Online research in philosophy

In The Politics of Exodus, Mark Dooley offers a lively interpretation of Kierkegaard as a precursor of the ethical and political insights of Jacques Derrida. While many connections have been forged in recent years between these two quintessentially "Continental" figures, Dooley's book argues that these affiliations run much deeper than any previous commentators have suggested. Indeed, his most controversial claim is that Kierkegaard is anything but a proponent of asocial individualism, but is one whose writings bear witness to the notion of an "open quasi-community" which has driven much of Derrida's work over the past decade. In vigorously challenging conventional wisdom surrounding the place of Kierkegaard in contemporary thought and political theory, Dooley shows how powerfully postmodern and politically charged the latter's specifically 'religious' ideas are. As such, Kierkegaard ought to be read as someone who anticipated Derrida's claim that genuine responsibility in the political sphere depends upon a phophetic call for justice on behalf of the least among us. will appeal to anyone interested in the intersection of religion and postmodernism, as well as to those with interests in ethics and politics from a Continental perspective. It will undoubtedly change the way we read Kierkegaard in the new millennium.

Mark Dooley has recently argued (principally against Simon Critchley) that the attempt to establish too strong a ‘connection’ between Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas not only distorts crucial disparities between their respective philosophies, it also contaminates Derrida’s recent work with Levinas’s inherent ‘political naivety’. In short, on Dooley’s reading, Levinas is only of ‘inspirational value’ for Derrida. I am not concerned with defending Critchley’s own reading of the ‘Derrida–Levinas connection’. My objective is rather to demonstrate, first, the way in which Dooley’s argument hinges upon a misreading of Levinas and Derrida, and, second, why Derrida’s recent thinking is in fact fundamentally Levinasian. Key Words: contingency • guilt • Holocaust • hospitality • institutions • nature • suffering • third party • violence.