This essay sounds out Derrida's plurivocal term of frequencies as well as Nancy's understanding of resonance to argue that ghosts live in the ear. Heeding how the different nuances of this term bear on Derrida's reading of Hamlet, it not only seeks to understand the significance of the ghost's rhythmic appearance:disappearance in Shakespeare's play, but indeed, how it comes to frequent Derrida's Specters of Marx.

The relationship of Jacques Derrida and Martin Heidegger has always been complex, encompassing an entanglement of two already immense networks and suspended between proximities and distances from infinitesimal to radical. Its peculiarity is evident in the way in which Derrida strategically inscribes his own text at the margin of Heidegger's thought via a double or cl6tural gesture which articulates the paradox that Derrida writes with Heidegger against Heidegger. One of the most decisive aspects of this gesture is Derrida's deconstruction of (...) Heidegger's claims regarding the relation between technology and philosophy. In "The Question Concerning Technology" and accompanying essays Heidegger opens up a way of reflecting upon the essence of technology moves against its metaphysical determination specifying, moreover, the sense of modern technology as a mode of disclosure. These reflections are, however, ambiguous. Heidegger is one of the first thinkers to confront technology in philosophical terms, and yet he wishes to purify thinking of originary technicity. Technology remains a question, and as a question asked by thinking, thinking is not technical. In other words, thinking for Heidegger, is constituted in its very difference from technology. This is the move that must be deconstructed. In simultaneously repeating and displacing the Heideggerian scheme, Derrida elaborates an infinitesimal and decisive différance between the thinking of Being and his own notion of "writing" (Vecriture) or generalized inscription. What is crucial is that as against Heidegger's Being, the general text is not an essence of technics nor is it a proper thinking opposed to technology. On the contrary, Derrida's main point, among other things, against Heidegger, is that technology has always already begun, that it is originary with respect to the history of Being and thinking. In this study I examine the stakes and implications of Derrida's move along with a possible Heideggerian response. To begin with, I develop a reading of Heidegger's text that shows the import of technology to his work as a whole and its centrality to the thinking of Being as difference. I then take up the question of Derrida's deconstruction of Heidegger's analysis of the history of Being and its technological completion as this is played out in The Post Card and related texts. Following this I revert back to Derrida's now "classic" writings of the late 1960s and early 1970s and explore the arguments that relate contemporary developments in technology, science, and the media to the problematic of writing and to the closure of logocentric metaphysics. The preceding chapters lay the groundwork for me to then offer a critical reading of Derrida's text that locates in the articulations and assumptions of deconstruction certain indications of its belonging, within the horizon of Heidegger's thinking of technology. Finally, I offer a reading of some of Derrida's later texts with the aim of showing that and how deconstruction emerges as an affirmative technology. (shrink)

I seek to interpret the work of Walter Benjamin in light of the "system programme" of German Idealism, in order to confront an antinomy of contemporary radical thought. Benjamin has been regarded as an anti-Hegelian thinker of the exception. Reading him against the grain, I draw out a concept of counter-tradition that eschews the opposition of intra-historical progress and extra-historical exception. The philological inspiration is a book by Franz Joseph Molitor, student of Schelling and "teacher" of Benjamin: The Philosophy of (...) History, or, On Tradition. (shrink)

Translated Felicia McCarren. Stanford: Stanford UP and Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995 (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics series). Pages: xxiii + 161. Pb: 0 8047 2385 0; 10.95. Hb: 0 8047 2376 I; 25.00. Originally published in French as Musica Ficta (Figures de Wagner). Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1991.

_ Source: _Volume 47, Issue 3, pp 366 - 387 In this article, I focus on Heidegger’s conception of hospitality in his first and final lectures on Hölderlin’s _Germania_, _Remembrance_, and _The Ister_. I argue that the hospitality of the foreigner for Heidegger is the condition of possibility of dwelling understood as the happening of history.In the first section I analyze the notions of hospitality in Levinas and Derrida. The second section unpacks some of the senses of the earth in (...) Heidegger as the site of man’s historical dwelling, whereas in the third section I focus on holy mourning as the disposition that reveals the earth as the uncanny ground of history. In the final section, I spell out Heidegger’s conception of hospitality, the greeting, and the foreign guest. (shrink)

Antigone fascinates G. W. F. Hegel and Luce Irigaray, both of whom turn to her in their explorations and articulations of ethics. Hegel and Irigaray make these re-turns to Antigone through the double and related lenses of nature and sexual difference. This essay investigates these figures of Antigone and the accompanying ethical accounts of nature and sexual difference as a way of examining Irigaray's complex relation to and creative uses of Hegel's thought.

This paper contributes to non-ocularcentric theory and theorizing by way of a methodological application and extension of Henri Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis. It explores the cultural dynamics of echoes and history, using as an instrumental case study Steve Reich’s 1966 tape-loop composition, Come Out, to elucidate the ambivalent and contradictory relations of time, temporality, and possibility. While the focus is primarily on the text of Come Out and its context of police brutality and civil rights, it moreover contributes to an enriched and (...) historically grounded understanding of rhythmanalysis while engaging with rhythmanalysis as a methodology, based on the expanded conception of echoes proposed. (shrink)

This paper contrasts the notion of “willing” in Heidegger’s politics with the notion of “dawning” in Heidegger’s philosophy. It argues that, in the political text, the attunement of Dasein to what-is is centred in the notion of Dasein’s “willing” of what-is, while in the philosophical text it is centred in the notion of what-is “dawning” on Dasein. It maintains that the attitude to anxiety essential to a “dawning” of what-is is not reached in Heidegger’s “The Self-Assertion of the German University”. (...) It concludes by maintaining that, rather than being attuned to what-is, the will in the “The Self-Assertion of the German University” is attuned to its own relationship to what is in a narcissistic rather than a philosophical way; that is, it territorializes “dawning” as a relation to “what is”, and makes “dawning” of “what-is” its “own” in the same way as any nationalism makes a culture, a language or a geographical region its own. In contrast to the narcissism of nationalism, philosophy, as outlined by Heidegger in the essay “What Is Metaphysics?”, is the experience of allowing what-is to “dawn” on Dasein rather than a preoccupation with “willing” of “dawning” as one’s own relation to Being. (shrink)

This paper is motivated by Heidegger’s invitation to think the essence of technics through a dialogue between technics and art. This dialogue is approached with the help of several artworks belonging to what can be called the “technological turn” in art. First, I draw a schematic picture of notions of instrumentality, rationality, totality, and teleology inherited from classical philosophy of art and technology and challenged by contemporary art. I underline the Romantic claim that art overcomes these features thanks to its (...) freedom and ask, referring to the work of Gilbert Simondon, whether technology could also be liberated from its subordination to utilitarian ends. Second, I look at how certain contemporary works of art attempt to solve some of these problems. Artists who seize technical objects generally seek to make their functioning visible and problematic by distorting, interrupting, or otherwise modifying the technical dispositif—this is when a machine becomes a work of art. I show how this happens in certain works of Rebecca Horn, Jean Tinguely, Anaïs Tondeur, Eduardo Kac, and Tomas Saraceno. In conclusion, I show how art can liberate technology by liberating it from utility and instrumentality and by exposing it as such in its functioning. On the other hand, I argue that technology can liberate art, both through artistic techniques and nonartistic technological processes. (shrink)

This article examines how Georges Bataille, one of the celebrated precursors of the postmodern death of a linguistic subject, is also a Nietzschean, pre-Freudian thinker who offers us an account of the birth of an affective subject. If critics still tend to recuperate Bataille within a “metaphysics of the subject,” the present article shows that the central concept of his thought needs to be reconsidered in the light of his debt to Pierre Janet’s “psychology of the socius,” an interpersonal psychology (...) that transgresses precisely this metaphysics. In line with contemporary theoretical developments, Bataille’s account of the birth of the subject out of the laughter of the socius offers us a theoretical model to rethink the foundations of subjectivity in relational, mimetic terms. (shrink)

This discussion consists of five sections, beginning with a pair of citations marking up a politics of inclusion, and exclusion in philosophical discussion. The second section, focusing on the first part of this essay’s title, ‘Phenomenological futures in dispute’, locates three inflections of the notion of the future, in the context of an encounter between phenomenology and Marxism. The third section proposes two rewritings of the subtitle, in terms of thematics, as opposed to using proper names as indices for theoretical (...) orientations. The first rewriting retrieves Heidegger’s notions of tradition, as both transmission and inheritance. This opens up a givenness of a futural horizon to alternating versions of futures; the second rewriting then offers modes of evaluating these alternating futures, in a contestation between a patriarchal, a differentiated, and a neutral mode of transmission. A fourth section raises some further questions of methodology, indicating the manner in which a rethinking of religion and of theology returns within phenomenology. In an inconclusive summary, the paper returns to the point of departure, the first version of a relation of non-relation, in a disputed connection to be set out between philosophy, a politics of exclusion, and psychoanalytical accounts of political investment. The paper seeks to locate a relation of non-relation, both in the failed encounters between Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy, with respect to phenomenology and its futures, and in the re-emergence, as non-relation, of the formative function within phenomenology of religious precursors, preconditions and commitments. (shrink)

The recent publication of André Bazin's Écrits complets (2018), an enormous two-volume edition of 3000 pages which increases ten-fold Bazin's available corpus, provides opportunities for renewed reflection on, and possibly for substantial revisions of, this key figure in film theory. On the basis of several essays, I propose a drastic rereading of Bazin's most explicitly philosophical notion of “ontology.” This all too familiar notion, long settled into a rather dust-laden couple (“Bazin and ontology”) nonetheless retains its fascination. Rather than attempting (...) to provide a systematic reworking of this couple along well established lines, particularly those defined by realism and indexicality, this article proposes to shift the notion of ontology in Bazin from its determination as actual existence toward a more radical concept of ontology based on the notion of mimesis, particularly as articulated, in a Heideggerian mode, by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. This more properly ontological concept, also paradoxically and radically improper, is shown to be at work already in Bazin's texts, and it allows us to see that far from simplistically naturalizing photographic technology, Bazin does the contrary: he technicizes nature. If Bazin says that the photograph is a flower or a snowflake, he also implies that, like photographs, these are likewise a kind of technical artifact, an auto-mimetic reproduction of nature. Bazin likewise refers to film as a kind of skin falling away from the body of History, an accumulating pellicule in which nature and history disturbingly merge. This shifted perspective on Bazin's thinking is extended further in reference to Georges Didi-Huberman on the highly mimetic creatures known as phasmids, insects that mimic their environement. I extend this into the dynamic notion of eternal return, an implicit dimension of Bazin's thinking, clarified here in reference to Giorgio Agamben and the “immemorial image” which, like Bazin's “Death Every Afternoon,” presents an eminently repeatable deathly image, an animated corpse-world that can be likened to hell. (shrink)

An examination of how, in literature, silence and veiling are related to moral significance. The paper emphasizes Walter Benjamin’s essay on Goethe’s Elective Affiniites and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Minister’s Black Veil” and poses the question of how the literary can possess moral meaning or effect when, as in these two works, silence and veiling appear as a means of refusing or denying intention. Benjamin’s and Hawthorne’s different critiques of the symbol are presented as the central issue around which the possibility (...) of moral meaning is decided as an intentionless act. Benjamin’s preservation of the moral is interpreted as the cause of the paradoxical and contradictory sources of the expressionless and its critical violence as well as the veiling and secrecy he identifies as forming the true work of art. Against this account, Hawthorne’s story is read as the refusal of any preceding secret as the basis of a moral claim and thus as the defining category of the work of art. (shrink)

For Hannah Arendt, spontaneous, ‘initiatory’ human action and interaction are suppressed by the normalizing pressures of society once ‘life’ - that is, sheer life - becomes the primary concern of politics, as it does, she finds, in the modern age. Arendt’s concept of the social is indebted to Martin Heidegger’s analysis of everyday Dasein in Being and Time , and contemporary political philosophers inspired by Heidegger, such as Jean-Luc Nancy, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Giorgio Agamben, tend to reproduce her account of (...) the withdrawal of the political in modernity. In this article, I complicate Arendt’s theory by turning to Michel Foucault’s parallel but diverging understanding of the nature of power in modern society to show, surprisingly, that Foucault’s narrative of the emergence of modern power pictures a society that is more, not less, politicized. Key Words: Hannah Arendt • bio-power • Michel Foucault • Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe • modernity • Jean-Luc Nancy • pastoral power • the social • rulership. (shrink)

Recent scholarship on Jacques Derrida’s work has turned toward his political and institutional engagements. I further this body of research by outlining a twofold problematic regarding the issue of “parliament.” Its first dimension concerns what I call a poli-technic of lying, which denotes that politically impactful techniques of lying demand we follow the lacunae of the polis, the phenomenality of an international public sphere and technologies of public circulation, and the relationship between the construction of categories of “peoples,” “nations,” “borders,” (...) and their “authorities” with practices of force or violence. In the following, I consider Derrida’s relation to the International Parliament of Writers (IPW) as a supplementary institution from which examination of this problematic might be situated in light of alternative traditions predicated on hospitality, and on sheltering the other as a practice inextricable from a “frank concept of truth.” I also consider the emergent possibilities this approach opens for responding to immediate conditions – attacks on the lives of writers around the world, accelerating global displacement, intensifying border closures, and unchecked police enforcement. I look toward the political unit Derrida identifies as crucial for these actions: the city as a space for frank and open speech – the ville franche. (shrink)