This essay examines the capacity of language (‘word’) to convey what there is (‘world’). It draws on philosophical thought, which it seeks to apply to law while making specific reference to comparative legal studies, that is, to the investigation of law that is foreign to its interpreter.

The idea of aporia, according to the author, leads to the transformation of Derrida’s philosophy on the basis of a new kind of universalism. This new universalism is based on the principles of relation and difference; it involves the concept of“radically Other” (in particular, in the modes of particularity and singularity) into the field of the Universal. As an essential factor of binarism’s deconstruction, an aporia leads to undermine a paradigm of choice. Derrida substitutes this paradigm with an attitude to (...) “impossible” interdependence of concepts, which, according to traditional approach, are treated as incompatible. -/- The author proves that universalistic potential of Derrida’s thought reveals itself in application of transcendental approach to the problem of universal. Nevertheless, in case of Derrida it is quasi-transcendentalism that unites in itself moments of critics and radicalization of Kantian and Husserlian types of transcendental approach. -/- The paper proves that the idea of aporia has fundamental significance for constituting quasi-transcendental universalism. Interconnectedness (up to identity) of concepts of aporia and experience is evinced, as well as fundamental link between the concept of aporia and basic quasi-transcendental structure of “conditions of possibility/conditions of impossibility”. Within the problem of aporia, as is shown, inherently transcendental overlap between theoretical and practical dimensions is taken place. As is detected, in the discourse of aporia there appears a rethinking of Universal/Particular (Singular) relation: traditional contraposition is transformed into oscillation and overlapping (this rethinking is proper for the transcendental approach). -/- The results of the study, set forth in the article, allow historico-philosophical conclusion about presence, significance and peculiarity of the motive of universality in Derrida’s quasi-transcendentalism. Often remaining implicit, this motive, however, appears to be the driving force for deconstructive thinking. (shrink)

The essay on Husserl’s phenomenology of touch in Derrida’s recent On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy represents his only substantial re-engagement with Husserlian phenomenology to be published following the series of texts dating from the period marked by his Mémoire of 1955 through to the essay ‘Form and Meaning’ included in Margins (1972). The essay, devoted to some key sections of Husserl’s Ideas II, appears to break new ground in Derrida’s readings of Husserl, but in fact demonstrates a profound continuity with his earlier (...) readings. In fact, I argue that this continuity is in a part an effect of Derrida’s ongoing commitment to the ‘methodology’ of deconstruction. I show how this commitment leads Derrida to conflate three separate distinctions within Husserl’s discussion, a conflation that obliges Derrida to misread the letter of Husserl’s text, and which, in turn, blinds him to a certain radical potentiality within Husserl’s phenomenology of sensibility. (shrink)

Philosophers and artists consider the relevance of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy for understanding art and aesthetic experience. This collection of essays brings together diverse but interrelated perspectives on art and perception based on the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Although Merleau-Ponty focused almost exclusively on painting in his writings on aesthetics, this collection also considers poetry, literary works, theater, and relationships between art and science. In addition to philosophers, the contributors include a painter, a photographer, a musicologist, and an architect. This widened (...) scope offers important philosophical benefits, testing and providing evidence for the empirical applicability of Merleau-Ponty’s aesthetic writings. The central argument is that for Merleau-Ponty the account of perception is also an account of art and vice versa. In the philosopher’s writings, art and perception thus intertwine necessarily rather than contingently such that they can only be distinguished by abstraction. As a result, his account of perception and his account of art are organic, interdependent, and dynamic. The contributors examine various aspects of this intertwining across different artistic media, each ingeniously revealing an original perspective on this intertwining. (shrink)

This article seeks to explore the implications of Jean-Luc Nancy’s reading of the subject for educational philosophy by connecting his re-interpretation of Descartes to his later thinking on what he names the ontological singular plural. Nancy’s re-imagining of the Cogito coalesces around the figure of the mouth through which the subject enunciates itself within the world. Reading this extension of the ego through the mouth as an enunciation of ontological singular plurality exposes a speaking subject that communicates via a sharing (...) of its own being with other singular subjects. The article concludes that Nancy’s singular plural holds potential for affirming a substance-less subjectivity that can nevertheless serve as a locus of meaning in the classroom. (shrink)

How might Derrida be said to greet Jean-Luc Nancy in Le Toucher? What kind of handshake does he offer? Derrida explicitly mentions the handshake at the very centre of his book, in the tangent devoted to Merleau-Ponty. A reading of this moment reveals an exemplary case of what happens when Derrida reads apparently ‘fraternal’ texts, and opens up further levels of difference. What then if we consider Nancy's response to Derrida, when the recipient of the handshake shakes back? By examining (...) Nancy's various (mis-)readings of Derrida's famous phrase ‘la différance finie est infinie’ it is possible to trace a subtle but irreducible non-reciprocity in this relationship, represented in the handshake of the ‘salut’ as greeting and valediction, beyond all safety or salvation. (shrink)

Written as a last, long posthumous letter to Jacques Derrida, the essay turns to the philosopher's last and, for the living, most important lesson – on ‘learning to live.’ In particular, it addresses – as constitutive of his unique ‘heterodidactics’ – two discrete communications on the subject. The first, in Spectres de Marx (1993), declares the lesson to be at once impossible and necessary, that is, ‘ethics itself’; in the second, the last interview ‘Je suis en guerre contre moi-même’ published (...) just before his death in 2004, Derrida confesses to ‘have remained uneducable’ on the subject. The essay reflects on the performative significance of this contradiction in the context of Derrida's intimacy with death, his taste for mourning, and his practice of writing as an experience of dying and resurrection. (shrink)

The article discusses Paweł Polit’s book on the philosophy and painterly oeuvre of S. I. Witkiewicz that relates both areas of Witkiewicz’s work based on his idea of “unity of personality.” Exploring Witkacy’s theory, also contained in his literary works, Polit confronts it with the philosophical sources of his thought, as well as with Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology and Deleuze’s and Derrida’s reflections on painting that bring to the fore its corporeal, haptic dimension. The idea of the “unity of personality” is, according (...) to Polit, a keystone of Witkacy’s thought, giving coherence to his aesthetic reflection, despite of its changes. Subjected to an appropriate interpretation, i.e. connected with the theory of the unconscious background of experiences, inseparable from the psychophysical identity of an individual, the idea of “unity of personality” becomes also the interpretative key to Witkacy’s painting. The author draws attention to the originality of Polit’s approach to Witkiewicz which situates itself within a broader contemporary discussion on the relationships between art and philosophy, painting and writing. She juxtaposes Witkacy’s case discussed by Polit with other examples of artists in whose oeuvre writing and visual work illuminate each other and intertwine. (shrink)

The article explores the need to eat as a biological and social practice among children in a preschool in Norway. The children in this preschool are aged from one to two years of age, and some of them have just started there. Different events from mealtimes relate to Derrida's concept of touch and Grosz's notion of bodies in‐place and out‐of‐place. How food touches the children and the practitioners is further discussed through a consideration of body/place relations, which are both material (...) and reflect pedagogical discourses. Its overall context is not only touching the food in a concrete sense, but also food as touch seen as a philosophical concept. Analyzing touching relations around the table including movements in materiality, bodies and discourses of eating may empower the youngest children in a preschool setting. (shrink)

This essay proposes to read Jean-Luc Nancy’s references to creation ex nihilo as both an intervention in the French debate concerning eventness, and as a transformative rethinking of the status of phenomenality. Nancy’s position is roughly triangulated relative to key remarks from other thinkers and, above all, its distinctive components (temporality, negativity, spatiality) are elucidated through historical glosses. Articulating the overall architecture of this theory serves to illustrate the Heideggerian access to the event debate. It also deepens aspects only elliptically (...) alluded to in Nancy’s own writing. (shrink)

La deconstrucción, en el pensamiento de Jacques Derrida y Jean-Luc Nancy, expresa loslímites del «ser en conjunto», al desafiar los conceptos tradicionales de fraternidad, amistado democracia. En este texto pretendemos incidir en la tangente entre Derrida y Nancy,poniendo en cuestión la prescripción ético-política inherente a la expresión «vivir juntos».Intentamos recorrer la línea, sutil pero decisiva, que marca la distancia y, como tal, lasingularidad de estos pensamientos en la filosofía contemporánea.

In Critics of pure reason the notion of affection appears at first in the "Transcendental Aesthetic" and is unfolded on the notion of self-affection in the "Transcendental Analytic". Husserl, in manuscripts written from 1918, presents some developments of these Kantian notions. If by affection Kant explains that something can be given to the subject from the sensibility, that is, something that affects oneself from the external and the internal sense, however, Husserl extends the analysis of affection toward a broad spectrum (...) of underlying phenomena, such as volitive acts, imaginative acts, drives and affects. Husserl also analyzes from a phenomenological point of view the Kantian implicit condition that, if anything is given to the subject in the internal consciousness of time, the relationship to itself must be thought as a temporal process. I intend to show that Husserl’s analysis of affection and its modulations unveil possible theoretical directions departing from Kant, but in this step, involving a change of focus on the transcendental field, more specifically on the transcendental foundation of temporality. (shrink)

:In this essay I will look at four recent films that have organ transplantations “at their heart”: 21 Grams, L'Intrus, Dirty Pretty Things and Heart of Jenin. Each film in its own way shows how Nancy's concept of the intruder balances in a different dynamics between biopolitical and biophilosophical concerns and proposes in various ways a changed concept of sacrifice, transforming sacrifice from religious offering into political or ethical resistance and allowing a-religious strivings to persist.

It is one of Jacques Derrida’s later texts, Le Toucher—Jean-Luc Nancy , wherein one finds his most sustained commentary on the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. I argue that Derrida’s criticisms of Merleau-Ponty in this text conceal a significant proximity between his own elaboration of sensibility and that of Merleau-Ponty. Their respective accounts of sensibility are similar in two respects. Firstly, for them both, sensibility is born of a parsing of the self in a hiatus or interval that disrupts the movement (...) of auto-affection. The self can only be known as such through this exposure to alterity. Secondly, this exposure and opening is in no way normative for either thinker, which is to say that their accounts of sensibility are similar not only in structure but also insofar as sensibility for them both is a non-normative opening to ethics; it is an elaboration of embodiment that provokes the question of response but no definitive or prescriptive answer. Hence the structure of sensibility begs the question of ethics, and the problem of response, but can provide little by way of a normative ethics. (shrink)

En el presente texto proponemos realizar un primer trazado de una zona de correspondencia entre cuerpo y materialidad, para replantear esta materialidad a partir de ciertas categorías conceptuales. La hipótesis planteada es que hay determinadas concepciones del cuerpo en el pensamiento del siglo XX en adelante que suponen una materialidad no reductible a principios de determinación, una materialidad emparentada con la libertad, donde la necesidad se subsume a la contingencia concreta de los cuerpos. Nos proponemos bosquejar una construcción conceptual de (...) materialidad que pueda articular diferentes pensamientos que incluyen al cuerpo de un modo relevante, especialmente el de Jean-Luc Nancy. (shrink)

Se busca resaltar el topos de la proximidad en la lectura que hace Derrida de Heidegger, conectándolo con la presuposición de la unidad de la palabra en tanto que núcleo de la posibilidad del sentido del ser, y con la autoafección como condición de la unidad del sentido y de la proximidad, condición..