Concerning Descartes and Kant, Michel Fichant and Jean Luc Marion claim that “when Kant thinks, Descartes still implicitly advances”. Yet, is a convergence among ontological theses (Heidegger) sufficient to nullify divergences among methodological grounds? To refuse the relationship of inherency "Descartes in Kant”, it is necessary to move from the standpoint of being to that of thinking, and observe in what sense words like “evidence” and “certainty”, once redefined by Kant, clarify the originality of the methodological problem of the Critique (...) of Pure Reason. (shrink)

Este texto começou por estruturar uma conferência proferida no IX Ciclo ECATI sob o título A Constelação do Planetário – estava em questão referir como o cosmopolitismo repensado por Jacques Derrida tenta responder à exigência de se «pensar sob o modo da constelação», salientando as implicações desta exigência no plano do instituído. Desenvolvido e fundamentado, este texto tenta agora mostrar como, salientando os limites, as impotências e as graves deficiências do cosmopolitismo, a partir do levantamento dos seus pressupostos teórico-‑filosóficos de (...) índole metafísica, Jacques Derrida o re-‑pensa em termos de alter-‑mundialização por vir. (shrink)

Beyond vague references to his ‘Eastern’ or ‘Oriental’ influences, there exists almost no work on the impact made by Buddhist traditions on the work of Georges Bataille. This study takes a first step towards understanding this impact. It embarks upon a reading of 'La Pratique de la joie devant la mort' as a record of Bataille’s meditation practice infused with Tibetan and Japanese Zen Buddhist concepts and practices as he understood them, through the prism of European interactions therewith. The study (...) traces the evolution of what are here termed the ‘imagined Buddhisms’ emerging from such interactions, from early Euro-Buddhist encounters during the Christian missions, through the 19th-century birth of ‘Buddhist Studies’ and the related influence of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, to an interwar avant-garde preoccupied with the rejection of the European values held to have caused WWI. Foremost of the avant-garde factions considered here is the secret society Acéphale, founded by Bataille with the stated aims of creating a new religion and waging war on ‘tout ce qui est reconnu aujourd’hui’. In the course of this investigation, a pattern of Buddhist traditions weaponised in support of European projects is established; one in which they are imagined and re-imagined alternately as equivalent and antagonist to the work of Bataille, his peers and their antecedents. 'La Pratique de la joie devant la mort' emerges in the light of Bataille’s ‘imagined Buddhism’ as a practical version of an inverted Nietzschean sovereignty, incorporating elements of the concepts and practices of Tibetan and Japanese Zen Buddhism as he understood them. In the former case, these include his method of dramatisation and the idea of Tibetan meditation as what he terms a means of ‘put[ting one] to sleep’. Such an ‘put[ting] to sleep’ is argued to be akin to the what Bataille elsewhere calls the ‘narcotic’ of the profane world and to which he offers his own practice as a solution. In the case of Japanese Zen, the process Bataille would come to call the 'opération souveraine' is shown to be present in 'La Pratique de la joie devant la mort' and to bear resemblance to the process of achieving the form of Zen enlightenment called satori. A momentary flash of insight, satori is also shown to be comparable to the breakthrough of sacred from profane. (shrink)