This paper is a response to Derek Attridge's review of my book Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008. Attridge's review was published in Derrida Today Vol. 2, Issue 2 (2009), pp. 271–281, the arguments of which have also been incorporated in Attridge's recent book Reading and Responsibility, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010.

For Clarice Lispector, language is a sacrament on dazzling display in her work, where the celebration of writing and the emergence of a creative consciousness through the act of writing about writing access an immanent experience of grace beyond any historical religious sensibility. In this, she simultaneously accesses the “great potency of potentiality” that is an experience of freedom undoing anything bound up by language. She embraces the failure of language as the “glory of falling,” the useless experience of grace, (...) and of experiencing the gift of having a body beyond whatever words we can place upon it. In the struggle to behold the “it” underneath language, she strives for an impersonal love – a joy – that respects the inviolability of nature, the “Force of what Exists and that is sometimes called God.” If “the absence of the God is an act of religion,” as she claims, the inviolability of nature is that which preserves an experience of immanent grace in our world. Rather than describe the limitless potential of the self, one’s immersion in the joyful failure of language points toward the self in unique and profound ways without offering definitions, instead allowing internal contradictions to condition one’s selfhood. In Lispector’s fiction we thus confront the pure paradox of the self: an internal, singular individual who yet maintains within themselves (hence, its immanence) a plurivocal affirmation of existence itself and a redefining of God. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn the literature on Derrida’s philosophical formation, the name of Eugen Fink is usually forgotten. When it is recalled, it is most often because of his 1930s articles on phenomenology. In this paper, I claim on the contrary that Fink’s writings exerted a lasting influence on Derrida’s thought, well beyond his early phenomenological works. More specifically, I focus on a 1957 paper presented at a conference on Husserl’s thought where Fink formulates an important distinction between operative and thematic concepts. By (...) adopting both historical and theoretical perspectives, I show how this couple of notions can help to understand Derrida’s singular way of reading philosophical texts. In particular, I present the Derridean concept of supplement as a reworking of Fink’s notion of operative concept. I conclude by suggesting that deconstruction can be understood in part as a radicalization of Fink’s theses. (shrink)

This paper is a response to Fagan's argument that Levinas's attempt to build an ethics, separated from politics, is misconceived. I take issue with her claim that the separation is untenable because the Third is always present in the encounter with the Other. I maintain that this conclusion fails to appreciate Levinas's attempt to resolve the apparent contradictions in his greatest work, Otherwise than Being. My approach, consciously in the Levinasian tradition, is elliptical in the sense that I seek not (...) simply to explain why her thesis is a misreading of his thinking but to demonstrate why the separation of ethics from politics is essential to it. Levinas's quest for an unproblematized ethics is a response to the collapse of belief in a transcendental deity, an inevitable outcome of the Shoah, and leads him to locate the divine in the face of the Other. This has to be a solitary encounter, a dyadic relation of Self to the Other, as the pre-cognitive genesis of ethics that accords precedence of the Good over the classical philosophical obsession with the True. (shrink)

I argue that the exception must be a legitimate possibility within law as a revolutionary project, in much the same way that civil disobedience is. In this sense, the exception is not outside law if by "law" we mean not positive law as defined by extant legal documents (statutes, legislative committee reports, written judgments, etc.) but law as a living tradition consisting of both abstract norms and a concrete historical understanding of them. So construed, the exception is what can be (...) exemplary - a law unto itself that best interprets and creatively extends (and transcends) the law that already exists, in order to make it inclusive of the other. In the final analysis, immigration law forces us to consider both the concrete individuality and abstract humanity of refugees, asylum seekers and other homeless persons who have been displaced by global economic underdevelopment. When combined with the "statelessness" of desperate classes of immigrants, this fact about immigration law reveals a revolutionary possibility for future development and perfection leading to its own transcendence: from an inhospitable immigration law that is administered exclusively by the nation state to a cosmopolitan law of universal citizenship under the auspices of a global human rights regime. (shrink)

To date, film scholars have found the films of Jim Jarmusch to be tantamount to works of postmodern philosophy. For as intriguing and productive as such interpretations of Jarmusch’s films have been, I submit that the postmodern framework occludes a crucial aspect of Jarmusch’s film-philosophy, namely, his investment in the ordinary. From this perspective, I intend to show the availability of Jarmusch’s films to Wittgensteinian interpretation. More specifically, I plan to situate Jarmusch’s arthouse action film Ghost Dog: The Way of (...) the Samurai (1999) between Ludwig Wittgenstein and Jacques Derrida in order to demonstrate the profound affinities between Jarmusch’s film-philosophy and Wittgenstein’s conception of ordinary language. Through a consideration of character dialogue, I will demonstrate the extent to which Jarmusch rejects the private language argument – which, by extension, amounts to a rejection of linguistic relativism as an instance, or species, of skepticism – in favor of ordinary conceptions of language, expressiveness, knowledge, and responsibility. (shrink)

Accepting Lyotard’s “incredulity toward metanarratives” as its definition of postmodernism, and Derrida’s “openness to the other” as deconstruction’s contribution to it this essay distinguishes three species of postmodernism: minimal (we have no believable metanarratives), mainline (they are unavailable in principle), and polemical (“good riddance!”). It then argues that the religious impulse challenges all three of these contentions. Contra polemical postmodernism, metanarratives/worldviews are needed. Contra mainline postmodernism, reliable ones are possible. And contra minimal postmodernism, they already exist - in the world’s (...) great, enduring religious traditions. (shrink)

This paper deals with the role of Judaism in Walter Benjamin's famous 1921 essay on violence and law, Zur Kritik der Gewalt. Despite the intense attention devoted to this essay, the role of Jewish myth in it has not yet been thoroughly explained. This study contends that the association between what Benjamin termed revolutionary violence and the Jewish messianic tradition, which plays a central role in the evaluation of Benjamin's text, is far more problematic than has hitherto been assumed, and (...) poses a serious challenge, which has not been fully examined in its historical context. Second, this essay claims that the subversive elements that many have supposedly found in Benjamin's text and the attempts to link these elements to messianic traditions are also unconvincing. Third, the paper contextualizes Benjamin's thought within the framework of the Jewish political–theological debate of the period. It contends that Benjamin's theory of law and justice should be understood not as a revolutionary, anti-republican text, as has been generally accepted, but as a secularized conservative orthodox one. In doing so, it seeks to shed light not only on Benjamin's early thinking and its influences, but also on the neglected element of Jewish orthodoxy within the broader topic of political theology. (shrink)

Instead of essentializing and defining what CSR “is”, we analyze CSR as a political discourse in which different actors struggle to fill the empty shell of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) with a legitimate interpretation. In this paper we take the current debate on CSR in Austria as an example to demonstrate how this debate is shaped by changes in the greater socio-economic environment. We suggest that this debate might be paradigmatic for the development of CSR in the European/International context. We (...) argue that the debate and the political moves concerning an implicit or an explicit concept of CSR are rooted in a more fundamental question: the societal (re-)embedding or disembedding of companies. (shrink)

This paper develops the notion of being right-with, a conceptual lens that underscores what happens when individuals turn to human rights law and other legal processes and proceedings to address injustices by the state. It does this through a critical multi-directional reading of two Uganda High Court appeal cases that overturned the decision of a lower court which at first instance had convicted Dr Stella Nyanzi of the offences of cyber harassment and offensive communications. Being right-with is a regulative and (...) coercive idea within human rights law that animates a violent irrepressible police drive. I use being right-with to assert that when individuals make rights claims under human rights law (however radical those assertions might be), they are still imbricated within a mode of liberal humanist subjecthood that is always conceptually unfree. In trying to move away from this conceptual and dialectical trap of being made right-with and unfree under liberal humanism, this paper tentatively considers Black feminist theorisations of care and freedom ‘to-come’, as well as Édouard Glissant’s notion of opacity to explore the concept of being with elsewhere as a way of articulating practices of Black life that make freedom elsewhere possible. (shrink)

Volume 10, Issue 1, March 2019, Page 118-120.

Cette étude rapproche les perspectives philosophiques laïques et les perspectives théologiques chrétiennes en montrant comment la critique de la violence métaphysique est commune à certains représentants des deux parties. En examinant spécifiquement les méthodes métaphysiques et, par conséquent, épistémologiquement significatives permettant de critiquer la violence, cette étude cherche à montrer que, tout comme la violence traverse le fossé sacré-laïque et couvre la distance entre l’abstraction et l’action, il en va de même de la critique de la violence.

Readings of Derrida’s work on law and justice have tended to stress the distinction between them. This stress is complicated by Derrida’s own claim that it is not ‘a true distinction’. In this essay I argue that ordinary experiences of the inadequacy of existing laws do indeed imply a claim about what would be more just, but that this claim only makes sense insofar as one can appeal to another more adequate law. Exploring how Derrida negotiates a subtle path between (...) classical Platonism and classical conventionalism about justice, the attempt is made to take seriously Derrida’s aim to affirm the idea of a ‘mystical’ foundation of the authority of laws by taking ‘the use of the word “mystical” in what I venture to call a rather Wittgensteinian direction’. (shrink)

Our actions, even the quietest, are liable to become occasions for inculpation. But what kind of action would remain immune to the act of judgement? Such an action is made manifest in Michelangelo’s Moses. Freud’s cinematic reading of the sculpture yields a concern with what Moses does not do. Neither the origin nor the outcome of an action proves decisive but rather “the remains of a movement that has already taken place.” Such a remainder troubles the ascription of agency to (...) action by undermining the fantasy of homogenous time which underlies it. Continuity is revealed as the semblance of an imperceptible series of temporal omissions. The paper aims not only to bring to light the radical potential harboured in Freud’s approach to the Moses but to account for the reason he arrests its appearance. (shrink)

‘Disastrologies’ explores Derrida's fascination with dates and how that fascination reveals a secret correspondence, in every sense of the word, with Walter Benjamin – a man who has the same birth-date as Derrida. It is, though, the date of Benjamin's death and indeed its infamous mise-en-scène, the cheap hotel on the Franco-Spanish border, that dominates this text which takes the form of a dramatic monologue delivered by the hotel manager, Juan Suñer, a man known to be both a manipulator of (...) dates and, indeed, close to the Gestapo. As the monologue unfolds, Suñer advances an elaborate calendrical re-reading of a host of Derrida texts which probes at the mystery not only of Benjamin's last night but also of living with both Jewish and Christian calendars. Finally, we see how this last of nights puts under unbearable pressure the infinite promise of both the Jewish Sabbath and the Christian Sunday. (shrink)

Chief Judge Achilles and Judge Hera – uniqueness of proceedings – the nature of judicial decision-making – the judicial order of Mega-city One – source of judicial power – judicial styles – qualities required for judicial office – context of judicial action – requirement of reflection – interpretation and meaning in enforcement of law – adjudicative models – law as horrific – legal theories – Hans Kelsen – Justice Hercules – Jacques DerridaJudge Howard – critical assessment of judicial order of (...) Mega-city One – Hans Kelsen, positivism and democracy – merging of law fondatrice and law conservatrice – the “soul of the law” – fracture of the Rule of Law – fascism – comparisons with fascist regimes of twentieth Century Europe – signifiers in judicial uniform – consequences of dissent – reasons for, and consequences of, resignationChief Judge AchillesJudge HeraJudgement delivered 3 March 2138.Grand Hall of Justice, Mega-city One. (shrink)

Democracy is usually identified with openness, order and pluralism and thus peace. Yet, everywhere, from the political convulsions that bring it into being to the wars that aim to extend it, democracy is violent. Usually this violence is seen as accidental or forced upon democracy. The aim of this paper is to argue that the violence of democracy springs from its inextricable if denied relationship to revolution, the drive to re-found the political order properly and definitively. Through a reading of (...) Derrida’s account of the relationship between violence and justice in Walter Benjamin, violence is identified as the unstable founding moment which democracy must both pass through in order to emerge and also endlessly recall in its drive to both expand and complete its mission. (shrink)

In his essay ‘Critique of Violence’, Walter Benjamin subjects violence to a critique in order to establish the criterion for violence itself as a principle. His starting point is the distinction between law-positing and law-preserving violence. However, these are for him inseparable and subjected to the law of historical change: the history of the law is nothing but the dialectical rising and falling of legal orders. Benjamin’s analysis of legal violence and his criticism of parliamentary democracies, this article advances, should (...) be related to the critical analysis of the possibilities for alternative politics in contemporary democratic rule of law states, as those advanced by Bernard Noël, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean-Luc Nancy and Jacques Rancière. For Benjamin, it is only law-destroying divine violence, whose principle is justice, not power, that is able to break this circle and open up a new era. Divine violence is, however, not only a provocative but also an extremely problematic, even dangerous, concept, as Jacques Derrida, among others, has claimed. This article considers, therefore, whether the concept of divine violence has any real political relevance in the contemporary era. (shrink)