This study reconstructs the relationship between philosophy and politics in the way in which Heidegger's failure as a politician influenced the redevelopment of philosophy in the 1930s. The author also explains how Heidegger's failure influenced the content and direction of his later work.

"Ce qui s'écrit ici différance marque l'étrange mouvement, l'unité irréductiblement impure d'un différer (détour, délai, délégation, division, inégalité, espacement) dont l'économie excède les ressources déclarées du logos classique. C'est ce mouvement qui donne unité aux essais ici enchaînés. Qu'ils questionnent l'écriture littéraire ou le motif structuraliste (dans les champs de la critique, des “sciences de l'homme” ou de la philosophie), que par une lecture configurante ils en appellent à Nietzsche ou à Freud, à Husserl ou à Heidegger, à Artaud, Bataille, (...) Blanchot, Foucault, Jabès, Levinas, ils n'ont qu'un lieu d'insistance : le point d'articulation dérobée entre l'écriture et la différence. A peser sur cette articulation, ils tentent de déplacer les deux termes."--Page 4 de la couverture. (shrink)

Christopher Fynsk offers a sustained critical reading of works written by Martin Heidegger in the period 1927-1947.

Critics have charged that Heidegger's account of authenticity is morally nihilistic, that his fundamental ontology is either egocentric or chauvinistic; and many see Heidegger's turn to Nazism in 1933 as following logically from an indifference, and even hostility, to "otherness" in the premises of his early philosophy. In_ The Fragile "We": Ethical Implications of Heidegger's "Being and Time,"_ Lawrence Vogel presents three interpretations of authentic existence--the existentialist, the historicist, and the cosmopolitan--each of which is a plausible version of the personal (...) ideal depicted in _Being and Time._ He then draws parallels between these interpretations and three moments in the contemporary liberal-communitarian debate over the relationship of the "I" and the "We." His book contributes both to a diagnosis of what there is about _Being and Time_ that invites moral nihilism and to a sense of how fundamental ontology might be recast so that "the other" is accorded an appropriate place in an account of human existence. (shrink)

These essays provoke new responses to the work of the eminent French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas through an analysis of how the problematics of reading, deconstruction, feminism, and psychotherapy complicate and deepen Levinas's account of ...

First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Theodor Adorno once wrote an essay to "defend Bach against his devotees." In this book Dana Villa does the same for Hannah Arendt, whose sweeping reconceptualization of the nature and value of political action, he argues, has been covered over and domesticated by admirers who had hoped to enlist her in their less radical philosophical or political projects. Against the prevailing "Aristotelian" interpretation of her work, Villa explores Arendt's modernity, and indeed her postmodernity, through the Heideggerian and Nietzschean theme of (...) a break with tradition at the closure of metaphysics.Villa's book, however, is much more than a mere correction of misinterpretations of a major thinker's work. Rather, he makes a persuasive case for Arendt as the postmodern or postmetaphysical political theorist, the first political theorist to think through the nature of political action after Nietzsche's exposition of the death of God. After giving an account of Arendt's theory of action and Heidegger's influence on it, Villa shows how Arendt did justice to the Heideggerian and Nietzschean criticism of the metaphysical tradition while avoiding the political conclusions they drew from their critiques. The result is a wide-ranging discussion not only of Arendt and Heidegger, but of Aristotle, Kant, Nietzsche, Habermas, and the entire question of politics after metaphysics. (shrink)

SÍNTESE - Este artigo apresenta uma análise da passagem sobre a voz do amigo, no § 34 de Ser e tempo, aproximando-a da temática da voz da consciência, tal como apresentada nos §§ 54 a 60. São destacados os pontos relevantes nas duas temáticas, que são aproximadas pelo papel central atribuído ao fenômeno do ouvir, enquanto forma essencial dó compartilhamento da própria existência com os outros existentes humanos. Tanto na voz da consciência, quanto na voz do amigo, está presente a (...) possibilidade de abertura do Dasein para o seu poder-ser mais próprio. Se a voz da consciência chama a vida humana diante de sua possibilidade autêntica, o ouvi-la, na forma do ouvir a voz do amigo, faz cada existente em particular aberto para tal possibilidade. Por isso, o central nesta voz não seria tanto o seu caráter amigável, mas o compartilhamento: um compartilhamento que não exclui o confronto. A conclusão central consiste em que esta afirmação sobre a voz do amigo pertence ao cerne da analítica da existência, não podendo ser vista como uma simples evocação poética. (shrink)

Introduction: Fundamental Ontology as a "Fundamental Ethics" In his "Letter on Humanism" Martin Heidegger claims that the fundamental ontology he works out ...

From the relative obscurity in which Levinas's work languished until very recently, Emmanuel Levinas must now be judged as one of the most influential figures in contemporary Continental philosophy. There is no better guide than John Lewelyn to lead one through the thickets of Levinas's prose. Bursting with questions, multiple references, cascading citations and multilingual puns and nuances, this book is the compelling record of intellectual obsession. Taking as its guiding thre the theme of genealogy, the book gives a broadly (...) chronological and impressively manageable presentation of the whole sweep of the Levinas's work. Balanced and finely grained, Llewelyn confronts questions of method, Heidegger, phenomenology, the theme of sensibility, religion, enjoyment, feminity, eros, justice and the political. The book reaches a stunning climax in a series of chapters that give a hestitant but tolerant discussion of the question of God in Levinas, the relation to Levinasian ethics to Nietzschean genealogy, and an extraordinary discussion of metaphor that leads into a wholly original analysis of Levinas's poetics and metaphorics. The book concludes with a sensitive reading of the autobiographical epigraphs to Levinas's Otherwise than Being... and a consideration of the Holocaust. (shrink)