This essay is an overview of the intellectual itinerary of the Japanese philosopher Kuki Shūzō (1888-1941). Kuki first came to the attention of Western readers in Heidegger's A Dialogue on Language between a Japanese and an Inquirer. After correcting the record on Kuki with regards to this famous piece, the essay turns to the work that Heidegger and the Japanese Inquirer were discussing, namely, The Structure of Iki. The essay discusses both the background and basic arguments of this work. The (...) essay then expands on Kuki's Western reception, indicating that his thinking evolved beyond his early work with the phenomenon of iki. His later thinking concerns the problem of contingency and the essay concludes with a discussion of his late work, The Problem of Contingency. The essay reviews Kuki's thinking as a whole in order to develop a sense of his hermeneutics. (shrink)

This essay engages ways in which the manifestation of ‘world’ occurs in poetry specifically through images, and how we can conceive of the imagination in this regard without reducing the imagination to a mimetic faculty of consciousness subordinate to cognition. Continental thought in the last century offers rich resources for this study. The notion of a ‘world’ is related to the poetic image in ways fundamental to the Heidegger’s theory of language, and may be seen in Continental poetics following Heidegger, (...) including Blanchot’s examination of poetry in his account of the space of literature. By means of images, I shall demonstrate, poetic language is exemplary in relation to ‘world’ in two ways. (1) Images, poetically arranged, generate and open up a sense or experience of a world, specific to that poem, for its reader. Poetic images then, exhibit a generative evocation of world. (2) Through images, a poem may evoke the way in which space and time are inhabited as a world of human dwelling in an ontologically or existentially meaningful way. The relation of images to world is, then, an illumination or a disclosure of world. The first of these relations remains, to a large extent, immanent to the poem, but may be seen as an analogue of the essentially human experience of inhabiting a world. The second relation transcends the poem and relates the poem immediately to the existential framework of human dwelling. (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.

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).

In the interview conducted with Giovanna Borradori, after the attack on the World Trade Centre, in September 2001, Jacques Derrida is pressed to specify connections between his own thinking, Heidegger's deployment of the term ‘event’, and the use of the term ‘event’ to pick out the unprecedented character of that attack. Derrida intimates that the attack is, perhaps, not as unprecedented, not the ‘wholly other’ which it has been framed as being. His reading of that event is to move it (...) from a naive status, as ‘wholly other’, to a philosophically inflected thinking of the political, in the mode of the ‘wholly otherwise’, that is, in a sense to be made out here, whereby politics takes precedence over physics, as the originator of the basic components to be thought, and whereby the future takes precedence over the past, as the site at which what is arrives. The principal aim of this article is to consider how to think this counter-factual ontology, in the mode of a future anteriority. The article will set out Heidegger's move from affirming a fundamental ontology, of Dasein, to an ontology in parentheses (vom Ereignis) but will show how both of these are objectionable, on different counts, to Derrida and to Levinas. Derrida explores the options of supplementing an inadmissible thetic stance, with respect to the future, and therefore with respect to what there is, by developing the notion of the prosthetic, that which stands in for the impossible, timelessly asserted thesis. Levinas invents a new mode of phenomenology which opens a route into this ‘wholly otherwise’. These two strands of enquiry contribute to an analysis displacing these versions of ontology, in favour of a reformulation of political ontology. A subsidiary aim is to clarify Derrida's reservations with respect to the Heideggerian notion of the event. These reservations about Heidegger's usage throw light on his reluctance to deploy the term, within an analysis of the destruction of the World Trade Centre. (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)

The primary focus of this project is the silent and subvocal speech-recognition interface unveiled in 2018 as an ambulatory device wearable on the neck that detects a myoelectrical signature by electrodes worn on the surface of the face, throat, and neck. These emerge from an alleged “intending to speak” by the wearer silently-saying-something-to-oneself. This inner voice is believed to occur while one reads in silence or mentally talks to oneself. The artifice does not require spoken sounds, opening the mouth, or (...) any explicit or external movement of the lips. The essay then considers such subvocal “speech” as a mode of writing or saying and the interior of the mouth or oral cavity as its writing surface. It briefly revisits discussions of telepathy to recontextualize Heidegger’s warning against enframing language exclusively within calculative technics and physiology, which he suggests is detrimental to Mundarten (mouth-modes of regional dialects). It closes in reconsideration of Husserl’s phenomenology of language and meaning in Ideas as it might apply to subvocal speech-recognition interfaces. It suggests ways by which the electrophysiology that the device detects and deciphers (as an alleged intention of a presumed natural language unspoken vocally or aloud) might supplement Husserl’s insinuation of the Leiblichkeit of language through a self-stamping extraction of an extension of meaning. (shrink)

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)

What did Heidegger learn and fail to learn from Laozi and Zhuangzi? This book reconstructs Heidegger's philosophy through its engagement with Daoist and Asian philosophy and offers a Daoist transformation of Heidegger on things, nothingness, and freedom. PDF includes the introduction, bibliography, and index.

This article takes up the idea of language as a home and dwelling, and reconsiders what this might mean in the context of diasporic bilingualism – where as a ‘heritage speaker’ of a minority language, the ‘mother tongue’ may be experienced as both deeply familiar yet also alien or alienating. Drawing on a range of philosophical and literary accounts (Cassin, Arendt, Anzaldúa, Vuong, among others), this article explores how the so-called ‘mother tongue’ is experienced by heritage speakers in an English-dominant (...) world. From navigating one’s being in-between language-worlds, to the experience of language loss and efforts of reconnection, I argue that bilingual dwelling involves many complex layers often overlooked by philosophical accounts of language that do not attend to the lived world of the migrant and racialised outsider. By turning to the example of bilingual parenting, I then examine how such an undertaking, while labour-intensive, offers opportunities to refresh and co-create language-worlds anew. (shrink)

This essay concerns Heidegger’s assertion that the biography of the poet is unimportant when interpreting great works of poetry. I approach the question in three ways. First, I consider its merits as a principle of literary interpretation and contrast Heidegger’s view with those of other Trakl interpreters. This allows me to clarify his view as a unique variety of non-formalistic interpretation and raise some potential worries about his approach. Second, I consider Heidegger’s view in the context of his broader philosophical (...) project. Viewed this way, Heidegger’s decision to neglect the poet’s biography seems quite reasonable and consistent with his inquiry into the being of language. Finally, I consider Heidegger’s suggestion that Trakl is a kind of mad genius. I recast this paradigmatic figure in terms of what I call the ‘wretched prophet’ and consider some ways in which its appeal sheds light on the crisis of modernity and the aestheticization of politics. (shrink)

The nature and value of autonomy has long been debated in diverse philosophical traditions, including moral and political philosophy. Although the notion dates back to ancient Greek philosophy, it was during the Age of Enlightenment that autonomy drew much attention. Thus, as may be known, moral philosophers tended to emphasize self-regulation, particularly one’s own will to abide by universal moral laws, as the term “autonomy” originates from the Greek words “self” (auto) and “rule” (nomos). In parallel, modern epistemologists supposedly espoused (...) the idea of intellectual autonomy as self-reliance. In this classical view, an intellectually autonomous explorer of knowledge must not depend on a belief that is obtained from another’s testimony, until one can justify it to oneself. However, accompanying the growing focus on the importance of social dimensions of acquiring knowledge and understanding, recent epistemologists have doubted the classical view and have since reconsidered intellectual autonomy from distinct approaches such as social and virtue epistemology. This paper propounds an interpersonal-epistemic approach to intellectual autonomy. First, it is argued that thinking through questioning both individually and with other epistemic peers is an interpersonal-epistemic practice. Second, it is demonstrated that with particular cognitive features inherent within us, an intellectually autonomous person must think through questioning in necessary situations. This interpersonal account of intellectual autonomy can conceptually enrich intellectual autonomy by considering its relationship with not only responsibility but also with vulnerability. Specifically, regarding responsibility, an intellectually autonomous person must be responsible for his or her own actions throughout questioning processes. Regarding vulnerability, our intellectual autonomy lies in retaining autonomy with vulnerability in the plastic control of the questioning processes. (shrink)

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)

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)

If the world in which we are intentionally involved is threatened by climate change, this raises the question about our place on Earth. In this article, we argue that the ecological crisis we face today draws our attention to the Earth as ontic-ontological condition of our being-in-the-world. Because the Earth is often reflected upon in relation to human existence, living systems or material entities in the philosophical tradition, we argue for an ontological concept of the materiality of the Earth as (...) un-correlated being in this article. We develop five principles of the materiality of the Earth: the conativity, non-identity, responsiveness, performativity and eventuality of the Earth. We will argue that it is this notion of Earth that matters to us in the age of global warming. (shrink)

This paper clarifies Merleau-Ponty’s distinction between speaking and spoken speech, and the relation between the two, in his Phenomenology of Perception. Against a common interpretation, I argue on exegetical and philosophical grounds that the distinction should not be understood as one between two kinds of speech, but rather between two internally related dimensions present in all speech. This suggests an interdependence between speaking and spoken aspects of speech, and some commentators have critiqued Merleau-Ponty for claiming a priority of speaking over (...) spoken speech. However, there is a sense in which Merleau-Ponty is right to emphasize the priority, namely, in terms of the ontological priority of the speaking subject with respect to language understood as a constituted cultural ideality. The latter only maintains its ontological status insofar as it is taken up by a language community. I favorably contrast Merleau-Ponty’s views on this question to those of the late Heidegger and de Saussure, and suggest potential applications of this clarified position for contemporary discussions in philosophy of language. (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)

The object of the paper is the attempt at retracing Heidegger’s conception of the relation of time and being from his major work “Being and Time” to the lecture he gave in 1962 on “Time and Being.” In order to explain the transformation of Heidegger’s thinking between 1927 and 1962, the emphasis is put on the new understanding of the oblivion of Being as belonging to the essence of Being itself, as well as on the analysis of the double meaning, (...) temporal and ontological of presence and on Ereignis, the “event of appropriation,” which is the new name given of the relation between man and Being. (shrink)

This essay explores the nature of authenticity through a comparison of Martin Heidegger and the classical Buddhist text, the Mumonkan (The Gateless Gate). As Stanley Cavell's interpretations of Heidegger have developed, the peculiarity of Heidegger's sense of authenticity lies in the fact that it requires us, not to negate the inauthentic everydayness into which we are fallen, but to learn to inhabit this everydayness in a new way. The task of authenticity, Cavell argues, involves a recovery and a transformation of (...) this original condition. But just what this transformation involves is tricky. To what extent does authenticity involve taking particular, concrete actions in the world? And insofar as we are never in complete mastery of our actions, how can we ensure that they are authentic? Through a comparison with the Mumonkan, this essay considers how the task of authenticity can be understood as a gateless gate, a way of dwelling in the everyday which affirms our thrownness into a plurality of ways. The essay, thus, argues for different roots than those Cavell finds manifest in Heidegger's philosophy (the traditions of early American transcendentalism and Anglo-American ordinary language philosophy) and thus contributes to the current conversation on the under-appreciated convergences between Heidegger and the Buddhist tradition. (shrink)

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)

In this article, the differences between Jean-Luc Marion, Emmanuel Levinas and Martin Heidegger’s approaches to ontotheology are discussed. Whereas Marion argues for a historical approach to this question, i.e., testing whether ontotheology can be detected in this or that thinker in this history of philosophy, this article aims, with Levinas and Heidegger, for an ontological approach to the question concerning ontotheology. In this regard, this text expresses wonder about Marion’s claim that Medieval theology would not have succumbed to ontotheology whereas (...) ancient and modern did. It is shown that ontotheology, for Levinas as well as Heidegger, might not be overcome with a simple command but rather belongs to the very structure of thought. The article concludes with offering some corrections to the Levinasian ‘God outside of onto-theology’ by a more phenomenological account of being-in-the world. (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)

Two hundred years ago, Friedrich Schleiermacher took critical issue with Immanuel Kant's intellectual notion of intuition as applied to human nature (Wellmon 2006). He found it necessary to modify—"hermeneutically," as he said—Kant's notion of anthropology by enabling it to include as human the new and strange human tribes Captain Cook found in the Pacific South Seas. A similar hermeneutic move is necessary if physics is to include the local contextual empirical syntheses of relativity and quantum physics. In this hermeneutical revision (...) the synthesis is formed around the notion of a Hilbert Vector Space as the universal grammar of physics, adding to it the dynamic of the Schrödinger equation, and representing empirical "observables" by projection operators that map the subspaces of definite measurable values. Among the set of observable projection operators, some pairs share the same subspace, commute with one another, and share a common laboratory setting. Other pairs do not share this property and are described as being mutually complementary. Complementary symmetries introduce into the discursive language of physics the commonsense notion of contextuality. The new synthesis, proposed by Eugene Wigner, John von Neumann, and (in his own way) Paul Dirac, brought physics into the community of common language and established it as a work of general human achievement. 1. (shrink)

Investigates, by way of Derrida's engagements with Kant, how the foundations of modern constitutionalism can be differently conceived to address some of the challenges of the twenty-first century.

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)

This article builds on Gadamer’s rehabilitation of the Augustinian concept of inner word. Unlike most interpretations, the thesis is that the Augustinian inner word does not show the potentialities, but rather the ineffectiveness of ontological hermeneutics. In the first section, it is argued that for the later Augustine, the verbum in corde is the consequence of a Word- and Truth- event. In the second section, the author suggests that Gadamer has properly understood the verbum in corde as a matter of (...) faith. In the third section, it is shown that Gadamer has found in the notion a paradigm for his philosophical and theological insights. Concerning the former, he has always been fascinated by the evenemential character of the ‘second’ Heidegger’s thought. Concerning the latter, Gadamer has explicitly accused Bultmann’s demythologization of being ‘human, all too human’, and he has implicitly praised Barth’s dialectical theology. (shrink)

The paper examines some philosophical aspects of translation as a metaphor for education—a metaphor that avoids the closure of final definitions, in favour of an ongoing and tentative process of interpretation and revision. Translation, it is argued, is a complex process involving language, within and among cultures, and in the exercise of power. Drawing on Foucault's analysis of power, Nietzschean contingency, and the inversion of meaning that characterises the work of Heidegger and Derrida, the paper points towards Ricoeur's notion of (...) linguistic hospitality as the ethical dimension to the inevitably inadequate representation of the ‘other’. In this exploration, translation is posited as a creative and interpretive act—involving neither image nor copy, but poetic transposition.The power of language emerges in the close association between power and knowledge, in which the ability to define what is real generates the realm of future possibilities. From a Foucauldian perspective, language functions as a creative strategic relation—a form of power that structures the field of other possible actions. It is through the mediation of translation, the paper argues, that language communicates, leaving us with a world of difference (i.e. ‘lost in translation’), as both our curse and our blessing as part of the human condition and as part of our ethical endeavour as educators. The contingent and arbitrary nature of language problematises what appears natural and necessary, generating the possibility of creative dialogue. (shrink)

_Examines the German and Jewish sources of Strauss's thought and the extent to which his philosophy can shed light on the crisis of liberal democracy._.

This essay probes into the possibility of encountering the Deleuzian sense-event in four Tom Stoppard radio plays, Moon (1964), Boot (1964), Glad (1966) and Artist Descending A Staircase (1972). Itself an incorporeal – an occurrence of the interface – the wonderful and strange protagonist of Gilles Deleuze's 1969 Logic of Sense is approached in apophatic gestures, with a glimpse at the various vestiges it has left upon texts. Within this exercise in indirection, ‘empty forms’ present themselves as the texts’ circulating (...) words. Informed by and receiving infusions from two parallel flows of Deleuzian signifiers and signifieds, these entities are singled out as the texts’ pointers that open up a cleavage where the sense-event can issue forth. (shrink)

This essay engages with Heidegger’s attempt to re-think the human being. It shows that Heidegger re-thinks the human being by challenging the way the human being has been thought, and the mode of thinking traditionally used to think about the human being. I spend significant time discussing Heidegger’s attempt before, in the final section, asking some critical questions of Heidegger’s endeavour and pointing out how his analysis can re-invigorate contemporary attempts to understand the human being.

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)

My hypothesis is that the cognitive challenge posed by death might have had a co-evolutionary role in the development of linguistic faculties. First, I claim that mirror neurons, which enable us to understand others’ actions and emotions, not only activate when we directly observe someone, but can also be triggered by language: words make us feel bodily sensations. Second, I argue that the death of another individual cannot be understood by virtue of the mirror neuron mechanism, since the dead provide (...) no neural pattern for mirroring: this cognitive task requires symbolic thought, which in turn involves emotions. Third, I describe the symbolic leap of the human species as a cognitive detachment from the here and now, allowing displaced reference: through symbols the human mind can refer to what is absent, possible, or even impossible (like the presence of a dead person). Such a detachment has had a huge adaptive impact: adopting a coevolutionary standpoint can help explain why language is as effective as environmental inputs in order to stimulate our bodily experience. In the end I suggest a further coevolutionary reversal : if language is necessary to understand the death of the other, it might also be true that the peculiar cognitive problem posed by the death of the other (the corpse is present, but the other is absent) has contributed to the crucial transition from an indexical sign system to the symbolic level, i.e., the cognitive detachment . Death and language, as Heidegger claimed, have an essential relation for humans, both from an evolutionary and a phenomenological perspective: they have shaped the symbolic consciousness that make us conceive of them. (shrink)

Derrida's reading of Heidegger in Of Spirit provides an excellent opportunity to assess the ethical and political value of each of their works. Derrida uncovers a slippage in Heidegger during the 1930s in which Heidegger ?forgot to forget? the dangers of the ?spirit? he had disavowed in Being and Time. This reveals a substantial early investment in the National Socialist project from which Heidegger never adequately recovered. Even in his attempts to distance himself from his Nazi past, Heidegger was still (...) caught up in a metaphysical, though not a racial?biological, gesture and while Heidegger may have written at the end of philosophy, it was an end never come. One cannot stop reading Heidegger on this account. Rather, one is all the more compelled to read him, and after him Derrida. In Derrida's reading of Heidegger, we see the ways in which Heidegger opened up for Derrida an alternative space for the ethical ? in ?The call of Being? before any decision ? in the obligation to the other. However, this ethical possibility of deconstruction is only a space of undecideabiliry and questioning, never a space for political comportment; that is, it is ontological?existential, not ontical?existentiell. In this, while deconstruction opens up a space for ethics, it is never to guide, only to expose. (shrink)

The critical nature of artwork is owed, according to Adorno, to the fact that it opposes its assimilation by reason and that it does not yield to the imposition of its established principles. This character which Heidegger, too, through a paradoxical convergence with Adorno, and in opposition to Lukács, recognizes as its ontological component, permits the work of art to represent a force of resistance to dominance in general, in the prospect of the salvation of a humanized society. As such, (...) it makes possible the radical rejection of political and, pertinent to it, pedagogical activity, when converted into primarily authoritiarian activity. Such a responsibility does art assume, according to Adorno, when it represents a spirituality, which is embodied in exemplary fashion both in the work of art itself, making the experience of the sublime possible, and in the aesthetic of the sublime, which is concentrated intensively on whatever remains unapproachable through concepts. In this way, we could say that the aesthetic of the sublime is converted into “first philosophy,” in the sense that it provides the rule for every theoretical approach. Concurring with this reading of Adorno, we consider how the sublime, as shown in the context of his aesthetic theory, is governed, furthermore, by a paideutic principle of exceptional significance, which we must necessarily activate through aesthetic education, so that western man may understand that he must uproot himself from the nihilistic social context in which he lives, rupturing the delusion of his omnipotence. In a world governed by a permanent crisis of democracy in public and private life, since the weakening of political imagination unites with the retreat from political ethos and an generalization of the unprecedented will for dominance, we consider this aesthetic theory to be exceptionally essential and useful to us both as pedagogical theory and as political theory, since it allows us to understand that the experience of the sublime through art is in opposition to this condition of destruction, and indeed represents the ideal of justice. (shrink)

Two books on Whitehead, a major study by the noted philosopher of science, Isabelle Stengers, and a shorter one by Didier Debaise are reviewed, along with two earlier mathematical and scientific works by Whitehead himself, which have been re-issued. This provides the basis for a wide-ranging discussion of the relationships between Whitehead's love of poetry and Heidegger's approach to it, Whitehead's background in mathematics and theoretical physics and his attitude to empirical science and more general problems of the philosophy of (...) the event, in particular how radical change can come about. (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)

The thought of Heidegger and Bataille has rarely been placed in proximity. However, the notion of the `ecstatic' unconsciously draws them together. Its fundamental ramifications in each thinker's oeuvre should prompt serious reflection, particularly in the age of calculation and cybernetics. The non-utilitarian aspects of the gift, exchange, sacrifice and the sacred also bring the two thinkers closer to each other in a challenge to the dominance of what Bataille calls the `restricted economy' of balanced accounts and equilibrium at all (...) costs. To allow the thought of Heidegger and Bataille to communicate is to demarcate a point of resistance to an uncritical acceptance of the postmodern age. However, this must be tempered by the recognition that the situation is immensely complex, and that there is always a risk of political regression in every essentialist orientation - as the example of Heidegger shows. (shrink)

This article is a critical methodological reflection on the use of interpretive phenomenological analysis (IPA) initiated in the context of a qualitative research project on the experience of seclusion in a psychiatric setting. It addresses an explicit gap in the IPA literature to explore the ways that Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology can extend the remit of IPA for noncognitivist qualitative research projects beyond the field of health psychology. In particular, the article develops Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of the lived-body, language, and embodied speech, with (...) specific attention to the ethical implications of body and place. It concludes with a discussion on phenomenological reflexivity and prompts a reconsideration of phenomenological methods across a wide range of qualitative research projects concerned with subjectivity and ethical practice, including critical health studies, critical bioethics, and cultural studies that employ a qualitative empirical research design. (shrink)