Deleuze's philosophy of cinema departs from the standard conception of modernist aesthetics that sees art withdrawing from representation in order to reflect upon the specificity of its medium. While ambitious and influential, Deleuze's attempt fails. Overdetermined by its own metaphysics, it forsakes the real importance of the movies. It is unable to explain how they function and why they matter. This essay pursues three lines of criticism: Deleuze cannot account for the aesthetic specificity of cinema because he deposes the primacy (...) of action in the movement-image in favour of the primacy of belief (the time-image). This failure is connected to the fact that a cinema of the virtual depends on the very Bazinian realism it is meant to displace. Realism must be acknowledged as the cinematic condition and truth of virtuality. Further, Bazinian realism is the cinematic form of philosophical modernism, preferable for many reasons to Deleuze's philosophy, which returns to pre-modern cosmology in its desire to escape the agent-based, anti-metaphysical commitments of modernism. I apply these criticisms to my analysis of Resnais's Hiroshima mon amour, a movie that prima facie looks made to fulfil the terms of Deleuze's theory but which I argue is an object lesson in realism. (shrink)
This essay explores the significance of Agamben’s sparse references to medieval Jewish thinkers (that is, the Rishonim) and raises the question as to whether the modern interpretive horizon of “history” is adequate for providing an understanding of these thinkers.
Abstract: Following the lead of Annette Baier, this essay argues that trust relations provide the ethical substance of everyday living. When A trusts B, A unreflectively allows B to approach sufficiently close so as to be able to harm A. In order for this to be possible, A practically presupposes that B perceives A as a person and will hence act accordingly. Trust relations are relations of mutual recognition in which we acknowledge our mutual standing and vulnerability with respect to (...) one another. A robust account of trust assumes: first, trust relations are primary and practical, and while monitored by reason, they are not rationally constituted; second, trust can sustain its practical primacy over moral reason because it is developmentally prior to reason; and third, trust relations can be the bearers of our worth and vulnerability because they are the developmental products of first love. (shrink)
This article explores the influence of Winnicott’s conceptual constellation of early childhood, play, use, transitional phenomena, and transitional object upon Agamben’s thinking of contemporary historical exigency.
Let me begin with a wisp of political history. According to the Earl of Clarendon, in 1639 the king’s “three kingdoms [were] flourishing in entire peace and universal plenty.”1 Yet by 1642 civil war had broken out, and in 1649 the king was beheaded. What had caused this breakdown of civil and political order, a breakdown that was not localized in England but, in fact, rife throughout Europe—1648 like 1848 was a year of revolutions? Clarendon himself is less than acute (...) on the matter, opting generally for a conspiracy theory in which the traitorous plots of ill men were the cause of the rebellion. In his book Behemoth —whose title stands for the Long Parliament, which sat in session from 1640 until the surviving .. (shrink)
This paper explores the transformation which Adorno’s conception of history undergoes from his texts of the 1930s to those of the 1960s. This transformation involves a change in the role played by Hölderlin’s figure of transience. In the texts of the ’30s, Hölderlinian transience (in its Benjaminian interpretation) amounts to a moment of negative content within Adorno’s conception of history. In the texts of the ’60s, such transience becomes the very form of Adornian philosophical history. As such, his thinking of (...) history changes from a tragic conception (emphasizing a “negative absolute”) to an iconoclastic one (emphasizing “absolute negativity”). (shrink)
This paper attempts to explore the problem of collective identity and its subsequent historical legacies through a reading of Spinoza’s and Freud’s respective accounts of Moses. In working their way through the aggadah (i.e., legend) of Moses, both Spinoza and Freud find the halakhic (i.e., legal) core of collectivity to be expressed in and as social mediation. Moreover, both thinkers discover that the occlusion of this core leads to a collective trauma (in Freud’s sense), the symptom of which is the (...) formation of the ‘theological-political’ (in Spinoza’s sense). (shrink)
This paper attempts to explore the problem of collective identity and its subsequent historical legacies through a reading of Spinoza’s and Freud’s respective accounts of Moses. In working their way through the aggadah (i.e., legend) of Moses, both Spinoza and Freud find the halakhic (i.e., legal) core of collectivity to be expressed in and as social mediation. Moreover, both thinkers discover that the occlusion of this core leads to a collective trauma (in Freud’s sense), the symptom of which is the (...) formation of the ‘theological-political’ (in Spinoza’s sense). (shrink)
It is the persistence of social suffering in a world in which it could be eliminated that for Adorno is the source of the need for critical reflection, for philosophy. Philosophy continues and gains its cultural place because an as yet unbridgeable abyss separates the social potential for the relief of unnecessary human suffering and its emphatic continuance. Philosophy now is the culturally bound repository for the systematic acknowledgement and articulation of the meaning of the expanse of human suffering within (...) technologically advanced societies that are already committed to liberal ideals of freedom and equality. (shrink)
Living in the Borderland addresses the evolution of Western consciousness and describes the emergence of the 'Borderland,' a spectrum of reality that is beyond the rational yet is palpable to an increasing number of individuals. Building on Jungian theory, Jerome Bernstein argues that a greater openness to transrational reality experienced by Borderland personalities allows new possibilities for understanding and healing confounding clinical and developmental enigmas. In three sections, this book charts the evolution of Western consciousness, examines the psychological and clinical (...) implications and looks at how the new Borderland consciousness bridges the mind-body divide. It challenges the standard clinical model, which views normality as an absence of pathology and equates normality with the rational, and abnormality with the transrational. Jerome Bernstein describes how psychotherapy itself often contributes to the alienation of many Borderland personalities by misdiagnosing the difference between the pathological and the sacred and uses case studies to illustrate the potential such misdiagnoses have for causing serious psychic and emotional damage to the patient. This challenge to the orthodoxies and complacencies of Western medicine's concept of pathology will interest Jungian Analysts, Psychoanalysts, Psychotherapists and Psychiatrists. (shrink)
This article explores the recent reception of the German Idealist tradition within the English-speaking philosophical world. Texts by four authors—Fredrick Beiser, Richard Velkley, Dennis Schmidt, and Gregg Horowitz—are examined as to their respective participation in what I call a materialist appropriation of German Idealism. In this article, I explore (1) what the term ‘materialism’ means in this context and (2) the reasons for such a new interpretation. I hold that this interpretation is utilized as a response to the Enlightenment priority (...) of universalizing abstraction. Further, I hold that such an interpretation amounts to a reclaiming of German Idealism from previous interpretations which viewed it as supporting this priority. (shrink)
Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism is usually considered to be either (1) an early Fichtean-influenced work that gives little insight into Schelling’s philosophy or (2) a text focusing on self-consciousness and aesthetics. I argue that Schelling’s System develops a subtle conception of history which originates in a dialogue with Kant and Hegel (concerning the question of teleology) and concludes in proximity to an Idealist version of Spinoza. In this way, Schelling develops a philosophy of history which is, simultaneously, a dialectical (...) engagement with the history of philosophy. (shrink)
This volume brings together major works by German thinkers, writing just prior to and after Kant, who were enormously influential in this crucial period of aesthetics. These texts include the first translation into English of Schiller's Kallias Letters and Moritz's On the Artistic Imitation of the Beautiful, together with new translations of some of Hölderlin's most important theoretical writings and works by Hamann, Lessing, Novalis and Schlegel. In a philosophical introduction J. M. Bernstein traces the development of aesthetics from its (...) still rationalist and mimetic construction in Lessing, through the optimistic construal of art and/or beauty as the appearance of human freedom in the work of Schiller, to Hölderlin's darker vision of art as the memory of a lost unity, and the variations of that theme - of an impossible striving after the lost ideal - which are found in the work of Schlegel and Novalis. (shrink)
This introduction provides the context for the succeeding papers in this volume. After raising the question as to why Spinoza's philosophy attracts such extreme-and extremely diverse-attention and interpretation, I suggest that there is a "repressed" element to his thought which becomes manifest when one perceives the diversity of Spinoza-interpretations in a relational manner. I refer to this repressed element of Spinoza's thought as "the materiality of nature." I claim that the articles in this volume, all of which contain important insights (...) in their own right, attest to this repressed element when taken together and viewed relationally. (shrink)
[This is a revised and expanded version of an article of the same name published in the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, October 2000: 31(3), 277–299.].
Theodor W. Adorno is best known for his contributions to aesthetics and social theory. Critics have always complained about the lack of a practical, political or ethical dimension to Adorno's philosophy. In this highly original contribution to the literature on Adorno, J. M. Bernstein offers the first attempt in any language to provide an account of the ethical theory latent in Adorno's writings. Bernstein relates Adorno's ethics to major trends in contemporary moral philosophy. He analyses the full range of Adorno's (...) major works, with a special focus on Dialectic of Enlightenment, Minima Moralia and Negative Dialectics. In developing his account Bernstein lays particular stress on Adorno's contention that the event of Auschwitz demands a new categorical imperative. This book will be widely acknowledged as the standard work on Adorno's ethics and as such will interest professionals and students of philosophy, political theory, sociology, history of ideas, art history and music. (shrink)
Jurgen Habermas' construction of a critical social theory of society grounded in communicative reason is one of the very few real philosophical inventions of recent times that demands and repays extended engagement. In this elaborate and sympathetic study which places Habermas' project in the context of critical theory as a whole past and future, J. M. Bernstein argues that despite its undoubted achievements, it contributes to the very problems of ethical dislocation and meaninglessness it aims to diagnose and remedy. Bernstein (...) further argues that the precise character of the failures of Habermas' program demonstrate the necessity for a return to the first generation critical theory of Adorno. Reading across nearly the whole range of Habermas' corpus, Recovering Ethical Life traces the development of the theory of communicative reason from its inception in Knowledge and Human Interests through its elaboration in The Theory of Communicative Action and into its defense against postmodernism in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity . In separate chapters Habermas' readings of Freud, Durkheim amd Mead, Adorno and Foucault, Castoriadis and Taylor are critically examined. The focus of Bernstein's analyses, however, is always problem centered and thematic rather than textual psychoanalytic theory as an account of self knowledge, the competing claims of ethical identity and moral reason, the place of judgment in practical reason, and the debate between philosophies of language based communities versus those oriented towards world-disclosure. Critical theory is unique among current philosophies in engaging with the problems of social injustice and nihilism by siding with an abstract moral reason that forfeits the processes of intersubjective recognition it intended to salvage. Even in the fine grain of Habermas' account of performative contradictions and the theory of discourses of application, Bernstein perceives a squandering of the resources of an ethical life in need of transfiguration. (shrink)
