Deconstructing Martial Arts analyses familiar issues and debates that arise in scholarly, practitioner and popular cultural discussions and treatments of martial arts and argues that martial arts are dynamic and variable constructs whose meanings and values regularly shift, mutate and transform, depending on the context. It argues that deconstructing martial arts is an invaluable approach to both the scholarly study of martial arts in culture and society and also to wider understandings of what and why martial arts are. Placing martial (...) arts in relation to core questions and concerns of media and cultural studies around identity, value, orientalism, and embodiment, Deconstructing Martial Arts introduces and elaborates deconstruction as a rewarding method of cultural studies. (shrink)

This article explores Heidegger's later philosophy with regard to the problem of a philosophical interpretation of religious language. In what follows, I will draw upon the work of Wittgenstein and refer to the cosmological argument to read Heidegger in terms of a post-theistic understanding of religious language that avoids the shortcomings of both theistic realism and non-cognitivism. At the same time, I am proposing a new interpretation of Heidegger's later philosophy against this background. I will show that, in spite of (...) its hermeticism, Heidegger's later philosophy has a specific relevance to philosophy of religion that still needs to be explored. (shrink)

Heidegger’s ‘serious idealism’ aims at capturing the realist impulses of our natural consciousness whilst avoiding a collapse into metaphysical realism. This idealism is best conceived as a form of transcendental empiricism. But we need to distinguish two varieties of transcendental empiricism, corresponding to Heidegger’s early and later work. The latter, transcendental empiricism2, is superior. Here, Heidegger’s ontology of gift gives full, conceptual shape to the two-way dependency between man and world characteristic of transcendental empiricism as a whole. In exemplary forms (...) of inspired experience, marked by the 'animation' of our conceptually-structured natural powers, things call on us in a speech that is their very own. This moves us decisively beyond not only early Heidegger’s transcendental empiricism1 but also the picture of experience presented in McDowell’s Mind and World. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger’s preparation of the question of human existence was the focus of his seminal work Being and Time, first published in 1927. This paper refers to Heidegger’s phenomenological work through Heidegger’s colleague and friend Hans-Georg Gadamer to focus on how Heidegger prepares the question of Being and the problem of language in his later work. In his conversation with the Japanese scholar professor Tezuka, the meaning of language in the west appears to restrict an understanding of Being by conceptualising (...) it ad infinitum. To the Japanese the simple term “what is” appears to be closer to Being because it does not attempt to conceptualise it. Therefore, Heidegger, Gadamer and Tezuka’s discussion about ontology concludes that language does get in the way of understanding Being. (shrink)

Metamorphosis is a sudden change, a ‘becoming-other’ in life or in philosophical perspective. A revelatory event initiates in a double manner the move from Heidegger's futile search for a transcendental IT that delivers perceptible beings to the confident positing of Deleuze's transcendental empiricism, suffused with the IF of incorporeal sense. In the process Deleuze dramatically enacts his personal connection between sense (Sinn) and being (Sein).

ABSTRACT In this essay, I shall discuss Gadamer’s interpretation of Celan’s dialogical poetry in his essay “Wer bin Ich und wer bist Du?” (“Who am I and Who are You?”). One may argue that this is Gadamer’s articulation of the problem of the self-other relationship. To understand the question of self and other, it is first of all necessary to return to the poetic word from which the question arises. Speaking is, for Gadamer, the most profoundly self-forgetful action, because when (...) one speaks, one is so deeply “within the word” that one is not turned toward the word but, rather, to what one wants to say with the word. For hermeneutics, interpreting means putting oneself on the task of the poetic text. The proximity between poetizing and interpreting emerges, also in its specificity concerning the proximity between poetizing and thinking. Such a proximity, in turn, divides itself into two extremes: the word that sublates itself, and the word that stands for itself. It is hence the uncertain fullness of language, where, unsurprisingly, both poetizing and interpreting come into themselves, which constitutes the link between the one and the other. Therefore, the interpreted word, intertwined with the poetic word does not replace what it indicates, but merely points beyond itself, to what is other than itself. Both pursue a meaning that points toward an open realm. (shrink)

This article is an attempt to interpret Yuk Hui’s ambitious and promising project of cosmotechnics and technodiversity as a kind of “critical synthesis” of the philosophies of technology of Martin...

In his protracted study of Nietzsche’s philosophy, which extended from the mid-1930s to the early 1950s, Heidegger considered Nietzsche’s political positions to be the inevitable consequence of modern metaphysics. The implication of his argument is that Nietzsche’s “overman” and the “last man,” though ideologically differentiated, are both captured by modern metaphysics in its orientation towards subjectivism and globalism. Heidegger classified Nietzsche’s politics under the headings of Machiavelli and Roman Culture, technique and imperium. These terms illustrate how the overman, who represents (...) subjectivism at its zenith, displaces the weaker subjectivism of the last man, who, nevertheless, also seeks dominion over the earth. This essay presents an analytic description of Heidegger’s definition of Nietzsche’s politics and vindicates its accuracy, along with his characterization of Nietzsche’s philosophy as fundamentally technological. (shrink)

This paper sets out an account of hermeneutics as essentially ‘topological’ in character at the same time as it also argues that hermeneutics has a key role to play in making clear the nature of the topological. At the centre of the argument is the idea that place and understanding are intimately connected, that this is what determines the interconnection between topology and hermeneutics, and that this also implies an intimate belonging-together of place and thinking, of place and experience, of (...) place and the very possibility of appearance, of presence, of being. (shrink)

The book is an attempt to explore the affinities between contemporary critical theories and modernist and postmodernist American poetry. The analysis focuses on poststructuralist theories, notorious for their tendency to destabilize generic boundaries between literary, philosophical and critical discourses. The main argument and the structure of the book derive from Jacques Derrida’s essay “Che cos’è la poesia” [What is poetry?] in which the philosopher postulates the impossibility of defining poetry by comparing a poem to a hedgehog – prickly, solitary, untamed, (...) fragile and protective, rolling itself up into a ball at the first sign of danger or when in the hands of the reader-intruder. The metaphor captures thus the fragility of the relationship between poetry and the world. The book examines this relationship as exemplified by the erinaceous poetics of high modernists and their postmodernist followers In the study I employ also other oststructuralist theories, such as the notion of the text and the pleasure of the text formulated by Roland Barthes, the heories of metaphor as seen by Paul Ricoeur or Paul de Man, and gender-sensitive theories of Helene Cixous and Luce Irigaray. (shrink)

Despite the central role that the concept of God played in Kitarō Nishida's philosophy—and more broadly, within the Kyoto School which formed around Nishida—Anglophone studies of the religious philosophy of modern Japan have not seriously considered the nature and role of God in Nishida's thought. Indeed, relevant Anglophone studies even strongly suggest that where the concept of God does appear in Nishida's writings, such a concept is to be dismissed as a 'subjective fiction', a 'penultimate designation', or a peripheral Western (...) intrusion with no genuine relationship to the core of Nishida's thought. However, a careful study of Nishida's own writings reveals that for Nishida, in his own words, God is 'that which is indispensable and decisive'. For the first time in English, this present study reveals Nishida's view of God, especially examining Nishida's debt to the theologian Karl Barth and Christianity. (shrink)

This article argues that late Heidegger’s analyses of the Fourfold can be used as a methodological starting point for discourse analyses. It argues that the Fourfold points out elements or foundations of discursive structures that orient us to differing, and to some extent opposing, directions that are at the same time mutually interdependent. A discursive analysis of how the Fourfold is at play in prevailing discursive exchanges and structures will thus be a matter of situating ourselves in a conceptual space (...) beyond existing practices and structures, from which we get a picture of their inadequacies. As such, the article contributes to a critical understanding of discourse analysis. It will be argued that through understanding the Fourfold, we can better understand the problems with various aspects of ‘measuring’, which are founded upon the (concealed) instability of elements of the Fourfold – which shapes practical discursive engagements. By foregrounding this structural instability we can approach it critically. I demonstrate how this approach might be used in an analysis of a debate between Greta Thunberg and Bjørn Lomborg. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to explore the connection between moods and meteors or atmospheric phenomena in Heidegger’s thinking. The idea of the weather as something affecting our emotional state is not new but goes all the way back to Homer. However, the ontological basis of this connection is missing. In this paper, I argue that Heidegger provides exactly such an ontological account of moods and meteors not as two separate spheres but as a common atmosphere of attuned elementality—a (...) dynamic interface where beings bend into being. Being can no longer be understood solely as that which determines beings qua beings but beings inform/transform being as well. (shrink)

This essay provides an overview of the ways in which contemporary philosophers have tried to make sense of ineffability as encountered in aesthetic contexts. Section 1 sets up the problem of aesthetic ineffability by putting it into historical perspective. Section 2 specifies the kinds of questions that may be raised with regard to aesthetic ineffability, as well as the kinds of answer each one of those questions would require. Section 3 investigates arguments that seek to locate aesthetic ineffability within the (...) object of aesthetic experiences, i.e. within aesthetic content. Section 4 discusses arguments that seek to locate aesthetic ineffability within the subject of aesthetic experience. (shrink)

The “Home” is ideologically understood as a place of safety and refuge. Such an account cloaks violence against women. The voices of battered women can disrupt that dominant construction of the space of the home, a construction typified by the work of Gaston Bachelard. The space that Bachelard presupposes and theorizes as given is in fact being-produced, cleaned, and organized by people who themselves may not find in it any solace or respite.

In 1929, doubtless to the discomfort of his logical positivist host Moritz Schlick, Wittgenstein remarked, ‘To be sure, I can understand what Heidegger means by Being and Angst’. I return to what Heidegger meant and Wittgenstein could understand later. I begin with that remark because it has had an instructive career. When the passage which it prefaced was first published in 1965, the editors left it out—presumably to protect a hero of ‘analytic’ philosophy from being compromised by an expression of (...) sympathy for the arch-fiend of ‘continental’ philosophy. It was as if a diary of Churchill's had been discovered containing admiring references to Hitler. This was the period, after all, when Heidegger was, as Michael Dummett recalls, a ‘joke’ among Oxford philosophers, the paradigm of the sort of metaphysical nonsense Wittgenstein had dedicated himself to exposing. (shrink)

This paper sympathetically explores Daoism's relevance to environmental philosophy and to the aspiration of people to live in a manner convergent with nature. After discussing the Daoist understanding of nature and the dao (Way), the focus turns to the implications of these notions for our relationship to nature. The popular idea that Daoism encourages a return to a way of life is rejected. Instead, it is shown that the Daoist proposal is one of living more than people generally do in (...) the modern, technological world, and of allowing other beings to do so as well. These themes are clarified in a final section, inspired by some Daoist remarks, devoted to the relationship of human beings with animals. (shrink)

RésuméDans cet article, j'analyse deux approches du phénomène du geste, tel qu'il est constitué par l'incarnation, l'intersubjectivité, l'affectivité et le langage : tandis que Martin Heidegger affirme que le mouvement corporel humain dans son ensemble doit être compris comme geste par opposition au mouvement spatial des choses, Vilém Flusser intègre sous cette notion une multitude de pratiques et d'activités humaines que le sens commun hésite à appeler gestes. Le dilemme de la phénoménologie du geste consiste dans cette tension entre la (...) concrétude plurielle des apparences gestuelles et la tentation irrépressible d'identifier une couche unitaire qui leur permettrait de tenir ensemble. (shrink)

What will philosophy of technology be as its practitioners depart from the cross- roads of the ideas of Don Ihde and Bernard Stiegler? Their two lines of thought confront and cross each other, giving rise to different ways of understanding technologies. Rather than following one or the other of these directions, I propose an Erörterung of such crossroads. As Heidegger’s commentary on Georg Trakl’s poetry insists, Erörterung means, first, “to point out the proper place or site of something to situate (...) it,” and, second, “to heed that place or site ”. This Erörterung has to be conducted at multiple times, on multiple levels, as each of them hermeneutically identifies its own site. I proceed first through an Erörterung of the crossroads of the thinking of technology after Ihde and Stiegler, and second through an Erörterung of the Ort or the site of the first Erörterung, where the Ort for Heidegger is the land of the evening, the Occident [Abendland], in the throes of globalization, or more precisely Americanisation, a form of disorientation, that obscures the unconcealment of the essence of the human-technology relationship central to Heidegger. In the third part, I propose that the way to integrate and extend Heidegger, Ihde, and Stiegler is to acknowledge the importance of historical, cultural, and geopolitical difference in the interrelationship between the cosmos, morality, and technical activities, what I call cosmotechnics. (shrink)

Violence is spoken of in several senses but its most basic definition, as a force exerted by one thing on another, harbors serious problems, especially when it comes to a consideration of its source or cause. We begin this article by identifying some of the aporias of violence with reference to philosophical and religious discourses and then we go on to analyze how violence problematizes concepts of law and justice in world historical contexts. We examine several traditions including Indo-European mythology, (...) as well as Hindu, Taoist, and ancient Greek philosophy, before addressing the concept of violence in modern thought, as a revision of Christianity. We conclude with some discussion of epistemological violence and its critics. (shrink)

Hans Blumenberg is celebrated for demonstrating that metaphors have had a more foundational influence than concepts on European intellectual history. Many acknowledge that his insights might have achieved even greater impact if he had articulated a more explicit theory of metaphor. In 1960 Blumenberg discusses the historical formation of metaphors that have given rise to meaningful discourses on metaphysical abstractions, like God, existence, or Being, but he does not develop a general model of metaphoric language, and his work rarely engages (...) with other contemporary theories of metaphor. During Blumenberg’s lifetime, French and German postwar philosophers rarely cited one another. Yet French hermeneutics, and the work of philosopher Paul Ricoeur in particular, may have strongly influenced Blumenberg’s research group, Poetik und Hermeneutik. This paper is an attempt to recuperate intellectual affinities between Blumenberg and Ricoeur, in order to demonstrate that Ricoeur’s claims about metaphor provide the theoretical background for a fuller appreciation of Blumenberg’s metaphor analyses. (shrink)

Heidegger and East-Asian thought have traditionally been strongly correlated. However, although still largely unrecognized, significant differences between the political and metaphysical stance of Heidegger and his perceived counterparts in East-Asia most certainly exist. One of the most dramatic discontinuities between East-Asian thought and Heidegger is revealed through an investigation of Kitarō Nishida’s own vigorous criticism of Heidegger. Ironically, more than one study of Heidegger and East-Asian thought has submitted that Nishida is that representative of East-Asian thought whose philosophy most closely (...) resembles Heideggerian thought. In words that then and now resound discordantly within the enshrined, established view of Heidegger’s relationship to East-Asian thought, Nishida stated uninhibitedly his own view of Heidegger in the noteworthy statement: “Heidegger is not worth your time… He…does not recognize that which is indispensible and decisive, namely, God.” This present study lays out for the first time in English, the significant differences between the metaphysical and political stances of Nishida and Heidegger, Nishida’s own critique of Heidegger, and Heidegger’s own rather dismal assessment of non-Western philosophy, all of which demonstrate a remarkable, hitherto unrecognized discontinuity between Heidegger and East-Asian thought. (shrink)

Given that Nick Land is one of the central influences on certain strands of accelerationism, xenofeminism, and inhumanism, it is important to understand how he himself first developed and deployed the concepts of acceleration, the feminine, and the inhuman, which others would go on to appropriate for their own purposes. This article will trace the four feminine figures throughout Land's philosophical trajectory, which he sees as agents for accelerating the transcendental critique of both anthropocentrism and phallocentrism: the slave turned lesbian; (...) the sister; the sexborg; and the Sphinx. Having elucidated the importance of these figures for Land's thought, this article will conclude by drawing upon the younger Land's feminist resources to immanently critique the disappearance of women from his more recent neoreactionary philosophy in favor of concessions to patriarchal traditionalists. (shrink)

Higher education institutions are major concentrations of political, social, economic, intellectual and communicative resources. They reach freely across populations and cultures and connect to government, professions, industry and the arts. The neoliberal logic of markets has entered the realm of education. This leads to discourse on the benefits of education being positioned almost exclusively in terms of their effect on income. The perspective taken in the paper is the development of a happiness motive that asks education to challenge what it (...) is to be a member of society: What moral and ontological stance one will seek to take in developing one’s future? The satisfied student perpetuates the current lifeworld in which they find themselves, seeking to improve the quality of the services provided. It is proposed that an overly emphasised desire satisfaction culture inhibits the edifying mission of universities. This is not to argue against high-quality service provision but to differentiate it from the edifying role of personal challenge, determination and social responsibility, conceptualised here as profound happiness or contentment, and the university’s role in its development. It calls for a different and more refreshing approach to higher education. (shrink)

This article considers martial corporeality in light of the revolution in military affairs and the transformation of strategic discourse wrought by the confluence of the digital and molecular revolutions whose ontology is that of code. It deconstructs contemporary strategic desires to make the military body intelligence incarnate through mastery of code. That desire is an ancient one. The article therefore proceeds by taking military strategic discourse’s invocation of Athena seriously, and re-reads the myth of Athena in terms of a primordial (...) war of the sign to master the undecidablity of the sign. Conflict over the sign’s un-masterable power of engendering is typically played out in sexualized terms. The will to martial corporeality as intelligence incarnate is characterized as a modern replay of this war As military embodiment pursues the intelligence incarnate offered by the information and molecular revolutions, power over life becomes allied with power over death in a complex convergence of sovereign geopolitics with a global biopolitics gone digital. Populated by martial bodies that have long been cyborgs, the digital way of war witnesses the emergence of a libidinality in thrall to Athena-the-wise as digital dominatrix. (shrink)

Noble rightly emphasizes that some modern evolutionary biologists´ neglect of agency is consequential with regard to our understanding of the natural world and real-world ecological developments. I elaborate on biosemiotic ideas on semiotic agency and explain how organisms can change the environment by way of semiotic causation. I also comment on the human language’s role in human Umwelten, and how our linguistically mediated reality can be self-deceptive – as if we lived in a bubble of our own making. Finally, I (...) indicate how we can make the Umwelt bubble of the Modern Synthesis burst. (shrink)

This article revises Foucault's account of biopolitics in the light of the impact of the molecular and digital revolutions on `the politics of life itself'. The confluence of the molecular and digital revolutions informationalizes life, providing an account of what it is to be a living thing in terms of complex adaptive and continuously emergent, informationally constituted, systems. Also revisiting Foucault's The Order of Things and its interrogation of the modern analytics of finitude, the article argues that our contemporary politics (...) of life is therefore distinguished by the quasi-transcendentals that now distinguish informationalized life: circulation, connectivity and complexity. Here, too, the article argues, the figure of Man, which once united the quasi-transcendentals of life, labour and language, is replaced by the contingency that now unites circulation, connectivity and complexity. Observing that a life of continuous emergence is also one in which production is continuously allied with destruction, such a life is lived as the continuous emergency of its own emergence. This account of contemporary biopolitics, together with its emergency of emergence, contrasts, in particular, with that offered by Agamben in his appropriation of Schmitt. (shrink)

Study is recently re-invoked as an alternative educational formation to disrupt the learning trap and trope. This paper calibrates study and learning as two hermeneutic principles and correlates them with seeing, hearing, and observing as three onto-epistemic modes that respectively underpin Greco-Christian, Rabbinic, and ancient Chinese exegetical traditions. Linking study and learning with the hermeneutic issues of language, text, meaning, and reality, my calibration unfolds in four steps. First, I introduce an epistemic aporia encountered in interpreting some Chinese educational “wind” (...) texts, exposing our naturalized reasoning of learning along a representational enclosure. Second, turning to Susan Handelman’s writing, I trace this learning-as-representation enclosure as being conditioned upon the Greco-Christian exegetical mode of seeing, meanwhile correlating study back with the Rabbinic hearing hermeneutic. Third, I move on to explicate an onto-cosmological Yijing observing, proffering a study hermeneutic as a movement of observing, following, and attuning to wendao, literally put, “a crisscrossing pattern that turns with dao.” Finally, I re-observe and study the crisscrossing Chinese educational “wind” texts, evoking a Chinese “wind-teaching” sensibility so far rarely discerned through representational thinking and learning. (shrink)

Both the commonsensical and leading theoretical accounts of entrepreneurship, democracy, and solidarity fail to describe adequately entrepreneurial, democratic, and solidarity?building practices. These accounts are inadequate because they assume a faulty description of human being. In this article we develop an interpretation of entrepreneurship, democratic action, and solidarity?building that relies on understanding human beings as neither primarily thinking nor desiring but as skillful beings. Western human beings are at their best when they are engaged in producing large?scale cultural or historical changes (...) in the way people and things are dealt with. The three domains of human activity where these historical changes are most clearly accomplished are entrepreneurship, democratic action, and solidarity. Section I, guided by a roughly Kuhnian notion of holding on to an anomaly until it re?gestalts the way we see things, offers a general interpretation of how skillful human beings open up new worlds by changing their shared background practices in three ways: reconfiguring, which makes a marginal practice central; cross?appropriation, in which one domain of practices takes over useful practices from another domain; and articulating, whereby dispersed or confused practices are brought into clearer focus. An entrepreneur creates a product which reconfigures the practices. This interpretation of entrepreneurial skills is contrasted with current accounts that overlook ehtrepreneurship to concentrate on instrumental or theoretical models of business activities. Section II claims that the most exemplary kind of political action in a liberal democracy is that of political action groups. Such groups produce a change in a nation's background practices through a kind of speaking that leads to massive cross?appropriation. We describe Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) and suggest that it both satisfies the requirements for genuine democratic action that we have established in our examination of other views and lacks their disadvantages. We conclude that the relatively detached action suggested by current theories of liberal democracy fail to do justice to democratic practice. The final section argues that those who claim that a single highest value or procedure provides a source of solidarity that satisfies all the competing interests in a multi?cultural nation always arrive at a solidarity that is too thin to provide for the serious sort of commitments that one would be willing to die for. We propose that solidarity in multi?cultural states implies commitment to a set of thick values, and that when one realizes that these thick values construct one's identity one is willing to die for them. While political action concerns itself with ordering values, solidarity involves the cultivation of them in such a way that no ordering of them matters. But solidarity is not to be understood as a subjective feeling. It is rather the experience of a group identity, a ?we?, that sees things and deals with things in terms of shared concerns. This ?we? comes to recognize itself when the actions it engages in transform it. The paradigmatic action that transforms such a ?we? occurs when a culture figure articulates some forgotten concern or value. As in the cases of entrepreneurship and democratic action, a culture figure cultivates solidarity by changing the background practices in a historical manner. It is concluded that traditional theoretical accounts, by overlooking the primacy of involved skillful activities and the importance of background change, fail to capture the source, the function, and the point of entrepreneurship, liberal democracy, and solidarity. (shrink)

Philosophy prides itself on beginning with Socrates’s death: scandalous with regard to Socrates’s virtue and wisdom, as well as his age, this death is transfigured into an entry into truth. One can...

This paper examines how Heidegger's view that language is poetry might provide a helpful way of understanding the nature of religious language. Poetry, according to Heidegger, is language in its purest form, in that it both reveals Being, whilst also showing the difference between word and thing. In poetry, Heidegger suggests, we come closest to the essence of language itself and encounter its strangeness and impermeability, and its revelatory character. What would be the implications for viewing religious language in this (...) way? Through examining Heidegger's view that poetry is the purest form of language, I suggest that it would also be possible to view religious language as poetry in this way, in that it also shows the transcendence of what cannot be brought to presence in language, except as concealed. Such a view of religious language does not regard it as a problematic type of language, deserving special treatment, but rather suggests that in religious language the inarticulable relationship between word and world is revealed. (shrink)

. Several contemporary writers have found certain correlations between Taoism and modern philosophy of science to be particularly noteworthy because of their usefulness for interpreting world views, implicit or explicit, in each. However, the recent project in science and epistemology–the work of Michael Polanyi–which is probably most fruitfully resonant with Taoism has not yet been explored in that connection. The purpose of the present article is to begin that exploration. The essay provides a preliminary sketch of certain key moments in (...) Polanyi's thought and then turns attention to the Taoist themes of Tao, wu‐wei, and tz'u as these illuminate and are illuminated by the Polanyian post‐critical epistemology. (shrink)

Stemming from a general study of rhythm in the work of Gilles Deleuze, we propose a distribution of this concept throughout three levels: a topic level, in which we place rhythm between chaos and measure; a dynamic level, in which we analyse the formation of rhythm towards its stabilisation as a spatio-temporal dynamism; and an unfolding, in which these dynamisms take on the form of rhythmic machines applied in music (refrain), in painting (sensation) and in cinema (montage and time crystals). (...) In this last phase, the rhythmic devices of various arts lead to a genesis of time. We are thus driven to think and elaborate on the link between these two concepts, rhythm and time, in the writings of Deleuze. Bearing this purpose in mind, we turn to the schema of the three syntheses of time in Difference and Repetition. These syntheses show how time emerges from different ways of understanding repetition, in the place of which rhythm will then appear. We will compare this schema with the argument articulated by Deleuze in Logic of Sensation regarding rhythm in its pictorial form. This comparison will enable us to deduce that both concepts follow a parallel path arising from the same series of processes: vibration, coupling, resonance and forced movement. We will conclude that the schema proposed in Difference and Repetition and its aesthetic purpose delineate the ways in which rhythms unfold creatively. These three syntheses of rhythm are implicated in artistic processes. (shrink)

In this article, I elucidate the meaning of the act of philosophizing as a research activity in academia. My main thesis is that, as academic philosophers, we need to change our existing relation to thinking in academia, which requires a radical re-evaluation of the ēthos, or, the dwelling-place of philosophy. Drawing on Martin Heidegger’s thought, I offer a place-based thinking, taking up the issue of being-in-academia as part of the question of dwelling. First, I explore the technological nature of being-in-academia (...) departing from Heidegger’s account of scientific research as ‘constant activity’. After identifying the ontological character of our situation in academia as captivation in the world, I bring up the matter of overcoming modern academia, discussing the possibility of orienting ourselves at the limits of education. I argue that reassessing our utilitarian relation to world and language, and recognizing the meontological dimension of thinking, is key for being able to de-structure academia and make room for ‘ontological freedom’. I conclude that the emergence of a new dwelling-place requires a poietic process of place-making at the limits of academia. (shrink)

In this paper, I explicate Ueda Shizuteru’s philosophy of the twofold being-in-the-world and the ethics he draws from it. Ueda provides an original reading of Nishida’s concept of pure experience and develops it together with an understanding of Nishida’s concept of place by combining it with the phenomenological notion of the horizon. This leads him to understand the world, or place wherein we are, as twofold, implying the semantic space or network of meanings within it, on the one hand, and, (...) on the other hand, the boundless or undetermined open which envelops the former as its other. Our being as being-in-the-world is thus also twofold in implying both sides of the horizon, inside and outside, whereby we are ontologically grounded but at the same time without ground in being suspended by the semantic emptiness and ontological nothingness lying beyond. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with the turning that occurs within the work of Martin Heidegger. In particular it seeks to reveal it as a turning that takes place within the notion of history as it is ela...

Henceforth "to transform" should mean "to change the sense of sense."The field of the entity … is structured according to the diverse—genetic and structural—possibilities of the trace.The first article in the first issue of Philosophy and Rhetoric is "The Rhetorical Situation," Lloyd Bitzer's critical exegesis on "the nature of those contexts in which speakers or writers create rhetorical discourse". Bitzer contends that the rhetor produces "the rhetorical text" when a "real" or "natural" —"objective and publicly observable" —situation "calls the discourse (...) into existence". That was 1968. Five volumes later, as you know, Richard E. Vatz flips the causal relation, maintaining instead that... (shrink)

In this article, Samuel D. Rocha uses Martin Heidegger’s later writings to compose a philosophical meditation on the phenomenology of education. Three key distinctions emerge: the difference between philosophy and philosophers, being and meaning, and education and the Gospel of Schoolvation.

In Heidegger’s last seminar, which was in Zähringen in 1973, he introduces what he called a “phenomenology of the inconspicuous”. Despite scholars’ occasional references to this “approach” over the last 40 years, this approach of Heidegger’s has gone largely under investigated in secondary literature. This article introduces three different, although not necessarily conflicting ways in which these sparse references to inconspicuousness can be interpreted: The a priori of appearance can never be brought to manifestation, and the unscheinbar is interwoven with (...) the scheinbar as an active characteristic or form of “hiddenness”, therefore making inconspicuousness inherent within all phenomenology. Or, there is now a particular step or reduction within phenomenology that involves one’s being attuned to the various modes of potential hiddenness, of which “inconspicuousness” is a particular character trait. Or there are particular, unique, and specific phenomena that give themselves “inconspicuously,” and there is also thus a corresponding, particular phenomenology in which one must engage in order to gain some kind of access to these specific things’ phenomenal strata. This paper introduces Heidegger’s “phenomenology of the inconspicuous” most especially in his last seminar in Zähringen in 1973, engages related references to unscheinbar in his 1942/1943 Seminar on Parmenides, and then puts forward an interpretation of what these somewhat ambiguous references could mean when contextualized according to Heidegger’s overall interests. This essay brings these references to light, and puts forward a proposal as to what kind of phenomenology Heidegger was–somewhat inconspicuously–referring. (shrink)

There is an obvious paradox in any attempt to map the topography of Paradise, for Paradise, theologians assure us, is outside of space as well as time. Yet mapping Paradise is what Dante's poem, the Paradiso, attempts to do. For the two preceding realms of the afterlife, hell and purgatory, Dante provides numerous finely articulated descriptions of rigorously ordered regions. And again for Paradise, the variegated states of the souls making up the spiritual order of the realm are expressed very (...) precisely by a topographical scheme, one in this case based on Ptolemy's system of the heavens. The seven planetary spheres are followed by the sphere of the fixed stars and the primum mobile, the whole finally bordering on the completely nonspatial heaven of the Empyrean. But this last “sphere” alone is Paradise in the full and strict sense. As Dante has Beatrice explain in canto 4.28–48, the whole poem attempts to describe this totally nonspatial order in terms of the array of the nine physical heavens as metaphorical correlatives for the successive degrees of beatitude experienced by the souls “in” the Empyrean. Paradise in this sense—as the Empyrean—is thus utopic, if any place is: it is literally “no place” at all. (shrink)

This paper explores a possibility of atheoretical feminist thinking. Anarchic thinking is a way of thinking which is neither based on nor yields one account of truth or reality. Its particular value to feminists is its affirmation of multiple voices, ways of being and possibilities for action.

In this essay I offer an interpretative reading of the first chapter in the two canonical works, the Zhuang-zi and the Lao-zi, and argue that there is an inner connection between the first chapters of the two books. My presupposition is that what Zhuang-zi has argued in "Xiao Yao You" is the theme of the relativity of the position of the human world, which is in accord with the mystery of Dao presented at the beginning of the Lao-zi. Therefore, there (...) are two opposite directions running in the Daoist philosophy in Lao-zi and Zhuang-zi: the first one is from this world (worlds) to Dao; the second one is from Dao to the worlds. While the first emphasizes the relativity of the point of views of the worldly beings, the second shows the mystery of Dao. This can be seen as a hermeneutical circle. (shrink)

In this paper Russian Symbolist philosophy is represented primarily by Viacheslav Ivanov (1866--1949), but its conclusions are intended to be valid for other philosophers we classify as Symbolist, including Nikolai Berdiaev and S. L. Frank. It is posited that, by comparing Ivanov''s cosmology, aesthetics, and anthropology to those of Martin Heidegger, one can reconceive of Symbolist philosophy as an existential hermeneutic. This, it is claimed, can help to identify a common basis among the Symbolist philosophers, and also to place Russian (...) thought in the context of modern European philosophy and vice versa. (shrink)

In coming to words, language “reserves” itself: it holds back its event, keeping it illegible and silent. It is possible to see much of modern innovative or “experimental” poetry as such an experience of reticence and stillness, an experiment of language listening to itself “speaking” in order to allow the force of the illegible to come to speech. How this silence both limits what can be said and holds what has been written open to the possibilities of saying otherwise comes (...) from the “restraint” characteristic of the specific way in which language “speaks,” that is, arrives each time singularly as words precisely by withholding this very arrival from signification. Myung Mi Kim’s poetry stands out among contemporary American poets precisely for its specific attentiveness to this simultaneously “generative” and “constraining” force of silence. To understand better the workings of this force of silence, I examine Kim’s poetry in the context of Heidegger’s reflection on language, specifically his point about the withdrawal and restraint “essential” to the unfolding of language. I suggest that this withdrawal marks the poietic momentum of language, which can be traced, though, only by way of a listening response. This listening response becomes in turn a kind of constraint under which poetic thinking operates, a holding back of assertions and statements in favor of a listening which responds precisely to how the saying withholds itself from what comes to be said. Exploring the proximity between Kim’s poetry and Heidegger’s thinking, this essay examines how this withdrawal—a restraint at play in language itself--necessitates the attitude of poetic “reservedness.”. (shrink)

In his 1985 lecture, Geschlecht III, Derrida sought to ‘situate Geschlecht within Heidegger’s path of thought’. Having identified a political disclosure of sorts in Heidegger’s discussion of the significance of Trakl’s poetic invocation of the polysemic, German word ‘Geschlecht’, Derrida intimates that Heidegger betrays ideas and presumptions concerning the ‘problematic of philosophical nationalism’. Given the contentious political context of Heideggerian thought, some scholars might hope that Derrida’s intervention here would bear upon the divisive scholarly concern referred to as the ‘Heidegger (...) Question’. While Geschlecht III does not provide a resolution, a close reading betrays productive political implications to his manner of engagement. In this brief study, I will survey the political stakes of various methodological approaches to reading Heidegger, with Derrida’s manner of reading Heidegger’s ‘Language in the Poem’ at the centre. Ultimately, I argue that Derrida and Heidegger both appeal to a particular sense of the political that must be respected, though not necessarily accepted. (shrink)

In both “Answering for Sense” and “Sharing Voices,” Jean-Luc Nancy offers an account of the poet as an interpreter of the gods. The voice of the poet in both Homer’s Iliad and Plato’s Ion is intrinsically and originally doubled. Although there is no divine voice outside of the poet’s voice, the divine voice speaks in the poet’s voice and the poetic voice gives a voice to that of the goddess or the muse. What exactly is at stake in this phenomenon (...) that we encounter here in the poet, namely that of gods making us speak? How is it related to the threshold of speech and communication that Nancy invokes in Adoration, when he also mentions the gods that make us speak? In this essay, I want to think with Nancy to see what is at stake in the figure of a voice on the threshold of speech and communication. I consider how the figure of the gods that make us speak is brought into play to elucidate the threshold of language and how this figure, as that which makes us speak, somehow offers the crossing of this threshold. To this end, I want to discuss three different figures or scenes in which the gods make us speak. In the first part of this article, I explore in more detail Nancy’s own account of the poet as interpreter of the divine voice. What does it mean for the poet to give a voice to the goddess and to desire this giving a voice? What is the demand or call to which the poet in giving a voice answers? To further the analysis of this divine interpreter, I want to compare this interpreter with two other ones which arise in two other basic scenes in which the gods make an interpreter speak. The first concerns the scene of the calling of the prophet Jeremiah in the book of the same name. The second concerns Saint Paul’s reflections on the glossolalist in the First Letter to the Corinthians. By exploring the differences between these three divine interpreters, I aim to further elucidate and assess the phenomenon of the interpreter and the double voice that characterizes Nancy’s poet. (shrink)