De-anthropocentrism is the leitmotif of philosophy in the twenty-first century, encouraging diverse and competing thoughts as to how this goal may be achieved. This article argues that the method by which we may achieve de-anthropocentrism is ethical rather than metaphysical – it must involve a creation of the self, rather than an interpretation of the given human conditions. Through engagements with the thought of Nietzsche, Levinas, and Foucault, and a close reading of Baudelaire’s poem “La Beauté,” I will illustrate three (...) ethical commitments essential to de-anthropocentrism: to abandon the claim to knowledge associated with human reason, to remain in perpetual quest of an object, and to transgress the given perceptual structure through aesthetic experience. In contrast to Kantian philosophy built upon universal human reason, art is the ethical arena where each artist creates their own way to relate to the object, while de-anthropocentrism occurs – this article argues – when the artist includes the self as the field of creation. Object-Oriented Ontology in my assessment is the only branch of philosophy that truly achieves de-anthropocentrism. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to explore how a sense of place informs the autobiographical in the work of Bernard Kangro. In order to establish a wider context for the relationship between the writer in exile, writing, and a sense of place there is a reference to the work and literary views of the German-speaking Jewish poet Paul Celan. The common basis for the comparison of the work of the two writers is their exile status, but they also share (...) an understanding of the interrelationship between language and reality, a distinctive relationship with places and a sense of place as well as religiousness in their work. The current article focuses on the depiction of places and a sense of place, and its associations with exile as a state of mind that heightens the sensitivity to the real places experienced in the past as well as the imaginary places experienced in the present. In the description of places and a sense of place the autobiographical element occurs on two levels. Firstly, an autobiographical reading is made possible by the proper names in the text that signify real geographical places, which allow for a positivist interpretation with regard to the author’s biography. Secondly, the autobiographical may be revealed through certain figures in Kangro’s work, which are repeated from work to work but whose meaning might be diametrically opposite. Such recurrent figures are, for example, those of the island, the sea, the land, the tree, fog, snow, the wind, the bog, the sky, and the star. The present article addresses the figure of the island and the shifting scale of meanings it creates in Kangro’s work. An approach to the autobiographical via textual tropes is based on Paul de Man’s consideration of autobiography, who was against defining autobiography as a genre or a mode but viewed it instead as “a figure of reading or of understanding that can occur in all texts”. In Kangro’s texts three kinds of islands are found: islands identified by their proper names, such as Ivösjö and Patmos, and islands having fictitious proper names, such as Midday Island, the Island of Dreams, the Island of Freedom, the Island of Miracles or the Island of Winds, and islands without name. The textual analysis of Kangro’s poems, poem cycles, the drama The Sunken Island (Merre vajunud saar) and the novels The Tree on the Island Still Stands (Puu saarel on alles) and Six Days (Kuus päeva) written in exile shows that these islands and the “I” of these texts form a kind of imaginary whole: the former exist in the textual space only through an “I” who goes into exile, is in exile or returns from exile, whereas the existence of this “I” depends on the possibility of the existence of the islands. On the basis of the analysis of the above-mentioned texts we can conclude that the symbol and the allegory are not opposites in Kangro’s texts. Several poems, for example “On the Midday Island” (“Keskpäevasaarel”), “Oh, Patmos!” (“Oo, Patmos!”), “Evil Visions” (“Kurinägemused”), a longer poem “Kihvakaania”, and the essay “At the Black Mnemosyne’s” (“Musta Mnemosyne juures”) can be read as allegories where the island is part of the allegorical image. The island figure also allows for yet another conclusion. The description of the relationship between the “I” and place in Kangro’s work seems to illustrate de Man’s analysis of Coleridge’s concept of the literary symbol, according to which cognition and the symbolic imagination are continuous, interrelated processes. In Kangro’s work the imagining, dreaming or remembering “I” often turns into a perceiving “I” who moves from reality into meta-reality. This “I” is an exile, similar to the subject position described by Paul Celan in his acceptance speech for Georg Büchner prize published as “Der Meridian” – a tireless traveller, who does not travel in reality but in the infiniteness of his imaginary worlds in order to create a reality necessary for survival and creative work. (shrink)

Derrida’s highly personal mourning texts are collected and published in a unique book under the title The Work of Mourning edited by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, two outstanding translators of Derrida’s works. The English collection is published in 2001, while the French edition came out later in 2003 titled Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde. In his deconstructed eulogies, Derrida, being in accordance with ‘the mission impossible’ of deconstruction, namely, ‘to allow the coming of the entirely other’ in (...) its otherness, seems to find his own voice. In my paper, I will focus on this special segment of Derrida’s death-work ; namely, on his mourning texts written for his dead friends, paying special attention to the rhetoric ‘circling around’ fidelity, friendship, and the other in his textual mourning. (shrink)

Jeffrey Tulis’s The Rhetorical Presidency is deceptively titled. It is not about rhetoric or political symbolism or even about the American presidency as such, as were many postmodern studies produced in the Reagan era. Rather, Tulis re‐situates rhetoric: a minor theme in a story about the presidency becomes an important avenue into profound questions of political order and republican governance. Like Tulis, I approach my thesis obliquely; I distinguish his from other, seemingly similar, works to underscore what I see as (...) the book’s lasting legacy: its explication of the double binds and central paradoxes of republican governance , and its articulation of the role of rhetoric in institutional transformation. (shrink)

This article examines the double account of the human in Friedrich Nietzsche's writings. Genealogically, Nietzsche insists that humanity is a tamed herd that attacks its own animality. Philologically, this human – through anthropomorphism – sunders itself from those aspects of language that are not representational. Read in relation to this double critique, the article argues that Thus Spoke Zarathustra is an attempt to imagine an entirely different relation between politics and language, one that enables a thinking of a future without (...) dominion and responds to the crisis of human rights and the humanities today. (shrink)

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)

The author examines Hegel's incorporation of the Sophists into the history of philosophy. The basic argument is that Hegel's history of the Sophists operates along tropological lines, the exact same lines that the truth claims of his philosophy oppose. Using the tropes of metaphor, metonymy and prolepsis, the author shows that when Hegel places the Sophists in the process of the teleological unfolding of reason he employs the very rhetorical mechanisms he denounces.