SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy
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Adorno, Heidegger, and the Politics of Truth
by Lambert Zuidervaart
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
An elusive and complex idea of truth lies at the center of Theodor Adorno's thought. Yet he never spells out what it is. Through close readings of Negative Dialectics, Aesthetic Theory, and related course lectures, Lambert Zuidervaart reconstructs Adorno's conception of truth, contrasts it with the conceptions of Martin Heidegger and Michel Foucault, and explores its relevance for contemporary philosophy, art, and politics. Adorno regards truth as a dynamic constellation in which various dialectical polarities intersect. The most decisive polarity, Zuidervaart argues, occurs between society as it has developed and the historical possibility of a completely transformed world. Critically reconstructed, Adorno's conception of truth can help inspire hopeful critiques of an allegedly post-truth society.
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Critical Studies on Heidegger
The Emerging Body of Understanding
by David Michael Kleinberg-Levin
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
In these boldly original studies, Heidegger's thought is carried critically and constructively beyond its original limitations, re-presenting his project in terms of an emerging body of understanding, making sense of this project not only in its historical, cultural significance but also in its bearing on the emergence of future possibilities. Continuing Heidegger's commitment to a way of thinking that is formed from reflectively lived experience, David Michael Kleinberg-Levin suggests what can be learned regarding the character of our typical and habitual ways of looking and seeing, hearing and listening, and touching, holding, handling, and gesturing. The body of ontological understanding consequently emerges as we learn how to take responsibility for the meaning of being in forming and developing the character of our relationship to all the beings in our world. In this original reading of Heidegger's thought, Kleinberg-Levin suggests what his project could mean for an ethical way of life.
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Hermeneutics and Education
by Shaun Gallagher
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
Shaun Gallagher is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Canisius College, and co-editor of the forthcoming book, Merleau-Ponty, Hermeneutics, and Postmodernism, which will be published by SUNY Press.
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Freedom and Ground
A Study of Schelling's Treatise on Freedom
by Mark J. Thomas
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
This book is a new interpretation of Schelling's path-breaking 1809 treatise on freedom, the last major work published during his lifetime. The treatise is at the heart of the current Schelling renaissance-indeed, Heidegger calls it "one of the most profound works of German, thus of Western, philosophy." It is also one of the most demanding and complex texts in German Idealism. By tracing the problem of the ground through Schelling's treatise, Mark J. Thomas provides a unified reading of the text, while unlocking the meaning of its most challenging passages through clear, detailed analysis. He shows how Schelling's implicit distinction between senses of ground is the key to his project of constructing a system that can satisfy reason while accommodating objects that seem to defy rational explanation-including evil, the origins of nature, and absolute freedom. This allows Schelling to unite reason and mystery, providing a rich model for philosophizing about freedom and evil today.
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The Politics of Orientation
Deleuze Meets Luhmann
by Hannah Richter
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
“The Politics of Orientation” provides the first substantial exploration of a surprising theoretical kinship and its rich political implications, that between Gilles Deleuze's philosophy and the sociological systems theory of Niklas Luhmann. Through their shared theories of sense, Hannah Richter draws out how the works of Luhmann and Deleuze complement each other in creating worlds where chaos is the norm and order the unlikely and yet remarkably stable exception. From the encounter between Deleuze and Luhmann, Richter develops a novel take on postfoundational ontology where subjects and societies unfold in self-productive relations of sense against a background of complexity. “The Politics of Orientation” breaks and rebuilds theoretical alliances by reading core concepts and thinkers of Continental Philosophy, from Leibniz to Whitehead and Marx, through this encounter. Most importantly, the book puts Luhmann and Deleuze to work to offer urgently needed insight into the rise of post-truth populism. In our complex democratic societies, Richter argues, orientation against complexity has become the ground of political power, privileging the simplistic narratives of the populist right.
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An Unprecedented Deformation
Marcel Proust and the Sensible Ideas
by Mauro Carbone
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
Philosophical interpretation of Proust based on the work of Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze.
French novelist Marcel Proust made famous "involuntary memory," a peculiar kind of memory that works whether one is willing or not and that gives a transformed recollection of past experience. More than a century later, the Proustian notion of involuntary memory has not been fully explored nor its implications understood. By providing clarifying examples taken from Proust's novel and by commenting on them using the work of French philosophers Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Gilles Deleuze, Italian philosopher Mauro Carbone interprets involuntary memory as the human faculty providing the involuntary creation of our ideas through the transformation of past experience. This rethinking of the traditional way of conceiving ideas and their genesis as separated from sensible experience-as has been done in Western thought since Plato-allows the author to promote a new theory of knowledge, one which is best exemplified via literature and art much more than philosophy.
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Adult Life
Aging, Responsibility, and the Pursuit of Happiness
by John Russon
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
Drawing from philosophy and psychology, offers a clear and compelling interpretation of what it means to be an adult.
What does it mean to be an adult? In this original and compelling work, John Russon answers that question by leading us through a series of rich reflections on the psychological and social dimensions of adulthood and by exploring some of the deepest ethical and existential issues that confront human life: intimacy, responsibility, aging, and death. Using his knowledge of the history of philosophy along with the combined resources of psychology, sociology, and anthropology, he explores the behavioral challenges of becoming an adult and examines the intimate relationships that are integral to healthy development. He also studies our experiences of time and space, which address both aging and the crucial role that our material environments play in the formation of our personalities. Of special note is Russon's provocative assessment of the economic and political contexts of contemporary adult life and the distinctive problems they pose. Engaging and accessible, Adult Life is for anyone seeking the profound lessons our human culture has learned about living well.
John Russon is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Guelph and the Director of the Toronto Summer Seminar in Philosophy. He is the author of Bearing Witness to Epiphany: Persons, Things, and the Nature of Erotic Life and Human Experience: Philosophy, Neurosis, and the Elements of Everyday Life, both also published by SUNY Press.
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Plato's Statesman
Dialectic, Myth, and Politics
by Various Authors
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
Explores the interplay between the dramatic form of the dialogue and the basic themes it addresses.
The Statesman is among the most widely ranging of Plato's dialogues, bringing together in a single discourse disparate subjects such as politics, mathematics, ontology, dialectic, and myth. The essays in this collection consider these subjects and others, focusing in particular on the dramatic form of the dialogue. They take into account not only what is said but also how it is said, by whom and to whom it is said, and when and where it is said. In this way, the contributors approach the text in a manner that responds to the dialogue itself rather than bringing preconceived questions and scholarly debates to bear on it. The essays are especially attuned to the comedic elements that run through much of the dialogue and that are played out in a way that reveals the subject of the comedy. In the Statesman, these comedies reach their climax when the statesman becomes a participant in a comedy of animals and thereby is revealed in his true nature.
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The Barbarian Principle
Merleau-Ponty, Schelling, and the Question of Nature
by Various Authors
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
Essays exploring a rich intersection between phenomenology and idealism with contemporary relevance.
Toward the end of his life, Maurice Merleau-Ponty made a striking retrieval of F. W. J. Schelling's philosophy of nature. The Barbarian Principle explores the relationship between these two thinkers on this topic, opening up a dialogue with contemporary philosophical and ecological significance that will be of special interest to philosophers working in phenomenology and German idealism.
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Complicated Presence
Heidegger and the Postmetaphysical Unity of Being
by Jussi Backman
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
A synthetic assessment of Heidegger's entire path of thinking as a radical attempt to thematize and rethink the fundamental notions of unity dominating the Western metaphysical tradition.
From its Presocratic beginnings, Western philosophy concerned itself with a quest for unity both in terms of the systematization of knowledge and as a metaphysical search for a unity of being-two trends that can be regarded as converging and culminating in Hegel's system of absolute idealism. Since Hegel, however, the philosophical quest for unity has become increasingly problematic. Jussi Backman returns to that question in this book, examining the place of the unity of being in the work of Heidegger. Backman sketches a consistent picture of Heidegger as a thinker of unity who throughout his career in different ways attempted to come to terms with both Parmenides's and Aristotle's fundamental questions concerning the singularity or multiplicity of being-attempting to do so, however, in a "postmetaphysical" manner rooted in rather than above and beyond particular, situated beings. Through his analysis, Backman offers a new way of understanding the basic continuity of Heidegger's philosophical project and the interconnectedness of such key Heideggerian concepts as ecstatic temporality, the ontological difference, the turn (Kehre), the event (Ereignis), the fourfold (Geviert), and the analysis of modern technology.
Jussi Backman is University Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland.
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Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Philosophical Writings
by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
The definitive scholarly edition of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg's philosophical aphorisms.
Admired by philosophers such as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Freud, Benjamin, and Wittgenstein, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742—1799) is known to the English-speaking world mostly as a satirist. An eminent experimental physicist and mathematician, Lichtenberg was knowledgeable about the philosophical views of his time, and interested in uncovering the philosophical commitments that underlie our common beliefs. In his notebooks (which he called his Waste Books) he often reflects on, challenges, and critiques these philosophical commitments and the dominant views of the Enlightenment, German idealism, and British empiricism. This scholarly collection of Lichtenberg's philosophical aphorisms contains hundreds of trenchant observations drawn from these notebooks, many of which have been translated into English here for the first time. It also includes a historical and philosophical introduction to his writings, situating him in the history of philosophy and ideas, and is supplemented with a chronology, suggestions for further reading, and extensive introductory and textual notes explaining his references.
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Philosophy-Screens
From Cinema to the Digital Revolution
by Mauro Carbone
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
Draws from twentieth-century French thought on film and aesthetics to address the philosophical significance of the pervasiveness of screens in contemporary technological life as well as the mutation of philosophy that such a pervasiveness seems to require.
In The Flesh of Images, Mauro Carbone analyzed Merleau-Ponty's interest in film and modern painting as it relates to his aesthetic theory and as it illuminates our contemporary relationship to images. Philosophy-Screens broadens the work undertaken in this earlier book, looking at the ideas of other twentieth-century thinkers concerning the relationship between philosophy and film, and extending that analysis to address our experience of electronic and digital screens in the twenty-first century. In the first part of the book, Carbone examines the ways that Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Lyotard, and Deleuze grappled with the philosophical significance of cinema as a novel aesthetic medium unfolding in the twentieth century. He then considers the significance of this philosophical framework for understanding the digital revolution, in particular the extent to which we are increasingly and comprehensively connected with screens. Smartphones, tablets, and computers have become a primary referential optical apparatus for everyday life in ways that influence the experience not only of seeing but also of thinking and desiring. Carbone's Philosophy-Screens follows Deleuze's call for "a philosophy-cinema" that can account for these fundamental changes in perception and aesthetic production, and adapts it to twenty-first-century concerns.
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Reading Kant's Geography
by Stuart Elden
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
Perspectives on Kant's teachings on geography and how they relate his understanding of the world.
For almost forty years, German enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant gave lectures on geography, more than almost any other subject. Kant believed that geography and anthropology together provided knowledge of the world, an empirical ground for his thought. Above all, he thought that knowledge of the world was indispensable to the development of an informed cosmopolitan citizenry that would be self-ruling. While these lectures have received very little attention compared to his work on other subjects, they are an indispensable source of material and insight for understanding his work, specifically his thinking and contributions to anthropology, race theory, space and time, history, the environment and the emergence of a mature public. This indispensable volume brings together world-renowned scholars of geography, philosophy and related disciplines to offer a broad discussion of the importance of Kant's work on this topic for contemporary philosophical and geographical work.
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Thinking the Poetic Measure of Justice
Holderlin-Heidegger-Celan
by Charles Bambach
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
A new reading of justice engaging the work of two philosophical poets who stand in conversation with the work of Martin Heidegger.
What is the measure of ethics? What is the measure of justice? And how do we come to measure the immeasurability of these questions? Thinking the Poetic Measure of Justice situates the problem of justice in the interdisciplinary space between philosophy and poetry in an effort to explore the sources of ethical life in a new way. Charles Bambach engages the works of two philosophical poets who stand as the bookends of modernity-Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843) and Paul Celan (1920-1970)-offering close textual readings of poems from each that define and express some of the crucial problems of German philosophical thought in the twentieth century: tensions between the native and the foreign, the proper and the strange, the self and the other. At the center of this philosophical conversation between Hölderlin and Celan, Bambach places the work of Martin Heidegger to rethink the question of justice in a nonlegal, nonmoral register by understanding it in terms of poetic measure. Focusing on Hölderlin's and Heidegger's readings of pre-Socratic philosophy and Greek tragedy, as well as on Celan's reading of Kabbalah, he frames the problem of poetic justice against the trauma of German destruction in the twentieth century.
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Virtue in Being
Towards an Ethics of the Unconditioned
by Andrew Benjamin
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
A radical rethinking of ethics set within the development of a philosophical anthropology.
In his last book, Towards a Relational Ontology, Andrew Benjamin provided a philosophical account of what he terms anoriginal relationality, demonstrating how this concept can be seen to be at work throughout the history of philosophy. In Virtue in Being, he builds on that project to argue for a new way of understanding the relationship between ontology and ethics through insightful readings of texts by Immanuel Kant, Hannah Arendt, and Jacques Derrida. Structuring the book around the themes of violence, evil, and pardon, Benjamin builds a convincing case for the connections he draws between thinkers not commonly associated with one another.
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Catastrophe and Redemption
The Political Thought of Giorgio Agamben
by Jessica Whyte
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
Offers a striking new reading of Agamben's political thought and its implications for political action in the present.
Challenging the prevalent account of Agamben as a pessimistic thinker, Catastrophe and Redemption proposes a reading of his political thought in which the redemptive element of his work is not a curious aside but instead is fundamental to his project. Jessica Whyte considers his critical account of contemporary politics-his argument that Western politics has been "biopolitics" since its inception, his critique of human rights, his argument that the state of exception is now the norm, and the paradigmatic significance he attributes to the concentration camp-and shows that it is in the midst of these catastrophes of the present that Agamben sees the possibility of a form of profane redemption. Whyte outlines the importance of potentiality in his attempt to formulate a new politics, examines his relation to Jewish and Christian strands of messianism, and interrogates the new forms of praxis that he situates within contemporary commodity culture, taking Agamben's thought as a call for the creation of new political forms.
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Contribution to the Correction of the Public's Judgments on the French Revolution
by J. G. Fichte
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
First translation into English of Fichte's major work on the French Revolution.
The reception history of the French Revolution in France and England is well documented among Anglophone scholars; however, the debate over the Revolution in Germany is much less well known. Fichte's Contribution played an important role in this debate. Presented here for the first time in English, Fichte's work provides a distinctive synthesis of Locke's "possessive individualism," Rousseau's general will, and Kant's moral philosophy. This eclectic blend results in an unusual rights theory that at times veers close to a form of anarchism. Written in 1792—93, just before Fichte moved to Jena to develop his philosophical system in a series of works-above all the Wissenschaftslehre of 1794-the Contribution provides invaluable insight into Fichte's early development. In addition, Fichte's work predates much of Kant's political philosophy, and can shed light on the rich dialogue in German political thought in the 1790s.
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The Philosophical Rupture between Fichte and Schelling
Selected Texts and Correspondence (1800-1802)
by J. G. Fichte
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
Correspondence and texts by Fichte and Schelling illuminate their thought and the trajectory of their philosophical falling out.
The disputes of philosophers provide a place to view their positions and arguments in a tightly focused way, and also in a manner that is infused with human temperaments and passions. Fichte and Schelling had been perceived as "partners" in the cause of Criticism or transcendental idealism since 1794, but upon Fichte's departure from Jena in 1799, each began to perceive a drift in their fundamental interests and allegiances. Schelling's philosophy of nature seemed to move him toward a realistic philosophy, while Fichte's interests in the origin of personal consciousness, intersubjectivity, and the ultimate determination of the agent's moral will moved him to explore what he called "faith" in one popular text, or a theory of an intelligible world. This volume brings together the letters the two philosophers exchanged between 1800 and 1802 and the texts that each penned with the other in mind.
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In the Spirit of Critique
Thinking Politically in the Dialectical Tradition
by Andrew J. Douglas
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
Offers a new perspective on the political significance of the Hegelian dialectical legacy.
Focusing on the critical postures of Hegel, Marx, and a series of twentieth-century intellectuals, including Sartre, Adorno, and C. L. R. James, this book explores what dialectical thinking entails and how such thinking might speak to the lived realities of the contemporary political moment. What is revealed is not a formal method or a grand philosophical system, but rather a reflective energy or disposition-a dialectical spirit of critique-that draws normative sustenance from an emancipatory moral vision but that remains attuned principally to conflict and tension, and to the tragic uncertainties of political life. In light of the unique challenges of the late-modern age, as theorists and citizens struggle to sustain an active and coherent critical agenda, In the Spirit of Critique invites serious reconsideration of a rich and elusive intellectual tradition.
Andrew J. Douglas is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Morehouse College.
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The World after the End of the World
A Spectro-Poetics
by Kas Saghafi
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
Examines themes of loss and mourning in the late work of Derrida.
In this book, Kas Saghafi argues that the notion of "the end the world" in Derrida's late work is not a theological or cosmological matter, but a meditation on mourning and the death of the other. He examines this and several other tightly knit motifs in Derrida's work: mourning, survival, the phantasm, the event, and most significantly, the term salut, which in French means at once greeting and salvation. An underlying concern of The World after the End of the World is whether a discourse on salut (saving, being saved, and salvation) can be dissociated from discourse on religion. Saghafi compares Derrida's thought along these lines with similar concerns of Jean-Luc Nancy's. Combining analysis of these themes with reflections on personal loss, this book maintains that, for Derrida, salutation, greeting, and welcoming is resistant to the economy of salvation. This resistance calls for what Derrida refers to as a "spectro-poetics" devoted to and assigned to the other's singularity.
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God and the Self in Hegel
Beyond Subjectivism
by Paolo Diego Bubbio
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
Argues that Hegel's conception of God and the self holds the key to overcoming subjectivism in both philosophy of religion and metaphysics.
God and the Self in Hegel proposes a reconstruction of Hegel's conception of God and analyzes the significance of this reading for Hegel's idealistic metaphysics. Paolo Diego Bubbio argues that in Hegel's view, subjectivism-the tenet that there is no underlying "true" reality that exists independently of the activity of the cognitive agent-can be avoided, and content can be restored to religion, only to the extent that God is understood in God's relation to human beings, and human beings are understood in their relation to God. Focusing on traditional problems in theology and the philosophy of religion, such as the ontological argument for the existence of God, the Trinity, and the "death of God," Bubbio shows the relevance of Hegel's view of religion and God for his broader philosophical strategy. In this account, as a response to the fundamental Kantian challenge of how to conceive the mind-world relation without setting mind over and against the world, Hegel has found a way of overcoming subjectivism in both philosophy and religion.
Paolo Diego Bubbio is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Western Sydney University, Australia. His books include Sacrifice in the Post-Kantian Tradition: Perspectivism, Intersubjectivity, and Recognition, also published by SUNY Press.
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The Closed Commercial State
by J. G. Fichte
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
Critical scholarly edition of J. G. Fichte's Closed Commercial State.
Appearing for the first time in a complete English translation, The Closed Commercial State represents the most sustained attempt of J. G. Fichte, the famed author of The Doctrine of Science, to apply idealistic philosophy to political economy. In the accompanying interpretive essay, Anthony Curtis Adler challenges the conventional scholarly view of The Closed Commercial State as a curious footnote to Fichte's thought. The Closed Commercial State, which Fichte himself regarded as his "best, most thought-through work," not only attests to a life-long interest in economics, but is of critical importance to his entire philosophical project. Carefully unpacking the philosophical nuances of Fichte's argument and its complex relationship to other texts in his oeuvre, Adler argues that The Closed Commercial State presents an understanding of the nature of history, and the relation of history to politics, that differs significantly from the teleological notions of history advanced by Schelling and later Hegel.
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Dialogue on the Threshold
Heidegger and Trakl
by Ian Alexander Moore
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
In the early 1950s, German philosopher Martin Heidegger proclaimed the Austrian expressionist Georg Trakl to be the poet of his generation and of the hidden Occident. Trakl, a guilt-ridden lyricist who died of a cocaine overdose in the early days of World War I, thus became for Heidegger a redemptive successor to Hölderlin. Drawing on Derrida's “Geschlecht” series and substantial archival research, “Dialogue on the Threshold” explores the productive and problematic tensions that pervade Heidegger's reading of Trakl and reflects more broadly on the thresholds that separate philosophy from poetry, gathering from dispersion, the same from the other, and the native from the foreigner. Ian Alexander Moore examines why Heidegger was reluctant to follow Trakl's invitation to cross these thresholds, even though his encounter with the poet did compel him to take up, in astounding ways, many underrepresented topics in his philosophical corpus such as sexual difference, pain, animality, and Christianity. A contribution not just to Heidegger and Trakl studies but also, more modestly, to the old quarrel between philosophy and poetry, “Dialogue on the Threshold” concludes with new translations of eighteen poems by Trakl.
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Heidegger and the Human
by Various Authors
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
The human being stands at the center of the humanities and social sciences. In an age that some have dubbed the Anthropocene, this book addresses Heidegger's conception of the human being and its role in the world. Contributors discuss how Heidegger envisages and interprets the human being and what we can learn from his thought. Pluralistic in outlook, this volume covers a broad range of divergent views on Heidegger and his complex conception of the human. A short introductory chapter orients the reader to the significance of the question of the human in Heidegger's works, its topicality, and its relevance for interpreting Heidegger's oeuvre. Chapters are divided into three thematic groups: anthropology and philosophy; human being, otherness, and world; and life, identity, and finitude. This organization facilitates discussions of the systematic interconnection between Heidegger's philosophy and his critical thoughts on anthropology and humanism, as well as his relation to contemporary philosophers and their views on the subject. Various problems in Heidegger's concept of the human are addressed, and moral dimensions and practical imperatives implicit in Heidegger explored in discussions about intersectionality and oppression, the frailty of the human, and the embeddedness of the human being in nature, society, and history.
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Remnants of Hegel
Remains of Ontology, Religion, and Community
by Felix Duque
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
An original philosophical exploration of the limits of Hegel's thought.
In the preface to the second edition of the Science of Logic, Hegel speaks of an instinctive and unconscious logic whose forms and determinations "always remain imperceptible and incapable of becoming objective even as they emerge in language." In spite of Hegel's ambitions to provide a philosophical system that might transcend messy human nature, Félix Duque argues that human nature remains stubbornly present in precisely this way. In this book, he responds to the "remnants" of Hegel's work not to explicate his philosophy, but instead to explore the limits of his thought. He begins with the tension between singularity and universality, both as a metaphysical issue in terms of substance and subject and as a theological issue in terms of ideas about the human and divine nature of Jesus. Duque argues that the questions these issues bring out require a search for some antecedent authority, for which he turns to Hegel's theory of "second nature" and the idea of nature as reflected in the nation-state. He considers Hegel's evaluation of the French Revolution in the context of political and civil life, and, in a religious context, how Hegel saw considerations of authority and guilt sublimated and purified in the development of Christianity.
Félix Duque is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Nicholas Walker has translated many books, including Thomas Hobbes (by Otfried Höffe), also published by SUNY Press.
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Merleau-Ponty and Contemporary Philosophy
by Various Authors
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
Assesses the importance of Merleau-Ponty to current and ongoing concerns in contemporary philosophy.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty is widely recognized as one of the major figures of twentieth-century philosophy. The recent publication of his lecture courses and posthumous working notes has opened new avenues for both the interpretation of his thought and philosophy in general. These works confirm that, with a surprising premonition, Merleau-Ponty addressed many of the issues that concern philosophy today. With the benefit of this fuller picture of his thought, Merleau-Ponty and Contemporary Philosophy undertakes an assessment of the philosopher's relevance for contemporary thinking. Covering a diverse range of topics, including ontology, epistemology, anthropology, embodiment, animality, politics, language, aesthetics, and art, the editors gather representative voices from North America and Europe, including both Merleau-Ponty specialists and thinkers who have come to the philosopher's work through their own thematic interest.
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Rethinking Interiority
Phenomenological Approaches
by Various Authors
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
A philosophical exploration of the concept of interiority, Rethinking Interiority presents readers with its unmined aspects and senses, including ideas of an inner world and life, personal identity, auto-affection, and its social and political dimensions as well as its ethical possibilities. Internationally recognized scholars and philosophers investigate figures in the history of phenomenology as well as recent developments in psychology and the neurosciences to uncover not only the depths of interiority but also how it comes to connect with and structure external reality. Western and Eastern philosophical positions are addressed, creating a fruitful dialogue in which readers are invited to participate.
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Eckhart, Heidegger, and the Imperative of Releasement
by Ian Alexander Moore
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
Provides the first systematic interpretation of Heidegger's relation to Eckhart, centering on the idea that we must release ourselves in order to know the truth.
In the late Middle Ages the philosopher and mystic Meister Eckhart preached that to know the truth you must be the truth. But how to be the truth? Eckhart's answer comes in the form of an imperative: release yourself, let be. Only then will you be able to understand that the deepest meaning of being is releasement and become who you truly are. This book interprets Eckhart's Latin and Middle High German writings under the banner of an imperative of releasement, and then shows how the twentieth-century thinker Martin Heidegger creatively appropriates this idea at several stages of his career. Heidegger had a lifelong fascination with Eckhart, referring to him as "the old master of letters and life." Drawing on archival material and Heidegger's marginalia in his personal copies of Eckhart's writings, Moore argues that Eckhart was one of the most important figures in Heidegger's philosophy. This book also contains previously unpublished documents by Heidegger on Eckhart, as well as the first English translation of Nishitani Keiji's essay "Nietzsche's Zarathustra and Meister Eckhart," which he initially gave as a presentation in one of Heidegger's classes in 1938.
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Fichte's 1804 Wissenschaftslehre
Essays on the "Science of Knowing"
by Various Authors
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
Fichte's 1804 Wissenschaftslehre, or The Science of Knowing, consists of a series of lectures he delivered in his Berlin home to members of the city's political and cultural elite in 1804. The lectures mark a dramatic shift in the terminology and methodology he uses to explore the nature of knowledge and reality as presented in his philosophical system, the Wissenschaftslehre. Although not published during his lifetime, Fichte's 1804 lectures provide a systematic update to his philosophy of knowledge and being, which was only hinted at in print in popular presentations like “Characteristics of the Present Age” (1805) and “The Way Towards the Blessed Life” (1806). In fact, these lectures contain Fichte's first public articulation of his philosophical position in the wake of the professional disaster of the "atheism controversy." This volume of new essays offers readers not only novel interpretations of the lectures, but it also introduces and clarifies key concepts, debates the relationship of the lectures to Fichte's Jena presentation of the Wissenschaftslehre, and examines issues related to his method and system of idealism.
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The Ontology of Socratic Questioning in Plato's Early Dialogues
by Sean D. Kirkland
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
A provocative close reading revealing a radical, proto-phenomenological Socrates.
Modern interpreters of Plato's Socrates have generally taken the dialogues to be aimed at working out objective truth. Attending closely to the texts of the early dialogues and the question of virtue in particular, Sean D. Kirkland suggests that this approach is flawed-that such concern with discovering external facts rests on modern assumptions that would have been far from the minds of Socrates and his contemporaries. This isn't, however, to accuse Socrates of any kind of relativism. Through careful analysis of the original Greek and of a range of competing strands of Plato scholarship, Kirkland instead brings to light a radical, proto-phenomenological Socrates, for whom "what virtue is" is what has always already appeared as virtuous in everyday experience of the world, even if initial appearances are unsatisfactory or obscure and in need of greater scrutiny and clarification.
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Without the Least Tremor
The Sacrifice of Socrates in Plato's Phaedo
by M. Ross Romero
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
A reading of the death of Socrates as a self-sacrifice, with implications for ideas about suffering, wisdom, and the soul's relationship to the body.
In Without the Least Tremor, M. Ross Romero considers the death of Socrates as a sacrificial act rather than an execution, and analyzes the implications of such an understanding for the meaning of the Phaedo. Plato's recounting of Socrates's death fits many of the conventions of ancient Greek sacrificial ritual. Among these are the bath, the procession, Socrates's appearance as a bull, the libation, the offering of a rooster to Asclepius, the treatment of Socrates's body and corpse, and Phaedo's memorialization of Socrates. Yet in a powerful moment, Socrates's death deviates from a sacrifice as he drinks the pharmakon "without the least tremor." Developing the themes of suffering and wisdom as they connect to this scene, Romero demonstrates how the embodied Socrates is setting forth an eikn of the death of the philosopher. Drawing on comparisons with tragedy and comedy, he argues that Socrates's death is more fittingly described as self-sacrifice than merely an execution or suicide. After considering the implications of these themes for the soul's immortality and its relationship to the body, the book concludes with an exploration of the place of sacrifice within ethical life.
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The Voice of Misery
A Continental Philosophy of Testimony
by Gert-Jan Van der Heiden
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
A systematic study of testimony rooted in contemporary continental philosophy and drawing on literary case studies.
From analytic epistemology to gender theory, testimony is a major topic in philosophy today. Yet, one distinctive approach to testimony has not been fully appreciated: the recent history of contemporary continental philosophy offers a rich source for another approach to testimony. In this book, Gert-Jan van der Heiden argues that a continental philosophy of testimony can be developed that is guided by those forms of bearing witness that attest to limit experiences of human existence, in which the human is rendered mute, speechless, or robbed of a common understanding. In the first part, Van der Heiden explores this sense of testimony in a reading of several literary texts, ranging from Plato's literary inventions to those of Kierkegaard, Melville, Soucy, and Mortier. In the second part, based on the orientation offered by the literary experiments, Van der Heiden offers a more systematic account of testimony in which he distinguishes and analyzes four basic elements of testimony. In the third part, he shows what this analysis implies for the question of the truth and the truthfulness of testimony. In his discussion with philosophers such as Heidegger, Derrida, Lyotard, Agamben, Foucault, Ricoeur, and Badiou, Van der Heiden also provides an overview of how the problem of testimony emerges in a number of thinkers pivotal to twentieth- and twenty-first-century thought.
Gert-Jan van der Heiden is Full Professor of Metaphysics at Radboud University in the Netherlands. His books include Ontology after Ontotheology: Plurality, Event, and Contingency in Contemporary Philosophy and The Truth (and Untruth) of Language: Heidegger, Ricoeur, and Derrida on Disclosure and Displacement.
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The Origin of Time
Heidegger and Bergson
by Heath Massey
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
A critical examination of the relationship between the philosophies of Martin Heidegger and Henri Bergson, focusing on the central issue of time.
The recent renewal of interest in the philosophy of Henri Bergson has increased both recognition of his influence on twentieth-century philosophy and attention to his relationship to phenomenology. Until now, the question of Martin Heidegger's debt to Bergson has remained largely unanswered. Heidegger's brief discussion of Bergson in Being and Time is geared toward explaining why he fails in his attempts to think more radically about time. Despite this dismissal, a close look at Heidegger's early works dealing with temporality reveals a sustained engagement with Bergson's thought. In The Origin of Time, Heath Massey evaluates Heidegger's critique of Bergson and examines how Bergson's efforts to rethink time in terms of duration anticipate Heidegger's own interpretation of temporality. Massey demonstrates how Heidegger follows Bergson in seeking to uncover "primordial time" by disentangling temporality from spatiality, how he associates Bergson with the tradition of philosophy that covers up this phenomenon, and how he overlooks Bergson's ontological turn in Matter and Memory. Through close readings of early major works by both thinkers, Massey argues that Bergson is a much more radical thinker with respect to time than Heidegger allows.
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Deconstructive Constitutionalism
Derrida Reading Kant
by Jacques De Ville
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
“Deconstructive Constitutionalism” explores the relationship between the thinking of Immanuel Kant and Jacques Derrida concerning modern constitutionalism. Kant is widely recognized as one of the philosophical forebears of modern constitutionalism; that is, the notion that state powers should be defined and limited through a constitution. Kant laid the foundation of constitutionalism through his exposition of freedom, practical reason, and moral law. However, constitutionalism is under severe strain due to the challenges posed by inter alia climate change, global health, global conflict, authoritarianism, authoritarian populism, religious fundamentalism, migration, and inequality. “Deconstructive Constitutionalism” investigates, by way of Derrida's engagements with Kant, how the foundations of constitutionalism can be conceived differently to address some of these twenty-first-century challenges. The book examines the possible implications of such a re-reading of Kant for democracy, the human-animal relation, criminal law and punishment, as well as for a global constitutional order.
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Sacrifice in the Post-Kantian Tradition
Perspectivism, Intersubjectivity, and Recognition
by Paolo Diego Bubbio
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
An examination of the philosophical notion of sacrifice from Kant to Nietzsche.
In this book, Paolo Diego Bubbio offers an alternative to standard philosophical accounts of the notion of sacrifice, which generally begin with the hermeneutic and postmodern traditions of the twentieth century, starting instead with the post-Kantian tradition of the nineteenth century. He restructures the historical development of the concept of sacrifice through a study of Kant, Solger, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, and shows how each is indebted to Kant and has more in common with him than is generally acknowledged. Bubbio argues that although Kant sought to free philosophical thought from religious foundations, he did not thereby render the role of religious claims philosophically useless. This makes it possible to consider sacrifice as a regulative and symbolic notion, and leads to an unorthodox idea of sacrifice: not the destruction of something for the sake of something else, but rather a kenotic emptying, conceived as a withdrawal or a "making room" for others.
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Freedom from the Free Will
On Kafka's Laughter
by Dimitris Vardoulakis
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
Brings Kafka's fiction into conversation with philosophy and political theory.
Many of Kafka's narratives place their heroes in situations of confinement. Gregor Samsa is locked in his room in the Metamorphosis, and the land surveyor in The Castle is stuck in the village unable either to leave or to gain access to the castle. Dimitris Vardoulakis argues that Kafka constructs these plots of confinement in order to laugh at his heroes' futile attempts to express their will. In this way, Kafka emerges as a critic of the free will and as a proponent of a different kind of freedom: one focused within the confines of one's experience and mediated by one's circumstances. Vardoulakis contends that his sense of humor is the key to understanding Kafka as a political thinker. Laughter, in this account, is the tool used to deconstruct power. By placing Kafka in dialogue with philosophy and political theory, Vardoulakis shows that Kafka can give us invaluable insights into how to be free-and how to laugh.
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The Tragedy of Philosophy
Kant's Critique of Judgment and the Project of Aesthetics
by Andrew Cooper
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
Reframes philosophical understanding of, and engagement with, tragedy.
In The Tragedy of Philosophy Andrew Cooper challenges the prevailing idea of the death of tragedy, arguing that this assumption reflects a problematic view of both tragedy and philosophy-one that stifles the profound contribution that tragedy could provide to philosophy today. To build this case, Cooper presents a novel reading of Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment. Although this text is normally understood as the final attempt to seal philosophy from the threat of tragedy, Cooper argues that Kant's project is rather a creative engagement with a tragedy that is specific to philosophy, namely, the inevitable failure of attempts to master nature through knowledge. Kant's encounter with the tragedy of philosophy turns philosophy's gaze from an exclusive focus on knowledge to matters of living well in a world that does not bend itself to our desires. Tracing the impact of Kant's Critique of Judgment on some of the most famous theories of tragedy, including those of G. W. F. Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Cornelius Castoriadis, Cooper demonstrates how these philosophers extend the project found in both Kant and the Greek tragedies: the attempt to grasp nature as a domain hospitable to human life.
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Statement on the True Relationship of the Philosophy of Nature to the Revised Fichtean Doctrine
An Elucidation of the Former
by F. W. J. Schelling
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
Schelling's 1806 polemic against Fichte, and his last major work on the philosophy of nature.
The heat of anger can concentrate the mind. Convinced that he had been betrayed by his former collaborator and colleague, Schelling attempts in this polemic to reach a final reckoning with Fichte. Employing the format of a book review, Schelling directs withering scorn at three of Fichte's recent publications, at one point likening them to the hell, purgatory, and would-be paradise of Fichtean philosophy. The central bone of contention is the understanding of nature: Fichte sees it as lifeless matter in motion, sheer opposition to be overcome, while Schelling waxes poetic in his defense of a living, organic nature of which humanity is a vital part. Indeed, we do not know ourselves without understanding our connection to nature, argues Schelling, anticipating many thinkers in contemporary environmental ethics.
Dale E. Snow's introduction sets the stage and explains the larger context of the conflict, which was already visible in the correspondence of the two philosophers, which broke off by 1802. Notes are included throughout the text, providing background information and identifying the many references to Fichte.
Dale E. Snow is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University of Maryland and the author of Schelling and the End of Idealism, also published by SUNY Press.
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Merleau-Ponty Between Philosophy and Symbolism
The Matrixed Ontology
by Rajiv Kaushik
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
Argues that symbolism is an important and unique element of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology.
Merleau-Ponty says in his Institution and Passivity lectures that he wants to "consider criticism itself as a symbolic form" instead of doing "a philosophy of symbolic form." This invites the possibility of an unconventional thought: If critical philosophy is a symbolic form, it cannot disclose its own limits and is, in fact, uncritical. Furthermore, the symbolic form can never itself be thought according to the terms of the criticism it produces but is always only constellated and matrixed within them-a symbolic form within both reflection and what it reflects on, within consciousness and the world. Thus, as Rajiv Kaushik argues, the symbolic form is another name for what Merleau-Ponty calls ontological divergence. Only now divergence introduces the question of a limit to both the subject and philosophy itself. This is nothing less than a psychoanalysis of philosophy.
Kaushik's analyses of the matrices between space-imagination, light-dark, awake-asleep, and repression-expression reveal this symbolism in its form of divergence, its lack of origin and destination. Kaushik also argues that the phenomenology of symbolism must detour from the purely descriptive method. Drawing from Merleau-Ponty's recently published course materials, and attentive to his reliance on literature and literary language, Merleau-Ponty between Philosophy and Symbolism continues the living force of Merleau-Ponty's thought and develops his radical insight of the primacy of the symbolic form, even in an ontology that claims to be about the sensible and its elements.
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Merleau-Ponty at the Gallery
Questioning Art beyond His Reach
by Veronique M. Foti
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
A study of the significance of the visual arts in Merleau-Ponty's aesthetics in relation to the work of five artists not known or discussed by him.
Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological ontology engages deeply with visual art, and this aspect of his work remains significant not only to philosophers, but also to artists, art theorists, and critics. Until recently, scholarly attention has been focused on the artists he himself was inspired by and wrote about, chiefly Cézanne, Klee, Matisse, and Rodin. Merleau-Ponty at the Gallery expands and shifts the focus to address a range of artists (Giorgio Morandi, Kiki Smith, Cy Twombly, Joan Mitchell, and Ellsworth Kelly) whose work came to prominence in the second half of the twentieth century and thus primarily after the philosopher's death. Véronique M. Fóti does not confine her analyses to Merleau-Ponty's texts (which now importantly include his late lecture courses), but also engages directly with the art. Of particular concern to her is the art's ethical bearing, especially as related to animal and vegetal life. The book's concluding chapter addresses the still-widespread rejection of beauty as an aesthetic value.
Véronique M. Fóti is Professor Emerita of Philosophy at Pennsylvania State University. She is the author of several books, including Tracing Expression in Merleau-Ponty: Aesthetics, Philosophy of Biology, and Ontology and Epochal Discordance: Hölderlin's Philosophy of Tragedy, also published by SUNY Press.
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Poetic Fragments
by Karoline von Günderrode
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
Bilingual English-German edition of second collection published by the German poet, dramatist, and philosopher Karoline von Günderrode (1780–1806).
The second collection of writings by the German poet, dramatist, and philosopher Karoline von Günderrode (1780–1806), Poetic Fragments was published in 1805 under the pseudonym "Tian." Günderrode's work is an unmined source of insight into German Romanticism and Idealism, as well as into the reception of Indian, Persian, and Islamic thought in Europe. Anna C. Ezekiel's introductions highlight the philosophical significance of the texts, demonstrating their radical and original consideration of the nature of the universe, death, religion, power, and gender roles. The dramas "Hildgund" and "Muhammad, the Prophet of Mecca" are two of Günderrode's most important works for her accounts of agency, recognition, and the status of women. The three poems included in the collection, "Piedro," "The Pilgrims," and "The Kiss in the Dream," represent the wide range of forms in which Günderrode wrote. They reflect themes of erotic longing and union with the divine, and point to her radical reimagining of death. This bilingual English-German edition is the first volume of Günderrode's work to appear in English, and will help unearth this rich, complex, and innovative writer for English readers.
Anna C. Ezekiel is an independent scholar living in Singapore.
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Ecstasy, Catastrophe
Heidegger from Being and Time to the Black Notebooks
by David Farrell Krell
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
Lectures on ecstatic temporality and on Heidegger's political legacy.
In Ecstasy, Catastrophe, David Farrell Krell provides insight into two areas of Heidegger's thought: his analysis of ecstatic temporality in Being and Time (1927) and his "political" remarks in the recently published Black Notebooks (1931—1941). The first part of Krell's book focuses on Heidegger's interpretation of time, which Krell takes to be one of Heidegger's greatest philosophical achievements. In addition to providing detailed commentary on ecstatic temporality, Krell considers Derrida's analysis of ekstasis in his first seminar on Heidegger, taught in Paris in 1964—1965. Krell also relates ecstatic temporality to the work of other philosophers, including Aristotle, Augustine, Kant, Schelling, Hölderlin, and Merleau-Ponty; he then analyzes Dasein as infant and child, relating ecstatic temporality to the "mirror stage" theory of Jacques Lacan.
The second part of the book turns to Heidegger's Black Notebooks, which have received a great deal of critical attention in the press and in philosophical circles. Notorious for their pejorative references to Jews and Jewish culture, the Notebooks exhibit a level of polemic throughout that Krell takes to be catastrophic in and for Heidegger's thought. Heidegger's legacy therefore seems to be split between the best and the worst of thinking-somewhere between ecstasy and catastrophe.
Based on the 2014 Brauer Lectures in German Studies at Brown University, the book communicates the fruits of Krell's many years of work on Heidegger in an engaging and accessible style.
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Between Levinas and Heidegger
by Various Authors
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
Investigates the philosophical relationship between Levinas and Heidegger in a nonpolemical context, engaging some of philosophy's most pressing issues.
Although both Levinas and Heidegger drew inspiration from Edmund Husserl's phenomenological method and helped pave the way toward the post-structuralist movement of the late twentieth century, very little scholarly attention has been paid to the relation of these two thinkers. There are plenty of simple-and accurate-oppositions and juxtapositions: French and German, ethics and ontology, and so on. But there is also a critical intersection between Levinas and Heidegger on some of the most fundamental philosophical questions: What does it mean to be, to think, and to act in late modern life and culture? How do our conceptions of subjectivity, time, and history both reflect the condition of this historical moment and open up possibilities for critique, resistance, and transformation? The contributors to this volume take up these questions by engaging the ideas of Levinas and Heidegger relating to issues of power, violence, secularization, history, language, time, death, sacrifice, responsibility, memory, and the boundary between the human and humanism.
John E. Drabinski is Professor of Black Studies at Amherst College. He is the author of several books, including Sensibility and Singularity: The Problem of Phenomenology in Levinas, also published by SUNY Press. Eric S. Nelson is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and the coeditor (with François Raffoul) of Rethinking Facticity, also published by SUNY Press.
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Towards a Relational Ontology
Philosophy's Other Possibility
by Andrew Benjamin
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
An original philosophical account of relational ontology drawing on the work of Descartes, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and Heidegger.
In this original work of philosophy, Andrew Benjamin calls for a new understanding of relationality, one inaugurating a philosophical mode of thought that takes relations among people and events as primary, over and above conceptions of simple particularity or abstraction. Drawing on the work of Descartes, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and Heidegger, Benjamin shows that a relational ontology has always been at work within the history of philosophy even though philosophy has been reluctant to affirm its presence. Arguing for what he calls anoriginal relationality, he demonstrates that the already present status of a relational ontology is philosophy's other possibility. Touching on a range of topics including community, human-animal relations, and intimacy, Benjamin's thoughtful and penetrating distillation of ancient, modern, and twentieth-century philosophical ideas, and his judicious attention to art and literature make this book a model for original philosophical thinking and writing.
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Utopia of Understanding
Between Babel and Auschwitz
by Donatella Ester Di Cesare
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
A hermeneutics of language after Auschwitz.
Speaking and understanding can both be thought of as forms of translation, and in this way every speaker is an exile in language-even in one's mother tongue. Drawing from the philosophical hermeneutics of Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer, the testimonies of the German Jews and their relation with the German language, Jacques Derrida's confrontation with Hannah Arendt, and the poetry of Paul Celan, Donatella Ester Di Cesare proclaims Auschwitz the Babel of the twentieth century. She argues that the globalized world is one in which there no longer remains any intimate place or stable dwelling. Understanding becomes a kind of shibboleth that grounds nothing, but opens messianically to a utopia yet to come.
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Phenomenology and Future Generations
Generativity, Justice, and Amor Mundi
by Various Authors
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
In the face of widespread environmental and social destabilization and growing uncertainty about the future of humanity, this collection of essays brings the philosophical tradition of phenomenology to the question of relations between generations to examine our ethical, political, and environmental obligations to future people. Emphasizing phenomenology's rich reflections on the role of time in the constitution of the social-historical world and its relation to the environment, the essays interweave the central themes of mortality, natality, generativity, and amor mundi to build vital bridges between new developments in both eco- and critical phenomenology and important work in intergenerational ethics. Together, the chapters reevaluate the traditional scope and foundational concepts of environmental ethics and social justice, paving the way for a revised understanding of intergenerational responsibilities, culminating in the key insight that future people are of us. The result is an invaluable conceptual toolkit for phenomenologists, ethicists, theorists, students, and activists concerned with environmental justice and climate ethics.
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Biodeconstruction
Jacques Derrida and the Life Sciences
by Francesco Vitale
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
Analyzes Derrida's 1975 seminar "La vie la mort" as a deconstruction of biology with relevance to his work more broadly.
In Biodeconstruction, Francesco Vitale demonstrates the key role that the question of life plays in Jacques Derrida's work. In the seminar La vie la mort (1975), Derrida engages closely with the life sciences, especially biology and evolution theory. Connecting this line of thought to his analysis of cybernetics in Of Grammatology, Vitale shows how Derrida develops a notion of biological life as itself a sort of text that is necessarily open onto further articulations and grafts. This sets the stage for the deconstruction of the traditional opposition between life and death, conceiving of death as an internal condition of the constitution of the living rather than being the opposite of life. It also provides the basis for the deconstruction of the rigidly deterministic concept of the genetic program, an insight that anticipates recent achievements of biological research in epigenetics and sexual reproduction. Finally, Vitale argues that this framework can enrich our understanding of Derrida's late work devoted to political issues, connecting his use of the auto immunitarian lexicon to the theory of cellular suicide in biology.
Francesco Vitale is Professor of Aesthetics at the University of Salerno, Italy. He is the author of The Last Fortress of Metaphysics: Jacques Derrida and the Deconstruction of Architecture, also published by SUNY Press, and the author and editor of several books in Italian on Derrida and contemporary French philosophy. Mauro Senatore is a British Academy Fellow at Durham University in the United Kingdom and Adjunct Professor of Contemporary French Philosophy at the Instituto de Humanidades, Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago, Chile. He is the author of Germs of Death: The Problem of Genesis in Jacques Derrida, also published by SUNY Press.
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The Cudgel and the Caress
Reflections on Cruelty and Tenderness
by David Farrell Krell
Part of the SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy series
Offers philosophical and psychological reflections on cruelty and tenderness.
The Cudgel and the Caress explores the enduring significance of tenderness and cruelty in a range of works across philosophy, psychoanalysis, and literature. Divided into two parts, the book initially focuses on tenderness, with David Farrell Krell delivering original readings of Homer's Iliad, Sophocles's Antigone, and writings by Hölderlin, Hegel, Freud, and Derrida that deal with the importance of tenderness and the tragic consequences of its absence. Part One concludes with an extended reading of Robert Musil's Man Without Qualities, in which Krell analyzes the tender relationship between Ulrich and Agathe. In Part Two, Krell begins by examining Otto Rank's Birth Trauma, which reflects on the tenderness of gestation in the womb and the cruel necessity of birth. He then turns to an examination of cruelty in general, focusing on Derrida's challenge to contemporary psychoanalysis, his opposition between Kant and Nietzsche, and his analysis (and indictment) of the death penalty. Groundbreaking and insightful, the book provides a rare philosophical treatment of subjects vital to the world we live in.