In his work on somaesthetics, Richard Shusterman employs Confucianism’s take on ritualized self-cultivation to address blind spots in Euro-American accounts. However, Shusterman’s remarks on the later classical-era thinker Xún Zǐ hint at a possible tension with the former’s pragmatism and promotion of somatic self-fashioning. The classical Confucian debate between Mencius and Xún Zǐ on human nature being either “good” or “bad” broaches issues of somaesthetics, namely as concerns self-cultivation being either internally spontaneous or externally imposed. Looking at this debate can (...) thus help the project of somaesthetics by bringing old, though in this case novel, vocabulary to bear on an issue with which Shusterman wrestles – the “ontic” status of somaesthetic practice. (shrink)

This paper analyses the opposing accounts of ‘the ordinary’ given by Jacques Derrida and Stanley Cavell, beginning with their competing interpretations of J. L. Austin¹s thought on ordinary language. These accounts are presented as mutually critiquing: Derrida¹s deconstructive method poses an effective challenge to Cavell¹s claim that the ordinary is irreducible by further philosophical analysis, while, conversely, Cavell¹s valorisation of the human draws attention to a residual humanity in Derrida¹s text which Derrida cannot account for. The two philosophers’ approaches are, (...) in fact, predicated on each other like the famous Gestalt-image of a vase and two faces: they cannot come into focus at the same time, but one cannot appear without the other to furnish its background. (shrink)

: This paper aims to investigate whether and in what respects the conceptions of the body and of agency that Judith Butler develops in Bodies That Matter are useful contributions to feminist theory. The discussion focuses on the clarification and critical assessment of the arguments Butler presents to refute the charges of linguistic monism and determinism.

Seeking to contribute to the recent emergence of critical phenomenology by clarifying the relation between ontology and ethics, this article offers a new account of the sources of normativity in the context of Heidegger’s critique of technological enframing (Gestell) and Derrida’s political philosophy. I distinguish three levels of normativity in Heidegger and show how moving between the levels permits the critical deployment of the affirmation (Zusage) in response to being’s address. On this view, not only are humans constitutively claimed by (...) being, but the claim calls for its express hearing and critical elaboration. I then show how Derrida reconceives Heidegger’s normativity by developing a notion of double affirmation that communicates with key concepts from his moral-political work, such as the gift, the advance, and friendship. I conclude by indicating what double affirmation entails for critique today. (shrink)

This article examines Jacques Derrida’s work of self-reflection on his own teaching practice by using as a guiding thread the problematics of reproduction in the seminars of the 1970s. The first part of the article examines the sequence of seminars taught by Derrida at École normale supérieure from 1971 to 1977 to show how the concept of reproduction is deconstructed by Derrida across several seminars. Derrida systematically demonstrates, across several themes and fields (sociology and economy, biology and sexuality, art, technique, (...) ontology, and so on), that the critical recourse to the concept of reproduction (for instance, in its Marxist form) risks being complicit in the reproductive system it criticizes. The deconstructive motif of débordement is introduced to problematize this onto-logic of re-production. The second part of the article analyzes more specifically the unpublished seminar “GREPH, le concept de l’idéologie chez les idéologues français” (1974–75), in which Derrida examines the seminar function, his role as a teacher, and his own situation within the French educational system. In particular, Derrida offers a deconstructive critique of the reproductive effects of teaching, and of the institution of philosophy inasmuch as it functions as a reproductive machine. This work of deconstruction is done in the seminar notably through readings of Marx, Engels, and Althusser, with special attention to the concepts of ideology, reproduction, and sexual difference. (shrink)

Beginning by offering an overview on legal aesthetic humanisms as a specific embodiment of critical discourse, and discussing the ways the recreation of juridical experience, rationality, and culture underpinning such a criticism, leaving behind monolithic views on textuality, judgment, and subjectivity, positively contributes to unsettling the main assumptions underlying typical understandings of law’s autonomy—mostly those of formal specification of juridical “sources” and “scientific” isolation of legal thought—, this paper argues that simply reproducing aesthetic heterodoxy as the epitome of a humanist (...) ‘alternative to law’, without first debating the very orthodox-heterodox binomial, ends up overlooking the discursive and methodological specificity of law, as a particular experience of practical and normative validity. In this way, it introduces, from an axiological-normative and juridically oriented standpoint, a different—jusaesthetic—argument for re-examining the relationship between law’s praxis, nomos, and community. (shrink)

The idea that Derrida kept silent on Marx before the publication of Spectres de Marx, in 1993, has become a commonplace in Derrida studies and in the history of Marxism and French 20th century political thought. This idea has often been accompanied by a certain representation of the relationship between deconstruction and dialectical materialism, and fed the legend of deconstruction’s «apoliticism» – at least before what some have called Derrida’s «ethicopolitical turn», usually dated in the early 1990s. Against this narrative, (...) this essay analyzes Derrida’s notorious «silence on Marx» before Specters of Marx from the perspective of the archives. Archival research transforms the narrative: Derrida’s «silence on Marx» was only «relative». Beyond the scene of publications, archives reveal another scene: multiple engagements with Marx and Marxist thought, marked and remarked in many archival documents – more particularly in a series of early seminar notes from the 1960s and 1970s. How does this archival scene transform our interpretation of Derrida’s «silence»? (shrink)

Straipsnyje tiriama vidujybės kontekstualizacija, įvykusi XX a. filosofijoje. Doktrina, įgalinusi šį procesą, vadinama kontekstualizmu. Skiriama vidujybės kontekstualizacija silpnajame ir stipriajame kontekstualizmuose. Siplnasis kontekstualizmas tiria įvairius kontekstiškos vidujybės atvejus, o stiprusis kontekstualizmas siekia formuluoti bendruosius metodologinius principus apie kontekstiškos vidujybės ir kalbos prigimtį. Kaip alternatyva kontekstualizmui teigiama filosofinio klasicizmo pozicija, kuri į filosofinį mąstymą grąžina tiesą ir asmens tapatybę. Pasak pastarosios filosofinės pozicijos šalininkų, filosofo tapatybė yra jo tiesa. Nors grąžinamos klasikinės filosofijos problemos, tačiau filosofinis klasicizmas vengia naiviojo realizmo ir siekia (...) išmokti kantišką-vitgenšteinišką-deridišką pamoką. (shrink)

Volume 11, Issue 1, March 2019, Page 34-47.

El artículo revela cómo la filosofía que desarrolló Karl Marx estuvo centrada en el tema de la vida. La esencia de la comprensión marxiana de la sociedad y la historia no radica en una primacía abstracta de lo económico, sino en el proceso real de producción y reproducción de la vida. Es la vida –y no la economía por sí misma– la que constituye el fundamento de la concepción materialista de la historia desarrollada por Marx.

RESUMO O artigo tem por objetivo analisar a raiz heideggeriana do tratamento da história no jovem Derrida. Juntamente à sua análise do problema genético em Husserl, Derrida constrói sua discussão crítica da razão histórica referindo-se ao problema da historicidade originária em "Ser e Tempo". São conhecidos os seus estudos dos anos 1970 em matéria de Heidegger, em torno do problema do tempo e da diferença, porém, uma nova e mais explícita evidência sobre esta relação primária com Heidegger em torno do (...) problema histórico é oferecida pelo curso que Derrida ministrou na École Normale Supérieure de Paris no período 1964-1965, sob o título "Heidegger: a questão do Ser e da História". Nesse curso, que acaba de ser publicado, Derrida discute a questão linguística associando-a ao problema heideggeriano da contaminação ineludível entre narração e fundação. No texto que segue, pretende-se analisar os termos de tal herança heideggeriana e, ao mesmo tempo, destacar as questões críticas que emergem desse curso e detalham a distância entre o jovem Derrida e Heidegger. ABSTRACT The article aims at analyzing the treatment of history in Young Derrida under a Heideggerian basis. Together with that, add Heidegger's analysis on the genetic issue in Husserl, Derrida builds his critical discussion on the historical reason referring to the originary historicity issue in "Ser e Tempo". His studies from the 70s, in terms of Heidegger, are known, regarding the issue of time and difference, but, a new and more explicit evidence on that primary relation with Heidegger round the historical issue is offered by the course Derrida taught at the École Normale Supérieure de Paris from 1964-1965, under the title "Heidegger: a questão do Ser e da História". In that course, which has just been published, Derrida discusses the linguistic issue linking it to Heideggerian issue of the unavoidable contamination between narrations and foundation. In the text below, we intend to analyze terms such as Heideggerian heritage and, at the same time, highlighting the critical issues emerging from that course and which detail the distance between the young Derrida and Heidegger. (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)

This paper sets out a series of critical contrasts between Alain Badiou and Gilles Deleuze's philosophies of the event. It does so in the context of some likely objections to their positions from a broadly analytic position. These objections concern problems of individuation and location in space-time. The paper also explains Deleuze and Badiou's views on the event through a literary application on a short story by John Cheever. In conclusion it is argued that both thinkers have good answers to (...) the objections, but that they diverge on the ontological commitments of their definitions of the event. (shrink)

The conceptual gambit of this article is to propose that the notion of anti-entropy should be complemented by that of exergy investment or destruction, a term first proposed by Zoran Rant in 1956. It argues that one of Bernard Stiegler’s most important interventions into deconstruction is the thermodynamic reformulation of Derridean différance. I argue that we should view the idea of anti-entropy as likewise the displacement of entropy to an external system. With the notion of exergy, it becomes possible to (...) outline an economics of exergy expenditure and investment that considers this displacement. Having argued for the necessity of exergy as a concept that may complement anti-entropy, I demonstrate that this economy of exergy expenditure, through transductive analogy, can be applied to signification. An economics of exergy may give crucial insight into the transcendental problem of signification; that which Derrida’s notion of différance first responded to. I ask the question: can a trace-like logic of sense be understood energetically if trace itself is understood to be materially inscribed into the world? Having explored this question, I then outline how education might be understood as both the means through with traditional significations are energetically maintained as well as the means through which metastable significations can be disrupted. I use the recent banning of anti-capitalist literature in the UK as an example of what I call logomachics, a conflict of significative exergetic investment and disinvestment. (shrink)

BackgroundThe evaluation of pain remains one of the most difficult challenges that healthcare practitioners face. Chronic pain appears to affect more than 35% of the population in the West, and indeed, pain is the most common reason patients seek medical care. Despite its ubiquity, studies in the last decades reveal that many patients feel their pain is dismissed by healthcare practitioners and that, as a result, they are denied proper medical care. Buchman, Ho, and Goldberg (J Bioethic Inq 14:31-42, 2017) (...) point to this phenomenon as a form of “epistemic injustice”: an unfair and harmful downgrading of credibility affecting some individuals and groups, which prevents them from receiving appropriate and beneficial medical care.MethodsBy exploring the existing literature on this downgrading of patients’ credibility written by healthcare professionals and scholars in medical humanities, I identify and examine the reasons patients are often not believed about their pain and why healthcare is too-often unhelpful or hurtful to people presenting with chronic pain. I also explore to what extent it is possible to forge an alternative epistemological model.ResultsI suggest that most of the causes of this downgrading of patient’s credibility result from either the difficulty in communicating pain or the widespread belief that pathology is always the result of objective tissue damage. I examine whether pain has to be effectively communicated and have an objective cause in order for it to be deemed credible. In the end, I argue that in the case of pain, both communication and objectivity are highly problematic.ConclusionsI conclude by suggesting that, although alternative epistemological models might be impossible to build, believing patients has both moral and clinical benefits, and this warrants further research. (shrink)

Considerations of Jacques Derrida’s oeuvre, and of deconstruction as theory and practice, are bound to revolve around Derrida’s key notion of différance, developed at the outset of his career. However, Derrida’s conception of justice, which started to make its presence felt in his work in the late 1980s, should also be considered to play a major role, not least when bearing in mind his declaration, made in 1989, that “deconstruction is justice.” In this paper, the relation between différance and justice (...) is explored against the background of Martin Heidegger’s essay “Anaximander’s Saying” which, it is argued, played a formative role in the development of Derrida’s thinking. Derrida’s analysis of justice as being comprised of three aspects—justice as idea, as law or right and as deconstruction—is shown to bear a strong resemblance with the conceptual scheme drawn from Anaximander in Heidegger’s essay. The parallels between Derrida’s différance and the notion of usage, described by Heidegger as “the early word for Being,” are also brought out. (shrink)

In Jacques Derrida's formalisation of the problem of the gift in Donner le temps (1991), where Derrida offers a joint reading of Marcel Mauss’’ The Gift and Baudelaire's La Fausse monnaie, there is an apparent rejection of rational calculation (and of economism) in a narrow sense. This exclusion is only one of the steps in the deconstruction of the metaphysics of the gift, and of other motifs such as, for example, invention, forgiveness, and hospitality. In another step, calculation and economy (...) are the terms of logico-formal paradoxes, and engages us to think of the incompatible demands of calculability and incalculability between which reason is torn, and which Derrida has discussed, for example, in ‘‘The ““World”” of the Enlightenment to Come (Exception, Calculation and Sovereignty)’’ (2003). In this paper, I argue that in his evaluation of Mauss’’ moderate view of economy and exchange, Derrida has limited Mauss’’ notions of economy and rationality to reason as calculation. This evaluation jars with Derrida's deconstruction of calculation in his reading of Hegel and Rousseau among others, as I begin to show, Hegel, for whom ‘‘counting was a bad procedure’’. (shrink)

According to Jacques Derrida, there is a différance – his infamous mis-spelling of the French différence – that ‘has no name in our language’ (‘Différance’, in Margins of Philosophy); its name is not différance, and it is not just nameless but ‘unnameable’. ‘The a of différance’, he also tells us, ‘remains silent, secret and discreet as a tomb’. My essay, which is haunted throughout by Derrida, seeks to address the following question: if the a of différance is like a tomb, (...) then who or what died? To Kzomil. (shrink)

Aksumite elites electively identified themselves as “black” in relation to the paler integument of other Mediterranean peoples. Prior to the fourth century CE, the proper noun Aithiopía referred to the area of northern Sudan. Aksum, however, deliberately appropriated the Greek term for its own geopolitical purposes, partly as a way to write itself both into the grand narratives of Graeco-Roman history, where “Ethiopians” recurrently figure as morally “blameless,” as well as—with their conversion to Christianity—into Old and New Testamental eschatologies that (...) consistently position “Ethiopians” as first in the sight of God. This process of self-definition—achieved under the formative gaze of Hellenic, Roman, and Levantine Others—ultimately allowed ‘Ityȯpyā to become a key, if nonetheless still liminal and rogue, player in the post-Constantinian politico-religious arena, in such a way that both economic and cultural capital accrued to the benefit of Aksum. (shrink)

In this article, I will discuss the idea of teachers as knowledge translators, not in a pedagogical or didactical sense, but in a “professional” one. A professional practice is supposed to be theoretically informed by academic research. In the name of effectiveness and efficiency, current policies in teaching and higher education repeatedly ask for research-based practices that legitimize the adoption of an instrumental view of knowledge. Knowledge is conceived of as detached from the context in which it was produced and (...) becomes a commodity that can be mobilized by the researcher or the teacher at any time, as if language is a direct and transparent vehicle of thought. But this idea fails to recognize that language endlessly translates and produces new meanings, which imply that “knowledge users” have a responsibility with regard to the meaning they give to the research, policy documents or professional accounts they are “mobilizing” for practice. Here, I will discuss this translation framework, using fruitful ideas developed in the field of translation studies. Then the framework is put to work through the analysis of concrete, and somewhat unfortunate, translations that Donald Schön’s influential work on reflective practice has undergone. These observations lead to an exploration of some concrete implications of an ethic of translation, which would require fostering some translational dispositions in teachers and the creation of translational spaces for teachers’ “professional development”. (shrink)

The link between force, violence and events in the philosophy of Jacques Derrida is explored, arguing that this relationship is at the very heart of the problem of meaning and its performativity. This thesis is based on the analysis of Derrida’s reading of both Benjamin’s Critique of Violence, as well as Austin’s linguistic performative theory, which allows, at first, to link the question of signification with that of force or violence. Subsequently, we use the analysis of W. Hamacher about Benjamin (...) in order to strengthen that connection and propose a new reading of the question of the event in Derrida. We obtain a philosophy of the event that moves between ethics, politics and linguistics that allows new approaches to the “critique” of violence. (shrink)

Argument, in any full sense of the word, needs resources and assumptions that postmodernism does not provide. Postmodernism is not a phenomenon that emerged ‘after modernism,’ as it were, to replace it; postmodernism is just an ultimate expression of the nihilistic tendencies of modernism, tendencies which were present from its beginning and have continued to the present. A radical critique of modernism undercuts postmodernism as well and clears the way for a revival of realist foundations for argument and rhetoric.

Dans son ouvrage Contre les « modèles » de justice constitutionnelle. Essai de critique méthodologique, Guillaume Tusseau décide de déconstruire et de combattre la traditionnelle dichotomie entre le soi-disant « modèle américain » et celui « européen » ou « kelsénien ». En effet, cette distinction est inutile voire contre-productive. Cet écrit est, pour l’auteur, l’occasion d’énoncer un projet comparatif, s’affranchissant des cadres antérieurs. Si sa démonstration est convaincante et fortement argumentée, une autre position théorique peut toutefois être embrassée. Sans (...) être opposée à celle développée dans l’ouvrage, elle peut se présenter de manière alternative, voire complémentaire. Celle-ci ouvre alors deux pistes de réflexion : la définition du concept de modèle et une remise en cause radicale des critères employés actuellement par la doctrine. Soutenus par une démarche problématologique, nous appelons à l’avènement d’un nouveau paradigme plus pragmatique et questionnant, que l’on pourrait qualifier de « post-moderne ». (shrink)

Starting from the often-used metaphor of the “horizon of experience” this article discusses three different types of intercultural hermeneutics, which respectively conceive hermeneutic interpretation as a widening of horizons, a fusion of horizons, and a dissemination of horizons. It is argued that these subsequent stages in the history of hermeneutics have their origin in—but are not fully restricted to—respectively premodern, modern and postmodern stages of globalization. Taking some striking moments of the encounter between Western and Chinese language and philosophy as (...) example, the particular merits and flaws of these three types of hermeneutics are being discussed. The claim defended is that although these different types of hermeneutics are mutually exclusive from a theoretical point of view, as interpreting beings in the current era we depend on each of these distinct hermeneutic practices and cannot avoid living them simultaneously. (shrink)

This paper has a twofold objective. First, it engages with the interrelation of time, space, and matter in Kant, Heidegger, and Derrida and questions whether and how this interrelation effects the possibility of self-relation. In Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics Heidegger suggests that the very structure of subjectivity is constituted by what he calls the ‘pure self-affection’ of time and thus the possibility of self-relation is intimately bound up with the temporalizing of time. In his 1964–65 seminar, Heidegger: the (...) Question of Being and History, Derrida translates this pure affection of time into the more generic term ‘auto-affection,’ which will remain a pivotal reference point for his deconstruction of the metaphysical privileging of time as presence. Derrida shows how the (im)possibility of auto-affection is bound up not only with time but also with space, or rather with the ‘spacing of time’ that he also refers to as ‘the trace.’ Second, the paper moves across the frontiers of philosophy and physics posing anew the question concerning the interrelations of temporality, spatiality, and materiality. With reference to what in general relativity is called ‘the curvature of spacetime,’ the efficacy of materiality in the movement of auto-affection is called into question. (shrink)

The aim of my contribution is to analyse the role that common sense has played in Umberto Eco’s work. After making clear the distinction between good sense and common sense, and highlighting a number of differences with the Scottish philosophy of common sense, I will consider the uses and functions that common sense assumes in Eco’s philosophy: namely, a phenomenological function, a regulatory function and a communicative function. I will demonstrate how the characterisation of common sense in Eco emphasises the (...) importance of the historical dimension of Sens, the importance of the public and social dimension of semiosis, and how common sense plays a fundamental, pragmatic role in the disposition to act, whilst revealing the importance of the Peircian lesson and Eco’s consonance with Peirce’s positions. (shrink)

This paper inquires in a central question in the Jean-Luc Nancy’s work, that is, the end of the West and his inmediate concequence: the return schema. The evaluation that Nancy realize is associated to his affirmation about this question is that the West has finished product planetary extension of its foundational philosophical slogans. The main argument is that one of the most conspicuous causes of that finishing is the global structure, regulated by the exclusive pattern of the One, in any (...) case, neutralizer considered singular beings. It is argued that the main output to said planetary nancyana neutralization is the concept of a community of singular beings under the being-in-common that cover deploys unique and unrepeatable sense networks. (shrink)

(2002). A Meditation on Knell, Funeral Melancholia and the Question of Self-Reflexivity: 'To Whom Would the Reflexive be Returned?' Angelaki: Vol. 7, No. 2, pp. 93-105.

My paper examines Derrida's attempts to resist, on the one hand, what he thought of as the increasing international hegemony of American English as the technolanguage of communication, and, on the other hand, forms of linguistic nationalism, when using the resources of the French language to deploy the syntagma: démocratie à venir. It does this by investigating what happens when claims about democracy are made in such a way as to be singularly idiomatic – made from a cosmopolitan point of (...) view that takes into account, rather than vitiates à la Kant, the singular poeticity of idioms. It contrasts Derrida's analysis of the relationship between the national, democracy and idiomaticity with Tocqueville's nationalistic claims; examining, in particular, the issue of how language supposedly binds people together, the role of singularity and generality in thinking about idioms, the divide between originary and techno-scientific idioms, and Derrida's practice of writing in plus d'une langue. It also outlines how, paradoxically, it is a form of idiomaticity and not linguistic instrumentality that disrupts the logic of appropriation, the logic inscribed in the neighbouring, though different, conceptual values of idion, proprius and le propre. (shrink)

Das Schwerpunktthema versammelt sieben Beiträge zur nachklassischen Phänomenologie in rezenten Diskursen der ethischen und politischen Theoriebildung, um das produktive und spannungsreiche Verhältnis von Ethik und Alterität in Hinblick auf Problembereiche der praktischen Philosophie auszuloten. Traditionell stellen sowohl Fragen des Ethischen als auch Fragen der Andersheit „Grenzprobleme“ der Phänomenologie dar. Der Schwerpunkt versucht demgegenüber zu verdeutlichen, dass gerade diese Themenfelder einerseits innerhalb der Phänomenologie zu grundlegenden und weitreichenden Transformationen Anlass gegeben haben und andererseits zu der anhaltenden Relevanz phänomenologischer Forschung für ethische (...) und politische Problemlagen einen wesentlichen Beitrag leisten. Im Rahmen dieser Einleitung wird knapp das spezifische Interesse an der Verschränkung von Ethik und Alterität in aktuellen Forschungszusammenhängen skizziert; darüber hinaus stellen wir die sieben Texte des Schwerpunktes in synoptischer Form vor. (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)

Starting from the often-used metaphor of the “horizon of experience” this article discusses three different types of intercultural hermeneutics, which respectively conceive hermeneutic interpretation as a _widening_ of horizons, a _fusion_ of horizons, and a _dissemination_ of horizons. It is argued that these subsequent stages in the history of hermeneutics have their origin in—but are not fully restricted to—respectively premodern, modern and postmodern stages of globalization. Taking some striking moments of the encounter between Western and Chinese language and philosophy as (...) example, the particular merits and flaws of these three types of hermeneutics are being discussed. The claim defended is that although these different types of hermeneutics are mutually exclusive from a theoretical point of view, as interpreting beings in the current era we depend on each of these distinct hermeneutic practices and cannot avoid living them simultaneously. (shrink)

In contemporary human and social sciences, it has become almost a commonplace to attribute to objects and artefacts the features of personhood and subjectivity. In the last decades, significant attempts have been made, in different disciplines, to show how things and material realities have the power to act upon the world and to transform human cognition as well as social processes. In order to describe the transformative power of things, scholars have then recurred to the semantic sphere of action and (...) will, to stop seeing agency anthropocentrically as a solely human property, by recognizing to inanimate entities, if not intention and desire, at least the role of social «agents» or «actors». By focusing on the recourse to the notion of «agency», I will single out some of the internal tensions that still inhabit this scientific trend, and, by drawing on the notion of «performativity», introduced by J.L. Austin and developed by Judith Butler, I will suggest a way to develop further the entanglement between material culture and the construction of identity. (shrink)

El presente trabajo ofrece seis estrategias contemporáneas de lectura del Escrito de la libertad de Schelling. Se comienza presentando el problema fundamental del Escrito: la contradicción entre naturaleza y libertad; y entre fundamento y existencia. La posición del fundamento es de carácter ontológico y supone una relación jerárquica y necesaria entre sus términos. La segunda es ética y supone una relación de separación, no-necesaria y horizontal entre aquellos. Entonces: ¿cómo es posible pensar este “a la vez” de dos posiciones fundamentales (...) irreconciliables? Para abordar este problema se propone una confrontación entre Schelling y Adorno respecto a los límites y posibilidades de toda filosofía no-identitaria. Finalmente, se ofrecen seis posibilidades de lectura del texto en cuestión que pueden ser agrupadas en: a) una perspectiva lógico-topológica y b) una perspectiva a través de cuatro pensadores contemporáneos: Karatani, Blondel, Merleau-Ponty y Günther y tres conceptos avanzados por ellos, profundamente emparentados entre sí, de paralaje, diplopía y quiasmo. (shrink)

Rorty saw the course of philosophy in the twentieth century as an effort to part from two major philosophical trends, namely historicism and naturalism, only to inevitably return at the end of a tortuous path to these very same tendencies. If we can concede without major objections Rorty’s diagnosis of the trends in contemporary continental and analytical philosophy, which seem to reveal the exhaustion of modern philosophy, based as it has been on epistemology, we must, on the other hand, examine (...) carefully the three main questions that this diagnosis leaves open: How does Rorty reconcile continental idealist subjectivism with materialistic behaviorism? Is it really inevitable that philosophy blinded by Geist are unable to question prevalent beliefs? Finally, is the acceptance of a liberalism that is not able to give reasons for itself the most effective and pragmatic liberalism? In answering these questions, it may not be possible to avoid a non-dogmatic, but pragmatic, metaphysics: a vocabulary of vocabularies that allows Rorty to speak of the problems of justice in Plato and Rawls, of the soul in Aristotle and Descartes, of the dystopias in Moro and Orwell. On pragmatic terms, perhaps a modest version of a metaphysic’s “vocabulary” turns out to be as legitimate and practical as any other vocabulary. (shrink)

Une certaine conception censément traditionnelle du signe le présente comme une entité binaire comportant un aspect sensible et un aspect intelligible. Selon Derrida, cette conception serait tributaire du logocentrisme et solidaire de la métaphysique de la présence. L'article passe en revue certaines caractérisations clefs du signe pour déconstruire l'opposition simple et simpliste entre un signifiant censément sensible et matériel, et un signifié censément intelligible et immatériel. Distinguant la conception factorielle du signe et sa conception constitutive, il conclut que "le signe (...) est peut-être moins un indice de la métaphysique occidentale que la soi-disant métaphysique occidentale ne serait l'indice d'une conception relativement rétrécie du signe". (shrink)

The aim of this article is to develop a postmetaphysical conception of reading by following Kierkegaard’s Either/Or Part I (1843) through such Derridian concepts as secret, hospitality, and spectrality. The work focuses on the three essays addressed to the Symparanekromenoi (“the community of the dead”), a fellowship neither young nor old with an aphoristic way of life (2010b, pp. 137–225) that can be understood as a figure of alterity. Special attention is paid to paratextual features of the book: the texts (...) are actually presented as old papers found in a secretary desk by a pseudonymous editor (“Victor Eremita”), which suggests that every text is a posthumous paper, that is to say, it will always be read after the death of its author. Instead of finding a solid author who holds the semantic weight of the text, these papers are based in a blank of sense, a specter, a secret: if they are sustained on its author, then they are sustained in a mystery, not in a sort of revelation of meaning. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to examine the theoretical foundations of the professional secret and confidentiality in Social Work and Social Education in order to propose an alternative approach to the issue which does not reduce the professional secret to a utilitarian device designed to increase the success of social services. Our approach rests upon the idea that the professional secret not only protects the individual that has confided a secret, but also society as a whole, since intimacy and (...) privacy are a necessary presupposition of all other human rights. Understood this way, the professional secret should be regarded as a cornerstone of democracy. The article therefore concludes by warning policy-makers and social workers and educators of the paradox inhabited by the professional secret: breaching confidentiality may be simultaneously an inevitable measure to safeguard society and a way to render society as a whole more vulnerable. (shrink)

This paper considers the charge that fictions and metaphors are non-normal, non-serious, non-primary uses of communication. This charge was made when Plato undertook the first critique of narrative art; and, ever since Aristotle’s Poetics, what there is that might be called a philosophy of narrative art has always seemed duty-bound to worry about it. This apologetic predicament has limited the development of a philosophy of fiction. The complementary charge—that literal, non-fictional uses have normal, serious and primary status in human communication, (...) and that fictions and metaphors are parasitic uses—is widely held; and, as expressed by John Austin in his theory of speech acts, it drew a response from Jacques Derrida, setting off a curious little debate between two philosophical traditions that have normally been as oil and water to one another. This paper investigates the relation between literal and non-fictional uses on the one hand, and metaphorical and fictional uses on the other. In the matter of determining the status of priority, it looks to the history of selection—both natural and social selection—of communicative traits and functions. Though it deals mainly with language, it argues that the questions should be generalised to cover human symbolic communication generally, if only because human symbolic communication has not evolved in isolation from mimetic acts and linguistic acts are themselves so often mimetic. And it argues that, because of the nature of conditional inferences involved in symbolic communication, metaphorical and fictive forms are inseparable from normal, serious, primary use. This ‘defence of poesy’ as contemporary with and inseparable from reason is offered not simply as a contribution to the philosophy of language, but primarily as a contribution to a philosophy of fiction. (shrink)

While the Anglo-American tradition approaches speech acts mainly through the philosophy of language, Derrida relocates the field of analysis and considers speech acts within the broader context of political philosophy as well as the philosophy of subject. Instead of asking ‘how and under which conditions certain speech acts change the state of affairs’, Derrida questions the very nature of social links in order to reveal the ‘condition of possibility’ of performative acts in particular and of verbal communication in general. He (...) shows that this condition is the primordial trust between interlocutors. The primordial trust is based on two heterogeneous types of experience: experience of relation to the absolute Other and experience of a sacral universal law that ensures stability of society. The speech act as based of the trust is twofold: it is both an event and a reinstatement of an automatic process. This juxtaposition of the event and the mechanical forms of social life links Derrida’s political thought to that of Arendt. Their agreement, however, does not continue into the realm of the philosophy of subject. Derrida insists on the importance of the hidden conversion of the speaker who privately addresses the Other, whereas for Arendt the self has no genuine access to itself outside of the public domain of the political. (shrink)

Contrary to the prevailing view, there is not one, but at least two poetic theories in Paul Valéry: the intellectual, formalist and technical poetics Valéry is usually associated to conflicts with another poetics, which highlights sensitivity, lyricism and subjectivity. The constitutive duplicity of Valéry’s literary theory has probably something to do with the ambiguity of his relationship with Stéphane Mallarmé.

A pesar de las divergencias sostenidas por la tradiciónfilosófica respecto al valor de la metáfora Derrida aporta,de manera deconstructiva, una perspectiva que permitereivindicar la metáfora como el origen y fuente de desarrollodel pensamiento filosófico. Para dar cuenta de lo anterior,se explicitará en un primer momento la discusión sostenidaentre Ricoeur y Derrida respecto al estatuto de la metáforaen la filosofía; esto permitirá, en un segundo momento,esclarecer los aportes y las limitaciones del debate. Con ello,finalmente, se propone abrir un espacio de reflexión (...) sobre elquehacer actual de la filosofía. (shrink)