One of the fundamental questions raised by Ruchkin, Grafman, Cameron, and Berndt's (Ruchkin et al.'s) interpretation of no distinct specialized neural networks for short-term storage buffers and long-term memory systems, is that of the link between perception and memory processes. In this framework, we take the opportunity in this commentary to discuss a specific working memory task involving percept formation, temporary retention, auditory imagery, and the attention-based maintenance of information, that is, the verbal transformation effect.
We agree with MacNeilage's claim that speech stems from a volitional vocalization pathway between the cingulate and the supplementary motor area (SMA). We add the vocal self- monitoring system as the first recruitment of the Broca-Wernicke circuit. SMA control for “frames” is supported by wrong consonant-vowel recurring utterance aphasia and an imaging study of quasi-reiterant speech. The role of Broca's area is questioned in the emergence of “content,” because a primary motor mapping, embodying peripheral constraints, seems sufficient. Finally, we reject (...) a uniquely peripheral account of speech emergence. (shrink)
In Transcendence , thinkers from John Milbank, Graham Ward, and Kevin Hart, to Thomas Carlson, Slavoj Zizek, and Jean-Luc Marion have come together to create the definitive analysis of this key concept in modern theological and philosophical thought.
Schizophrenia, like other pathological conditions of mental life, has not been systematically included in the general study of consciousness. By focusing on aspects of chronic schizophrenia, we attempt to remedy this omission. Basic components of Husserl’s phenomenology (intentionality, synthesis, constitution, epoche, and unbuilding) are explicated and then employed in an account of chronic schizophrenia. In schizophrenic experience, basic constituents of reality are lost and the subject must try to explicitly re-constitute them. “Automatic mental life” is weakened such that much of (...) the world that is normally taken-for-granted cannot continue to be so. The subject must actively re-lay the ontological foundations of reality. (shrink)
The data emerging from the clinical and brain studies described above suggest that, in the case of OCD, there are two pertinent brain mechanisms that are distinguishable both in terms of neuro dynamics and in terms of the conscious experiences that accompany them. These mechanisms can be characterized, on anatomical and perhaps evolutionary grounds, as a lower level and a higher level mechanism. The clinical treatment has, when successful, an activating effect on the higher level mechanism, and a suppressive effect (...) on the lower level one. (shrink)
Taking his critique of totalitarianizing conceptions of community as a starting point, this text examines Jean-Luc Nancy's work of an "ontology of plural singular being" for its political implications. It argues that while at first this ontology seems to advocate a negative or an anti-politics only, it can also be read as a "theory of communicative praxis" that suggests a certain ethos - in the form of a certain use of symbols (which is expressed only inaptly by the word (...) "style") that would render the ontological plurality of singulars perceptible and practically effective. Finally, some recent texts by Nancy even sidestep the ontology of being-with and face the question of what politics, faced with demands of justice, could be and what a democratic politics could provide. Both of these aspects in Nancy's work, however, still remain to be spelled out more politically. (shrink)
The kind of phenomenology that can be useful to theology will be a hermeneutical phenomenology, one that takes us beyond the Cartesian/Husserlian ideal of presuppositionless intuition. It will also be a phenomenology of inverse intentionality, one in which the constituting subject is constituted by the look and the voice of another. In light of these suggestions, the phenomenology of Jean-Luc Marion is defended against three critiques, namely that it compromises the boundary between phenomenology and theology, that the theology it (...) serves is a bad one to boot, and that it has an inadequate account of the subject. At the heart of this defense is Marion's clear distinction between phenomenology as a description of possible experience, and theology as the claim that a certain kind of experience, namely revelation or epiphany, is not merely actual but veridical. Phenomenology says, If revelation occurs it will be in the form of a saturated phenomenon. Theology says, for example, the burning bush was an epiphany, or Jesus Christ is a revelation. The attentive reader should have no trouble distinguishing Marion's phenomenological analyses, which should be persuasive to believer and unbeliever alike, from his theological claims. Marion's account of the subject falls under the heading of inverse intentionality, and there are hints that vision is aufgehoben in the voice. The seer is first of all the one seen, but above all the one addressed, called forth into response-able being. (shrink)
Using the philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy as an anchoring point, Jacques Derrida in this book conducts a profound review of the philosophy of the sense of touch, from Plato and Aristotle to Jean-Luc Nancy, whose ground-breaking book Corpus he discusses in detail. Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Edmund Husserl, Didier Franck, Martin Heidegger, Francoise Dastur, and Jean-Louis Chre;tien are discussed, as are Rene; Descartes, Diderot, Maine de Biran, Fe;lix Ravaisson, Immanuel Kant, Sigmund Freud, and others. The scope of Derrida’s (...) deliberations makes this book a virtual encyclopedia of the philosophy of touch (and the body). Derrida gives special consideration to the thinking of touch in Christianity and, in discussing Jean-Luc Nancy’s essay “Deconstruction of Christianity,” devotes a section of the book to the sense of touch in the Gospels. Another section concentrates on “the flesh,” as treated by Merleau-Ponty and others in his wake. Derrida’s critique of intuitionism, notably in the phenomenological tradition, is one of the guiding threads of the book. On Touching includes a wealth of notes that provide an extremely useful bibliographical resource. Personal and detached all at once, this book, one of the first published in English translation after Jacques Derrida’s death, serves as a useful and poignant retrospective on the work of the philosopher. A tribute by Jean-Luc Nancy, written a day after Jacques Derrida’s death, is an added feature. (shrink)
This text begins by considering the phrase ‘digital haptology’ as suggested by the closing pages of Derrida's Le Toucher. It suggests that this moment in telecommunications presents a model of ‘tele-haptology’. The text goes on to consider Jean-Luc Nancy's ‘Noli me tangere’ as a response to Le Toucher. In particular it is concerned with Nancy's hypothesis on Modern literature and art as having an essential link to the gospel parables. Through a reading of Nancy's text and the gospels, this (...) hypothesis is placed in doubt. Notably, the argument is made that once again Nancy's discourse on touching leads him to make a too hasty fore-closure of otherness within his intended deconstruction of reading and his account of Mary Magdalene. In response to Nancy's formulation of literature as parable, an alternative consideration of literature as tele-haptology is proposed. (shrink)
It is commonly recognized that Jean-Luc Nancy’s efforts to elaborate a conception of ‘the political’ are based upon Heidegger’s thinking of die Tecknik , even as they seek to overcome the difficulties that beset Heidegger’s own politics. But few have noted that Nancy also seeks to critically engage Carl Schmitt’s conception of das Politische , according to which there is a metaphysical and practical need for a sovereign decision on friends and enemies if effective political community and law are (...) to be possible. This article argues that recognizing that Nancy seeks to overcome Schmitt’s conception of the political throws into high relief his failure to address the actual subject matter of politics. In the end, Nancy remains too metaphysical to engage with the political. (shrink)
This paper examines Jean-Luc Nancy's interpretation of Hegel, focusing in particular on The Restlessness of the Negative. It is argued that Nancy's reading represents a significant break with other post-structuralist readings of Hegel by taking his thought to be non-metaphysical. The paper focuses in particular on the role Nancy gives to the negative in Hegel's thought. Ultimately Nancy's reading is limited as an interpretation of Hegel, since he gives no sustained explanation of the self-correcting function of reason.
This article explores how Jean-Luc Nancy attempts to gain critical traction on Christianity by proscribing thinking of completion. First, it describes Nancy's deconstruction of Christianity as stemming from his aesthetic redirection of Heidegger's thinking of finitude. Second, it further details Nancy's noetic declension of Heidegger via Kant and Lyotard, where the imagination and aesthetic communication are deemed impossible. Third, it examines Nancy's treatment of paintings of the Virgin Mary who, for Nancy, exemplifies his brand of incompletion. Nancy's work on (...) Mary reveals both the oversights and the insights of his deconstruction of Christianity, which Catholic theology should seriously engage. (shrink)
This article carries out a systematic exposition of the concept of the body in Jean-Luc Nancy, with all the risks of reduction that such an exposition entails. First it is necessary to return to Western philosophy’s founding text on living corporality, that is, Aristotle’s treatise on the soul. The oppositions that can be established between the Greek thinker’s psyche (soul) and Nancy’s dead Psyche are not so radical as may at first be thought: In both it is a question (...) of thinking the soul as the difference, the retreat or departure in which the exposition of bodies consists. The article continues with an analysis of touch and the self and concludes with an elaboration of the idea of the body within the general program of the deconstruction of Christianity. (shrink)
This essay works to set up a debate between the German philosopher Manfred Frank and the French philosophers Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy. At stake in the debate is the concept of freedom. The essay begins by explaining Frank's subject-based concept of freedom and then it presents the perfectly opposed non-subjective ontological concept of freedom that Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy forward. In the end, in the interest of threading a way through this impasse, and following the cue of these three (...) philosophers, we turn to the early German Romantics Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel to help us reconceptualise freedom. Following their cue, I draw on the strengths of Frank and Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy while avoiding their dangerous extremes. (shrink)
In his recent article, ‘A Gift to Theology? Jean-Luc Marion's ‘Saturated Phenomena’ in Christological Perspective’, Brian Robinette has critiqued Marion's phenomenology for confining theology to a one-sided approach to Christology, one that stresses only the passive, mystical reception of Christ. To correct this imbalance, Robinette brings Marion into dialogue with those more active Christologies or ‘prophetical-ethical’ liberation theologies of Gustavo Gutierrez, Johann Baptist Metz and others that stress a life-praxis focused on confronting evil and suffering. In this essay I (...) am arguing that Robinette has not fully developed the ‘logic’ of Marion's phenomenology of the ‘call and the gifted’, in which both a passive and an active element are operative. I explore more fully that very dynamic phenomenological process of the call-and-the-gifted as developed in Marion's work Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness. Once viewed in Christological perspective, and especially in light of Christ's death and resurrection, Marion's phenomenology entails an ethical trope consistent with the mission of Christ as rendered in Scriptural revelation, and thus the gap between Marion's work and the prophetical-ethical theologies of Gutierrez and Baptist Metz becomes narrowed. (shrink)
After reviewing the status of the concept of the phenomenon in Husserl’s phenomenology and the aim of successive attempts to reform, de-formalize, and to widen it, we show the difficulties of a method that, following the example of Jean-Luc Marion’s phenomenology, intends to connect the phenomenon directly to the revelation of an exteriority. We argue that, on the contrary, Marc Richir’s phenomenology, which strives to grasp the phenomenon as nothing-but-phenomenon, is more likely to capture the “meaning” of the phenomenological (...) , and hence to help us orient in the field of problems that phenomenology encounters without always knowing how to tackle them. Yet, this extension of the phenomenon’s domain does not thereby encompass everything: there may well be certain issues that require a phenomenology without phenomenon ; but the meaning of this cannot be determined before the complete reenvisioning of transcendental phenomenology. (shrink)
As many struggle to find meaning at the end of philosophy, Jean-Luc Nancy's writing has enlightened many philosophical debates around the questions of community, the political, and freedom. Situatuing his work in an explicitly contemporary context--the collapse of communism, the Gulf War, the former Yugoslavia--Nancy has forced us to rethink nothing less than what "doing" philosophy entails. On Jean-Juc Nancy provides fascinating insights into one of the most contemporary philosophers writing today. The full range of Nancy's work as a (...) philosopher of the contemporary is considered, allowing us to see his engagement with Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Bataille and Derrida. Issues of violence and power, finitude, east and west, the meaning of "Europe", and the crisis of the global community are all approached through Nancy's work. (shrink)
Jean-Luc Nancy is a contemporary continental philosopher who argues that the hope of fully unifying a community through work is problematic. This is because people cannot be reduced to their function as workers. Thus, community is, at best, inoperative. This article takes Nancy’s ideas of community and applies them to the notion of teamwork in business. It shows how in some literature on business teamwork, there is a desire to build a team through shared work experiences. It then explains (...) Nancy’s view as to why this cannot work, and it enters into Nancy’s positive account of how a community should be seen as a web of people communicating and sharing with each other in a variety of ways. The practical conclusion the study draws is that team members need to be careful about allowing goal orientation to obfuscate the richness of the relationships that occur among team members. People need to explore all of the ways in which people share with each other rather than just those ways that advance a narrow set of goals. If the richness of those relationships is recognized, many new directions for business and for general human development may appear. (shrink)
The phenomenological project of Jean-Luc Marion’s Being Given (namely, to free phenomenological possibility to the unconditional self-giving of all phenomena) should be distinguished from the theological project of his God without Being (to think God unconditionally and absolutely). In freeing phenomenological possibility to the self-giving of all phenomena (on the model of the saturated phenomenon), and in proposing a new figure of the subject who receives phenomena (the gifted), Marion’s phenomenology provides the conceptual means for a philosophy of religion (...) that admits the phenomenonality of unconditional revelation. And yet, thereremain striking parallels between the unconditional, self-giving phenomenon as it is described in the phenomenology of Being Given and the unconditional, self-giving God of the theological God without Being. This essay concludes by offering a framework for interpreting these parallels without claiming that the saturated phenomenon transforms phenomenology into theology and without claiming that phenomenological givenness limits revelation to its philosophical possibility. (shrink)
Re-treating Religion is the first volume to analyze his long-term project The Deconstruction of Christianity,especially his major statement of it in Dis-Enclosure.Nancy conceives monotheistic religion and secularization not as opposite ...
This introduction to the philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy gives an overview of his philosophical thought to date and situates it within the broader context of contemporary French and European thinking. The book examines Nancy’s philosophy in relation to five specific areas: his account of subjectivity; his understanding of space and spatiality; his thinking about the body and embodiment; his political thought; and his contribution to contemporary aesthetics. In each case it shows the way in which Nancy develops or moves (...) beyond some of the key concerns associated with phenomenology, post-structuralism, and what could broadly be termed the “post-modern.”. (shrink)
In this article, using the recent work by Charles Taylor in A Secular Age as my point of departure, I will argue that Jean-Luc Nancy enables us to think past the competing binary of atheistic and religious experience and allows us to surpass the present narratives of secularism. In A Secular Age, Taylor himself seeks a middle ground between atheism and religion, arguing that it is possible to open ourselves to the cross-pressures of modern existence that find us caught (...) between scientific atheism and a need for spiritual and religious guidance. Here, Taylor finds a way of picturing ourselves within a secular age, remaining faithful to scientific rationalism, but still open to religion and a sense of a higher good. However, as I shall demonstrate, in his thesis Taylor misrepresents the Continental philosophical tradition (particularly Nietzsche and post-structuralism) that has itself sought to understand these cross-pressures of existence. Taking this misrepresentation, and specifically his reductive and colloquial analysis of Nietzsche, Camus, and Derrida, as my point of departure, I provide an alternative manner of thinking through the work of these writers, one that leads to a detailed analysis of Jean-Luc Nancy and his project the deconstruction of Christianity. In this analysis I argue that Nancy provides a manner of thinking that remains open and allows an experience of freedom, without seeking to close that sense of openness with explanation, nor maintaining that sense of openness with a conception of the divine. (shrink)
This article seeks to defend the possibility of a metaphysical approach to philosophical theology. Challenging the claim that there can be nothing in commonbetween God (with whom theology or even a form of phenomenology such as Jean-Luc Marion’s deals) and being (as expounded for example in the metaphysical approach of Thomas Aquinas), the article develops a critique of Marion’s views with close reference to his interpretations of Aquinas.
This paper examines the extent to which certain aspects of the philosophies of Emmanuel Lévinas and Jean-Luc Marion are directed toward the divine, especially in regard to how they employ religious imagery or even explicitly biblical metaphors, namely those of the face of the neighbor, the glory of the Infinite, the response of the witness, and the breaking or sharing of bread. This will show important parallels and connections between their respective works, but it will also highlight where they (...) diverge from each other. In respect to all four symbols or (biblical) images, I suggest that while it is indeed one (or even the primary) goal of Marion’s work to open phenomenological discourse to enable talk about the divine, Lévinas is instead interested in emptying biblical language of its theological import for purely philosophical (or ethical) purposes. (shrink)
Ever since the publication of Dieu sans l’être in 1982, Jean-Luc Marion’s various (and varying) pronouncements on the status and meaning of esse in Aquinas have excited a good deal of interest and controversy among Thomists. Marion’s evolving understanding of Thomistic metaphysics in general, and of Thomistic analogy in particular, has been commended for its openness to correction even as it has been criticized for what many still regard as its residual deficiencies. All such criticisms, however, neglect to take (...) account of the phenomenological provenance of Marion’s concerns, and to this extent they risk misunderstanding them. Ironically, Marion’s phenomenological approach to Aquinas intends to safeguard precisely what his Thomist critics think he has jettisoned: namely, our ability to speak about God in a way that says something meaningful—or perhaps better, reveals something meaningful—about God to us. The apophatic language Marionuses to make this point should be taken as a reminder to his fellow Christians (and especially to those who happen to be Thomists) who rightfully desire to speak of God about the danger that is involved in doing so. If we interpret Aquinas’s use of the divine names according to the phenomenological horizon of distance and thus think the various names of God “according to truly theological determinations,” Marion suggests, we can avoid the danger of lapsing into a conceptual idolatry of univocal predication that occludes their phenomenological disclosiveness. (shrink)
In Briefings on Existence, Alain Badiou calls for a radical atheism that would refuse the Heideggerian pathos of a “last god” and deny the affliction of finitude. I will argue that Jean-Luc Nancy’s deconstruction of monotheism, as well as his thinking of the world, remains resolutely atheistic, or better a-theological, precisely because of Nancy’s insistence on finitude and his appeal to the Heideggerian motif of the last god. At the same time, I want to underline, by considering it as (...) a Derridean paleonymy, the danger of Nancy’s maintenance of the word “god” to name the infinite opening of the world right at (à meme) the world. (shrink)
De los filósofos acusados de “giro teológico”, Jean-Luc Marion es posiblemente el que mejor ha seguido la iniciativa heideggeriana de una fenomenología radical: una fenomenología de lo inaparente. Lo ha hecho al introducir en la fenomenalidad los llamados “fenómenos saturados”, lo que lo ha puesto en el centro del debate. Contra sus críticos, este ensayo muestra que esta ampliación de la fenomenalidad no proviene prioritariamente de una voluntad teológica, sino de una necesidad de liberar la fenomenalidad del paradigma de (...) la visión, en favor del paradigma del decir. Con este presupuesto, se intenta reconciliar la filosofía analítica con la fenomenología. (shrink)
This essay proposes to read Jean-Luc Nancy’s references to creation ex nihilo as both an intervention in the French debate concerning eventness, and as a transformative rethinking of the status of phenomenality. Nancy’s position is roughly triangulated relative to key remarks from other thinkers and, above all, its distinctive components (temporality, negativity, spatiality) are elucidated through historical glosses. Articulating the overall architecture of this theory serves to illustrate the Heideggerian access to the event debate. It also deepens aspects only (...) elliptically alluded to in Nancy’s own writing. (shrink)
Absent within Jean-Luc Marion’s theory of selfhood is an account of psychosis that displaces standard phenomenological and psychoanalytic models. Working primarily with Book V of Being Given, my paper sketches the formal possibilities exhibited in a self who cannot manage the superabundance of the given and, swept away by an uncontrollable flood of givenness, thereby falls into a hysteria of self-experience and loses its ipseity. Then, contrasting psychosis with positive figures of the self, I explore the dynamic relationship between (...) givenness and the gifted highlighted by the phenomenological diremption and effacement of selfhood displayed in both. (shrink)
Ch. 1: Inadequate approaches to the question of God -- 1.1. Initial clarifications -- 1.2 Wholly unsystematic direct approaches -- 1.3. Semi-systematic indirect approaches -- 1.4. A wholly anti-systematic, anti-theoretical, and direct approach: Ludwig Wittgenstein -- 1.5. A characteristic example of a failed critique: Thomas Nagel's objections to God as "last point" -- Ch. 2. Heidegger's thinking of Being: the flawed development of a significant approach -- 2.1. Heidegger's failed and distorting interpretation and critique of the Christian metaphysics of Being (...) -- 2.2. Heidegger's four approaches to "retrieving" the "question of being" -- 2.3. What is unthought in Heidegger's thinking of Being I: Being-as-Ereignis -- 2.4. What is unthought in Heidegger's "thinking of Being" II: Being and being(s)- Ereignis and Ereignete(s) -- 2.5. The "overcoming [Überwinding] of metaphysics" as "transformational recovering [Verwindung]" of metaphysics and "the end of the history of Being" -- 2.6. The status of Heideggerian thinking I: thinking of Being as thinking within Ereignis, thinking that reaches its destination with Ereignis (Denken, das in das Ereignis einkehrt) -- 2.7. The status of Heideggerian thinking II: absolute claim, provisionality, the poverty of language, the language of thinking, the finitude of thinking -- 2.8. Heidegger's thinking and the topic "God" -- 2.9. Heidegger's "thinking": a fundamentally deficient and confused form of thinking -- Ch. 3:The structural-systematic approach to a theory of Being and God -- 3.1. The systematic context: the theoretical framework of the structural-systematic philosophy -- 3.2. The unrestricted universe of discourse as the universal dimension of primordial Being -- 3.3. Explication of the dimension of Being I: theory of Being as such -- 3.4. Explication of the dimension of Being II: theory of Being as a whole -- 3.5. Explication of the relation between absolutely necessary Being and the contingent dimension of Being as key to a conception of absolutely necessary Being as minded (as personal) -- 3.6. Absolutely necessary minded (personal) Being as creator of the world (as absolute creating) -- 3.7. The clarified relation between Being and God and the task of developing an integral theory about God -- Ch. 4: Critical examination of two counterpositions: Emmanuel Levinas and Jean-Luc Marion -- 4.1. Levinas's misguided conception of transcendence "beyond B/being" -- 4.2. Jean-Luc Marion's failed conception of "radical and non-metaphysical transcendence" and of "God without Being". (shrink)
Being and God: A Systematic Approach in Confrontation with Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jean-Luc Marion , by Lorenz B. Puntel Content Type Journal Article Pages 164-165 Authors Christina M. Gschwandtner, University of Scranton Journal Comparative and Continental Philosophy Online ISSN 1757-0646 Print ISSN 1757-0638 Journal Volume Volume 4 Journal Issue Volume 4, Number 1 / 2012.
Jean-Luc Godard’s Eye and MindIn his commentary concerning Jean-Luc Godard’s film, Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle, the film critic, Alain Bergala, writes that certain sequences of this film are “at the same time cinema and philosophy of cinema, a philosophy not very far from that of Merleau-Ponty in Eye and Mind, but a joyful and actually cinematic philosophy.” Here I propose a reading of Godard’s certain works found in different periods (Deux ou trois choses que (...) je sais d’elle, Ici et ailleurs, Passion et JLG – Autoportrait de décembre), according to this precise axis, namely, as a cinematic response to Merleau-Ponty’s Eye and Mind. To do that presupposes that we open up the stakes of this famous text, which is at the limit of the philosophical and political, and that we grasp the work of the filmmaker as a movement of thought which continues and deepens Merleau-Ponty’s questions concerning the political dimensions of flesh.L’occhio e lo spirito di Jean-Luc GodardNelle sue osservazioni sul film di Jean-Luc Godard, Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle, il critico cinematografico Alain Bergala scrive che alcune sequenze del film sono “allo stesso tempo cinema e filosofia del cinema, una filosofia non troppo lontana da quella elaborata da Merleau-Ponty in L’occhio e lo spirito, una filosofia gioiosa e davvero cinematografica.” Propongo qui una lettura di alcune opere godardiane di periodi differenti (Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle, Ici et ailleurs, Passion e JLG – Autoportrait de décembre), muovendomi lungo questa stessa linea, dunque intendendo quelle opere come una risposta “cinematografica” a L’occhio e lo spirito. Fare questo significa, d’altra parte, rianimare la posta in gioco di questo celebre testo, situata al limite tra il filosofico e il politico, e assumere l’opera del regista come un movimento di pensiero che prolunga e approfondisce l’interrogazione merleau-pontyana sulle dimensioni politiche della carne. (shrink)
In this text the translator of the English-language edition of Derrida's Le Toucher, the translator and former book editor Christine Irizarry, discusses her experience of translating the volume. She discusses translation as a philosophical problem, as the passage into philosophy as well as specific problems of translation in this book. She discusses her experiences of being taught by Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe and its relation to translation.
Because music communicates extra-propositionally, philosophers often use musical concepts and metaphors to discuss implicit and/or affective knowledges. Music is a productive means to philosophically analyze affect, but only when these analyses are grounded in rigorous studies of actual musical works and practices. When we don’t ground our study of music in musical practices, works, and theories, “music” just becomes a mirror of whatever assumptions and biases we already have. I show how the overly-abstract treatment of music and sound in (...) class='Hi'>Jean-Luc Nancy’s Listening leads to significant philosophical and political problems. By following his musical metaphors all the way through, I show how his theory of listening naturalizes maleness/masculinity, and, like liberal multiculturalism, values “difference” only as a way to re-center whiteness and patriarchy. As an alternative, I use R&B/electropop singer Kelis’s 2010 single “Acapella” (sic) to develop an alternative account of music, affect, and the politics of difference. (shrink)
The deposition of the political -- From paradox to partage : on citizenship and teletechnologies -- The disposition of being -- Being communist -- Seattle and the space of exposure.
In this paper I consider Ricœur’s negotiation of the boundary or relationship between philosophy and religion in light of the larger debate in contemporary French philosophy. I suggest that contrasting his way of dealing with the intersection of the two discourses to that of two other French thinkers (Jean-Luc Marion and Michel Henry) illuminates his stance more fully. I begin with a brief outline of Ricœur’s claims about the distinction or relation between the discourses, then reflect on those of (...) Marion and Henry, who although they do not relate them in the same way still together form a significant contrast to Ricœur’s perspective, and conclude with a fuller consideration of Ricœur’s methodology in light of this comparison. I suggest that it is in particular his hermeneutic commitments that lead him both to more rigorous distinctions between discourses and ironically to greater mediation. (shrink)
According to Jean-Luc Nancy the essential condition for the existence of sense is the 'otherness' of our being-together. For John Cassavetes being-together makes sense only there where it escapes sense. It will be shown that in fact that both propositions derive from a qualitative distance at the heart of our being-together. This qualitative distance triggers the circulation of sense and leaves sense always open. It is in this way that being-together responds of sense absolutely (responding to its content – (...) the acquired meanings – and its structure – sense’s referentiality) by foreclosing any absolute sense, maintaining itself as it were as the moving horizon of sense. (shrink)
Introduction -- Marion's claims -- The hermeneutic structure of phenomenality -- The theory of saturated phenomena -- Events -- Dazzling idols and paintings -- Flesh as absolute -- The face as irregardable icon -- Revelation : the phenomenon of God's appearing -- Conclusion: Revising the phenomenology of givenness.
Atheisms Today -- The God of Metaphysics -- The God of the Poets -- Difficult Atheism -- Beyond A/theism? Quentin Meillassoux -- The Politics of the Post-Theological I: Justifying the Political -- The Politics of the Post-Theological II: Justice -- General Conclusion: How to Follow an 'Atheism' That Never Was.
