The final lines of Deleuze and Guattari’s What is Philosophy? call for a non-philosophy to balance and act as a counterweight to the task of philosophy that had been described by them in terms of concept creation. In a footnote, Deleuze and Guattari mention François Laruelle’s project of non-philosophy, but dispute its efficacy in terms of the designated relationship between non-philosophy and science, as had been realised by Laruelle at the time. However, the mature non-philosophy of Laruelle could indicate a (...) resolution to the problematic relationship between science and educational philosophy that we have inherited due to the poststructural theories of Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze. Non-philosophy suggests a framework for thought that includes science in a non-positivist style and provides the means to view education as a performative practice. This article explores the non-philosophy of Laruelle in education as a means to view education under the conditions of strict immanence and in line with an anti-phenomenological metaphysics of non-representation. Laruelle is perhaps one of the most important critics of Deleuze in France, and as such, his insights into the Deleuzian oeuvre reveal a way forward for education as a practice that analyses science, philosophy and politics through non-philosophy. (shrink)

This study focuses on analysing the ways in which vehicle stickers construct individual and group identities, people's religious faith and social vision in the context of religious assumptions and practices in Nigeria. Data comprise 73 vehicle stickers collected in Lagos and Ota, between 2006 and 2007 and are analysed within the framework of the post-structuralist model of discourse analysis which views discourse as a product of a complex system of social and institutional practices that sustain its continuous existence. Results show (...) that through stickers people define their individual and group identities within religious institutional practices. And as a means of group identification, they guarantee social security and privileges. In constructing social vision the stickers help mould the individual aspiration about a future which transcends the present. Significantly, stickers in the data also reveal the tension between Islam and Christianity and the struggle to propagate one above the other. (shrink)

The author wishes to thank Professor Larry Grossberg for his helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

In recent continental philosophy of religion there has been significant attention paid to the Abrahamic doctrines of creation ex nihilo and divine omnipotence, especially by deconstructive thinkers such as Derrida, Caputo, and Keller. For these thinkers, the doctrine represents a form of agency that does violence to various forms of alterity. While broadly supportive of their fundamental philosophical and ethico-political views, especially about the primordiality of alterity, I differ from them in that I argue that creation ex nihilo articulates the (...) very structure of the alterity they are concerned with. The essay proceeds through a reading of Derrida’s representation of the doctrine and a “deconstruction” of his view by means of a reading of Augustine and Anselm. (shrink)

In recent years Derrida has devoted a considerable number of writings to addressing “the question of the animal,” and, more often than not, this question arises in a reading of one of Heidegger's texts. In order to appreciate more fully the stakes of Derrida's posing of this question in relation to Heidegger, in this essay I offer some prefatory remarks to the question of the animal in Derrida's reading of Heidegger. The essay opens with a careful analysis of Derrida's early (...) essay “The Ends of Man,” in which Heidegger's “Letter on ‘Humanism”’ is read in terms of the motif of man's “proper.” Taking my point of departure from this Derridean reading of Heidegger's humanism, I return to Heidegger's “Letter” in order to uncover the manner in which Heidegger distinguishes man's “proper” from what is “improper,” namely, animality. This reading reveals that, while Heidegger offers a convincing account of the limits of metaphysical humanism, this critical account nevertheless ends up uncritically reinforcing the anthropocentrism of this same tradition. My closing suggestion is that Derrida's rethinking of animality should be understood as an extended meditation on the various consequences and effects of this dogmatic anthropocentrism in Heideggerian and post-Heideggerian thought. (shrink)

This paper explores the thought of Hegel, Saussure and Derrida regarding the nature of the linguistic sign. It argues that Derrida is right to maintain that Hegel is an influence on Saussure. However, Derrida misrepresents both Hegel and Saussure by interpreting them as falling within the Platonic rather than the Aristotelian philosophical tradition.

This paper attempts to draw a comparison between Derrida’s idea of “trace” (in connection to the more famous notions of différance, supplement, and deconstruction) and the idea of dao 道 in classica...

This article argues that Derrida’s thinking is relevant to comparative philosophy. To illustrate this, at various stages classical Daoism is compared with Derrida’s thought, to highlight Derrida’s “applicability” and to see how using Derrida can contribute to new interpretations of Daoism. The article first looks into Derrida’s engagement with non-Western thought, and then proceeds to his extensive work regarding language and translation, comparing this with views on classical Chinese language and translation of key Daoist characters. It then explores Derrida’s efforts (...) at opening up philosophy to its outside, and argues that he was very much concerned with other ways of thinking and their possible influence on Western thought. The final section argues both that Derrida’s abiding concern with otherness and alterity forms a fertile background from which to reinvestigate traditional interpretations of classical Daoism and that employing his way of thought can lead us to interesting new perspectives on Daoism. (shrink)

This paper arises out of the transition from a PhD thesis on Heidegger's phenomenology to my attempts to come to terms with ‘becoming a teacher’. The paper will provide a phenomenological interpretation of being a teacher in relation to the question of an ‘authentic’ interpretation of teaching/learning and the possibility of an authentic interpretative praxis. I will argue that being a teacher is a phenomenon of human existence which can be interpreted as a possible way of being with authentic and (...) inauthentic potentialities. This way of being is intrinsically linked to that of learning; of becoming human or becoming the authentic possibilities of being‐human. As such, the problem of being a teacher is primarily an ethical question (or a question of ɛτηοσ—dwelling); of who we are as humans and of how being a teacher engages with the in‐formation of the becoming of students as authentic human beings. This then leads to the problem of how a phenomenological interpretation of education can be applied or lived; of authenticity in teaching/learning and the possibilities of authentic learning environments (educational dwelling). (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)

This article addresses the question how educational theory can overcome the assumptions of the tradition of the philosophy of consciousness, a tradition which can be seen as the foundation of the modern project of education. While twentieth century philosophy has seen several attempts to make a shift from consciousness to intersubjectivity (Dewey, Wittgenstein, Habermas) it is argued that this shift still remains within the humanistic tradition of modern thought in that it still tries to define, still tries to develop a (...) theory about the human subject. Foucault's thesis of the end of man is interpreted as an attempt to move beyond humanism, an attempt motivated by a sincere concern for the humanity of the subject. Starting from the question as to who comes after the subject, several answers to this question, which all share an interest in the question as to where the subject comes into presence, are discussed (referring to the writings of Tschumi, Arendt and Levinas). In the concluding section it is argued that one way to move beyond the humanistic tradition of modern thought is to conceive of the subject in terms of responsibility and ethics (Levinas) and to conceive of the very task of theory in terms of justice, and not in terms of truth. This, so it is argued, should be the final concern for educational theory and curriculum theory. (shrink)

This article argues that there is ultimately a very close convergence between prominent conceptions of being in mainstream Anglo‐American philosophy and mainstream postmodern Continental philosophy. One characteristic idea in Anglo‐American or analytic philosophy is that we establish what is meaningful and so what we can say about what is, by making evident the limits of sense or what simply cannot be meant. A characteristic idea in Continental philosophy of being is that being emerges through contrast and interplay with what it (...) is not, with what has no being at all and so is beyond sense. The two traditions consequently conceive being in significantly related ways. As a result, what the Continental tradition gets at with “the meaning of being as such and in general,” and how it gets at it, has much in common with what the Anglo‐American tradition gets at, and how it gets at it, by establishing “what can be meaningfully said.”. (shrink)

This paper is a contribution to a discussion in philosophy of technology by focusing on the epistemological status of the example. Of the various developments in the emerging, inchoate field of philosophy of technology, the “empirical turn” stands out as having left the most enduring mark on the trajectory contemporary research takes. From a historical point of view, the empirical turn can best be understood as a corrective to the overly “transcendentalizing” tendencies of “classical” philosophers of technology, such as Heidegger. (...) Empirically oriented philosophy of technology emphasizes actual technologies through case-study research into the formation of technical objects and systems and how they, for example, transform our perceptions and conceptions or pass on and propagate relations of power. This paper explores the point of convergence of classical and contemporary approaches by means of the notion of the “example” or “paradigm.” It starts with a discussion of the quintessential modern philosopher of technology, Martin Heidegger, and his thinking about technology in terms of the ontological difference. Heidegger’s framing of technology in terms of this difference places the weight of intelligibility entirely on the side of being, to such an extent that his examples become heuristic rather than constitutive. The second part of the paper discusses the methodological and epistemological import of the “example” and the form of intelligibility it affords. Drawing on the work of Wittgenstein, Foucault, and Agamben, we argue that the example offers an alternative way of understanding the study of technologies from that of empirical case studies. (shrink)

In Anglophone educational research in the United States, the name Foucault has been more pointedly celebrated in some subfields such as curriculum studies relative to its more noticeable censorship in subfields such as history of education. This paper illustrates how such differential epistemological politics might be accounted for through reapproaching the challenges to historiography that Histoire de la Folie (Madness and Civilization) raised. Through the formalist lens of performative apophasis, and with attention to the dependencies of discourse that characterize narrative (...) prosthesis, this paper re‐engages the least referenced of Foucault's major histories in the educational field to bring into noticeability other ‘conditions of possibility’—ones that explicate how an apophatic turn might account for divergent reactions to less familiar philosophies of history and/or to ‘alternative’ approaches to documents through which history is now being narrated and critiqued in education and beyond. (shrink)

In this article I will consider John D. Caputo’s ‘radical hermeneutics’, with ‘undecidability’ as its major theme, in conversation with Martin Heidegger’s notion of ‘anticipatory resoluteness’. Through an examination of the positions of Caputo and Heidegger I argue that Heidegger’s notion of ‘anticipatory resoluteness’ reaches far beyond the claims of ‘radical hermeneutics’, and that it assumes a reconstructive process which carries within its scope the overtones of deconstruction, the experience of repetition and authenticity and also the implications of Gelassenheit. Further, (...) I am arguing that Caputo’s ‘radical hermeneutics’ is problematic and even erroneous when it comes to criticize Heidegger’s thought portraying it as being founded on ‘the myth of the early Greeks’. (shrink)

In this article I will consider John D. Caputo’s hermeneutics of deconstruction or what he calls ‘radical hermeneutics’, with ‘undecidability’ as its major theme, in conversation with Martin Heidegger’s notion of ‘resolute existence’. Through an examination of the different positions of Caputo, Heidegger, and also Kierkegaard, Derrida and Meister Eckhart on the possibility of repetition, the hermeneutical circle and the mystical way of prayer and faith, I am arguing that deconstruction is not the end of hermeneutics, it is not the (...) final destination of an interpretative task, and thus deconstructive hermeneutics has to concede a reconstructive process. Further, I am arguing that Caputo’s ‘radical hermeneutics’ is too reductionist to keep any meaning for the hermeneutic enterprise to aspire to. I am contending, rather, that it is resolute existence that theology aspires to as it is a move beyond ‘undecidability’. (shrink)

I suggest in this article that there are several aspects of the Lacanian Real that so-called Lacanian literature has not adequately addressed, or barely did so. In this pursuit, I present a deconstructing reading of a number of Lacanian texts. My deconstructive reading suggests that three key features characterize the literature on the Real. First, there always is resistance that is involved in thinking about, and in experiencing the effects of, the Real. Second, the Real is most characteristically thought of (...) in negative terms. Third, the Real is more or less thought of as a limit that cannot be transgressed. A deconstruction of these features leads to two arguments. First, I propose that the deployment of the Real as khôra within a discourse is an originary performativity which speaks of retroactively positing of a have-always-been-there Real. Second, I argue that the Real is the impossible–possible event which is at the heart of ‘saying the Real’. The deconstruction thus leads to a reconfiguration of the Real as a ‘ saying the Real ’ qua event in the discourse. (shrink)

One of the more recalcitrant issues in the philosophy of time concerns the question of temporal asymmetry. Some theorists, many of them, like Einstein, physicists, believe that time is fundamentally reversible. According to this view, the physical universe is indifferent to the direction of time; consequently, something like an arrow of time is held to be a human subjective imposition on an otherwise temporally isotropic world. Another position, held by Alfred North Whitehead and contemporary process philosophers, maintains that temporal asymmetry (...) is a primitive condition of the universe, and that therefore even the most basic physical processes, such as those occurring at the subatomic level, display a distinct temporal direction. Finally, the philosopher of time J.T. Fraser (1978) claims that temporal asymmetry is an emergent feature of the universe, appearing for the first time with biogenesis. According to Fraser, with the emergence of life comes a present, or “now”, a temporal dimension whose absence in more primitive levels of cosmic evolution prohibits the attribution of an arrow of time to any pre-biotic entity. (shrink)

This paper examines the overwhelming desire of transnational adoptees to establish a connection with their origins in order to both come to terms with the past and develop an understanding of their identity. It considers the ethical ramifications of the commodification of human bodies. It is suggested that the idea of displacement is most helpful in approaching questions of transnational adoption. In this way, we can look at transnational adoption as a 'beginning' - one that disappears into the present moment, (...) becoming the constitutive reality underlying Derrida's concern with displacement - rather than its origin. For, what does the quest for a return to the point of origin entail? Transnational adoptees, when they embark on the journey of reclaiming their past, of coming to terms with their sense of loss, realise that there is no simple comfort in returning - that they are inevitably caught in the two worlds in which they co-exist. It is through this recognition of the traces that are contained in them, through this displacement, that they are able to negotiate identity. (shrink)

. Values in the cultural timescapes of science. Cultural Values: Vol. 2, No. 2-3, pp. 385-402.

_Examines how violence has been conceptually and rhetorically put to use in continental social theory._.

Media are surely central to Western societies of the past several centuries and to the emerging global societies of the contemporary era and the future. There is a thickening, an intensification and an increasing complexity to the use of information machines, technologies that are necessary in the production, reproduction, storing and distribution of texts, images and sounds, the constituent elements of culture. The phenomenon has been termed a “media ecology,” adding a new layer to the ecologies of animal, vegetable and (...) mineral. It behooves anyone engaged in critical discourse to take serious account of media. I argue they offer a key to understanding the process of globalization in relation to a new configuration of interaction between humans and machines. (shrink)

Rajesh Sampath ABSTRACT: This paper begins with several opening passages from the most esoteric writings in Hinduism’s vast, ancient religious-philosophical heritage, namely the Upanishads. The aim is to reveal certain essential connections between the primordial relation between self and sacrifice while exploring uncanny paradoxes of eternity and time, immortals and mortals and their secret linkages. ….

Drawing on the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, this paper describes the role of habit in the cycle of preconfiguration andreconfigurion of place in architectural practice, especially in the design of homes—les habitations—in which habit and inhabitation intertwine. In this paper, Proust’s novel provides the primary examples of the intertwining of habit and inhabitation. Proust shows us that an artist (or architect) acquires a relation to a prefigured place into which she or he is already thrown and can only reshape that world (...) from the inside out, not the top down. The paper provides an overview of the influence of place in Proust’s novel, then relates these examples to Merleau-Ponty’s reflections on place, along the way considering Merleau-Ponty’s brief mentions of architecture and whether we can justifiably apply his painting-based aesthetics to architecture. Finally, the paper suggests what this might mean for architectural design practice, especially for new digital tools that use gesture to better reflect an embodied relation to place.The program of the paper is to trace the origin of “program”—in its architectural sense of the use-structure of a building and its mediation by habits and inhabitation in the design process. The design process—right down to whether or not architects use pens and pencils or digital tools—must come up for revision if phenomenological evidence (both literary and philosophical) is truly to transform the practice. (shrink)

Using the 2010 film Into Eternity as a springboard for thought, this article considers how archaeologies of the future might help us make sense of how to seek commonality and take care across vast temporal scales. The film, about a nuclear waste repository in Finland, addresses the impossibility of communicating across millennia. In thinking with this film, we engage with recent responses to the post-human call, arguing that they are inadequate in dealing with the new questions that are asked by (...) post-human thought. Instead, we attempt to engage the work of Spinoza and Sloterdijk in rethinking the human as a strategic position or point of purchase amongst the shared materiality of present and future worlds. We offer the concepts of the materially affective and atmosphere in order to identify points of connection, drawing on moments in Into Eternity to work through these arguments in a tentative repositioning of the human as a site of concern. (shrink)

Engages the work and career of a central figure in contemporary philosophy. Hugh J. Silverman was an inspiring scholar and teacher, known for his work engaging and shaping phenomenology, hermeneutics, psychoanalysis, structuralism, poststructuralism, and deconstruction. As Professor of Philosophy and Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies at Stony Brook University, State University of New York, Silverman’s work was marked by “the between,” a concept he developed to think the postmodern in the space between philosophy and non-philosophy. In this volume, leading scholars (...) explore and extend Silverman’s philosophical contributions, from reflections on the notions of care, time, and responsibility, to presentations of the practices and possibilities of deconstruction itself. They provide an assessment of Silverman’s life and work at the intersection of philosophy, ethics, and politics. (shrink)

Should a debate of the choice between metaphorical investigation and epistemological realism in organizational research be prioritized as Willy McCourt called for in Organization Studies? We argue here against doing any such thing — a ‘realism’ debate in organizational theory would merely be a ‘red herring’. Theoretical investigation from Ricoeur to Derrida has liberated us from the need to re-visit the theme, but examination of Gareth Morgan's intellectual development, as begun by McCourt, is of interest because it reveals two very (...) different ‘realisms’. What is of interest about ‘realism’ is not an eitherlor of either ‘realism’ or ‘constructivism’, but a polyphony of the many voices of research. (shrink)

This thesis discusses the potential consequences of applying the philosophy of Mark C. Taylor to the field of Human-Computer Interaction. The first part of the thesis comprises a study focusing on two discursive trends in contemporary HCI, materiality and the self, and how these discourses describe interaction. Through a qualitative, inductive content analysis of 171 HCI research articles, a number of themes are identified in the literature and, it is argued, construct a dominant perspective of materiality, the self, and interaction. (...) Examples that differ from the dominant discourse are also discussed as alternative perspectives for each of the three focal areas. The second part of the thesis comprises an analysis of Mark C. Taylor’s philosophical project which enables a number of philosophical positions on materiality, the self, and interaction to be identified. These positions are suggested to be variations and rereadings of themes found in Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy. These variations emerge as Taylor approaches Nietzsche through poststructuralism and complexity theory, and it is argued that the apparent heterogeneity of Taylor’s project can be understood as a more coherent position when interpreted in relation to Nietzsche’s philosophy. Based on the findings of the two literature studies, the thesis then discusses the possible consequences for HCI, if Taylor’s philosophy were to be applied as a theoretical framework. The thesis argues that Taylor’s philosophy describes the interaction between humans and computers as an existential process, which contrasts with the dominant HCI discourse; that this view can be related to and provide a theoretical foundation for the alternative discourses in HCI; and that it can contribute to developing HCI. (shrink)