedicated in large part to the legacy of the "mind-body problem" formulated by Descartes and the challenge it poses to rethinking the ancient problems of the corpus. The last and most poignant of these essays is "The Intruder," Nancy's philosophical meditation on his heart transplant. The book also serves as the opening move in Nancy's larger project called "The deconstruction of Christianity."
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Saintly Influence
Edith Wyschogrod and the Possibilities of Philosophy of Religion
by Various Authors
Part of the Perspectives in Continental Philosophy series
Since the publication of her first book, Emmanuel Levinas: The Problem of Ethical Metaphysics, in 1974-the first book about Levinas published in English-Edith Wyschogrod has been at the forefront of the fields of Continental philosophy and philosophy of religion. Her work has crossed many disciplinary boundaries, making peregrinations from phenomenology and moral philosophy to historiography, the history of religions (both Western and non-Western), aesthetics, and the philosophy of biology. In all of these discourses, she has sought to cultivate an awareness of how the self is situated and influenced, as well as the ways in which a self can influence others. In this volume, twelve scholars examine and display the influence of Wyschogrod's work in essays that take up the thematics of influence in a variety of contexts: Christian theology, the saintly behavior of the villagers of Le Chambon sur Lignon, the texts of the medieval Jewish mystic Abraham Abulafia, the philosophies of Levinas, Derrida, and Benjamin, the practice of intellectual history, the cultural memory of the New Testament, and pedagogy. In response, Wyschogrod shows how her interlocutors have brought to light her multiple authorial personae and have thus marked the ambiguity of selfhood, its position at the nexus of being influenced by and influencing others.
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Speculative Grace
Bruno Latour and Object-Oriented Theology
by Adam S. Miller
Part of the Perspectives in Continental Philosophy series
This book offers a novel account of grace framed in terms of Bruno Latour's "principle of irreduction." It thus models an object-oriented approach to grace, experimentally moving a traditional Christian understanding of grace out of a top-down, theistic ontology and into an agent-based, object-oriented ontology. In the process, it also provides a systematic and original account of Latour's overall project. The account of grace offered here redistributes the tasks assigned to science and religion. Where now the work of science is to bring into focus objects that are too distant, too resistant, and too transcendent to be visible, the business of religion is to bring into focus objects that are too near, too available, and too immanent to be visible. Where science reveals transcendent objects by correcting for our nearsightedness, religion reveals immanent objects by correcting for our farsightedness. Speculative Grace remaps the meaning of grace and examines the kinds of religious instruments and practices that, as a result, take center stage.
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Quiet Powers of the Possible
Interviews in Contemporary French Phenomenology
by Tarek R. Dika
Part of the Perspectives in Continental Philosophy series
Quiet Powers of the Possible offers an excellent introduction to contemporary French phenomenology through a series of interviews with its most prominent figures. Guided by rigorous questions that push into the most important aspects of the latest phenomenological research, the book gives readers a comprehensive sense of each thinker's intellectual history, motivations, and philosophical commitments. The book introduces readers to debates that have not previously been accessible to the English-speaking world, such as the growing interest in the phenomenological concept of life in its affective and even vital dimensions, the emerging dialogue with the analytic philosophy of mind and language, and reassessments of the so-called theological turn. The diversity of approaches collected here has its origin in a deeper debate about the conceptual and historical foundations of phenomenology itself. In this way the book offers the most accessible and wide-ranging introduction to French phenomenology to have appeared in the English-speaking world to date.
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Crossing the Rubicon
The Borderlands of Philosophy and Theology
by Emmanuel Falque
Part of the Perspectives in Continental Philosophy series
In France today, philosophy-phenomenology in particular-finds itself in a paradoxical relation to theology. Some debate a "theological turn." Others disavow theological arguments as if such arguments would tarnish their philosophical integrity, while nevertheless carrying out theology in other venues. In Crossing the Rubicon, Emmanuel Falque seeks to end this face-off. Convinced that "the more one theologizes, the better one philosophizes," he proposes a counterblow by theology against phenomenology. Instead of another philosophy of "the threshold" or "the leap"-and through a retrospective and forward-looking examination of his own method-he argues that an encounter between the two disciplines will reveal their mutual fruitfulness and their true distinctive borders. Falque shows that he has made the crossing between philosophy and theology and back again with audacity and perhaps a little recklessness, knowing full well that no one thinks without exposing himself to risk.
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The Rebellious No
Variations on a Secular Theology of Language
by Noëlle Vahanian
Part of the Perspectives in Continental Philosophy series
This book aims to renew theological thinking by extending and radicalizing an iconoclastic and existentialist mode of thought. It proposes a theology whose point of departure assumes and accepts the critiques of religion launched by Nietzsche, Freud, Marx, and Feuerbach but nevertheless takes theological desire seriously as a rebellious force working within, but against, an anthropomorphic, phallogocentric worldview. As a theology of language, it does not claim any privileged access to some transcendent divine essence or ground of Being. On the contrary, for Noelle Vahanian theology is a strictly secular discourse, like any other discourse, but aware of its limitations and wary of great promises-its own included. Its faith is that this secular theological desire can be a force against the constitutive indifference of thought, and it is a meditative act of rebellion. Aphoristic instead of argumentative, this book offers an original and constructive engagement with such seminal issues as indifference, belief, madness, and love.
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Philosophical Chronicles
by Jean-Luc Nancy
Part of the Perspectives in Continental Philosophy series
In eleven brief, engaging talks originally broadcast on French public radio, Jean-Luc Nancy offers a philosopher's rough and ready account of some of the pressing questions of our day and addresses chronic issues within philosophical inquiry. The fundamental question, which recurs again and again, is whether philosophy is conditioned by the world the philosopher inhabits, or whether it must remain unconditioned by that world. Nancy discusses: terror in relation to religion and capitalism; the relevance of philosophy to life (whether philosophy can be a form of life); the status of god in monotheism; the relevance of 'politics' as it is defined today; the 'Heidegger affair' and its consequences for philosophy; war, especially in the context of the invasion of Iraq; the role of negativity in philosophical and cultural discourses; 'art' and the variability of its meanings; the predominance of the metaphor of the sun. The essays can be read separately, but together they amount to the striking vision of a philosopher sensitive to the world of his times and attempting to open his own path within it.
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The God Who Deconstructs Himself
Sovereignty and Subjectivity Between Freud, Bataille, and Derrida
by Nick Mansfield
Part of the Perspectives in Continental Philosophy series
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 the 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. As with so many of the forebears who influenced him, Derrida echoes and adapts Bataille's thinking while radically de-literalizing it. The results are crucial for understanding Derrida's views on power, subjectivity and representation, as well as all of the other key themes in late Derrida: hospitality, justice, otherness and the gift.
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Husserl's Missing Technologies
by Don Ihde
Part of the Perspectives in Continental Philosophy series
Husserl's Missing Technologies looks at the early-twentieth-century "classical" phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, both in the light of the philosophy of science of his time, and retrospectively at his philosophy from a contemporary "postphenomenology." Of central interest are his infrequent comments upon technologies and especially scientific instruments such as the telescope and microscope. Together with his analysis of Husserl, Don Ihde ventures through the recent history of technologies of science, reading and writing, and science praxis, calling for modifications to phenomenology by converging it with pragmatism. This fruitful hybridization emphasizes human–technology interrelationships, the role of embodiment and bodily skills, and the inherent multistability of technologies. In a radical argument, Ihde contends that philosophies, in the same way that various technologies contain an ever-shortening obsolescence, ought to have contingent use-lives.
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Resistance of the Sensible World
An Introduction to Merleau-Ponty
by Emmanuel Alloa
Part of the Perspectives in Continental Philosophy series
It would be unfair to blame a philosophy whose development was brutally interrupted for not being conclusive. But while this openness incited many readers toward other fertile horizons, the oeuvre is hardly ever studied for itself. In this book, Emmanuel Alloa offers a handrail for venturing into the complexities of the work of the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961). Through a comprehensive analysis of the three main phases of his thinking and a thorough knowledge of Merleau-Ponty's many unpublished manuscripts, he traces how Merleau-Ponty's philosophy evolved and exposes the remarkable coherence that structures it from within. While stressing two turns Merleau-Ponty's thought underwent-a linguistic turn after 1945 and an ontological turn in the late 1950s, Alloa teases out the continuity of a motive that traverses the entire oeuvre as a common thread. Merleau-Ponty struggled incessantly against any kind of ideology of transparency, whether of the world, the self, of knowledge, or of the self's relation to others. Alloa's innovative reading of this crucially important thinker not only offers a new look at Merleau-Ponty but also shows why the issues he raised are more than ever those of our time.
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Phenomenologies of Scripture
by Adam Wells
Part of the Perspectives in Continental Philosophy series
Phenomenologies of Scripture addresses two increasingly convergent disciplines: philosophy and biblical studies. On the one hand, the recent "theological turn" in phenomenology has established religion as a legitimate area of phenomenological inquiry. If that turn is to be enduringly successful, phenomenology must pay attention to the scriptures on which religious life, practice, and thought are based. On the other hand, biblical studies finds itself in a methodological morass. Contemporary approaches to scripture have raised important questions about the meaning and function of scriptural texts that phenomenology is uniquely positioned to answer: how is the meaning of a text constructed or gleaned? How can the divine be present in human words? Is a scientific approach to the Bible still possible? By putting scripture and phenomenology in conversation, this volume serves two practical purposes: in turning to the Bible, phenomenology tests and clarifies its own limits by considering scriptural phenomena that reside at the boundaries of human knowledge and perception. By turning to phenomenology, biblical studies gains clarity about the philosophical and theological problems it faces today. Bringing together essays by eight of today's most prominent philosophers of religion with responses by two leading biblical scholars, Phenomenologies of Scripture reestablishes the possibility of fruitful, dialectical exchange between fields that demand to be read together.
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Rethinking God as Gift
Marion, Derrida, and the Limits of Phenomenology
by Robyn Horner
Part of the Perspectives in Continental Philosophy series
Rethinking God as Gift is situated at the intersection of philosophy, critical theory and theology. The first sustained study of the work of Jean-Luc Marion in English, it offers a unique perspective on contemporary questions and their theological relevance. Taking its point of departure from the problem of the gift as articulated by Jacques Derrida, who argues that the conditions of possibility of the gift are also its conditions of impossibility, Horner pursues a series of questions concerning the nature of thought, the viability of phenomenology, and, most urgently, the possibility of grace. For Marion, phenomenology, as the thought of the given, offers a path for philosophy to proceed without being implicated in metaphysics. His retrieval of several important insights of Edmund Husserl, along with his reading of Martin Heidegger and Emmanuel Lévinas, enables him to work out a phenomenology where even impossible phenomena such as revelation and the gift might be examined. In this important confrontation between Marion and Derrida issues vital to the negotiation of postmodern concerns in philosophy and theology emerge with vigor. The careful elucidation of those issues in an interdisciplinary context, and the snapshot it provides of the state of contemporary debate, make Rethinking God as Gift an important contribution to theological and philosophical discussion.
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Material Spirit
Religion and Literature Intranscendent
by Manuel Asensi
Part of the Perspectives in Continental Philosophy series
The essays in this collection examine philosophical, religious, and literary or artistic texts using methodologies and insights that have grown out of reflection on literature and art. In them, the phrase "material spirit" becomes a point of departure for considering the continuing spectral effects of religious texts and concerns in ways that do not simply call for, or assume, new or renewed forms of religiosity. The writers in this collection seek to examine religion beyond traditional notions of transcendence: Their topics range from early Christian religious practices to global climate change. Some of the essays explore religious themes or tones in literary texts, for example, works by Wordsworth, Hopkins, Proust, Woolf, and Teresa of Avila. Others approach-in a literary critical mood-philosophical or para-philosophical writers such as Bataille, Husserl, Derrida, and Benjamin. Still others treat writers of a more explicitly religious orientation, such as Augustine, Rosenzweig, or Bernard of Clairvaux.
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The Metamorphosis of Finitude
An Essay on Birth and Resurrection
by Emmanuel Falque
Part of the Perspectives in Continental Philosophy series
"This book starts off from a philosophical premise: nobody can be in the world unless they are born into the world. It examines this premise in the light of the theological belief that birth serves, or ought to serve, as a model for understanding what resurrection could signify for us today. After all, the modern Christian needs to find some way of understanding resurrection, and the dogma of the resurrection of the body is vacuous unless we can relate it philosophically to our own world of experience. Nicodemus first posed the question ""How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother's womb and be born?"" This book reads that problem in the context of contemporary philosophy (particularly the thought of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Deleuze). A phenomenology of the body born ""from below"" is seen as a paradigm for a theology of spiritual rebirth, and for rebirth of the body from ""on high."" The Resurrection changes everything in Christianity-but it is also our own bodies that must be transformed in resurrection, as Christ is transfigured. And the way in which I hope to be resurrected bodily in God, in the future, depends upon the way in which I live bodily today."
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Words Fail
Theology, Poetry, and the Challenge of Representation
by Colby Dickinson
Part of the Perspectives in Continental Philosophy series
There has been much philosophical speculation on the potential failure of language as well as the search for a presentation of the "thing itself" beyond representation. Words Fail pursues the writings of a trio of philosophers-Jacques Derrida, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Giorgio Agamben-as prime examples of how modern poetry presents us with a profitable vantage point from which to survey the ongoing struggle of living in a highly fragmented world. Alongside these thinkers, this book looks specifically at the form of spirituality that is given shape by this intersection of poetics and theological-philosophical reflection-all of which offer rich suggestions about our spiritual nature.
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Transcendence and the Concrete
Selected Writings
by Jean Wahl
Part of the Perspectives in Continental Philosophy series
Jean Wahl (1888–1974), once considered by the likes of Georges Bataille, Gilles Deleuze, Emmanuel Levinas, and Gabriel Marcel to be among the greatest French philosophers, has today nearly been forgotten outside France. Yet his influence on French philosophical thought can hardly be overestimated. Levinas wrote that "during over a half century of teaching and research, [Wahl] was the life force of the academic, extra-academic, and even, to a degree anti-academic philosophy necessary to a great culture." And Deleuze, for his part, commented that "Apart from Sartre, who remained caught none the less in the trap of the verb to be, the most important philosopher in France was Jean Wahl." Besides engaging with the likes of Bataille, Bergson, Deleuze, Derrida, Levinas, Maritain, and Sartre, Wahl also played a significant role, in some cases almost singlehandedly, in introducing French philosophy to movements like existentialism, and American pragmatism and literature, and thinkers like Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Jaspers, and Heidegger. Yet Wahl was also an original philosopher and poet in his own right. This volume of selections from Wahl's philosophical writings makes a selection of his most important work available to the English-speaking philosophical community for the first time.
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Responding to Loss
Heideggerian Reflections on Literature, Architecture, and Film
by Robert Mugerauer
Part of the Perspectives in Continental Philosophy series
Much recent philosophical work proposes to illuminate dilemmas of human existence with reference to the arts and culture, often to the point of submitting particular works to preconceived formulations. In this examination of three texts that respond to loss, Robert Mugerauer responds with close, detailed readings that seek to clarify the particularity of the intense force such works bring forth. Mugerauer shows how, in the face of what is irrevocably taken away as well as of what continues to be given, the unavoidable task of interpretation is ours alone. Mugerauer examines works in three different forms that powerfully call on us to respond to loss: Cormac McCarthy's The Crossing, Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum Berlin, and Wim Wenders's film Wings of Desire. Explicating these difficult but rich works with reference to the thought of Martin Heidegger, Jean-Luc Marion, Hannah Arendt, and Emmanuel Levinas, the author helps us to experience the multiple and diverse ways in which all of us are opened to the saturated phenomena of loss, violence, witnessing, and responsibility.
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Walter Benjamin and Theology
by Colby Dickinson
Part of the Perspectives in Continental Philosophy series
In the Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin writes that his work is "related to theology as blotting pad is related to ink. It is saturated with it." For a thinker so decisive to critical literary, cultural, political, and aesthetic writings over the past half-century, Benjamin's relationship to theological matters has been less observed than it should, even despite a variety of attempts over the last four decades to illuminate the theological elements latent within his eclectic and occasional writings. Such attempts, though undeniably crucial to comprehending his thought, remain in need of deepened systematic analysis. In bringing together some of the most renowned experts from both sides of the Atlantic, Walter Benjamin and Theology seeks to establish a new site from which to address both the issue of Benjamin's relationship with theology and all the crucial aspects that Benjamin himself grappled with when addressing the field and operations of theological inquiry.
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The Guide to Gethsemane
Anxiety, Suffering, Death
by Emmanuel Falque
Part of the Perspectives in Continental Philosophy series
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.
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Negative Ecstasies
Georges Bataille and the Study of Religion
by Jeremy Biles
Part of the Perspectives in Continental Philosophy series
Despite Georges Bataille's acknowledged influence on major poststructuralist thinkers-including Foucault, Derrida, Kristeva, Lacan, Baudrillard, and Barthes-and his prominence in literary, cultural, and social theory, rarely has he been taken up by scholars of religion, even as issues of the sacred were central to his thinking. Bringing together established scholars and emerging voices, Negative Ecstasies engages Bataille from the perspective of religious studies and theology, forging links with feminist and queer theory, economics, secularism, psychoanalysis, fat studies, and ethics. As these essays demonstrate, Bataille's work bears significance to contemporary questions in the academy and vital issues in the world. We continue to ignore him at our peril.
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Believing in Order to See
On the Rationality of Revelation and the Irrationality of Some Believers
by Jean-Luc Marion
Part of the Perspectives in Continental Philosophy series
Faith and reason, especially in Roman Catholic thought, are less contradictory today than ever. But does the supposed opposition even make sense to begin with? One can lose faith, but surely not because one gains in reason. Some, in fact, lose faith when reason is not able to make sense of the experiences of our lives. We very quickly realize that reason does not understand everything. Immense areas remain incomprehensible and irrational, which we abandon to belief and opinion. Soon we definitively renounce thinking what that has been excluded from the realm of the thinkable. Ideological nightmares arise from this slumber of reason. Thus, the separation between faith and reason, too quickly taken as self-evident and even natural, is born from a lack of rationality, an easy capitulation of reason before what is supposedly unthinkable. Rather than lose faith through excessive rationality, we often lose rationality because faith is too quickly excluded from the realm that it claims to open, that of revelation. We lose reason by losing faith. Examining such topics as the role of the intellectual in the church, the rationality of faith, the infinite worth and incomprehensibility of the human, the phenomenality of the sacraments, and the phenomenological nature of miracles and of revelation more broadly, this book spans the range of Marion's thought on Christianity. Throughout he stresses that faith has its own rationality, structured according to the logic of the gift that calls forth a response of love and devotion through kenotic abandon.
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The Reflexive Method Applied to the Problem of God in Lachelier and Lagneau
by Paul Ricœur
Part of the Perspectives in Continental Philosophy series
An engaging and thought-provoking translation of Paul Ricoeur's earliest work that is essential for understanding his philosophical development
The Reflexive Method Applied to the Problem of God in Lachelier and Lagneau, now held in the Ricoeur Archive in Paris, was a qualifying thesis Ricoeur wrote at the age of twenty-one when he was just beginning his advanced university studies. In it he examines the use of the reflexive method by two important French philosophers from the nineteenth century, Jules Lachelier and Jules Lagneau. They both sought to develop an "integral metaphysics" that recognizes God as the principle underlying pure, impersonal thought and practical reason, and that requires a kind of philosophical faith. In his conclusion, Ricoeur criticizes their doctrine of God and philosophy of immanence for not being able to deal with the question of transcendence and for its failure to address concrete human existence, yet he concedes that it may be seen as a first truce in "the internecine war" between faith and reason.
Despite this criticism, Ricoeur later maintained that his own philosophy does stand "in the line of a reflexive philosophy" while remaining "within the sphere of Husserlian phenomenology" and striving to be "a hermeneutical variation of this phenomenology." He also continued to address the question of faith and reason in works like Figuring the Sacred and (with André LaCocque) Thinking Biblically, as well as in many other essays.
The Reflexive Method Applied to the Problem of God in Lachelier and Lagneau is necessary reading for anyone doing serious work on and with Ricoeur's philosophy.
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A Philosophy of Prayer
Nothingness, Language, and Hope
by George Pattison
Part of the Perspectives in Continental Philosophy series
Exploring the silence of prayer in Post-Kantian philosophy and traditional spirituality
A Philosophy of Prayer explores prayer within the perspective of post-Kantian philosophy. Against a background of traditional sources, including Augustine, The Cloud of Unknowing, and the seventeenth-century French school of spirituality, the book uses Schleiermacher, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Heidegger, Berdyaev, Tillich, Marcel, Simone Weil, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jean- Louis Chrétien to provide an interpretation of what is meant by the passivity and self-annihilation of the praying self, suggesting an "apophatics of the personality."
Pattison pays particular attention to the question of language and the implications of the role given to silence in traditional texts, arguing that language remains a defining element of the human–God relationship and that silence is not to be construed as the negation of language but as the revelation of the depth of language itself. The basic structure of prayer is shown to be implicitly eschatological, oriented toward a coming kingdom of justice and peace while, at the same time, expressing a deep desire for ontological homecoming, a tension manifest in, respectively, Levinas and Heidegger. On Pattison's reading, prayer calls for and develops a particular orientation of the self toward existence, corresponding to the virtue of humility, long understood as the basic Christian virtue. This is shown to be in tension with modernity's commitment to strong versions of autonomy. However, the choice of humility is not presented as the reinstatement of religious heteronomy but as a free choice of the praying self.
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Jean-Luc Nancy Among the Philosophers
by Various Authors
Part of the Perspectives in Continental Philosophy series
This volume focuses on the relational aspect of Jean-Luc Nancy's thinking. As Nancy himself showed, thinking might be a solitary activity but it is never singular in its dimension. Building on or breaking away from other thoughts, especially those by thinkers who had come before, thinking is always plural, relational. This "singular plural" dimension of thought in Nancy's philosophical writings demands explication.
In this book, some of today's leading scholars in the theoretical humanities shed light on how Nancy's thought both shares with and departs from Descartes, Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, Weil, Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, and Lyotard, elucidating "the sharing of voices," in Nancy's phrase, between Nancy and these thinkers.
Contributors: Georges Van Den Abbeele, Emily Apter, Rodolphe Gasché, Werner Hamacher, Eleanor Kaufman, Marie-Eve Morin, Timothy Murray, Jean-Luc Nancy, and John H. Smith.
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A Theology of Failure
Žižek against Christian Innocence
by Marika Rose
Part of the Perspectives in Continental Philosophy series
Everyone agrees that theology has failed; but the question of how to understand and respond to this failure is complex and contested. Against both the radical orthodox attempt to return to a time before the theology's failure and the deconstructive theological attempt to open theology up to the hope of a future beyond failure, Rose proposes an account of Christian identity as constituted by, not despite, failure. Understanding failure as central to theology opens up new possibilities for confronting Christianity's violent and kyriarchal history and abandoning the attempt to discover a pure Christ outside of the grotesque materiality of the church. The Christian mystical tradition begins with Dionysius the Areopagite's uncomfortable but productive conjunction of Christian theology and Neoplatonism. The tensions generated by this are central to Dionysius's legacy, visible not only in subsequent theological thought but also in much twentieth century continental philosophy as it seeks to disentangle itself from its Christian ancestry. A Theology of Failure shows how the work of Slavoj Žižek represents an attempt to repeat the original move of Christian mystical theology, bringing together the themes of language, desire, and transcendence not with Neoplatonism but with a materialist account of the world. Tracing these themes through the work of Dionysius and Derrida and through contemporary debates about the gift, violence, and revolution, this book offers a critical theological engagement with Žižek's account of social and political transformation, showing how Žižek's work makes possible a materialist reading of apophatic theology and Christian identity.
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Murderous Consent
On the Accommodation of Violent Death
by Marc Crépon
Part of the Perspectives in Continental Philosophy series
Murderous Consent details our implication in violence we do not directly inflict but in which we are structurally complicit: famines, civil wars, political repression in far-away places, and war, as it's classically understood. Marc Crépon insists on a bond between ethics and politics and attributes violence to our treatment of the two as separate spheres. We repeatedly resist the call to responsibility, as expressed by the appeal-by peoples across the world-for the care and attention that their vulnerability enjoins. But Crépon argues that this resistance is not ineluctable, and the book searches for ways that enable us to mitigate it, through rebellion, kindness, irony, critique, and shame. In the process, he engages with a range of writers, from Camus, Sartre, and Freud, to Stefan Zweig and Karl Kraus, to Kenzaburo Oe, Emmanuel Levinas and Judith Butler. The resulting exchange between philosophy and literature enables Crépon to delineate the contours of a possible/impossible ethicosmopolitics-an ethicosmopolitics to come.Pushing against the limits of liberal rationalism, Crépon calls for a more radical understanding of interpersonal responsibility. Not just a work of philosophy but an engagement with life as it's lived, Murderous Consent works to redefine our global obligations, articulating anew what humanitarianism demands and what an ethically grounded political resistance might mean.
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Pauline Ugliness
Jacob Taubes and the Turn to Paul
by Ole Jakob Løland
Part of the Perspectives in Continental Philosophy series
In recent decades Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, and Slavoj Žižek have shown the centrality of Paul to western political and philosophical thought and made the Apostle a central figure in left-wing discourses far removed from traditional theological circles. Yet the recovery of Paul beyond Christian theology owes a great deal to the writings of the Jewish rabbi and philosopher Jacob Taubes (1923-1987).
Pauline Ugliness shows how Paul became an effective tool for Taubes to position himself within European philosophical debates of the twentieth century. Drawing on Nietzsche's polemical readings of the ancient apostle as well as Freud's psychoanalysis, Tabues developed an imaginative and distinct account of political theology in confrontations with Carl Schmitt, Theodor Adorno, Hans Blumenberg, and others. In a powerful reconsideration of the apostle, Taubes contested the conventional understanding of Paul as the first Christian who broke definitively with Judaism and drained Christianity of its political potential. As a Jewish rabbi steeped in a philosophical tradition marked by European Christianity, Taubes was, on the contrary, able to emphasize Paul's Jewishness as well as the political explosiveness of his revolutionary doctrine of the cross.
This book establishes Taubes's account of Paul as a turning point in the development of political theology. Løland shows how Taubes identified the Pauline movement as the birth of a politics of ugliness, the invention of a revolutionary criticism of the 'beautiful' culture of the powerful that sides instead with the oppressed.
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Adoration
The Deconstruction of Christianity II
by Jean-Luc Nancy
Part of the Perspectives in Continental Philosophy series
This second volume in Nancy's 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 us in the midst of the world. A major contribution to the contemporary philosophy of religion, Adoration clarifies and builds upon not only Dis-Enclosure, the first volume in this project, but also Nancy's other previous writings on sense, the world, and the singular plurality of being.
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The Political Logic of Experience
Expression in Phenomenology
by Neal DeRoo
Part of the Perspectives in Continental Philosophy series
The Political Logic of Experience argues that experience and phenomenology are essentially political, with profound implications for our understanding of subjectivity, epistemology, experience, the phenomenological method, and politics.
Drawing on work from across the phenomenological tradition, it develops an account of expression as the internal relationship uniting knowing, being, and doing with both transcendental conditions and empirical phenomena. This expressive unification generates subjectivity as an expression of particular communities and subjects as an expression of subjectivity. Subjectivity and experience are therefore both revealed to be inherently political prior to their expression in particular subjects.
In clarifying the political nature of experience and the constitution of subjectivity, the book puts the work of critical phenomenology in dialogue with transcendental phenomenology to reveal the need for a phenomenological politics: a field tasked with explaining the expressive, co-constitutive, and necessarily political relationships between subjects and their communities. It is only through such a phenomenological politics that we can properly make sense of the epistemological, ontological, and practical significance of issues like racism and sexism, problems that concern our very experience of the world. The book reveals phenomenology to be both essentially political and politically essential, as it emerges within particular communities and shapes and transforms how individuals within those communities experience the world.
Touching on issues of transcendental phenomenology, political strategy, historical interpretation and inter-disciplinary phenomenological method, the book argues for foundational claims pertaining to phenomenology, politics, and social criticism that will be of interest to those working in philosophy, gender studies, race, queer theory, transcendental and applied phenomenology, and beyond.
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The Trace of God
Derrida and Religion
by Various Authors
Part of the Perspectives in Continental Philosophy series
"Derrida's most lasting legacy might well be his writings on religion . . . If the perplexed seek a guide, they can do no better than this excellent volume." -Warren Breckman, University of Pennsylvania
Jacques Derrida's writings on the question of religion have played a crucial role in the transformation of scholarly debate across the globe. The Trace of God provides a compact introduction to this debate.
It considers Derrida's fraught relationship to Judaism and his Jewish identity, broaches the question of Derrida's relation to the Western Christian tradition, and examines both the points of contact and the silences in Derrida's treatment of Islam.
"An astonishingly fresh and vivid set of essays that not only cast new light on the work of the greatest philosophical provocateur of the late twentieth century but also provide food for reflecting today on the relations among violence, modernity, secularity, and religion."?Allan Megill, University of Virginia
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Listening
by Jean-Luc Nancy
Part of the Perspectives in Continental Philosophy series
"A book of philosophy very much captivated with music . . . an acoustemological elaboration of [Nancy's] theorization of difference." -Journal of the American Musicological Society
In this lyrical meditation on listening, Jean-Luc Nancy examines sound in relation to the human body. How is listening different from hearing? What does listening entail? How does what is heard differ from what is seen? Can philosophy even address listening, écouter, as opposed to entendre, which means both hearing and understanding?
Unlike the visual arts, sound produces effects that persist long after it has stopped. The body, Nancy says, is itself like an echo chamber, responding to music by inner vibrations as well as outer attentiveness. Since "the ear has no eyelid" (Pascal Quignard), sound cannot be blocked out or ignored: our whole being is involved in listening, just as it is involved in interpreting what it hears.
The mystery of music and of its effects on the listener is subtly examined. Nancy's skill as a philosopher is to bring the reader companionably along with him as he examines these fresh and vital questions; by the end of the book the reader feels as if listening very carefully to a person talking quietly, close to the ear.
"Listening adds a much needed poetic register to the philosophy of music and sonic culture." -Parallax
"In Charlotte Mandell's splendid translation of Jean-Luc Nancy's brief but passionate À L'Écoute, the French philosopher gives us a glimpse of this completely different philosophy of music." -Current Musicology
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The Ground of the Image
by Jean-Luc Nancy
Part of the Perspectives in Continental Philosophy series
The renowned philosopher provides "noteworthy contributions to themes connected with images, imagination, representation, aesthetics, and . . . religion." -Journal of American Academy of Religion
What is this power that lies in the depths and recesses of an image-which is always only an impenetrable surface? What secrets are concealed in the ground or in the figures of an image-which never does anything but show just exactly what it is and nothing else? How does the immanence of images open onto their unimaginable others, their imageless origin?
In this collection of writings on images and visual art, Jean-Luc Nancy explores such questions through an extraordinary range of references. From Renaissance painting and landscape to photography and video, from the image of Roman death masks to the language of silent film, from Cleopatra to Kant and Heidegger, Nancy pursues a reflection on visuality that goes far beyond the many disciplines with which it intersects. He offers insights into the religious, cultural, political, art historical, and philosophical aspects of the visual relation, treating such vexed problems as the connection between image and violence, the sacred status of images, and, in a profound and important essay, the forbidden representation of the Shoah. In the background of all these investigations lies a preoccupation with finitude, the unsettling forces envisaged by the images that confront us, the limits that bind us to them, the death that stares back at us from their frozen traits and distant intimacies.
In these vibrant and complex essays, a central figure in European philosophy continues to work through some of the most important questions of our time.
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The Play of Goodness
Creation, Phenomenology, and Culture
by Jacob Benjamins
Part of the Perspectives in Continental Philosophy series
One of the enduring claims in the Christian tradition is that creation is good. Given the diversity of experience and the abundance of suffering in the world, however, such an affirmation is not always straightforward. The Play of Goodness provides a phenomenology of creation's goodness that clarifies the ongoing relevance of the doctrine today. It argues that what is "good" about creation is not synonymous with a confession of faith and does not require an overly optimistic disposition, but instead appears within diverse and often surprising circumstances.
Alongside original contributions to French phenomenology and creation theology, The Play of Goodness counterbalances a tendency in continental philosophy to focus on negative phenomena. By developing the philosophical concept of a prelinguistic experience of goodness, the book identifies a quality of goodness that is integral to the place in which we find ourselves. It also articulates shared points of contact among people in an increasingly polarized world, while demonstrating that distinctly theological concepts do not need to be presented in opposition to secular, agnostic, or atheist perspectives in order to be relevant.
Benjamins develops an account of creation's goodness that has the potential to animate an abiding affection for one's place, accentuate our reasons to care for it, and confirm that what happens in our lives is of genuine significance.
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The Ruse of Techne
Heidegger's Magical Materialism
by Dimitris Vardoulakis
Part of the Perspectives in Continental Philosophy series
The Ruse of Techne offers a reappraisal of Heidegger's entire work by focusing on the forms of activity he regards as separate from instrumentality. Non-instrumental activities like authenticity, poetry, and thinking-in short, the ineffectual-are critical for Heidegger as they offer the only path to the truth of being throughout his work.
By unearthing the source of the conception of non-instrumental action in Heidegger's reading of Aristotle, Vardoulakis elaborates how it forms part of Heidegger's response to an old problem, namely, how to account for difference after positing a single and unified being that is not amenable to change. He further demonstrates that an action without ends and effects leads to an ethics and politics rife with difficulties and contradictions that only become starker when compared to other responses to the same problem that we find in the philosophical tradition and which rely on instrumentality.
Heidegger's conception of an action without ends or effect forgets the role of instrumentality in the tradition that posits a single, unified being. And yet, the ineffectual has had a profound influence in how continental philosophy determines the ethical and the political since World War II. The critique of the ineffectual in Heidegger is thus effectively a critique of the conception of praxis in continental philosophy. Vardoulakis proposes that it is urgent to undo the forgetting of instrumentality if we are to conceive of a democratic politics and an ethics fit to respond to the challenges of high capitalism.
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Nothing Absolute
German Idealism and the Question of Political Theology
by Various Authors
Part of the Perspectives in Continental Philosophy series
Against traditional approaches that view German Idealism as a secularizing movement, this volume revisits it as the first fundamentally philosophical articulation of the political-theological problematic in the aftermath of the Enlightenment and the advent of secularity.
Featuring scholars at the forefront of contemporary political theology and the study of German Idealism, Nothing Absolute explores the intersection of these two flourishing fields. Against traditional approaches that view German Idealism as a secularizing movement, this volume revisits it as the first fundamentally philosophical articulation of the political-theological problematic in the aftermath of the Enlightenment and the advent of secularity.
Nothing Absolute reclaims German Idealism as a political-theological trajectory. Across the volume's contributions, German thought from Kant to Marx emerges as crucial for the genealogy of political theology and for the ongoing reassessment of modernity and the secular. By investigating anew such concepts as immanence, utopia, sovereignty, theodicy, the Earth, and the world, as well as the concept of political theology itself, this volume not only rethinks German Idealism and its aftermath from a political-theological perspective but also demonstrates what can be done with (or against) German Idealism using the conceptual resources of political theology today.
Contributors: Joseph Albernaz, Daniel Colucciello Barber, Agata Bielik-Robson, Kirill Chepurin, S. D. Chrostowska, Saitya Brata Das, Alex Dubilet, Vincent Lloyd, Thomas Lynch, James Martel, Steven Shakespeare, Oxana Timofeeva, Daniel Whistler.
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What Is Theology?
Christian Thought and Contemporary Life
by Adam Kotsko
Part of the Perspectives in Continental Philosophy series
The secular world may have thought it was done with theology, but theology was not done with it. Recent decades have seen a resurgence of religion on the social and political scene, which have driven thinkers across many disciplines to grapple with the Christian theological inheritance of the modern world.
Adam Kotsko provides a unique guide to this fraught terrain. The title essay establishes a fresh and unexpected redefinition of theology and its complex and often polemical relationship with its sister discipline of philosophy. Subsequent essays build on this framework from three different perspectives. In the first part, Kotsko demonstrates the continued vibrancy of Christian theology as a creative and constructive pursuit outside the walls of the church, showing that theological concepts can underwrite a powerful critique of the modern world. The second approaches Christian theology from the perspective of a range of contemporary philosophers, showing how philosophical thought is drawn to theology even despite itself. The concluding section is devoted to the unexpected theological roots of the modern world-system, making a case that the interplay of state and economy and the structure of modern racial oppression both build on theological patterns of thought.
Kotsko's book ultimately shows that theology is not a scholarly game or an edifying spiritual discipline, but a world-shaping force of great power. Lives are at stake when we do theology-and if we don't do it, someone else will.
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Merleau-Ponty's Poetic of the World
Philosophy and Literature
by Galen A. Johnson
Part of the Perspectives in Continental Philosophy series
Merleau-Ponty has long been known as one of the most important philosophers of aesthetics, yet most discussions of his aesthetics focus on visual art. This book corrects that balance by turning to Merleau-Ponty's extensive engagement with literature.
From Proust, Merleau-Ponty developed his conception of "sensible ideas," from Claudel, his conjoining of birth and knowledge as "co-naissance," from Valéry came "implex" or the "animal of words" and the "chiasma of two destinies." Literature also provokes the questions of expression, metaphor, and truth and the meaning of a Merleau-Pontian poetics.
The poetic of Merleau-Ponty is, the book argues, a poetic of the flesh, a poetic of mystery, and a poetic of the visible in its relation to the invisible. Ultimately, theoretical figures or "figuratives" that appear at the threshold between philosophy and literature enable the possibility of a new ontology. What is at stake is the very meaning of philosophy itself and its mode of expression.
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The Wedding Feast of the Lamb
Eros, the Body, and the Eucharist
by Emmanuel Falque
Part of the Perspectives in Continental Philosophy series
A philosophical and theological study of the eucharist in the Catholic Church.
Emmanuel Falque's The Wedding Feast of the Lamb represents a turning point in his thought. Here, Falque links philosophy and theology in an original fashion that allows us to see the full effect of theology's "backlash" against philosophy.
By attending closely to the incarnation and the eucharist, Falque develops a new concept of the body and of love. By avoiding the common mistake of "angelism"?consciousness without body?Falque considers the depths to which our humanity reflects animality, or body without consciousness. He shows the continued relevance of the question "How can this man give us his flesh to eat?" (John 6:52), especially to philosophy.
We need to question the meaning of "this is my body" in "a way that responds to the needs of our time" (Vatican II). Because of the ways that "Hoc est corpus meum" has shaped our culture and our modernity, this is a problem both for religious belief and for culture.
Praise for The Wedding Feast of the Lamb
"Animality, embodiedness, and eros: such, for Emmanuel Falque, are the grounds for our hope as we kneel before the altar and await the words of consecration in the Eucharist and behold not only what nourishes us here but also an intimacy promised to us hereafter. Here, as a complement to theologies of the Eucharist, is a phenomenology of the sacred liturgy: perhaps the most capacious account of our desire for Christ in the Sacrament offered to us by a contemporary." -Kevin Hart, The University of Virginia
"A generative text for advanced study of worship and a deeper engagement of phenomenological approaches to sacramental theology." -Homiletic: The Journal of the Academy of Homiletics
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Dis-Enclosure
The Deconstruction of Christianity
by Jean-Luc Nancy
Part of the Perspectives in Continental Philosophy series
From one of France's leading contemporary thinkers, "an astutely reasoned philosophical text, offering a revolutionary analysis of theistic religion" (The Midwest Book Review).
This book is a profound and eagerly anticipated investigation into what is left of a monotheistic religious spirit-notably, a minimalist faith that is neither confessional nor credulous. Articulating this faith as works and as an objectless hope, Nancy deconstructs Christianity in search of the historical and reflective conditions that provided its initial energy. Working through Blanchot and Nietzsche, re-reading Heidegger and Derrida, Nancy turns to the Epistle of Saint James rather than those of Saint Paul, discerning in it the primitive essence of Christianity as hope.
The "religion that provided the exit from religion," as he terms Christianity, consists in the announcement of an end. It is the announcement that counts, however, rather than any finality. In this announcement there is a proximity to others and to what was once called parousia. But parousia is no longer presence; it is no longer the return of the Messiah. Rather, it is what is near us and does not cease to open and to close, a presence deferred yet imminent.
In a demystified age where we are left with a vision of a self-enclosed world-in which humans are no longer mortals facing an immortal being, but entities whose lives are accompanied by the time of their own decline-parousia stands as a question. Can we venture the risk of a decentered perspective, such that the meaning of the world can be found both inside and outside, within and without our so-immanent world?
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Class Acts
Derrida on the Public Stage
by Michael Naas
Part of the Perspectives in Continental Philosophy series
Class Acts examines two often-neglected aspects of Jacques Derrida's work as a philosopher, his public presentations at lectures and conferences and his teaching, along with the question of the "speech act" that links them. What, Michael Naas asks, is one doing when one speaks in public in these ways?
The book follows Derrida's itinerary with regard to speech act theory across three public lectures, from 1971 to 1997, all given, for reasons the book seeks to explain, in Montreal. In these lectures, Derrida elaborated his critique of J. L. Austin and his own subsequent redefinition of speech act theory. The book then gives an overview of Derrida's teaching career and his famous "seminar" presentations, along with his own explicit reflections on pedagogy and educational institutions beginning in the mid-1970s. Naas then shows through a reading of three recently published seminars, on life, death, theory, and practice, and forgiveness, just how Derrida the teacher interrogated and deployed speech act theory in his seminars. Whether in a conference hall or a classroom, Naas demonstrates, Derrida was always interested in the way spoken or written words might do more than simply communicate some meaning or intent, but might give rise to something like an event. Class Acts bears witness to the possibility of such events in Derrida's work as a pedagogue and a public intellectual.
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Radical Hospitality
From Thought to Action
by Richard Kearney
Part of the Perspectives in Continental Philosophy series
Radical Hospitality addresses a timely and challenging subject for contemporary philosophy: the ethical responsibility of opening borders, psychic and physical, to the stranger.
Kearney and Fitzpatrick show how radical hospitality happens by opening oneself in narrative exchange to someone or something other than ourselves-by crossing borders, whether literal or figurative. Against the fears, dogmas, and demands for certainty and security that push us toward hostility, we also desire to wager with the unknown, leap into the unanticipated, and celebrate the new, a desire this book seeks to recognize and cultivate. The book contends that hospitality means chancing one's hand, one's arm, one's very self, thereby opening a vital space for new voices to be heard, shedding old skins, and welcoming new understandings.
Radical Hospitality engages with urgent moral conversations concerning identity, nationality, immigration, commemoration, and justice, moving between theory and praxis and on to the formative life of the classroom. Building on key critical debates on the question of hospitality ranging from phenomenology, hermeneutics and deconstruction to neo-Kantian moral critique and Anglo-American virtue ethics, the book explores novel possibilities for an ethics of hospitality to our contemporary world of border anxiety, refugee crises, and ecological catastrophe.
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The Animal That Therefore I Am
by Jacques Derrida
Part of the Perspectives in Continental Philosophy series
The translated, complete text of Derrida's 1997 ten-hour address, "The Autobiographical Animal," focusing on the industrialized treatment of animals.
The Animal That Therefore I Am is at once an affectionate look back over the multiple roles played by animals in Derrida's work and a profound philosophical investigation and critique of the relegation of animal life that takes place as a result of the distinction?dating from Descartes?between man as thinking animal and every other living species. That starts with the very fact of the line of separation drawn between the human and the millions of other species that are reduced to a single "the animal." Derrida finds that distinction, or versions of it, surfacing in thinkers as far apart as Descartes, Kant, Heidegger, Lacan, and Levinas, and he dedicates extended analyses to the question in the work of each of them.
The book's autobiographical theme intersects with its philosophical analysis through the figures of looking and nakedness, staged in terms of Derrida's experience when his cat follows him into the bathroom in the morning. In a classic deconstructive reversal, Derrida asks what this animal sees and thinks when it sees this naked man. Yet the experiences of nakedness and shame also lead all the way back into the mythologies of "man's dominion over the beasts" and trace a history of how man has systematically displaced onto the animal his own failings or bêtises.
The Animal That Therefore I Am is at times a militant plea and indictment regarding, especially, the modern industrialized treatment of animals. However, Derrida cannot subscribe to a simplistic version of animal rights that fails to follow through, in all its implications, the questions and definitions of "life" to which he returned in much of his later work.
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The Decolonial Abyss
Mysticism and Cosmopolitics from the Ruins
by An Yountae
Part of the Perspectives in Continental Philosophy series
The Decolonial Abyss probes the ethico-political possibility harbored in Western philosophical and theological thought for addressing the collective experience of suffering, socio-political trauma, and colonial violence. In order to do so, it builds a constructive and coherent thematization of the somewhat obscurely defined and underexplored mystical figure of the abyss as it occurs in Neoplatonic mysticism, German Idealism, and Afro-Caribbean philosophy. The central question An Yountae raises is, How do we mediate the mystical abyss of theology/philosophy and the abyss of socio-political trauma engulfing the colonial subject? What would theopoetics look like in the context where poetics is the means of resistance and survival? This book seeks to answer these questions by examining the abyss as the dialectical process in which the self's dispossession before the encounter with its own finitude is followed by the rediscovery or reconstruction of the self.
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The Question of German Guilt
by Karl Jaspers
Part of the Perspectives in Continental Philosophy series
Shortly after the Nazi government fell, a philosophy professor at Heidelberg University lectured on a subject that burned the consciousness and conscience of thinking Germans. Are the German people guilty? These lectures by Karl Jaspers, an outstanding European philosopher, attracted wide attention among German intellectuals and students; they seemed to offer a path to sanity and morality in a disordered world. Jaspers, a life-long liberal, attempted in this book to discuss rationally a problem that had thus far evoked only heat and fury. Neither an evasive apology nor a wholesome condemnation, his book distinguished between types of guilt and degrees of responsibility. He listed four categories of guilt: criminal guilt (the commitment of overt acts), political guilt (the degree of political acquiescence in the Nazi regime), moral guilt (a matter of private judgment among one's friends), and metaphysical guilt (a universally shared responsibility of those who chose to remain alive rather than die in protest against Nazi atrocities). Karl Jaspers (1883–1969) took his degree in medicine but soon became interested in psychiatry. He is the author of a standard work of psychopathology, as well as special studies on Strindberg, Van Gogh and Nietsche. After World War I he became Professor of Philosophy at Heidelberg, where he achieved fame as a brilliant teacher and an early exponent of existentialism. He was among the first to acquaint German readers with the works of Kierkegaard. Jaspers had to resign from his post in 1935. From the total isolation into which the Hitler regime forced him, Jaspers returned in 1945 to a position of central intellectual leadership of the younger liberal elements of Germany. In his first lecture in 1945, he forcefully reminded his audience of the fate of the German Jews. Jaspers's unblemished record as an anti-Nazi, as well as his sentient mind, have made him a rallying point center for those of his compatriots who wish to reconstruct a free and democratic Germany.
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