I am grateful that someone whose work I greatly admire could be the philosopher to so eloquently and succinctly cut to the heart of the problem that I posed in the previous issue of Deleuze Studies. James Williams' critical reply leaves me, prima facie, confronted by a stark alternative: either I have misunderstood Deleuze, or I have illustrated problems and lacunae in Deleuze. I will suggest, however, that this is a false alternative, and that Williams' and my divergent accounts of (...) The Logic of Sense – and even Deleuze's oeuvre as a whole – is better understood as a situation of ‘both/and’ rather than ‘either/or’, and hence that my interpretation of Deleuze isn't wrong, but necessarily iconoclastic. (shrink)

A major event in the history of twentieth-century thought, Notebooks for a Ethics is Jean-Paul Sartre's attempt to develop an ethics consistent with the profound individualism of his existential philosophy. In the famous conclusion to Being and Nothingness , Sartre announced that he would devote his next philosophical work to moral problems. Although he worked on this project in the late 1940s, Sartre never completed it to his satisfaction, and it remained unpublished until after his death in 1980. Presented here (...) for the first time in English, the Notebooks reveal Sartre at his most productive, crafting a masterpiece of philosophical reflection that can easily stand alongside his other great works. Sartre grapples anew here with such central issues as "authenticity" and the relation of alienation and freedom to moral values. Exploring fundamental modes of relating to the Other--among them violence, entreaty, demand, appeal, refusal, and revolt--he articulates the necessary transition from individualism to historical consciousness. This work thus forms an important bridge between the early existentialist Sartre and the later Marxist social thinker of the Critique of Dialectical Reason . The Notebooks themselves are complemented here by two additional essays, one on "the good and subjectivity," the other on the oppression of blacks in the United States. With publication of David Pellauer's lucid translation, English-speaking readers will be able to appreciate this important contribution to moral philosophy and the history of ethics. Jean-Paul Sartre (1906-1980) was offered, but declined, the Nobel Prize for literature in 1964. His many works of fiction, drama, and philosophy include the monumental study of Flaubert, The Family Idiot , and The Freud Scenario , both published in translation by the University of Chicago Press. (shrink)

One of the more important and under-thematized philosophical disputes in contemporary European philosophy pertains to the significance that is given to the inter-related phenomena of habituality, skilful coping, and learning. This paper examines this dispute by focusing on the work of the Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger-inspired phenomenologist Hubert Dreyfus, and contrasting his analyses with those of Gilles Deleuze, particularly in Difference and Repetition. Both Deleuze and Dreyfus pay a lot of attention to learning and coping, while arriving at distinct conclusions about (...) these phenomena with a quite different ethico-political force. By getting to the bottom of the former, my hope is to problematize aspects of the latter in both philosophers' work. In Deleuze's case, it will be argued that he adopts a problematic position on learning that is aptly termed 'empirico-romanticism'. While I will agree with the general thrust of Dreyfus' foregrounding of habit and skilful coping, even in the political realm, it will also be argued that there are some risks associated with his view, notably of devolving into a conservative communitarianism. (shrink)

Deleuze suggests that his work grounds a new conception of the Other - the Other as expression of a possible world, as a structure that precedes any subsequent dialectical mediation, including the master-slave dialectic of social relations. I will argue, however, that the ethico-political injunction that Deleuze derives from his analysis of the ‘other-structure’ confronts a different problem. It commits Deleuze to either tacitly prescribing a romantic morality of difference that valorizes expressive encounters without ‘relations of explication’ and any kind (...) of pre-understanding (embodied or otherwise), or his continual flirtations with a mystical ‘going beyond’ the other-structure must be more than mere flirtations. (shrink)

This paper explores the idea that Deleuze’s oeuvre is best understood as a philosophy of the wound, synonymous with a philosophy of the event. Although this wound/scar typology may appear to be a metaphorical conceit, the motif of the wound recurs frequently and perhaps even symptomatically in many of Deleuze’s texts, particularly where he is attempting to delineate some of the most important differences (transcendental, temporal, and ethical) between himself and his phenomenological predecessors. I raise some some potential problems for (...) this trajectory, most of which revolve around Deleuze's use of transcendental philosophy. (shrink)

This essay examines Deleuze's account of time and the wound in The Logic of Sense and, to a lesser extent, in Difference and Repetition. As such, it will also explicate his understanding of the event, as well as the notoriously opaque ethics of counter-actualisation that are bound up with it, before raising certain problems that are associated with the transcendental and ethical priority that he accords to the event and what he calls the time of Aion. I will conclude by (...) proposing a dialectic between the two aspects of time that he counterposes (Aion and Chronos, roughly the disjunctive and the conjunctive) that does not instantiate any kind of a priori privilege of the one over the other. (shrink)

Deleuze suggests that his work grounds a new conception of the Other–the Other as expression of a possible world, as a structure that precedes any subsequent dialectical mediation, including the master-slave dialectic of social relations. I will argue, however, that the ethico-political injunction that Deleuze derives from his analysis of the 'other-structure' confronts a different problem. It commits Deleuze to either tacitly prescribing a romantic morality of difference that valorizes expressive encounters without 'relations of explication' and any kind of pre-understanding (...) (embodied or otherwise), or his continual flirtations with a mystical 'going beyond' the other-structure must be more than mere flirtations. (shrink)

This paper critically engages with Simon Glendinning’s The Idea of Continental Philosophy. Glendinning purports to show that there can be no coherent philosophical understanding of continental philosophy as comprising any sort of distinct or unified tradition. In this paper, however, I raise some questions about the largely unilateral direction in which his account of the motives for the divide is pursued: analytic philosophy is envisaged as pathologically projecting the internal and unavoidable threat of philosophical failure upon an external ‘continental’ other. (...) I also contend that Glendinning’s claims regarding the lack of thematic and methodological continuity at work in continental philosophy are overstated. Without denying that there is less of a normative consensus undergirding this polyvocal tradition than is evinced in the analytic tradition, in the second half of the paper I will argue for a ‘quasi-unity’ that revolves around the co-imbrication of methodological considerations and what I characterise as continental philosophy’s ‘temporal turn’. (shrink)

Despite its consistently mild tone, Simon Glendinning’s The Idea of Continental Philosophy is a provocative and uncompromising work. It is to be admired for this. Without “chickening out” (94), Glendinning purports to show that there can be no coherent philosophical understanding of continental philosophy as comprising any sort of distinct or unified tradition. Furthermore, he argues that the vast majority of us working in this so-called tradition actually know this at some level but shy away from this uncomfortable conclusion. This (...) second claim might seem to be readily falsifiable, but Glendinning’s suggestion that we can’t face up to this absence of a unified tradition guards against this. In fact, many of his central arguments rely upon a highly perceptive deconstructive and psychoanalytic understanding of the ‘divide’ between analytic and continental philosophy, which is not surprising given his previous important work on Derrida in Arguing With Derrida (Blackwell 2001) and On Being With Others (Routledge 1998). In what follows, however, I’ll raise some questions about the largely unilateral direction in which his account of the motives for the divide is pursued: analytic philosophy is envisaged as pathologically projecting the internal and unavoidable threat of philosophical failure upon an external ‘continental’ other, much as the foreign policy of successive US administrations has projected an internal threat upon others through rhetoric like the ‘axis of evil’ and ‘rogue states’. I will also contend that Glendinning’s claims regarding the lack of thematic and methodological continuity at work in continental philosophy are overstated. Without denying that there is less of a normative consensus undergirding this polyvocal tradition than is evinced in the analytic tradition, in the second half of the paper I will argue for a ‘quasi-unity’ that revolves around the co-imbrication of methodological considerations and what I characterise as continental philosophy’s ‘temporal turn’. (shrink)