This paper assumes that the purpose of ethics is to open up a space for the possibility of moral conduct in the flow of everyday life. If this is the case then we can legitimately ask: "How then do we do ethics"? To attempt an answer to this important question, the paper presents some suggestions from the work of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida. With Levinas, it is argued that ethics happens in the singularity of the face of the Other (...) before me "here and now". Ethics matters in my everyday contact with the Other that disturbs my egological existence and claims my response. But what about all other Others, not here now but nevertheless simultaneously already present? What about their equal claim on me? With Levinas and Derrida, the paper attempts to articulate the notion of singular justice as the simultaneous demand of all others requiring my response. In singular justice, the paper attempts to show how the demands of ethics (the singular) and the demands of justice (all other Others) can become the impossible possibility for a "justice where there is no distinction between those close and those far off, but in which there also remains the impossibility of passing by the closest". Furthermore, the paper attempts to argue that singular justice is our calling - or more precisely my calling - to do the right thing, here and now. Finally, by way of explication, the paper discusses a case of software piracy to try to show how singular justice can help us not to think about ethics, which is important, but to (almost) do it - which is very important. (shrink)

This paper is an attempt to present disclosive ethics as a framework for computer and information ethics – in line with the suggestions by Brey, but also in quite a different manner. The potential of such an approach is demonstrated through a disclosive analysis of facial recognition systems. The paper argues that the politics of information technology is a particularly powerful politics since information technology is an opaque technology – i.e. relatively closed to scrutiny. It presents the design of technology (...) as a process of closure in which design and use decisions become black-boxed and progressively enclosed in increasingly complex socio-technical networks. It further argues for a disclosive ethics that aims to disclose the nondisclosure of politics by claiming a place for ethics in every actual operation of power – as manifested in actual design and use decisions and practices. It also proposes that disclosive ethics would aim to trace and disclose the intentional and emerging enclosure of politics from the very minute technical detail through to social practices and complex social-technical networks. The paper then proceeds to do a disclosive analysis of facial recognition systems. This analysis discloses that seemingly trivial biases in recognition rates of FRSs can emerge as very significant political acts when these systems become used in practice. (shrink)

While the concept of internationalization plays a key role in contemporary discussions on the activities and outcomes sought by universities, it is commonly argued that it is poorly understood or realised in practice. This has led some to argue that more work is needed to define the dimensions of the concept, or even to plot out stages of its achievement. This paper aims not to provide a definition of internationalisation for those working in higher education. On the contrary, it seeks (...) to open up discussion on internationalisation by considering Derrida's reflections on hospitality and the metaphysics of presence. In so doing, it will be shown that internationalisation is an ethical demand that is as much about being unsettled by thinking about ourselves and others, as it is about mobility programs and online education, and about being ‘late’ rather than surrendering to the space‐time compression of modernity. (shrink)

By prioritizing the ethical encounter with the Other over politics, Levinas appears to relegate political concerns to a secondary status. Not only does politics appear to be less important than the face-to-face, it even appears to be morally compromised. Nevertheless, Levinas insists that politics are necessary for a moral society. This paper attempts to navigate this tension between morality and politics by exploring Levinas’s account of original peace as opposed to competing accounts of original violence in Hobbes and Derrida. This (...) original peace not only serves as a foundation of the political order, but also provides the context in which to understand Levinas’s famous account of the third. The introduction of the third party appears to problematize the self-other account and opens an aporia in the ethical relation. Far from being a necessary evil, politics instead appears as a necessary good to both remain true to the ethical imperative of the face-to-face and solve the problem introduced by the third party. It is by recognizing that the political is already implicated in the face-to-face relation that Levinas seeks to bridge the gap between peace with the Other and peace within a political society. (shrink)

This article explores the relationship between critical distance and the idea of proximity. In times that are often described as ‘global’, ‘24/7’, ‘connected’, ‘networked’ and ‘immersive’, distance seems ever reduced and proximity omnipresent. The contemporary impression of ubiquitous proximity might constitute a threat to the survival of critical distance understood either as a cornerstone of enlightened and humanist critical practice or as a key metaphysical ‘technology’. The resulting ‘crisis of critical distance’ produces the question of how to position oneself with (...) regard to the ‘other’ in a time that lacks distance and privileges proximity? In tracking the ambiguity that surrounds proximity – the desire to be near and the need to maintain a distance – this article rereads some key Heideggerian and Derridean texts in order to attempt a deconstruction of the opposition of distance and proximity at work in the ‘metaphysics of presence’. (shrink)

Two major developments of the last two decades have radically undermined traditional justifications of leftist politics: the failure of 20th-century `socialist' experiments, and what might be termed the deessentializing movement in contemporary philosophy. However, the social injustices that animated revolutionary thinkers in many respects remain, and some have arguably worsened in the era of globalized capitalism. This article investigates whether it is possible to articulate a new theoretical underpinning for progressive politics that nevertheless avoids the essentialist moves of Marxism. Ethico-political (...) readings of Derrida — one of the most influential anti-essentialist thinkers — are compared to Ernesto Laclau's attempts at formulating a post-Marxist progressive politics built around the notions of `hegemony' and `radical democracy'. Laclau's intervention in the Marxist tradition is to deconstruct its traditional categories so as to take account of contingency; his intervention in deconstruction is to introduce what in this article is described as `contestation', so as to provide a more coherent account of the political. The article concludes that neither deconstruction nor radical democracy provides an adequate basis for poltical action, but that the latter's account of the political is a meaningful development of the theoretical schema articulated by the former and does point to the possibility of a non-essentialist progressive politics. Key Words: aporia • contestation • contingency • deconstruction • Jacques Derrida • hegemony • justice • Ernesto Laclau • Emmanuel Levinas • responsibility. (shrink)

Resumen El objetivo general del trabajo es analizar las influencias y recepciones del post-estructuralismo en las lecturas de Judith Butler y sólo algunas derivaciones en el pensamiento de Paul B. Preciado. A partir de este rastreo se pueden establecer las críticas de la teoría queer al feminismo a través de las imágenes y textualidades que propone el arte. La hipótesis general del trabajo supone que, a partir de la recepción del postestructuralismo en los análisis de Butler y Preciado, se podría (...) reconocer en la estética la capacidad crítica y política que las teorías de la identidad sexual pretenden lograr. A los efectos de identificar estos legados nos detendremos en reconocer los aportes de Jacques Derrida en la obra de estxs autorxs. Para finalizar dejamos planteadas algunas críticas que podrían advertir sobre los posibles límites en el plano de la estética de las teorías de género.The general objective of this article is to analyze the influence of post-structuralism in the thought of Judith Butler and Paul B. Preciado. It is argued that queer theory’s critique of feminism can be established through the images and textualities proposed by art; furthermore, on the basis of the influence of poststructuralism in Butler’s and Preciado’s analyses, one can recognize in aesthetics the critical and political capacity that theories of sexual identity intend to achieve. In order to identify these influences, we discuss the contributions of the ideas Jacques Derrida to the work of these authors. In conclusion, we raise some criticisms that warn of the possible limits of gender theories in the plane of aesthetics. (shrink)

La relevancia del pensamiento de Emmanuel Levinas para comprender el surgimiento de la filosofía de la liberación –uno de los movimientos filosóficos más importantes de América Latina durante la segunda mitad del siglo XX– es innegable. En este artículo se analiza la interpretación geopolítica y analógica que Enrique Dussel realizó de los conceptos levinasianos de “Alteridad” y “Otro” para mostrar su equivocidad en el ámbito de lo político.

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)

Narratives are everywhere. We tell narratives about ourselves and we make the world meaningful through storytelling. We position others through the narratives we tell and are positioned by stories told about us. And yet, while narratives have, of course, been analysed in critical discourse studies (CDS), including in one of its most popular approaches, the discourse-historical approach (DHA), this article proposes to go a step further by systematically integrating the concept of narrative into the core of the DHA. More specifically, (...) I consider narrative from the perspective of the concept of narrative genre. That is, I propose a focus on how meaning arises via the narrative genres of romance, tragedy, comedy and irony, i.e. through (modes of) emplotment. Such an integration does not contradict the DHA’s (and CDS’) focus on detailed textual analysis or reject existing foci, e.g. on argumentation, but recognises the centrality of the narrative form for social life and offers further concepts for empirical analyses. This focus on narrative genre contributes, furthermore, to the critical study of meaning-making by revising Jürgen Habermas’ Critical Theory and offering a novel integration of the latter into the DHA, thus providing a theoretically justified, immanent foundation for its critique. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Narratives are everywhere. We tell narratives about ourselves and we make the world meaningful through storytelling. We position others through the narratives we tell and are positioned by stories told about us. And yet, while narratives have, of course, been analysed in critical discourse studies (CDS), including in one of its most popular approaches, the discourse-historical approach (DHA), this article proposes to go a step further by systematically integrating the concept of narrative into the core of the DHA. More (...) specifically, I consider narrative from the perspective of the concept of narrative genre. That is, I propose a focus on how meaning arises via the narrative genres of romance, tragedy, comedy and irony, i.e. through (modes of) emplotment. Such an integration does not contradict the DHA’s (and CDS’) focus on detailed textual analysis or reject existing foci, e.g. on argumentation, but recognises the centrality of the narrative form for social life and offers further concepts for empirical analyses. This focus on narrative genre contributes, furthermore, to the critical study of meaning-making by revising Jürgen Habermas’ Critical Theory and offering a novel integration of the latter into the DHA, thus providing a theoretically justified, immanent foundation for its critique. (shrink)

Emmanuel Levinas is variously used to provide a conceptualization of ethics from which to deduce an ethical politics, an account of the movement from ethics to politics or an exhortation to continually interrupt politics in the name of ethics. What all these approaches share is a reading of Levinas where ethics and politics are separated and ethics is prioritized. My argument in this article is that if the concept of the Third is given due weight in Levinas's work then this (...) separation and prioritization is untenable. The reading advanced foregrounds the Third and in doing so demonstrates that the unproblematized ‘ethics’ often drawn from Levinas is more complex than might initially appear. I argue that if the Third is taken seriously then Levinas's work leads to a requirement to think in terms of the ethico-political, so complicating any attempt to deduce politics from ethics which draws on this. (shrink)

Derrida’s philosophy is usually known as a form of critique of metaphysics. This article, however, argues that Derrida’s deconstructions do not only dismantle metaphysics from within, but also remain in themselves thoroughly, and problematically, metaphysical. Its goal is to determine exactly where the metaphysical features of Derrida’s work can be found. The article starts with an analysis of Derrida’s understanding of metaphysics, as well as its deconstruction, by explaining the working of différance, mainly focusing on its temporality. Further, it will (...) demonstrate how in the temporization or deferral of différance a metaphysical desire for purity remains effective. In readings of several texts, the mutual interdependence of metaphysics and deconstruction will be sketched. Then the ethical side of deconstruction will be highlighted, both in Derrida’s early work as well as in the slightly different elaboration of différance in the later ethical notions like justice, the gift and the messianic. This results in a distinction of three versions of différance. Finally, a critical discussion of the metaphysical side of deconstruction will be followed by a comparison of different readings of deconstruction and différance. (shrink)

:In this essay, I argue that what I consider a generally valid critique of the traditional model of representation remains too closely focused on its limitations and not its liminality. To make this distinction, I couch my analysis in terms of sacrifice. The canonical model of mimesis was concerned by the sacrificed thickness of “presence” in the thin re-presentation; today's anti-essentialist model is instead concerned that presence or sameness comes at the sacrificial cost of the other. Although the latter is (...) accordingly more sensitive to racial representation, it still fails to come to terms with liminality, which is the structural inability to represent the margins. The Lacanian analysis of an Iranian film that cannot rely on traditional visual cues opens the door to appreciating liminality. But unless a “narcissistic” tendency of the Lacanian scholarship is addressed, liminality becomes a fetish for the other as a “stain.”. (shrink)

The essay draws on a little-known fragment from M.M. Bakhtin’s Draft Exercise Notebooks of 1943 to highlight both the affinities and the divergences of the respective philosophical projects of Bakhtin and Emmanuel Levinas. The first part of the discussion follows their parallel itineraries through several points of convergence, from a sense of profound philosophical disenchantment to a conception of the ethical subject as living on borderlines, facing the other, irremediably vulnerable and infinitely responsible. The second part focuses on the “dialogic (...) impasse” and its attempted resolution through gestures of triangulation, evidenced in Levinas’s “third” and Bakhtin’s “superaddresee.” The third part of the discussion, beginning with Bakhtin’s and Levinas’s different readings of Dostoevsky, focuses on the ultimate divergence of their philosophical positions, and suggests that Bakhtin’s discursive conception of subjectivity may point the direction towards a more viable thinking of a post-metaphysical ethics. (shrink)

This investigation concerns first what Jacques Derrida and Paul Ricœur consider to be «the question of writing» in Plato’s Phaedrus, and then whether their conception of a general philosophical problem of writing finds support in the dialogue. By contrast to their attempts to «determine» the «status» of writing as the general condition of knowledge, my investigation has two objections. (1) To show that Plato’s concern is not to define writing, but to reflect on what is involved in honest and dishonest (...) inquiry. (2) To argue that Derrida’s and Ricœur’s determination of the instrumental (epistemic and moral) «status» of writing, overlooks crucial difficulties of dishonest writing that Plato’s discussion of the pharmakon reveals. The argument proposed is that honest and dishonest inquiry is not tied to the moral status that writing, as an invention or instrument, unconditionally involves, but to the moral quality of what a human being does when inquiring. (shrink)

Challenges the accepted model, and builds a politically sensitive notion of generosity.

This article attempts to chart a course beyond the 'impasse of the political' in Derridean deconstruction that avoids both the ontologization of ethics in Levinas and the recourse to morality in Habermasian discourse ethics. Instead, it presents an account of the decision in a terrain of undecidability through the concept of affinity. This mode of ethico-political activity, when combined with Foucault's analytics of power and Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis, provides the outlines of a project of radical social transformation that could (...) achieve greater nuance with regard to 'actually existing' democracy and justice than has so far been achieved within deconstructive political theory. At the level of social structure, such a project is commensurate with a move away from subject positions associated with the system of liberal-capitalist nation-states, in favour of identifications produced by a locus of 'coming' communities. Key Words: affinity • Critchley • deconstruction • Deleuze and Guattari • Derrida • ethics • Foucault • Laclau and Mouffe • politics. (shrink)

This article tries to bring out the implication of Cavell’s critical comments on Derrida, clustered around Cavell’s charge that deconstruction entails a flight from the ordinary. Cavell’s and Derrida’s different readings of Austin’s ordinary language philosophy provide a common ground for elaborating their respective positions. Their writings are at once the closest but also the most divergent when addressing the moral implication of speech, or more precisely, when addressing their understanding of responsibility and voice. Employing Derrida’s so-called ‘double reading’ as (...) a leitmotif will not only shed light on the moral dimension of deconstruction, but also bring the central target of Cavell’s critique into the open. (shrink)

The controversial case of Terri Schiavo came to a close on March 31, 2005, with her death following the removal of a percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy tube. This event followed years of controversy and social upheaval. Voices from across the entire political and cultural spectrums filled the airwaves and op-ed pages of major newspapers. Protests ensued outside of Ms. Schiavo’s care facility. Ms. Schiavo’s parents published videos of their daughter on the internet in an effort to prove that she was not (...) in a vegetative state and could potentially recover. There is a certain mystery to the entire controversy given the fact that, legally, it was largely a matter of settled law. Precedent cases and legal statutes clearly set out the proper procedures and decisions to be followed in this case. Nonetheless, powerful challenges and virulent opposition to these standards arose. Through an investigation of this case as well as a comparative study of the case of Dax Cowart (in particular, the documentary depictions of Dax Cowart’s case) and of a photograph by Joel-Peter Witkin, I plan to investigate the source of these social upheavals and hypothesize that they were largely the result of a phenomenological reaction to the human face. (shrink)

This paper explores, from a phenomenological perspective, the conditions necessary for the possession of intentional content, i.e., for being intentionally directed toward the world. It argues that Levinas's concept of ethics as first philosophy makes an important contribution to this task. Intentional directedness, as understood here, is normatively structured. Levinas's ‘ethics’ can be understood as a phenomenological account of how our experience of the other subject as another subject takes place in the recognition of the normative force of a command. (...) This supplies a condition that—as the paper shows by examining Husserl and Sartre on how our experience of the Other constitutes an ‘objective’ world—earlier phenomenologists have misunderstood, because they have treated ethical experience as ‘founded’ on a prior theory of representation (‘ontology’ in Levinas's language). Ethics is first philosophy because it is only by acknowledging the command in the ‘face’ of the Other that we can account for the sensitivity to the normative distinctions that structure intentional content. Throughout, the paper shows how Levinas's analyses, in Totality and Infinity, draw upon and develop the analyses of Husserl and Sartre. (shrink)

According to Emmanuel Levinas, the individual bears an infinite obligation to the other person. In the Talmudic reading “Judaism and revolution,” Levinas suggests that we move from the ethical encounter to social relationships using contracts—both particular contracts and the social contract. So social relationships are created by limiting obligation, and as a result these relationships can only be practically acceptable, not ethical. Jewish religious practice for Levinas should also be understood as a set of negotiated limits to our infinite obligation.

This article examines a peculiarity dating from Classical times, namely, that democracy may be achieved, in practice, independently of and prior to its articulation as theory. This peculiarity has implications for the way in which the history of democratic theory is understood, and also for the place of the democratic theorist in society. Paul Feyerabend, Richard Rorty, Chantal Mouffe and John Keane are theorists of democracy, but they all depart, first, from the commitment to the universal truth‐claims that underpin other (...) schools of democratic thought, and, second, from the concomitant belief in the priority of theory over practice. In doing so, they make it difficult to theorise how democracy might be brought about, except, circularly, where it already exists. On the one side, Feyerabend, Rorty and, to a lesser extent, Keane, assume that ‘democracy’ already exists, so that its realisation requires no theory. On the other, Mouffe argues that ‘democracy’ does not yet exist in practice, but her attempts to theorise its realisation are not convincing. (shrink)

Recent debates among scholars in Literature education have led to polarizing views about the aims of the subject. The debate reignites ancient quarrels about the aesthetic and political values of literary study and relatedly, the different pedagogical approaches to teaching. In the first part of this paper, I explore the aesthetic-political divide in Literature education paying particular attention to how this was reinforced by New Criticism and Poststructuralist Criticism as these were key movements that have had a significant influence on (...) the teaching of Literature in schools. More importantly, I argue that such a divide exemplified the different goals of the West, in which Literature education originated as a platform for the cultivation of taste, and Postcolonial countries, in which the subject was utilized as a political tool for colonization resulting in acts of mimicry and subversion among colonized subjects. In the second part of the paper, I apply third space theory to disrupt the aesthetic-political divide. I discuss the need to create third spaces in Literature classrooms that are critical, inclusive, negotiated and ethical allowing students to engage with aesthetic, political and ethical dimensions of literature. (shrink)

Education has long been charged with the taskof forming and shaping subjectivity andidentity. However, the prevailing view ofeducation as a project of producing rationalautonomous subjects has been challenged bypostmodern and poststructuralist critiques ofsubstantial subjectivity. In a similar vein,Emmanuel Levinas inverts the traditionalconception of subjectivity, claiming that weare constituted as subjects only in respondingto the other. In other words, subjectivity isderivative of an existentially priorresponsibility to and for the other. Hisconception of ethical responsibility is thusalso a radical departure from the prevailingview (...) of what it means to be a responsible moralagent. In this paper, I use jazz improvisationas a metaphor to focus on three interrelatedaspects of ethical responsibility on Levinas'saccount: passivity, heteronomy, andinescapability. I then point toward some waysin which reframing responsibility andsubjectivity along this line might offer newpossibilities for conceiving subjectivity andmoral agency in education. (shrink)

Nuestro propósito en el presente artículo será investigar el modo en que Jacques Derrida dirige la cuestión de la “responsabilidad ética” y de la “decisión política” en su propia obra a través de la lectura de Martin Heidegger en Del espíritu. Para ello, en primer lugar, analizaremos la noción de “promesa” que permite cuestionar el privilegio de la pregunta en Heidegger e ilustrar el acontecimiento ético desde la propia lectura. En segundo lugar, nos adentraremos en la dimensión política de la (...) deconstrucción desde la noción de “indecidibilidad” que hace posible la justicia de la decisión precisamente por realizarse en ausencia de un fundamento racional. Por último, trataremos de pensar aquello a partir de lo que la adhesión de Heidegger al nazismo fue posible desde la lógica textual de discursos en ocasiones antagónicos, que se profieren en nombre del “espíritu”, así como la necesidad de “pensar” y no solo “condenar” el nazismo. (shrink)

: This essay examines Irigaray's analysis of politics and the political implications of her critique of sacrificial orders that repress difference/matter. I suggest that her descriptions of a fluid "feminine" can be read as an alternative symbolic not dependent on repression. This idea is politically promising in opening a possibility for justice and a nonantagonistic intersubjectivity. I conclude by assessing Irigaray's concrete proposals for sexuate rights and a civil identity for women.

This article is an attempt to understand ethical theory not just as a set of well-developed philosophical perspectives but as a range of moral capacities that human beings more or less grow into over the course of their lives. To this end, we explore the connection between formal ethical theories and stage developmental psychologies, showing how individuals mature morally, regarding their duties, responsibilities, ideals, goals, values, and interests. The primary method is to extract from the writings of Kohlberg and his (...) students the cues that help to flesh out a developmental picture of a wide range of ethical perspectives. Thus, developmental psychology benefits from gaining a broader understanding of “morality” and “ethics,” and ethical theory benefits from a richer understanding of how moral maturity arises from youthful beginnings in juvenile and adolescent thinking. Results of this study offer insight into the difficulty of teaching ethics and a refined ability to assess moral maturity in business activity. (shrink)

The moral philosophy of Levinas offers a stark prospectus of impossibility for corporate ethics. It differs from most traditional ethical theories in that, for Levinas, the ethical develops in a personal meeting of one with the Other, rather than residing in some internal deliberation of the moral subject. Levinasian ethics emphasizes an infinite personal responsibility arising for each of us in the face of the Other and in the presence of the Third. It stresses the imperious demand we experience to (...) be open to, prepared for and impassioned with that which we may not know, or recognize, about ourselves or about the Other. Such a demand transcends our intellectual and/or rational potential; it involves us in a carnal and somatic bodily experience of otherness. If we are to speak of Levinasian ethics in a business context, it cannot be a matter of corporate ethics but only a matter of individual managerial ethics. What such an ethics would be like is yet to be outlined. This paper proposes a series of questions and suggestions that will explicate some key terms of a practice organized around a Levinasian vocabulary of otherness, responsibility, proximity, diachrony and justice. (shrink)

To date, film scholars have found the films of Jim Jarmusch to be tantamount to works of postmodern philosophy. For as intriguing and productive as such interpretations of Jarmusch’s films have been, I submit that the postmodern framework occludes a crucial aspect of Jarmusch’s film-philosophy, namely, his investment in the ordinary. From this perspective, I intend to show the availability of Jarmusch’s films to Wittgensteinian interpretation. More specifically, I plan to situate Jarmusch’s arthouse action film Ghost Dog: The Way of (...) the Samurai (1999) between Ludwig Wittgenstein and Jacques Derrida in order to demonstrate the profound affinities between Jarmusch’s film-philosophy and Wittgenstein’s conception of ordinary language. Through a consideration of character dialogue, I will demonstrate the extent to which Jarmusch rejects the private language argument – which, by extension, amounts to a rejection of linguistic relativism as an instance, or species, of skepticism – in favor of ordinary conceptions of language, expressiveness, knowledge, and responsibility. (shrink)

This article argues that, propaedeutic to the construction of an Objectivist aesthetics, scholars must refute the irrational/immoral philosophical premises that have been destroying the philosophy of art. Due to the troubling combination of its contemporaneity, extremism, and considerable influence, poststructuralism, which, since the 1960s, has served as the default philosophical foundation for philosophers of art, is the target of this article. This article contends that the road to an Objectivist aesthetics must first be cleared of philosophical debris like poststructuralism before (...) we can hope to go back to the world of art. (shrink)

In this paper I seek to critically examine UCT’s and CCT’s and consider how a Levinasian ethics might offer normative guidelines to evaluate such aid programmes. Such an analysis will serve to both critique and supplement the traditional utilitarian analyses of such programmes. In so doing, this paper also hopes to contribute to the business ethics literature in which a Levinasian ethics may be brought to bear on real world problems. I proceed by enlisting Jordaan who argues that a Levinasian (...) ethical politics can be instantiated in institutional designs by allowing a more complex representation of the other’s alterity. Two UCT programmes are interrogated in light of this finding – the first, a UCT programme in a community in Vietnam; the second, a joint CCT/UCT programme targeting adolescent girls in Malawi, designed to test the efficacy of conditionality to achieve certain. (shrink)

The article centres on the notion of responsibility in Tom Stoppard’s Darkside (2013). While Pink Floyd’s original album, which inspired the playwright, thematises its connection to ethics in a spectral and hauntological manner, through the use of field recording sound snippets interwoven in the music, the radio play explores the notion of responsibility through what is called “thought experiments.” The article identifies the subversive function of these narrative examples and, following Emanuel Levinas’ suggestions concerning the instability of the link between (...) the philosophical discourse and that of examples, shows the latter’s insolent and disruptive nature. The notion of responsibility is further linked to its discussion by Jacques Derrida in his Gift of Death (1995) which consequently makes it possible to view the relation between responsibility and responding from a subversive, hauntological and undecidable perspective. (shrink)

The thesis analyses the relation between Rousseau’s musical writings and elements of his moral, social and linguistic philosophy. In particular, I am concerned to demonstrate: (i.) how the core of Rousseau’s theory of musical imitation is grounded in the same analysis of the nature of man which governs his moral and social philosophy; (ii.) how this grounding does not extend to the stylistic prescriptions the justification of which Rousseau intended his musical writings to offer. The central argument draws on Rousseau’s (...) analysis of the origin of man as distinctively human. This origin extends to the awareness of moral and aesthetic value, and to communication in speech and song. Rousseau’s moral analyses of social and political life usually take the form of relating contemporary practice to the original structure in which man’s awareness of his own good is commensurate with that of the good of others. The analysis of music follows a similar model: music is to be considered good in so far as it replicates, or faithfully reflects, the original model of communication. The value of music is thereby understood to extend to moral as well as aesthetic goodness. Given the subtlety of Rousseau’s understanding of the ‘origin’, I argue that this analysis of music’s aesthetic value is powerful and far‐ reaching in its relevance for contemporary musical aesthetics. However, I also argue that while the analysis in general is good in this way, it does not entail the specific kind of musical‐stylistic preferences which Rousseau sought to use it to advance. (shrink)

Recent years have seen educationalists turning to Emmanuel Levinas when considering the relationship between ethics and education. While it is true that Levinas never speaks of ethics in relation to the practice of classroom education, nonetheless, for Levinas, ethics is a teaching, and learning can only take place in the presence of the Other. This book considers how, within the constraints of the Irish primary school education system, teachers can develop a Levinasian approach to teaching, that affords both them and (...) the children they teach multiple opportunities throughout the school day to take up their ethical responsibility for each other as Other. Beginning from a Levinasian understanding of learning and teaching as constituting primordially relational and ethical events, and weaving the philosophies of Levinas, and the educationalists he inspires, into the approaches of philosophy with children, restorative practice, and PAX, this book suggests a unique approach to ethics in Irish primary school classrooms. The focus of this thesis, then, is on both the philosophical underpinnings that anchor teaching as a Levinasian, and a consideration of what practical approaches could be employed by the Levinasian teacher. (shrink)

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

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

Masculinity? This book attempts to answer this one-word question by revisiting key philosophical concepts in the construction of masculinity, not in order to re-write or debunk them again, but in order to provide a radically new departure to what masculinity means today. This new departure focuses on an understanding of sexuality and gender that is neither structured in oppositional terms nor in performative terms, but in a perpendicular relation akin to that which brings space and time together. In doing so, (...) this book doesn’t aim to establish yet another theory within the field of masculism or men’s studies, but to put forward a personal account of how a revised understanding of the relationship between space, time, and gender can thoroughly alter concepts of masculinity. virility and patriarchy. (shrink)

Can deconstruction be accomplished not through the close reading of just one discourse, but through its combination with another? This paper aims at exploring this second way of performing deconstruction through a particular case study: Marxism and psychoanalysis. In the body of the essay, the history of Freudo-Marxism is divided into two parts, depending on which psychoanalyst stands as point of reference: Freud or Lacan. We proceed by studying the four main strategies by virtue of which a genuine combination between (...) Marxism and psychoanalysis has been historically attempted: separation (Reich), domination (Marcuse), contradiction (Althusser) and, finally, deconstruction (Laclau). (shrink)

Images share a common feature with all phenomena of imagination, since they make us aware of what is not present or what is fictional and not existent at all. From this perspective, the philosophical approach of Kendall Lewis Walton—born in 1939 and active since the 1960s at the University of Michigan—is perhaps one of the most notable contributions to image theory. Walton is an authoritative figure within the tradition of analytical aesthetics. His contributions have had a considerable influence on a (...) broad range of topics, such as the role of categories in the understanding of the arts (Walton, “Categories of Art”. Philosophical Review, 79(3): 334–367, 1970), the ambiguous nature of emotions in the experience of fictional stories (Walton, “Fearing Fictions”. The Journal of Philosophy, 75(1): 5–25, 1978), the transparency of photographic images compared to other depictions (Walton, “Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic Realism”. Noûs, 18(1): 67–72, 1984) and, above all, the development of a general theory of fiction as imaginative activity. His 1990 book Mimesis as Make-believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts collects and re-elaborates articles Walton published on the subject since the 1970s. Though he does not attempt to give a definitive answer for what imagination is, Walton thoroughly investigates its role in all cases of representational works, describing depictions as a specific case of “make-believe” activity: images, in short, are specific props of a visual and perceptual “make-believe” game. (shrink)

ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This thesis is a philosophical exposition of violence informed by two theoretical positions which confront complexity as a phenomenon. These positions are complexity theory and deconstruction. Both develop systemsbased understandings of complex phenomena in which relations of difference are constitutive of the meaning of those phenomena. There has been no focused investigation of the implications of complexity for the conceptualisation of violence thus far. In response to this theoretical gap, this thesis begins by distinguishing complexity theory as a (...) general, trans-disciplinary field of study from critical complexity theory. The latter is used to develop a critique and criticism of epistemological foundationalism, emphasising the limits to knowledge and the normative and ethical dimension of knowledge and understanding. The epistemological break implied by this critique reiterates the epistemological shift permeating the work of, among others, Friedrich Nietzsche and Jacques Derrida. In this context, critical complexity theory begins to articulate the idea of violence on two levels: first, as an empirical, ethical problem in the system; and, secondly, as asymmetry and antagonism. Violence in this second sense is implicated in the dynamic relations of difference through which structure and meaning are generated in complex organisation. The sensitivity to difference and violence shared by critical complexity theory and deconstruction allows for the parallel reading of these philosophical perspectives; and for the supplementation and opening of critical complexity theory by deconstruction within the architecture of this thesis. This supplementation seeks to preserve the singularity of each perspective, while exploring the potential of their points of affinity and tension in the production of a coherent philosophical analysis of violence. Deconstruction offers a more developed understanding of violence and a wealth of related motifs: différance, framing, law, singularity, aesthetics and others. These motifs necessitate the inclusion of other philosophical voices, notably, that of Nietzsche, Arendt, Kant, Levinas, and Benjamin. In conversation with these authors, this thesis links violence to meaning, to its possibility, to its production and to the process by which meaning comes to change. Given these links, violence is conceptualised in relation to the notion of difference on three distinct levels. The first is the difference between elements in a complex system of meaning; the second is the notion of difference between systems or texts around which boundaries or frames can be drawn; and the third is the notion of difference between meaning and the absence of meaning. This discussion examines the relationship between this violence implicated in the constitution of meaning and the more colloquial understanding of violence as atrocity, as rape, murder and other socially, politically and ethically problematic expressions thereof. It is to empirical violence, following Derrida and Levinas, that we are called to respond and to intervene in the suffering of the other. The ethical and political necessity of response anchors this discussion of violence. And, it is towards the possibility of an adequate response – the possibility of an ethics sensitive to its own violence and a politics that is directed at the eradication of empirical violence – which this discussion navigates. (shrink)