When details of the literary critic Paul de Man's anti-Semitic wartime journalism surfaced in the 1980s, enemies of deconstruction in the academy claimed that the always-controversial style of thought tended inherently towards nihilism in its tight focus on the paradoxes of language and in its relative indifference to truth claims. More recently, ‘speculative realists’ in philosophy have lambasted deconstruction and critical theory more generally with neglecting the reality of the physical world as it exists outside language and human comprehension. But (...) what if Paul de Man's own engagements with Kant and the European philosophical tradition in the latter years of his life reveal a side of deconstruction that was as concerned with the intransigence of the material world as it was with the paradoxes of language? In this article, I take the measure of recent debates in Continental philosophy around realism and language, with the aim of bringing to light a less visible side of de Man's philosophical poetics, one that has nonetheless been pursued by scholars critically concerned with the precisely philosophical resonances of de Man's bracing theories of language and materiality. (shrink)

Just as becoming-woman is a divided concept, looking back to a seemingly redemptive figure of the feminine beyond rigid being, but also forward to a positive annihilation of fixed genders, so modernism was also a doubled movement. But modernism was a pulverisation of ‘the’ subject for the sake of a plural and multiplying point of view, and like ‘becoming-woman’, should be read as a defiant and affirmative refusal.

The collection Virtual Mathematics: the logic of difference brings together a range of new philosophical engagements with mathematics, using the work of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze as its focus. Deleuze’s engagements with mathematics rely upon the construction of alternative lineages in the history of mathematics in order to reconfigure particular philosophical problems and to develop new concepts. These alternative conceptual histories also challenge some of the self-imposed limits of the discipline of mathematics, and suggest the possibility of forging new connections (...) between philosophy and more recent developments in mathematics. This component of Deleuze’s work has, to date, been rather neglected by commentators working in the field of Deleuze studies. One of the aims of this collection is to address this critical deficit by providing a philosophical presentation of Deleuze’s relation to mathematics; one that is adequate to his project of constructing a philosophy of difference and to the exploration of some of its applications. This project developed as a result of encounters with an increasing number of researchers who have been working on the mathematical aspects of Deleuze’s work and the key role that these play in his philosophy. By bringing this work together for the first time, this collection makes an important contribution to the emerging body of work that endeavours to explore the broad range of Deleuze’s philosophy. (shrink)

RESUMEN El trabajo reconstruye la recepción del pensamiento de Fr. Schlegel en la obra temprana de Paul De Man. Nuestra hipótesis sostiene que si analizamos los ensayos gestados antes de los años 80 se puede visibilizar que De Man inscribe al romanticismo a partir de algunos de los críticos del romanticismo, pero, al mismo tiempo, modifica la imagen orgánica y totalizadora del romanticismo que una parte de la crítica literaria sostenía en relación con la poesía romántica. A tales efectos, examinamos (...) de qué modo se presenta esta recepción en dos textos previos a 1980: Retórica de la temporalidad y Alegorías de la lectura. ABSTRACT The work reconstructs the reception of the thought of Fr. Schlegel in the early work of Paul De Man. Our hypothesis holds that if we analyze the essays produced before the 1980s, it can be appreciated that De Man inscribes the romanticism from some of the critics of romanticism, but, at the same time, it modifies the organic and totalizing image of romanticism that a part of literary criticism held in relation to romantic poetry. To this end, we examine how this reception is presented in two texts previous to 1980: Rhetoric of Temporality and Allegories of Reading. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:Relational leadership invokes an ethics involving a leader’s affective engagement and genuine concern with the interests of others. This ethics faces practical difficulties given it implies a seemingly limitless responsibility to a set of incommensurable ethical demands. This article contributes to addressing the impasse this creates in three ways. First, it clarifies the nature of the tensions involved by theorising relational leadership as caught in an irreconcilable bind between an infinitely demanding ethics and the finite possibilities of a response to (...) those demands. Second, it examines this ethical challenge in acknowledgement of the hierarchical discourses and power dynamics in which leadership relationships are constrained and enacted. Third, it proposes “ethical irony” as a way leaders can respond to the demand for ethics without resulting in either an escape from ethics, or being crushed by its burden. Three dimensions of ethical irony are examined: ironic perspective, ironic performance, and ironic predilection. (shrink)

Could there be a better instance of ethical conflict at the scene of the modern Western university than the case of Martin Heidegger, who in 1933 became a Nazi, arguably to elevate his own standing and career? In this article I examine the opposing ethical forces that animated Heidegger’s brief foray into Nazism, to ask whether the same forces continue to be found in the technocratized university described by Bill Readings. I address Heidegger’s own philosophy as a context in which (...) these conflicting ethical forces are confronted, using metaphorical references to Pollyanna and Cujo. This absorption of literary allusions within a contribution to educational philosophy seeks deliberately to break the stranglehold that empiricism has on the discipline of education. It regards the hegemony of empiricism as an ideological fetishism. I am using the work of Jacques Derrida to deconstruct the idea of the university, with Heidegger’s political opportunism as symptomatic of current patterns of self-marketing, self-promotion, and entrepreneurialism amongst academics. (shrink)

Though irony is a category familiar to rhetoric and literature, its philosophical forms are far less explored, and this is especially true with regards to its articulation in the work of Friedrich Schlegel. Schlegel’s engagement with irony is essential to the Romantic philosophical project, one that is fundamentally concerned with contradiction and posits itself as a challenge to and continuation of idealism. Through exploring his relation to the philosophies of Kant and Fichte, this essay demonstrates that Schlegel can deploy irony (...) as a method of taking up the philosophical paradigm of idealism without limiting himself to their systems. He can use Kant and Fichte against themselves, making sincere philosophical arguments through a brazen playfulness. Further, Schlegel’s concept of irony is shown to be a philosophical faculty that is concerned with the limits of philosophy in language. Irony is much more than a rhetorical device – it is a form that allows Schlegel to approach the limits of discursivity from within and so continually stage instances of philosophical contradiction, undermining systematicity. This centering of contradiction is one of Schlegel’s major contributions to the development of German philosophy, critical of those who precede him and spurning their presuppositions of univocal logic. The outworking of Schlegel’s philosophical concern with irony is unmistakably humorous, full of puns, jokes and witticisms, which nevertheless need to be taken seriously. This paper contends that irony is at the crux of Schlegel’s philosophical project, simultaneously the content and mode of his criticism, the source and justification of his humour, and one of Romanticism’s most significant conceptual developments. (shrink)

By comparison with other parts of his philosophy, Hegel'sAestheticshas been slighted by Anglo-American philosophers. All the more welcome then are two recent essays by Robert Pippin, which promise to go well beyond received notions. WithHegel's Idealism, Pippin published what is by any measure one of the most original of recent treatments. Shortly thereafter came a penetrating study of the idea of the modern, which allotted a central role to artistic modernism, and since then he has published various essays actively engaging (...) our post-Kantian legacy. Readers will therefore have heightened expectations of Pippin's turn to Hegel's aesthetics, or rather, as he himself signals, the philosophy of art — unlike some he clearly approves of the shift from Kantian questions of aesthetic taste to Romantic speculations on art, indeed on Art as cultural absolute.They will hardly be disappointed. Yet in the event they will find themselves negotiating texts that are at once dense and elliptical, much of the argument being conducted via footnotes, its implications—what it commits the author to in theory and in practice — not evident straightaway. If Hegel's position is complex, Pippin's turns out to be no less so. While I can hardly do justice to its intricacies, I do consider it both important and controversial, whether as interpretation of Hegel or as an approach to modernist abstraction. (shrink)

Bridging feminist new materialism and feminist phenomenology, Astrida Neimanis’s volume, Bodies of Water, discusses water in terms of nurturing maternality based on a figural reservoir of what she terms “amniotics” and “planetary breastmilk” in order to posit this maternality as the material condition of the embodiment of life. In this article I show that this imagery is a construction consistently haunted by figures of anxiety and loss. I do this by first revisiting earlier interventions in deconstruction concerning materiality and feminist (...) theory as follows. First, pointing out a resonance between this figuration of wateriness and Kant’s notion of the dynamic sublime, I turn to Paul de Man’s reading of materiality in the Kantian sublime in order to suggest that Neimanis’s figuration of maternal water is an effect of an aesthetic ideology. Subsequently, I will revisit Diana Fuss’s reading of Irigaray – Neimanis’s main feminist resource – to show that the ontological status of water as maternal is constructed via an Irigarayan distinction between metaphor and metonymy. Finally, in order to show ways in which the maternal materiality of water is haunted by figures of anxiety and loss, I will consult Elissa Marder’s more recent work on the maternal function. (shrink)

Could there be a better instance of ethical conflict at the scene of the modern Western university than the case of Martin Heidegger, who in 1933 became a Nazi, arguably to elevate his own standing and career? In this article I examine the opposing ethical forces that animated Heidegger’s brief foray into Nazism, to ask whether the same forces continue to be found in the technocratized university described by Bill Readings. I address Heidegger’s own philosophy as a context in which (...) these conflicting ethical forces are confronted, using metaphorical references to Pollyanna and Cujo. This absorption of literary allusions within a contribution to educational philosophy seeks deliberately to break the stranglehold that empiricism has on the discipline of education. It regards the hegemony of empiricism as an ideological fetishism. I am using the work of Jacques Derrida to deconstruct the idea of the university, with Heidegger’s political opportunism as symptomatic of current patterns of self-marketing, self-promotion, and entrepreneurialism amongst academics. (shrink)

This article begins from a consideration of this issue’s contention that ‘central to politicized academic projects … is a critique of the cultural power of institutions’ and in particular pedagogical institutions. It argues that is clear enough what the Editor is thinking of here: he names ‘cultural studies’ as his prime suspect and from here it is not too far a leap to imagine that the pedagogical institution at which his ‘politicized academic projects’ take aim is the university. The article (...) concedes that this might all appear to be superficially true, and that much of what is argued in it will up hold this hypothesis. However, the article does not wish to rush too quickly towards an unproblematic equation of cultural studies, or the ‘politicized academic project’ of a critical study of culture with something like a pedagogy of the popular. Equally, it proposes, we must distinguish rigorously between ‘a pedagogy of the popular’, pedagogy able to treat the popular, popular pedagogy, and popular culture as such. In this respect it argues that we would not wish to foreclose the impertinent question of ‘what is cultural studies?’ too early in an understanding of what it might mean to offer an institutional critique that takes the form of pedagogy. Much will depend upon what we mean by these vaguest of terms ‘culture’, ‘education’, ‘power’ and ‘pedagogy’ itself, none of which is at all straightforward even though a certain normative discourse renders such terms the cornerstone of national policy debates through which billions of human and financial capital are routed. The stakes in fact could not be higher in a ‘critique of the cultural power of [pedagogical] institutions’. Therefore, it is crucial that we make the effort to understand, or at least begin to unpack, a conjunction such as the one Bowman offers here that amalgamates ‘politicized academic projects such as cultural studies and politicized work in cultural theory and philosophy’. It argues that we will not be able to progress to a wider schema until we have some leverage on this relation. And this is what this article seeks to provide. (shrink)