Russell Ford examines Gilles Deleuze's Empiricism and Subjectivity within its academic and philosophical context, arguing that the significance of this work only becomes apparent in connection to a larger problematic: the conceptual constitution of a purely immanent account of existence.

This wide-ranging conversation explores the potential of comedy to effect social change; the connections and disconnections between comedy and tragedy; the problem of laughter, humor, and ridicule; and the power of feminist humor.

Shocking, brilliant, and eccentric, the French author, translator, and artist Pierre Klossowski (1905-2001) exerted a profound effect on French intellectual culture throughout the twentieth century. The older brother of the painter Balthus, secretary to the novelist Andre Gide, friend to Geroges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot, and heralded as one of the most important voices in the French "return to Nietzsche" by Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, Klossowski pursued his singular vision of mortal embodiment through a variety of scholarly manifestations. In (...) Such a Deathly Desire, Klossowski's original interpretation of Nietzsche's eternal return is developed around the enigmatic figure of the "demon," then deepened with provocative readings of Gide's correspondence; Barbey d'Aurevilly's novel A Married Proest; and the intertwining of language and death in the work of Bataille, Blanchot, and Brice Parain. The book concludes with the powerful essay "Nietzsche, Polytheism, and Parody," in which Klossowski articulates the consequences of the eternal return and the meaning of Nietzsche's genealogy of the fabulation of the world. Intersecting with and confounding a range of disciplines - including psychoanalysis, literary criticism, gender studies, and philosophy - Klossowski's critical writings on language, literature, and the aesthetics of embodiment remain powerful and original contributions to contemporary concerns in the theoretical humanities. (shrink)

Dramatization and comedy are recurring themes in Deleuze's work in the 1960′s and, from his book on Nietzsche in 1962 through The Logic of Sense in 1969, remarks on humor and comedy are closely bound to ethical and political concerns. In Nietzsche and Philosophy, he speaks of the “true” and “false” senses of the tragic in order to frame his interpretation of Nietzsche as a whole, but the distinction acquires its immediate importance from its bearing on the question, “what is (...) justice?” In 1967, in Coldness and Cruelty, he describes legal critique as possible only in terms of irony and comedy. And, in 1969, in The Logic of Sense, the series on humor is followed and explicated by the series “On the Moral Problem in Stoic Philosophy.” This final discussion makes clear what binds these disparate discussions together: comedy is a mode of dramatization that facilitates a morally relevant experience that does not necessarily or immediately engender an act of judgment. For Deleuze, comedy is a demonstration that provokes an experience of wonder at a world that is not organized by the concepts and judgments of subjectivity. (shrink)

The present essay argues that Bergson’s account of the comic can only be fully appreciated when read in conjunction with his later metaphysical exposition of the élan vital in Creative Evolution and then by the account of fabulation that Bergson only elaborates fully three decades later in The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. The more substantive account of the élan vital ultimately shows that, in Laughter, Bergson misses his own point: laughter does not simply serve as a means for (...) correcting human behavior but is rather the élan vital’s vital summons, the demand of life itself, that human beings challenge their obligations, question their societal forms, and thereby create new and, for Bergson, more ideal forms of life and community. (shrink)

Namita Goswami’s book, Subjects That Matter: Philosophy, Feminism, and Postcolonial Theory, challenges its reader not only to attend to how one philosophizes about difference but also how one might philosophize differently. It is concerned with how we, now, practice philosophy as well as what we philosophize about. In this response, I raise a series of questions meant to challenge and expand Goswami’s work from the standpoint of someone rooted in the dominant framework of the Anglo-European academic discourse on difference. In (...) raising these questions, I take myself to be attempting the very twisting free of conventional philosophizing that Subjects That Matter invites. Some of the most powerful discussions in Goswami’s book concern the issues of metaphysics, dialectics, and history. The questions raised here predominantly concern whether specifically “dialectical” non-identity is faithful to Goswami’s conception of a non-antagonistic understanding of difference. Relatedly, does the past-facing metaphysical concept of the Whole insinuate itself in philosophy in such a way as to preclude thinking in ways that go against the grain of the Eurocentric tradition? From this concern for the conceptual commitments of dialectics and its associated metaphysics arises the further concern of whether even a negative dialectics allows for sufficiently differential genealogies. (shrink)

The problem of forgiveness may rightly be regarded as a perennial philosophical problem. But of what sort? Introducing his 1973 contribution to the discussion, entitled simply "Forgiveness"—an essay that remains the standard reference for contemporary discussions of the problem, especially in the Anglo-American philosophical community—Aurel Kolnai writes that while the ethical nature of the problem is indisputable, he intends his argument "to be chiefly logical in nature: the central question I wish to discuss is … whether, and if so in (...) what manner, [forgiveness] is logically possible at all."1 The problem, as Kolnai develops it in the first two sections of his essay, is that forgiveness seems to be either... (shrink)

The notes for Theodor Adorno’s courses in the 1960’s are important resources not only for an understanding of his magnum opus, Negative Dialectics, but also for developing critical responses to this problematic philosophical heir of idealism. Particularly noteworthy among the volumes that have appeared so far is from Adorno’s 1965 course on metaphysics where he engages in a sustained reading of Aristotle’s Metaphysics and explicitly connects it with the project of Negative Dialectics. Adorno’s chief concern is to demonstrate, by way (...) of Eduard Zeller’s work, that Aristotle is indeed a proto-idealist and that his ontology is comprised of a fundamental dualism. Adorno is not an informed reader of Aristotle, as his reliance on Zeller makes clear, but he succeeds in drawing the reader’s attention to the organizing force exerted by  upon . The interest in this organizing force is motivated by an interest in the ethics that is consequent upon it: an ethics that ignores the sufferings of the concrete in the name of a rational ideal. While there are echoes of this in Aristotle’s ethical writings, his account of imagination in De Anima ought to give pause to an account as reductive as Adorno’s. In De Anima, Aristotle provides an account of the imagination () that makes it a power reducible neither to  nor to . The imagination, a power of the bodily senses, and especially sight, is a power that grants to thinking its power but is itself the unmotivated actualization of the purely potential. This essay argues that such a power resists interpretation into any dialectical schema insofar as it constitutes a distinct power of the human animal. At the same time, such an interpretation provides a possible route out of the ethical impasse of the unthinkable concrete. (shrink)

Attentive readings of Deleuze’s works alongside the projects of his teachers show that they often share a common problem or set of problems. One of the most innovative and influential of these projects is the work of Jean Wahl. Wahl’s analysis of French existential phenomenology, here analyzed through a representative essay published in 1950, focuses on the problem of the pre-personal, pre-subjective elements of thinking and worldly existence. Deleuze’s philosophical project, already visible in his early essays on Bergson, is a (...) critique of the phenomenological presuppositions that determine this problem in terms of negation. (shrink)

Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is a frequent point of reference for Edward Said’s investigations into the various forces that structure and define the encounter of imperial societies with others. In Culture and Imperialism, Said explains the importance of Conrad’s novella by linking it to his concept of culture as the aesthetic acme of a society that simultaneously marks it and divides it from others. In Heart of Darkness, Said claims, we have a narrative that challenges its own imperial society (...) by emphasizing the ambiguity of its cultural limit. Heart of Darkness is thereby able to dramatize and emphasize the constituent elements of imperial society, even as it is unable to exceed that society’s fundamental character. Said’s reading is important, and even vital, for an appreciation of the complexities of Conrad’s novella, but it does not go far enough. The ambiguity of Conrad’s depiction of imperial society is only an ambiguity to the extent that the novella is critiqued at the level of content, with a corresponding lack of emphasis upon its rhetorical form. Through a consideration of the three primary elements of this form – the careful situation of the Nellie as the site of the narrative, the work of interruption in Marlow’s narrative, and the reverberation of Kurtz’s dying words in the conclusion of the novella – this essay argues that there is very little ambiguity in Conrad’s text. Indeed, what ambiguity remains is a function of its effort to dramatize the limit of imperialism precisely as a limitation, as a cultural determinant that through its form perpetually determines other societies as inferior, even as this very culture, as a limit set against these other societies, shows their richness to which imperialism is essentially blind. (shrink)

This essay considers Richard Calder’s Dead trilogy as an important contribution to the argument concerning how pornography’s pernicious effects might be mitigated or disrupted. Paying close attention to the way that Calder uses the rhetoric of fiction to challenge pornographic stereotypes that have achieved hegemonic status, the essay argues that Calder’s trilogy provides an important link between debates about pornography and contemporary philosophical discussions of alterity and community. Finally, it argues that, for Calder, sexuality is implicitly predicated on a reconceptualization (...) of social relations in general – a reconceptualization achieved through the exhaustion of that decadent shadow of the Enlightenment, pornography. (shrink)

Long recognized as an important and abiding influence in the European artistic and intellectual circles of the last century, the work of Pierre Klossowski is slowly gaining recognition in the Anglo-American scholarly community. The older brother of the painter Balthus, a friend of Rilke and Gide among others, and a celebrated artist in his own right, Klossowski is a difficult if not impossible thinker to categorize. From quite early in his career, Nietzsche was an important influence on Klossowski’s work. In (...) addition to translating two volumes for Nietzsche’s Oeuvres Complètes (1967, 1976), as well as Heidegger’s four-volume work on Nietzsche (1976), Klossowski also wrote a number of essays on Nietzsche as well as a book, Nietzsche et le Cercle Vicieux (1969). In a note to Différence et Répétition, Gilles Deleuze, citing “Nietzsche, Polytheism, and Parody” as well as “Forgetting and Anamnesis in the Lived Experience of the Eternal Return of the Same,” writes that Klossowski’s work has “renewed the interpretation of Nietzsche.” “Nietzsche, Polytheism, and Parody” appeared as the final essay of Klossowski’s book, Un si funeste désir (Such a Deathly Desire), first published in 1963. It is one of two essays in the book that are devoted explicitly to Nietzsche; the second, “On Some Fundamental Themes of Nietzsche’s Gaya Scienza,” is the opening essay of the volume and had previously appeared as an introduction to Klossowski’s translation of The Gay Science. “Nietzsche, Polytheism, and Parody” had not previously appeared in print, although Klossowski had presented it as a lecture at the Collège de Philosophie in Paris in 1957. Together, the two essays bound a series of reflections on Gide, Blanchot, Bataille, and others, all of which appeared previously – sometimes in a different form – and that taken together explicate Klossowski’s conception of “the demon.” The conception of the demon, drawn from The Gay Science, is for Klossowski a figuration of the double life of the existing human being: both conscious, rational, goal-directed, and vital, passionate, a victim of intensities. (shrink)

The Vietnamese philosopher Tran Duc Thao exerted an important influence over the development of 20th century French philosophy. In articles that stretched across the 1940s, Thao sought to employ the concrete insights of Marxism and dialectical materialism in order to correct and critique the dominant philosophical programs of phenomenology and existentialism. Thao’s pervasive concern was the determination of a basis for truthful action. In two essays – one taken from the beginning of his professional career, the other from near its (...) end – this concern is clearly displayed. A member of the General Delegation of Indochina advocating for an end to French colonial rule, Thao’s philosophical work is always undergirded by his political engagement. At the same time, his philosophical work seeks to demonstrate that his political activity is truthful, not merely partisan. (shrink)

The aim of this essay is to specify the chief concern for post-Marxist political strategy as the discovery or invention of a new political logic. Beginning with Laclau and Mouffe’s influential Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, this essay extends Lyotard’s well-known diagnosis of the status of metanarratives to a consideration of the conditions for political resistance and dissent. Using concepts drawn from the work of Althusser, Nealon, and others, it reworks Laclau and Mouffe’s appropriation of Gramsci’s (...) concept of hegemony in order to separate it from any foundational, normative political identity. In conclusion, the essay uses Bergson’s discussion of intuition and fabulation in order to begin to articulate the concepts of a democratic politics. (shrink)

In the course of remarking on the “parodic” nature of Nietzsche’s “doctrine” of Eternal Return, Klossowski writes of “laughter, this infallible assassin.” (Amir 2021, 272) The laughter of homo risibilis does not err in its elimination of human despair, nor does it errantly dispose of any other portion of human existence. A question that I will develop over the course of these remarks is the question of this assassination by laughter: what, precisely, is assassinated? and, what might be lost in (...) such an assassination? In pursuing this question, I want to explore the temporal overlap between the academic acceptance of Nietzsche in France in the early 1960s and the discussion of Spinoza in France at the same time—a discussion that was closely linked to the Holocaust—in order to raise the question of the relation of humor and history. -/- My question to Prof. Amir is: do laughter and humor have a role to play even in the face of world-shattering wrongs? In her account of homo risibilis and in her account of Nietzsche’s philosophy of laughter and its French inheritors, the focus seems squarely on the present and the future. Deleuze’s laughter is that of the human being who has embraced fate but also of the individual who, with their laughter, would overturn norms and conventions. Prof. Amir writes that “Deleuze … focuses on the iconoclastic force of humor, its capacity to break any boundary or law.” (Amir 2021, 282) But is such a focus recalcitrant to ethical efforts to reckon with past evils and injustices? In the overcoming of the tragic by the comic, is there room for remembrance? Is there room for honor to be paid to history? Or, are laughter and humor a-historical forces—is laughter, after all, in Klossowski’s words, an infallible assassin? Is no historical event secure from its transformative and iconoclastic work? -/- . (shrink)

Introduction: Another Diction The hack. The salesman. The fired cop. The drifter. The betrayed criminal. Each of these constitutes a novel literary invention; each gives a new sense to the investigative character. They are not modifications of the classical model, stamped with the rational imprimatur of Sherlock Holmes, C. Auguste Dupin, or Joseph Rouletabille – there is no line of filiation from these to Vachss’s Burke, Pelecanos’s Nick Stefanos, or Himes’s Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones. Even Lacan’s powerful (...) psychoanalytic reading of Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” reveals Dupin to be a genius only in a game whose dialectical structure is given in advance. Although the subjects that come to occupy this structure only acquire determination through the assumption of their places, the dynamic form of the dialectic is itself “foreclosed” by the phallus whose circulation organizes the system. Dupin understands the circulation of the signifier only because this circulation is the figure of the law. Rejecting the phallocentric rationality of the mastermind, the new figurations of Vachss, Pelecanos, Himes, and others retain only in order to parody the grand orchestration of reason – their language is slang not deduction. They are not detectives but “dicks”: a name that incorporates within its reduction an empirical transformation of the transcendental. In fact, it is a transformation of the very sense of inquiry that requires this new type of conceptual personae in order to traverse its contours. The philosophical project of Gilles Deleuze – which he characterizes as a “transcendental empiricism” – is directed toward freeing thought from its determination by the philosophical traditions that constitute its history. Such a freeing would allow for a philosophical conceptualization of present events that are no longer able to be adequately conceptualized by that history. The distinctive character of Deleuze’s project comes from his insistence on the discontinuity between the tradition of thought and the new formulations that it is called upon to generate. For Deleuze, the philosopher is the one who asks about the generation of new concepts and thereby places herself in a double bind. On the one hand, the philosopher is historically conditioned, thrown into a tradition whose tools present a limited number of possible conceptual resolutions of a particular event. On the other hand, this conditional determination of philosophical thought is repeated, perpetually, so that the philosopher is always a parody of herself: solving the question of the determination of a present event by resolving the question of the determinability of the present by the past. This situation of parody is the limit of thinking; it is where thinking develops according to the vicissitudes of history. (shrink)

With the publication of the notes from Bergson’s early courses it has become possible to investigate the tradition of thinking that Bergson understood himself to be working within. A historical investigation of this understanding is valuable for at least two reasons: first, it allows us to appreciate the decisive interventions that Bergson’s thought makes within the post-Kantian tradition. Part of Bergson’s popularity was due to his insistence upon ‘beginning anew’ in thinking. However, while there is certainly much that is new (...) in Bergson’s thought, to emphasize this element of novelty at the price of occluding Bergson’s scholarly work on the history of philosophy is to simultaneously deprive Bergson’s own philosophy of the depth and relevance that it gathers through its resonance with other great thinkers and, inversely, to fail to understand the critical force of Bergson’s intellectual creativity. In addition to being valuable as an elaboration of the stakes in a particular moment of the history of philosophy, a historical investigation of Bergson’s reading of Spinoza affords us the opportunity to work out and think through the motivating questions that animate Bergson’s own thought and which become visible in the way that he takes up other philosophical concepts and systems. Clearly, such a historical investigation is unconcerned with the question of whether or not Bergson “understood” Spinoza, or “got him right.” That Kierkegaard “misunderstood” Hegel is hardly a profound or even philosophically interesting statement. However, it becomes constructive when it drives us to ask, for instance, how it is that Kierkegaard misunderstands Hegel. What concerns motivate Kierkegaard to reject Hegel’s system? What are the points of disagreement and, perhaps most importantly, what new concepts, what new directions of thought, do these points allow Kierkegaard to create? This point can be generalized as follows: the historical investigation of a philosopher’s engagement with the philosophical tradition is productive (i.e. creative rather than reductive) when this engagement is taken up and interpreted as indicative of the new and distinctive concerns that drive the more recent philosopher’s thought – a thought whose distinction at the same time marks the distinctiveness of his or her historical interlocutor. As Deleuze writes of the concept of the subject, “it is never very interesting to criticize a concept: it is better to build the new functions and discover the new fields that make it useless or inadequate.” By extension, an “interesting” reading of Bergson’s interpretation of Spinoza ought not to emphasize the points of agreement and disagreement between them – as though it could be taken for granted that they have the same or equivalent concerns – but would inquire into the direction of Bergson’s thought that makes Spinoza simultaneously one of his closest philosophical allies and, at the same time, a thinker from whom Bergson repeatedly distances himself and critiques in order to elucidate his own thinking. (shrink)

Of the critical eyes that have focused upon Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, perhaps none is as insightful as Edward Said. Said repeatedly turned to Conrad’s tale as a privileged point of access to the tensions of colonialism. What is most remarkable about Said’s reading is the hesitancy and uncertainty that surrounds it – qualities that mirror Marlow’s troubles about his own story. Said’s reading is concerned with the form of the story, with its position as a cultural artifact, a tribute (...) to the society that it represents before that’s culture’s other, that it nonetheless is placed into intimate contact with. Taking Heart of Darkness as a cultural work, while at the same time paying particular attention to the rhetorical richness of the form of the story itself (the narrative displacement, the precise description of the situation of the Nellie, the description of Marlow, the patterned interruption of his voice, etc.), allows one to glimpse the limiting function of colonial culture. At the same time, as such a limit, it provides a place of encounter for counter-narratives, a place where the difference between a colonial society and its other might be revealed through the structural affinities and dissimilarities between their narratives. Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North is such a counter-narrative, and employs its structural parallels to Conrad’s novella to refashion the cultural limit between the colonizer and colonized. The center of Salih’s novel is the complicated relation between the narrator and Mustafa Sa’eed, both of whom have returned to Sudan following sojourns in England. While there is an obvious (but shallow) parallel here to Marlow and the narrator of Heart of Darkness, the echo is reinforced by the structural parallels of the narrative. The centrality of the Nile in Salih’s story – a river that serves both as a marker of native identity and as a place of civic, colonial projects – echoes both the Thames and Congo; the relations between the narrator, his past, and Sa’eed and his past, reflect and complicate the relations between Conrad’s narrator, Marlow, Marlow’s memory, and, finally, Kurtz. Most telling of Salih’s deliberate engagement with Conrad is the final, brief scene in which the narrator enters the river that (presumably) took Sa’eed’s life and there confronts the question of the maintenance of native identity in the wake of a migration to the heart of colonial power. Here Salih plays on the same structural ambiguities that Conrad only implicitly invokes, and that Said thematizes in his analysis. Like Conrad, he deliberately chooses not to offer a solution. For to offer a solution would be bind a society with a set limit. What we find in Salih’s novel is both the acceptance of culture as a form of political life, and also the rejection of culture as a justification of oppression. As Said notes, Conrad cannot find a way out of his society; he can only invent Marlow as a protest. Salih echoes this protest, but where Conrad’s tale ends in the sterility of darkness, Salih’s, precisely through the distinction of its rhetorical form from Conrad’s (one that also echoes), concludes with an urgent cry for other voices to take up the task of valorizing the multiplicity of cultures that illuminate the globe. (shrink)

Albert Carr’s contention that business and individual behavior within business can be understood through an analogy with a game of poker suffers from two central deficiencies. The first is conceptual: in his account, Carr slips between a discussion of games and a discussion of poker as thought they were interchangeable. However, “bluffing,” which is the only concept that Carr is interested in, is actually a mode of play, particular to a subset of games. The second deficiency is one of scale: (...) Carr’s account elides the difference between business understood as a practical domain and business understood from the standpoint of one of the participants or “players” within that domain. These two deficiencies are tacitly invoked by Norman Gillespie in his critique of Carr’s argument. However, Gillespie’s counter-claim – that business is a limited aspect of a more general ethical domain whose rules ought to be able to be shaped by its subjects – fails to pursue the conceptual shortcomings of Carr’s argument far enough. Beginning with Gillespie’s critique, this essay will use Gilles Deleuze’s image of the dice-throw (drawn from Heraclitus and Nietzsche) in order to argue that, 1) the concept of play is not synonymous with bluffing (the latter being only a limited aspect of the former); 2) the concept of play conceptualizes the always incomplete domain of ethics; 3) the incompletion of the ethical domain is not a function of relativism, but of the insufficiency of concepts to completely encompass empirical events; and 4) that business is a particular ethical domain circumscribed not by bluffing, but by a set of rules that overcodes moral evaluations with economic ones. (shrink)

Freud had read Bergson’s 1900 book Laughter when he composed his own book on jokes, and, even prior to his development of the concept of the super-ego, Freud had criticized Bergson for not following up his insights into the linkage between comedy and childhood experiences. Freud thus chides Bergson for failing to pursue a line of inquiry that would confirm the ultimately tragic underpinnings of comedy. Wise to this clever and even mischievous little suggestion, Bergson’s book can be read as (...) an account of comedy that might avoid the perennial temptation of yoking it to tragedy. Bergson approaches the problem of comedy in its concreteness, in its liveliness, and follows the various paths of its unfolding. What results is an analysis that shares some similarities with Freud’s investigations but that also eliminates the theoretical prejudices that guide Freud’s reflections. The comic spirit is, first of all, “undefinable.” A strange way to begin an essay on the subject except that, for Bergson, this designation is not a strictly negative one: “we shall not aim at imprisoning the comic spirit within a definition. We regard it, above all, as a living thing. However trivial it may be, we shall treat it with the respect due to life. We shall confine ourselves to watching it grow and expand.” In a deliberate departure from the sort of circumscription that characterizes the style of Aristotle’s Poetics – as well as its progeny – Bergson’s strategy is an indefinite one appropriate to the particular complexity of the subject. The text of the investigation will then share its subject’s style – it will dramatize rather than describe the comic – in order to give an account that is suited to the nature of the comic: it will be neither a joke nor a tragedy. Bergson’s book is of an essential different kind than Freud’s: its focus is upon the motivation or forces that bring laughter and the comic situation into existence. Freud’s analysis ultimately moves in a circle, discovering the tragic principles of its investigation in its conclusion, because it fails to begin with the question closer to the vital complex of which humour and the comic are a part: what advantage does comedy procure for life? (shrink)

While it has perhaps always accompanied philosophical thought – one immediately thinks of Plato’s Dialogues – the problem of the communication of that thought, and therefore of its capacity to be taught, has acquired a new insistence in the work of post-Kantian thinkers. As evidence of this one could cite Fichte’s repeated efforts to formulate a definitive version of his Wissenschaftslehre, the model of the Bildungsroman that Hegel adopts for his Phenomenology of Spirit, Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous works, Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, (...) and Heidegger’s uncompleted Being and Time. Certainly each of these thinkers, as well as their projects, are quite distinct from the others, but their works are also signposts. It is not a question here of reducing the puzzles and difficulties of these works to some single element, some trace of a philosophical zeitgeist. Rather, it is enough to indicate this preoccupation with the problem of the communicability of thinking in order to raise the question of the modality of such a communication. How has thinking come to be so fundamentally troubled by its own expression? That Kant’s Critical philosophy has precipitated this preoccupation ought to come as no surprise, for it was Kant, most famously in the Critique of Pure Reason, who sought to definitively set the limits of philosophical thinking. In doing so, however, Kant is unable to remain utterly silent about what he himself sets outside the bounds of meaningful thought and speech: things-in-themselves. The mere fact that this meaningless element is an essential component of Kant’s philosophical exposition is an indication of the paradoxical logic of the limit: to postulate a limit is simultaneously to set out its obverse side. In Kant’s case, then, the demarcation of what can be thought carries with it the implicit thinking of what is ruled out of bounds for thought. Beginning with Fichte, the philosophical project of Kant’s successors and inheritors is then largely determined by an effort to incorporate or at least accommodate this alien element within thinking. The initial phase of this effort is marked by a tragic motif, a conjoining of thought with the experience of loss and suffering that is characteristic of Romanticism, that culminates in the dialectic of Hegel’s Absolute Knowing. In Absolute Knowing, thought has not vanquished its limitations, it has instead discovered the resources with which it can perpetually surmount them. This first phase is followed by a reaction or response to this seeming completion and overcoming of the Kantian limitation. Now, the tragic movement of thought comes to be understood as itself limited, and necessarily so according to the logic of the limit that imposes itself upon every gesture of closure. Tragedy thereby gives way to comedy insofar as the limitation that is incorporated as an obstacle to be overcome by tragic thought is shown to be the external condition of that very thought. Finally, if the comic is the fate of the limitations of tragedy, the thought of comedy itself demands a third mode of thinking, one capable of something more than the mere reiteration of the limit between comedy and tragedy that troubles them both. This third form of expression is parody, an expression appropriate to a thinking that repeats and completes the threefold movement of tragic thought while, in this very repetition, creating a limitless domain of thoughtful expression. (shrink)

The Western philosophical tradition shows a marked fondness for tragedy. From Plato and Aristotle, through German idealism, to contemporary reflections on the murderous violence of the twentieth century, philosophy has often looked to tragedy for resources to make suffering, grief, and death thinkable. But what if, in showing this preference, philosophical thought has unwittingly and unknowingly aligned itself with a form of thinking that accepts injustice without protest? What if tragedy, and the philosophical thinking that mobilizes it, gives a tacit (...) assent to injustice?This collection explores possibilities for philosophical thinking that are revealed by deliberately refusing the tragic model of thought, by turning instead to its often-overlooked companion: comedy. Comprising a series of experiments ranging across the philosophical tradition, the essays in this volume propose to break, or at least suspend, the use of tragedy as an index of truth and philosophical worth. In so doing, they explore new conceptions of solidarity, sympathy, critique, and justice.In conjunction with the extended network of projects and ideas with which they engage, the essays collected here provide ample reason to believe that philosophical thinking, aligned with comedy, is capable of important and original insights, discoveries, and creations. The prejudicial acceptance of tragic seriousness only impoverishes the life of thought; it can be rejuvenated and renewed by laughter and the comic. (shrink)

The Western philosophical tradition has shown a marked and perennial fondness for tragedy. From Plato and Aristotle, through the development of Christianity, to German idealism, and even to contemporary reflections on the murderous violence of the twentieth century, philosophy has repeatedly looked to tragedy for resources to make suffering, grief, and death thinkable. But what if by showing such a preference for tragedy, philosophical thought has unwittingly and unknowingly aligned itself with a form of thinking that accepts human suffering and (...) pain without protest? This collection explores possibilities for philosophical thinking that refuse the tragic model of thought and turn instead to its often-overlooked companion: comedy. Composed of a series of experiments ranging across the philosophical tradition, the essays in this volume propose to break, or at least suspend, the use of tragedy as an index of truth and philosophical worth. Instead, they explore new conceptions of solidarity, sympathy, critique, and justice. In addition, the essays collected here provide ample reason to believe that philosophical thinking, aligned with comedy, is capable of important and original insights, discoveries, and creations. The prejudicial acceptance of tragic seriousness only impoverishes the life of thought; it can be rejuvenated and renewed by laughter and the comic. This book was originally published as a special issue of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:diacritics 35.1 (2005) 3-6MuseSearchJournalsThis JournalContents[Access article in PDF]Whispers of the Flesh Essays in Memory of Pierre KlossowskiIan JamesRussell Ford Pierre Klossowski—novelist, essayist, painter, and translator—was one of the most startling, original, and influential figures in twentieth-century French intellectual culture. The older brother of the well-known painter Balthus and a close associate of Georges Bataille, Klossowski's diverse oeuvre includes novels, philosophical essays, and translations, as well as paintings and (...) films. Confined thus far to an undeserved but somehow fitting shadow existence in the margins and notes of theorists who have become mainstays of Anglo-American criticism, Klossowski's own work has increasingly become a focus of critical interest for its decisive contribution to the development of thought and aesthetics in France from the 1950s onward. Born in 1905, the eldest son of Polish émigrés, Klossowski spent his first ten years in Paris in an artistic milieu, heavily influenced by the neoimpressionism of figures such as Bonnard and Derain. His father, Erich Klossowski de Rola, was a painter and art historian, the author of an important monograph on Daumier. His mother, Baladine, was also a painter and trained under Bonnard. While still a teenager Klossowski was introduced to the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, with whom he became close and who in turn introduced him to the novelist André Gide. At eighteen he became Gide's secretary and assisted him with the drafts of his famous novel Les faux-monnayeurs.Not until 1930, however, did Klossowski's own career properly begin, when he translated with Jean-Pierre Jouve a collection of poems by Friedrich Hölderlin. Throughout his life Klossowski was a prolific and influential translator from both German and Latin into French, translating amongst others Nietzsche, Kafka, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein from the German, and Suetonius, Virgil, Augustine, and Tertullian from the Latin. While working for the prominent Parisian psychoanalyst René Laforgue, Klossowski published his first philosophical essay on the Marquis de Sade in 1933 in the Revue française de la psychanalyse. Scandalized by Klossowski's Nietzschean-inflected psychoanalytic interpretation of Sade's writing, Laforgue dismissed Klossowski immediately. Throughout the 1930s Klossowski made a number of key friendships and acquaintances, most importantly with Georges Bataille, but also many others, including Walter Benjamin, André Masson, Jean Wahl, and Maurice Heine. During this period he published several articles and collaborated with Bataille on the review Acéphale and in the avant-garde experiment of the Collège de Sociologie (where, it is said, he would attend meetings dressed in a soutane). During the war years Klossowski trained in a number of Catholic seminaries, a vocation which ultimately failed and led to the writing of his first novel, La vocation suspendue. In the postwar period he married [End Page 3] a war widow, Denise Morin Sinclair, who had been interned in Ravensbrück for her activities in the Resistance and who became the model for Roberte, a key figure in much of Klossowski's fiction and painting. After the war Klossowski began to publish the influential works for which he will chiefly be remembered: literary-philosophical essays on Sade and Nietzsche (among others), as well as six important novels written between 1950 and 1965, La vocation suspendue (1950), the three works, originally published separately, which went on to form the Lois de l'hospitalité trilogy—Roberte ce soir (1954), La révocation de l'Édit de Nantes (1959) and Le souffleur ou le théâtre de société (1960)‚—and, finally, Le Baphomet (1965).Klossowski's seminal 1947 work, Sade mon prochain, was one of the first full-length literary and philosophical studies of Sade's work to be published in France and marked a decisive break from earlier accounts. Whereas earlier treatments of Sade had focused either on biographical detail or on the medical and psychosexual import of his life and writing, Klossowski's reading was concerned with the intertwined figures of law and transgression in Sade's work. After Sade mon prochain French intellectuals and writers... (shrink)

Written in an accessible style which still manages to avoid gross generalizations, James Mensch’s book is to be recommended for anyone engaged in thinking through the “postmodern” problematic of subjectivity. Composed of a series of essays both individually and collectively insightful, the book is divided into two sections. The first is concerned with an exposition of the development of modernity, while the second retrieves Aristotle in an attempt to develop a way of thinking which would elude modernity’s well-worn path.

Anscombe holds that a proper account of intentional action must exhibit “a ‘form’ of description of events.” But what does that mean? To answer this question, I compare the method of Anscombe’s Intention with that of Frege’s Foundations of Arithmetic—another classic work of analytic philosophy that consciously opposes itself to psychological explanations. On the one hand, positively, I aim to identify and elucidate the kind of account of intentional action that Anscombe attempts to provide. On the other hand, negatively, I (...) hope to dispel the canard that Anscombe’s opposition to the causal theory of action is a product of “behaviorism.”. (shrink)

In the first monograph on Lyotard and education, Derek R. Ford approaches Lyotard's thought as pedagogical in itself. The result is a novel, soft, and accessible study of Lyotard organized around two inhuman educations: that of "the system" and that of "the human." The former enforces an interminable process of development, dialogue and exchange, while the latter finds its force in the mute, secret, opaque, and inarticulable. Threading together a range of Lyotard's work through four pedagogical processes-reading, writing, voicing, (...) and listening-the author insists on the distinct educational logics that can uphold or interrupt different ways of being-together in the world, touching on a range of topics from literacy and aesthetics to time and political-economy. While Inhuman Educations can serve as an introduction to Lyotard's philosophy, it also constitutes a singular, provocative, and fresh take on his thought. (shrink)

Existing social disparities in the United States are inconsistent with the promise of democracy; therefore, there was a need for critical conceptualization of the first principles that undergird American democracy and the genesis of democratic social change in America. This constructivist grounded theory study aimed to construct a grounded theory that provides an understanding of the process of American democratic social change as it emerged from the nation’s founding documents. A post hoc polytheoretical framework including Foucault’s, Bourdieu’s, and Marx and (...) Engels’s theories of power was used to understand power dynamics. The research question focused on understanding the process of democratic social change in America. The sample comprised the Articles of Confederation, the U.S. Declaration of Independence, The Federalist Papers, and the U.S. Constitution. The documents were retrieved from the National Archives and Library of Congress. The data analysis plan incorporated successive comparison, situational and dramaturgical analysis, deconstruction, and perspective taking as strategies. The result was the construction of a democratic social change process theory preceded by five grounded theories: (a) first principles of democracy, (b) first principles of democracy conceptual framework, (c) socio-ethical principles of democracy, (d) demoralizing process, and (e) either-or approach to democracy. Positive social change implications include applying a democratic social change process to future social change endeavors across domains and levels of analysis, a normative framework for a republican form of government, and a tool to analyze and minimize the latent consequences of social justice policies. (shrink)

Alongside the major narratives of ethics in the tradition of Western philosophy, a reader with an eye to the vague and the peripheral, to the turbulent and shifting, will uncover minor lines of thinking--and with them, new histories and thus new futures. Minor Ethics develops a new approach to reading texts from the history of philosophical ethics. It aims to enliven lines of thought that are latent and suppressed within the major ethical texts regularly studied and taught, and to include (...) texts and ideas that have been excluded from the canon of Western ethics. The editors and contributors have put Gilles Deleuze's concepts--such as affect, assemblage, and multiplicity--into conversation with a range of ethical texts from ancient thought to the present. Rather than aiming for a coherent whole to emerge from these threads, the essays maintain a vigilant alertness to difference, to vibrations and resonances that are activated in the coupling of texts. What emerges are new questions, new problems, and new trajectories for thinking, which have as a goal the liberation of ethical questioning. Minor Ethics takes up a range of canonical ethical questions and thinks through concrete ethical problems relating to drug addiction, environmental responsibility, xenophobia, trauma, refugees, political parties, and cultural difference. The responses to these concerns demonstrate the minoritarian promise of the opening up of ethical thinking. (shrink)

Some writers object to logical pluralism on the grounds that logic is normative. The rough idea is that the relation of logical consequence has consequences for what we ought to think and h...

First published in 1946, History of Western Philosophy went on to become the best-selling philosophy book of the twentieth century. A dazzlingly ambitious project, it remains unchallenged to this day as the ultimate introduction to Western philosophy. Providing a sophisticated overview of the ideas that have perplexed people from time immemorial, it is 'long on wit, intelligence and curmudgeonly scepticism', as the New York Times noted, and it is this, coupled with the sheer brilliance of its scholarship, that has made (...) Russell's History of Western Philosophy one of the most important philosophical works of all time. (shrink)

_''Philosophy' is a word which has been used in many ways, some wider, some narrower. I propose to use it in a very wide sense, which I will now try to explain.'_ - _ Bertrand Russell Nearly forty years since its first publication, History of Western Philosophy_ remains unchallenged as the ultimate introduction to its subject, while claiming classic status in its own right. It is the bestselling philosophy book of the twentieth century and one of the most important (...) philosophical works of all time. This compact and affordable paperback edition makes this comprehensive and brilliantly-written text readily available for a new generation of readers. As part of our commitment to Russell publishing, the delux version of this bestselling title will continue to be available. 1961: 848pp: Pb: 0-145-07854-7: £16.99. (shrink)

First published in 1946, _History of Western Philosophy_ went on to become the best-selling philosophy book of the twentieth century. A dazzlingly ambitious project, it remains unchallenged to this day as the ultimate introduction to Western philosophy. Providing a sophisticated overview of the ideas that have perplexed people from time immemorial, it is 'long on wit, intelligence and curmudgeonly scepticism', as the _New York Times_ noted, and it is this, coupled with the sheer brilliance of its scholarship, that has made (...) Russell's _History of Western Philosophy_ one of the most important philosophical works of all time. (shrink)

First published in 1946, _History of Western Philosophy_ went on to become the best-selling philosophy book of the twentieth century. A dazzlingly ambitious project, it remains unchallenged to this day as the ultimate introduction to Western philosophy. Providing a sophisticated overview of the ideas that have perplexed people from time immemorial, it is 'long on wit, intelligence and curmudgeonly scepticism', as the _New York Times_ noted, and it is this, coupled with the sheer brilliance of its scholarship, that has made (...) Russell's _History of Western Philosophy_ one of the most important philosophical works of all time. (shrink)

Immensely intelligible, thought-provoking guide by Nobel prize-winner considers such topics as the distinction between appearance and reality, the existence and nature of matter, idealism, inductive logic, intuitive knowledge, many other subjects. For students and general readers, there is no finer introduction to philosophy than this informative, affordable and highly readable edition that is "concise, free from technical terms, and perfectly clear to the general reader with no prior knowledge of the subject."—The Booklist of the American Library Association.

An unabridged edition with updated footnotes and layout, to include: Recent Criticisms of "Consciousness" - Instinct and Habit - Desire and Feeling - Influence of Past History on Present Occurrences in Living Organisms - Psychological and Physical Causal Laws - Introspection - The Definition of Perception - Sensations and Images - Memory - Words and Meaning - General Ideas and Thought - Belief - Truth and Falsehood - Emotions and Will - Characteristics of Mental Phenomena.

Great Britain subjugated colonists using various power strategies, including dehumanization, misinformation, fear, and other divisive strategies. The Founders described these oppressive strategies as “a long train of abuses and usurpations.” Throughout the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, the Founding Fathers imbued the people with hope in a government for the people: one unlike that of the monarchy, which sought to protect itself at the expense of colonists. As a result, the Founders created a government more likely to lead (...) with fairness, demonstrate respect for human dignity, unite Americans as one people, empower citizens through hope, and lead the nation toward security. This socio-ethical framework was an abductive discovery nested within a grounded theory study where it had been concluded that the first principles of democracy were woven within the American founding documents. Using Charmaz’s constructivist grounded theory, the first principles of democracy—knowledge, fairness, human dignity, hope, unity, and security—were used to answer an emerging research question: Are there two democratic frameworks in the founding documents, and how do they differ? The first principles of democracy promote a culture of ethics, resilience, and freedom. Their empowering disposition makes them suitable as a normative framework for a democratic government for the people. (shrink)

This anthology is a thorough introduction to classic literature for those who have not yet experienced these literary masterworks. For those who have known and loved these works in the past, this is an invitation to reunite with old friends in a fresh new format. From Shakespeare's finesse to Oscar Wilde's wit, this unique collection brings together works as diverse and influential as The Pilgrim's Progress and Othello. As an anthology that invites readers to immerse themselves in the masterpieces of (...) the literary giants, it is must-have addition to any library. (shrink)

Bertrand Russell was one of the greatest logicians since Aristotle, and one of the most important philosophers of the past two hundred years. As we approach the 125th anniversary of the Nobel laureate's birth, his works continue to spark debate, resounding with unmatched timeliness and power. The Problems of Philosophy, one of the most popular works in Russell's prolific collection of writings, has become core reading in philosophy. Clear and accessible, this little book is an intelligible and stimulating (...) guide to those problems of philosophy which often mistakenly lead to its status as too lofty and abstruse for the lay mind. Focusing on problems he believes will provoke positive and constructive discussion, Russell concentrates on knowledge rather than metaphysics, steering the reader through his famous 1910 distinction between "knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description," and introducing important theories of Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Hume, Locke, Plato, and others to lay the foundation for philosophical inquiry by general readers and scholars alike.With a new introduction by John Perry, this valuable work is a perfect introduction to the field and will continue to stimulate philosophical discussion as it has done for nearly forty years. (shrink)

An outstanding group of leaders left evidence that a richer and more sustainable democracy could be achieved with American independence and democratic principles integrated into a new republican form of government. They were moved by principles that are the very spirit of democracy. These principles are needed to enhance democracy and improve well-being. Using the constructivist tradition of grounded theory and Aristotle’s conception of abstraction, the article proposes a theory of the first principles of democracy based on substantive data: the (...) Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, The Federalist Papers, and the United States Constitution. Knowledge, fairness, human dignity, hope, unity, and security are the first principles of democracy and are regarded as the bedrock of democracy and a government framework for the people. This theory contributed to a formal model of democratic social change. It also contributes a conceptual framework that supports Solum’s semantic originalism, a theory of constitutional interpretation. The principles of democracy can revitalize democracy and provide new possibilities by protecting education as an innate human right, abolishing capital punishment, criminalizing private prisons on the stock market, and reevaluating the proportionality of prison sentences. (shrink)

A survey of contemporary work on logical pluralism.