This thesis suggests that Deleuze’s early philosophy, culminating in Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense, unfolds as a polemic between two structural positions – the problematic and the dialectic. This polemic sheds light on “political” aspects in Deleuze’s work as a student of authors such as Jean Hyppolite, Jean Wahl, Martial Guéroult and Ferdinand Alquié, in a period in which he places critical weight on the attempt to escape the constraining influence of their positions. Reading Bergson, Nietzsche, Hume, (...) Kant and Hegel through his teachers, Deleuze seeks to expunge from his thought every trace of their mediation, so as to be able to pose new problems for philosophy. To this end Deleuze puts forward the notion of philosophy as being essentially problematic, irreducible to empiricist, transcendentalist or dialectic dispositions and delineated by unique problems. This notion is established as a calculated move marked by an anti-Hegelian rhetoric, Hegel being the epitome of “old” metaphysical problems that must be overcome. The introduction of Deleuze’s critique of his teachers, who could be considered somewhat marginalised authors from the more recent history of French philosophy, and the establishment of the problematic-dialectic dyad as fundamental to Deleuze’s development as a philosopher, hopes to bring out critical aspects of his work that remain strategically buried in the text. Chapter one introduces Deleuze’s triangulation of Hyppolite-Guéroult-Alquié starting from his confrontation with Hyppolite’s Logic and Existence and continuing to his early efforts to put forward a satisfying “middle ground” with respect to these authors’ disparate positions, from which emerges a unique preoccupation with problems that will persist in Deleuze’s work throughout the 1950s and 60s. Chapter two examines the extent to which Nietzsche and Philosophy is a critical response to Hyppolite’s renowned interpretation of Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit, Genesis and Structure, a response which amounts to Deleuze’s interpretation of eternal recurrence as an anti- Hegelian mode of problematization, and which would later be transformed into the Deleuzian project of the overturning of Platonism. Chapter three is a reading of Empiricism and Subjectivity as an anti-Hegelian polemic profoundly inspired by Wahl’s vision of empiricism as a problematic and problematizing theory that responds to Hegel’s critique of “self-certainty” and of empiricism in general. Chapter four considers Deleuze’s Kantianism a strategic endeavour to shift the tectonics of philosophical rigor from a preoccupation with the Absolute as the ultimate ground for knowledge, to a revival of the problematic Idea as that which incites experimentation with the “thickness” of sensibility demolished in the first moment of the Hegelian dialectic, a shift whose successfulness is placed in question. (shrink)

An essay discussing David E. Storey's book on Heidegger's contributions to environmental philosophy.

ABSTRACTThroughout his writings, Heidegger's view of animals is ostensibly anthropocentric, defining them as deficient in relation to human beings. His most extensive analysis of animality, found in the 1929–1930 lecture course entitled The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, seems to be a clear example of this anthropocentrism, defining the animal as poor in world in opposition to the human being's world-forming character. Nevertheless, Heidegger is explicitly ambivalent regarding the anthropocentric implications of this conception of animality. This paper examines Heidegger's articulation of (...) the notion of world-poverty as a distinct form of negativity, its implications for the question concerning Heidegger's anthropocentrism, as well as his ambivalence with regard to this question. (shrink)

What scope is there for emancipatory politics in light of the postmodern critique of philosophical foundations? This paper examines the response to this question by Italian philosopher, Gianni Vattimo, who for over two decades has defended the emancipatory prospects of what he terms ‘nihilism’. Vattimo conceives the retreat of metaphysics as a progressive weakening of ontological claims and an opening towards new and diverse modes of being. In his view, far from an exclusively tragic experience of loss or meaninglessness, nihilism (...) is a steadily expanding narrative that invites us to face up to our own radical freedom. The paper sets out Vattimo's central arguments and contrasts the ethical thrust of his ‘emancipatory nihilism’ with the distinctly political take on emancipation presented by Ernesto Laclau. While the two converge on the withdrawal of metaphysics as the premise for a radical and democratic freedom, Vattimo's vision remains insufficiently focused on the dynamics of contestation that a generalized nihilism implies. (shrink)

This paper attempts to assess the state of the contemporary debate over humanism. Beginning with a brief recap of the main historical meanings of the concept of humanism itself, it details both the most recent articulation of the humanist standpoint in the work of Tzvetan Todorov and his "critical humanism" and the most potent anti-humanist replies in W.G. Sebald and Giorgio Agamben. While concerned to critically evaluate these new constellations of the debate, its main contention is not to wholly endorse (...) either position nor to consign the opposition itself to the past but rather to explain why this has not happened and consider where the figure of humanism stands today. (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)

International Journal of Philosophical Studies, Volume 19, Issue 2, Page 285-293, May 2011.

ABSTRACT This paper examines Heidegger’s remarks about the worldlessness of Judaism in his Black Notebooks. In the first part of the paper I examine Heidegger’s concept of the world in Being and Time and subsequent writings. In the second part, I analyze a distinction that Heidegger draws between mere human actuality and genuine human existence in a 1932 lecture course on The Beginning of Western Philosophy. This distinction, I suggest, relates to the development of Heidegger’s thoughts on nihilism and what (...) he conceives as its gravest danger. In the third part, I argue that the above-mentioned distinction can help us to better understand Heidegger’s remarks on Judaism. In particular, I suggest that the Jewish figure comes to symbolize for Heidegger a kind of unessential human actuality that is irredeemably detached from the question of Being. (shrink)

This article reflects on the received view of the rupture which constitutes the beginning of a critical, ethical, political and legal opening, the understanding of which inhabits the cry of, and response to, injustice. It takes the very critique that feeds into, and is distorted by, practical reasoning, as its point of departure. Grasping this rupture as the complementary relation between deconstruction and radical alterity, would entail unreflectively accepting a certain kind of truthfulness—truthfulness as [in]correctness, manifesting in a relationship that (...) involves rootless and controlling movement of making and unmaking of world. In closely reading Wittgenstein and Heidegger on the level of seeing, showing and saying, truthfulness is shown to contain an essential tension between, on the one hand, the Socratic, metaphysically-bound notion of beingness, correctness and meaning-steering and, on the other hand, the pre-Socratic notion of unconcealment (a-lethia), which, pointing even earlier than pre-Socratics into aboriginality, involves attentive letting of gliding in the inexpressible saying of language. While steering is about generating new possibilities of expressibility, gliding is about poetic dwelling, or enduring inexpressibility as a constitutive part of saying. Although aletheia is taken to be the key influence on rootless post-foundational thinking, it is argued that unconcealment involves letting and enduring the presencing inexpressibility of place and home-coming, that is, worlding-rootedness; thus showing Heidegger’s originary politics as the district of the uncanny to be about worlding that attentively lets the presencing inexpressibility of earth be as place. In reading Heidegger’s views on humanism, beginning and language, the argument links inexpressibility—essentially and historically—to the grasping of the belongingness together of world, earth and place, viewing this belongingness as key to both the saying of art and of mortals dwelling together temporally, spatially, materially in a manner always strange to, and nearer than, the steering/controlling of beingness, time, space and place that the very gesture and emergence of critique is captive of and is not capable of attuning to and capturing. Art always estranges the metaphysical cycle of correctness which preserves pain and suffering—a cycle that inhabits a double bind of responding to violence and injustice generated by the violence of metaphysics with metaphysical violence and justice. In showing essential strife within truthfulness itself, Heidegger points to even greater and earlier problematic than the pre-Socratics—to the painful core of inexpressibility between the ontology of steering time, spaces and material—steering places—and the gliding temporality, spatiality and materiality of ontology of place. (shrink)

In this essay, hegemony in traditional Marxism is posited as a social ontology based on overcoming the alienation of the masses. The aim of hegemony is to produce the full realization through the work of the proletariat as one specific political subject, as a collective version of the bourgeois subject. The emancipation through hegemony marks the self-realization of the proletariat as the subject of history, as one subject that somehow imposes itself on the alienated forms of capitalism. On the other (...) hand, poshegemony is thought from the decline of the subjectivist and productivist idolatry of hegemony, from the end of its expired truth, in the name of another promise. (shrink)

Eschatologies often associate this world with darkness and the beyond with light, seeking a move from the former to the latter. This article rethinks the importance of darkness through a reading of Heidegger’s concept of Augenblick, a blink of an eye, which exhibits a moment and site of a “beyond” coming to presence. Thus, the article contributes to approaches that seek to explore the ontological and poetic dimensions of politics. An onto-poetics of darkness draws attention to the presence of the (...) concealed in each moment of actualization and it highlights the way in which the beyond created in the Augenblick involves relation both to other beings and to Being itself. The conceptual problematic of a “beyond” is further explicated through an engagement with Marina Abramović’s performance “The Artist Is Present.” Instead of a move from darkness to light, such eschatology implies inhabiting the darkness of the blink of an eye. (shrink)

The modern notion of the subject as constant self-presence that conditions the truthful appearance of phenomena is brought under sustained critical scrutiny by Heidegger. More than critical scrutiny, Heidegger offered a positive sketch of what is other than the subject, Dasein. Understanding the human being as openness for the circulation and preservation of the meaning of what-is as such is posed as the negation of the self-contained closure and interiority that subjectivity is. Levinas sees materialism and the loss of interiority (...) and freedom in Heidegger’s project, inclining more towards an ethics of things rather than persons. However, Levinas’s criticisms themselves are not free of the modern predilection for the human, albeit in a fresh and rich way. Conversely, it can be argued that that being which is open to the world of things and people still has a profound interior dimension because it is in each case mine. The Heideggerian notion of human agency and freedom may be appropriated as a possible response to technological nihilism and modern subjectivism. (shrink)

This article identifies already existing theoretical and methodological commonalities between evolutionary biology and phenomenology, concentrating specifically on their common pursuit of origins. It identifies in passing theoretical support from evolutionary biology for present-day concerns in philosophy, singling out Sartre’s conception of fraternity as an example. It anchors its analysis of the common pursuit of origins in Husserl’s consistent recognition of the grounding significance of Nature and in his consistent recognition of animate forms of life other than human. It enumerates and (...) exemplifies five basic errors of continental philosophers with respect to Nature, errors testifying to a philosophical fundamentalism that distorts the intricate interconnections and relationships of Nature in favor of a preferred knowledge rooted in ontological reductionism. It shows that to discover and appreciate the common ground, one must indeed study “the things themselves.”. (shrink)

Since the early 1970s humanistic psychology has struggled to remain a relevant force in the social and psychological sciences, we attribute this in part to a conceptualisation of the self rooted in theoretically outmoded thinking. In response to the issue of relevancy a sociocultural turn has been called for within humanistic psychology, which draws directly and indirectly on the conceptual insights of Michel Foucault. However, this growing body of research lacks a unifying conceptual base that is able to encompass its (...) new perspectives and the movement’s theoretical antecedents. This analysis suggests a way forward by offering a potential reconceptualisation of the self in humanistic psychology through the existential-phenomenology of Martin Heidegger. We argue that Heidegger’s conception of the self takes account of subjectivities produced in discourse and institutional practice, while acknowledging the human capacity for actualisation in his concept of the authentic-self. (shrink)

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 This discussion utilises the thought of Slavoj Žižek as a departure point to consider the ontological emergence of technology as techne in the conceptual encounter of the Abyss in Being. Following Heidegger, Žižek’s critique examines the ontical and ontological implications of modern science. His championing of the political Cause makes the social realm essential for Žižek’s turn against the possible domination of a deterministic, technical, and scientific rationality. The problem of modern (...) science dominating subjectivity with objectivity, i.e. the reduction of humanity to a biogenetic structure, calls for an opening of the deadlock of rationalist determinism with the facilitation of envaluing Being, lest we be cut off from intersubjectivity by a psychotic breakdown. It is precisely in the lack of control we have of other people, the reliance on others, that we come to revivify our mastery of who we are and our actions. In the Žižekian mode the ethical ‘ought’ is not an obstacle in the path of modern science but a guide, an epochal constellation of value and understanding occurring in the socio-political realm that emancipates itself from the naïve resignation inculcated by the deterministic causality of rationalisation. The aim of this paper is to explore how Žižek understands this envaluing as the ‘mythologisation of technology’.  . (shrink)

This article explores the experience of ethical responsivity from the perspective of the parent whose child requires medical care. The concern is with the lived meaning of ethics itself as it originates and wells up in the parent’s experience of being touched by his or her child. Examples are taken from the practice of neonatal-perinatal medicine where newborns require hospitalization for issues such as prematurity, transitional problems, congenital abnormalities, and so forth. Here, the condition of the child and the techno-medical (...) environment itself have the potential of complicating the touching contact of parent and child. (shrink)

This article discusses the final volume of Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe. It does so by contextualizing its main themes, that is, by relating it to other writings of Heidegger of roughly the same period. Three such themes can be discovered in Heidegger’s “final” writing: a discussion of the nature of phenomenology, the abandonment of the ontological difference and the relation between the thought of being and the discipline of theology. The essay concludes with a comparison of Heidegger’s thinking of Ereignis to how (...) theology configured the relation between God and the human being, so arguing that Heidegger seemed more indebted to the tradition of theology that he at times could acknowledge. (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)

A truly enlightened anthropocentrism that understood the human in its essential interdependency with other creatures but nonetheless concluded that the human species was toxic to the planet could identify with the life-stream and, on the basis of values it cherished, in the absence of necessary radical transformation, will its own demise. The distinctive value of the human cannot rest on virtues of which we are in principle capable but which we repeatedly fail to realize. Is there a logical or metaphysical (...) link, as Schelling and Derrida in different ways suggest, between our seemingly suicidal and toxic behavior as a species and what we might broadly call our capacity for “transcendence”? Or should we lay the blame more concretely on the form that global capitalism has taken? Even if we do in fact have the resources to overcome our species narcissism, an even more disturbing question awaits us. Human evolution could generate a predictable human being with whom we would have little reason to identify. What then? (shrink)