This article begins by posing the question: how can we understand the ‘terror’ of 11 September? First, a brief discussion of the reactions, both psychological and political, provides a background for establishing the particular character of this act of terror as being both inside and outside, simultaneously. The pairing of ‘us’ and ‘them’ in inextricable struggle reminds us of the role monsters have always played in putting a face on the radical alterity of the Other. Second, the experience (...) of terror is examined from three distinct philosophical positions: the fatalism of Baudrillard, the sublime of Kant, and the political of Arendt. Third, a discussion of the media and the role of the viewer of the Event of 11 September ends the discussion. In conclusion, it is suggested that the three ways of responding to the monstrous - practical understanding, working through and pardoning - may provide the best ways to help us empathize with our fellow human beings, which ultimately may move us to a fuller imaginative understanding. (shrink)

Terrorism challenges our Western world system with a new form of war. Terror contrasts strongly with the Western world's concept of freedom. Thus, an aggravation of this conflict is inevitable. In terms of technical equipment, we are prepared. Mentally, we are not. We know the mental treasures of mankind. We know examples of similar situations, which have happened before. We never wanted to meet them again. Thus, our awakening is even more terrifying. Referring to quite contrasting systems, eras, philosophers (...) and historical events, the volume shows what has to be taken into consideration. (shrink)

The horror and psychological denial of our mortality, along with the corruptibility of our flesh, are persistent themes in drama. Body horror films have intensified these themes in increasingly graphic terms. The aesthetic of body horror has its origins in the ideas of the Marquis de Sade and the existential philosophies of Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche, all of whom demonstrated that we have just cause to be anxious about our physical reality and its existence in the world. This book (...) examines the relationship between these writers and the various manifestations of body horror in film. The most characteristic examples of this genre are those directed by David Cronenberg, but body horror as a whole includes many variations on the theme by other figures, whose work is charted here through seven categories: copulation, generation, digestion, mutilation, infection, mutation, disintegration and extinction. (shrink)

The idea for _Philosophy in a Time of Terror_ was born hours after the attacks on 9/11 and was realized just weeks later when Giovanna Borradori sat down with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida in New York City, in separate interviews, to evaluate the significance of the most destructive terrorist act ever perpetrated. This book marks an unprecedented encounter between two of the most influential thinkers of our age as here, for the first time, Habermas and Derrida overcome their mutual (...) antagonism and agree to appear side by side. As the two philosophers disassemble and reassemble what we think we know about terrorism, they break from the familiar social and political rhetoric increasingly polarized between good and evil. In this process, we watch two of the greatest intellects of the century at work. (shrink)

This dissertation, located at the crossroads of Continental political philosophy, feminist theory, critical theory, intellectual history, and cultural studies, provides a critical cartography of contemporary new materialist thought in its various constellations and assemblages, while using diffractive theorizing to examine two Continental terror(ist) events. It is argued that such a critical cartography is not only a novel but also much needed undertaking, as we, more than almost two decades after the Habermas-Derrida dialogues on terror(ism), are in need (...) of a Zeitgeist-adjusted conceptual framework, and, thus, a revitalization of philosophizing as such, that could lead to an analysis of the complex ontological, epistemological, and eco-ethico-political entangled aspects of global crises, and, specifically, terrorist events, the actual terror they produce, and the bio-/necropolitical repercussions they often engender. -/- Using the new materialist methodologies of critical cartography and diffraction, this project’s first part explores what it means to “theorize from the ground up” in a feminist manner, while furthermore offering a situated critical cartography of new materialist thought. Within the contours of this Deleuzoguattarian mapping exercise, new materialist thought is shown to be grounded in foregoing materialist philosophies, transversal and trans(/)disciplinary, and, moreover, a revitalizing ever-evolving philosophical strand of thought with crisscrossing, transcontinental roots and a strong foundation in (post-)Foucauldian poststructuralist thought. Particular attention is paid to what in this project are called “critical” new materialisms, or those new materialist philosophies that take the necessity of critical power analyses seriously, and could be said to be “eco-ethico-political” in nature. This cartography is furthermore accompanied by a digital critical cartography that can be utilized for pedagogical means. -/- The second and final part of this dissertation, preceded by an excursus that accentuates the importance of Harawayan ecophilosophical thought for critical new materialist philosophies, consists of one chapter that puts the idea of diffractive theorizing into practice; subsequently exploring theorizing on terror(ism), the Habermas-Derrida dialogues with regard to 9/11, and the Paris 2015 and Brussels 2016 attacks as affect-inducing events of “feeling-thinking-through.” This chapter ends with a diffractive rereading of Habermas, Derrida, Benjamin, and also partially Levinas, on the subject of the contemporary democratic state, terrorism, and the legitimacy of lockdowns and emergency state declarations. By doing so, this final chapter anticipates on this dissertation’s epilogue, in which the need for an up-to-date critical new materialist eco-ethico-political model of justice and responsiveness-as-response-ability, is highlighted. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt's rich and varied political thought is more influential today than ever before, due in part to the collapse of communism and the need for ideas that move beyond the old ideologies of the Cold War. As Dana Villa shows, however, Arendt's thought is often poorly understood, both because of its complexity and because her fame has made it easy for critics to write about what she is reputed to have said rather than what she actually wrote. Villa sets (...) out to change that here, explaining clearly, carefully, and forcefully Arendt's major contributions to our understanding of politics, modernity, and the nature of political evil in our century.Villa begins by focusing on some of the most controversial aspects of Arendt's political thought. He shows that Arendt's famous idea of the banality of evil--inspired by the trial of Adolf Eichmann--does not, as some have maintained, lessen the guilt of war criminals by suggesting that they are mere cogs in a bureaucratic machine. He examines what she meant when she wrote that terror was the essence of totalitarianism, explaining that she believed Nazi and Soviet terror served above all to reinforce the totalitarian idea that humans are expendable units, subordinate to the all-determining laws of Nature or History. Villa clarifies the personal and philosophical relationship between Arendt and Heidegger, showing how her work drew on his thought while providing a firm repudiation of Heidegger's political idiocy under the Nazis. Less controversially, but as importantly, Villa also engages with Arendt's ideas about the relationship between political thought and political action. He explores her views about the roles of theatricality, philosophical reflection, and public-spiritedness in political life. And he explores what relationship, if any, Arendt saw between totalitarianism and the "great tradition" of Western political thought. Throughout, Villa shows how Arendt's ideas illuminate contemporary debates about the nature of modernity and democracy and how they deepen our understanding of philosophers ranging from Socrates and Plato to Habermas and Leo Strauss.Direct, lucid, and powerfully argued, this is a much-needed analysis of the central ideas of one of the most influential political theorists of the twentieth century. (shrink)

"In her introduction, Borradori contends that philosophy has an invaluable contribution to make to the understanding of terrorism. Just as the traumas produced by colonialism, totalitarianism, and the Holocaust wrote the history of the twentieth century, the history of the twenty-first century is already signed by global terrorism. Each dialogue here, accompanied by a critical essay, recognizes the magnitude of this upcoming challenge. Characteristically, Habermas's dialogue is dense, compact, and elegantly traditional. Derrida's, on the other hand, takes the reader (...) on a long, winding, and unpredictable road. Yet unexpected agreements emerge between them: both have a deep suspicion of the concept of "terrorism" and both see the need for a transition from classical international law, premised on the model of nation-states, to a new cosmopolitan order based on continental alliances.". (shrink)

Comparative philosophy and religion can help us to understand the violence and terrror that often dominate our world. These new, creative studies - ranging in scope from ancient Biblical, Greek, Indian, and Chinese formulations to recent religious and philosophical positions - broaden and deepen our understanding of terror and present new possibilities for greater nonviolence, peace, and true security.

This volume collects Jeremy Waldron's challenging and influential work on the moral, political and legal issues surrounding the response to terrorism since 9/11. The volume will be essential reading for all those engaged with contemporary politics and security law, and the continuing struggle for an ethical response to terrorism.

The idea for Philosophy in a Time of Terror was born hours after the attacks on 9/11 and was realized just weeks later when Giovanna Borradori sat down with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida in New York City, in separate interviews, to evaluate the significance of the most destructive terrorist act ever perpetrated. This book marks an unprecedented encounter between two of the most influential thinkers of our age as here, for the first time, Habermas and Derrida overcome (...) their mutual antagonism and agree to appear side by side. As the two philosophers disassemble and reassemble what we think we know about terrorism, they break from the familiar social and political rhetoric increasingly polarized between good and evil. In this process, we watch two of the greatest intellects of the century at work. (shrink)

The general idea of this investigation is to emphasize the elusiveness of the concept of terrorism and the pitfalls of the so-called “War on Terror” by way of confronting, roughly, the reflections made in the immediate following of 9/11 by Habermas and Derrida on the legacy of Enlightenment, globalization and tolerance, with Foucault’s concept of biopolitics seen as the modern political paradigm and Agamben’s understanding of “the state of exception” in the context of liberal democratic governments. The main argument (...) will state that the modern Western individual and the modern terrorist are in a way linked together as products of the same biopolitical network. So I shall argue that religious fundamentalism and international terrorism are not external factors to the Western civilization, nor even some radical late forms of ‘Counter-Enlightenment’ threatening the Western ‘way of life,’ but phenomena revealing what we could call, borrowing J. Derrida’s biological metaphor, a “crisis of autoimmunization” of Western neo-liberal democracies. The only long-term solution to the threat of global terrorism would have to involve the “deconstruction” of our common notion of tolerance and the experience of an unconditional hospitality that is actually the inversion of the terrorist action that is threatening us “from within,” according to Derrida. But we cannot reasonably hope for this radical change in our relationship to others unless we aren’t really trying to modify the relationship to the self that is prevalent in contemporary Western societies: a vision of us as self-encapsulated monads or ‘nuclear’ selves, for whom genuine community life is, at the most, only a nostalgic evocation of a past long gone, and the respect for the others, a strategic name for moral indifference. (shrink)

This collection of essays by eminent scholars on the reconstruction and critique of Kant's transcendental philosophy in the Indian context specifically discusses his ideas on perpetual peace, universal history, and critical philosophy.

This is the third technical paper in a five part series on "ecocriticism" as it relates to the author's work on fear and fearlessness.... focused engagement with Desh Subba's philosophy of fearism in the last three years, and with his attempting to link Subba's notion of "fearism" and the "fearist perspective" with ecocriticism....

In this volume, Simona Goi and Frederick M. Dolan gather stimulating arguments for the indispensability of fiction_including poetry, drama, and film_as irreplaceable sites for wrestling with nature, meaning, shortcomings, and the future of modern politics.

The biopolitics of empire : slavery and "the Muslim" -- The biopolitics of settlement : temporality, desire, and civilization -- Foucault and queer theory -- Society must be destroyed -- Queer terror -- Bibliography.

This chapter contains sections titled: “How can these things be?” Reason's Transcendental Climb Where Were We?

This article offers a close reading of Derrida's response to the events of 11 September 2001, in the interview he conducted immediately afterwards with Giovanna Borradori in the text Philosophy in a Time of Terror (2003). I argue that this text is significantly different from previous philosophical responses to horrific political events (such as those by Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno and Hannah Arendt) insofar as it invites us to contest radically the assumption that philosophy's role is to (...) envision and to realize the `good'. Instead, Derrida's response provokes us to acknowledge that philosophy's role was only ever to criticize itself, that this is the absolute limit of what philosophy can or should do, and that this work is both genuinely risky and crucially important, because in undertaking a critique of itself philosophy intervenes for democracy, without rules or guarantees, in the very determinations that are the material of political life. Key Words: 9/11 • Theodor Adorno • critique • deconstruction • democracy • Jacques Derrida • futurity • philosophy • terror • to-come. (shrink)

A review of David Huckvale's (2020) book "Terrors of the Flesh: The Philosophy of Body Horror in Film".

Meditations, maxims, aphorisms, notes, and comments address topics that range from pathos and genius to careerism and club sandwiches. Marcus Steinweg's capacity to implicate the other is beautiful, bright, precise, and logical, grounded in everyday questions, which to him are always big questions. —from the foreword by Thomas Hirschhorn The houses of philosophy need not be palaces. —Marcus Steinweg, “House,” The Terror of Evidence This is the first book by the prolific German philosopher Marcus Steinweg to be available (...) in English translation. The Terror of Evidence offers meditations, maxims, aphorisms, notes, and comments—191 texts ranging in length from three words to three pages—the deceptive simplicity of which challenges the reader to think. “Thinking means getting lost again and again,” Steinweg observes. Reality is the ever-broken promise of consistency; “the terror of evidence” arises from the inconsistency before our eyes. Thinking is a means of coping with that inconsistency. Steinweg is known for his collaborations with Thomas Hirschhorn and the lectures and texts he has provided for many of Hirschhorn's projects. This translation of The Terror of Evidence includes a foreword by Hirschhorn written especially for the MIT Press edition. The subjects of these short texts vary widely. (“The table of contents is in itself excessive and ambitious,” writes Hirschhorn.) They include pathos, passivity, genius, resentment, love, horror, catastrophe, and racism. And club sandwiches (specifically, Foucault's love for this American specialty), blow jobs, and dance. Also: “Two Kinds of Obscurantism,” “Putting Words in Spinoza's Mouth,” “Note on Rorty,” and “Doubting Doubt.” The Terror of Evidence can be considered a guidebook to thinking: the daily journey of exploration, the incessant questioning of reality that Steinweg sees as the task of philosophy. (shrink)

Si bien hubo grandes pensadores a lo largo de la historia que hicieron referencia al concepto de «terror» (Kant y lo sublime, Hegel y el terror posrevolucionario francés, Heidegger y la significación ontológica del término, o la aproximación del psicoanálisis a lo siniestro), escasean aún los estudios vinculados a esta temática y los pocos que existen carecen de la profundidad adecuada para tratar este fenómeno. La presente edición cuenta con una serie de textos escritos por reconocidos especialistas (Vicente (...) Serrano, Antonio Castilla, Arturo Leyte, Miguel Morey, Mauricio Mancilla Muñoz, Ana Carrasco Conde, Jorge Fernández Gonzalo y Enrique Lynch) que nos permitirán adentrarnos de lleno en el tema del terror y sus principales vinculaciones con la filosofía, el psicoanálisis, la literatura y la sociedad en general. ¿Qué es el terror? ¿Cómo interpretarlo? ¿Cómo se representa en la literatura y el cine? ¿Cuál es, realmente, su función política? La filosofía, el terror y lo siniestro nos da la llave para acceder a estas y a otras cuestiones y abre vías de reflexión que resultan de vital importancia para comprender los resortes que operan detrás de nuestra sociedad contemporánea. (shrink)

One reason why the continued popularity of the film Alien (1979) is philosophically interesting is that it bears out the aesthetic theories of seminal American horror-writer H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) about what makes good science-fiction horror. Lovecraft never directly offers a philosophy of science-fiction horror. However, at different points in his essays and letters, he address genres he labels “interplanetary fiction”, “horror”, “supernatural horror”, and “weird fiction”, the last being a broad heading covering both supernatural fiction and science fiction. Taken (...) together, a philosophy of science-fiction horror emerges. The chapter is an examination of the philosophy of science fiction horror of H.P. Lovecraft, illustrated using examples drawn from the film Alien. (shrink)

However, the book, with its promising title, is in many ways disappointing. You may have expected to find a rare discussion between Habermas and Derrida, but there is no dialogue at all. Instead we are presented with two separate fairly short interviews conducted by Giovanna Borradori in New York just after 9/11. The interview with Habermas comprises twenty pages and the one with Derrida fifty-two pages. The rest of the book is written by the interviewer Borradori herself, who compares and (...) contrasts Habermas’s and Derrida’s positions in a rather didactic fashion. Considering that both interviews are easy to follow, such detailed commentary seems rather superfluous, although it may be of help to readers who are not familiar with the thought of the two philosophers. (shrink)

In _Ontological Terror_ Calvin L. Warren intervenes in Afro-pessimism, Heideggerian metaphysics, and black humanist philosophy by positing that the "Negro question" is intimately imbricated with questions of Being. Warren uses the figure of the antebellum free black as a philosophical paradigm for thinking through the tensions between blackness and Being. He illustrates how blacks embody a metaphysical nothing. This nothingness serves as a destabilizing presence and force as well as that which whiteness defines itself against. Thus, the function of (...) blackness as giving form to nothing presents a terrifying problem for whites: they need blacks to affirm their existence, even as they despise the nothingness they represent. By pointing out how all humanism is based on investing blackness with non-Being—a logic which reproduces antiblack violence and precludes any realization of equality, justice, and recognition for blacks—Warren urges the removal of the human from its metaphysical pedestal and the exploration of ways of existing that are not predicated on a grounding in Being. (shrink)

It is tempting to regard the perpetrators of the September 11th terrorist attacks as evil incarnate. But their motives, as Bruce Lincoln’s acclaimed Holy Terrors makes clear, were profoundly and intensely religious. Thus what we need after the events of 9/11, Lincoln argues, is greater clarity about what we take religion to be. Holy Terrors begins with a gripping dissection of the instruction manual given to each of the 9/11 hijackers. In their evocation of passages from the Quran, we learn (...) how the terrorists justified acts of destruction and mass murder “in the name of God, the most merciful, the most compassionate.” Lincoln then offers a provocative comparison of President Bush’s October 7, 2001 speech announcing U.S. military action in Afghanistan alongside the videotaped speech released by Osama bin Laden just a few hours later. As Lincoln authoritatively demonstrates, a close analysis of the rhetoric used by leaders as different as George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden—as well as Mohamed Atta and even Jerry Falwell—betrays startling similarities. These commonalities have considerable implications for our understanding of religion and its interrelationships with politics and culture in a postcolonial world, implications that Lincoln draws out with skill and sensitivity. With a chapter new to this edition, “Theses on Religion and Violence,” Holy Terrors remains one of the essential books on September 11 and a classic study on the character of religion. “Modernity has ended twice: in its Marxist form in 1989 Berlin, and in its liberal form on September 11, 2001. In order to understand such major historical changes we need both large-scale and focused analyses—a combination seldom to be found in one volume. But here Bruce Lincoln . . . has given us just such a mix of discrete and large-picture analysis.”—Stephen Healey, Christian Century “From time to time there appears a work . . . that serves to focus the wide-ranging, often contentious discussion of religion’s significance within broader cultural dynamics. Bruce Lincoln’s Holy Terrors is one such text. . . . Anyone still struggling toward a more nuanced comprehension of 9/11 would do well to spend time with this book.”—Theodore Pulcini, Middle East Journal. (shrink)

section 1. Reason, language, and the self -- section 2. Law, emergency, and exception -- section 3. Terrorism as a paradigm of (in)security -- section 4. Terrorism and the crisis of the political.

The essays in Waldron’s Torture, Terror, and Trade-Offs have important implications for debates about the criminalization of terrorism and terrorism-related offences and its consequences for criminal law and criminal justice. His reflections on security speak directly to contemporary debates about the preventive role of the criminal law. And his analysis of inter-personal security trade-offs invites much closer attention to the costs of counter-terrorism policies, particularly those pursued outside the criminal process. But is Waldron right to speak of a ‘welcome (...) the return to the criminal justice model’? This article considers the arguments in favour of prioritizing the prosecution of terrorist suspects and asks if their prosecution can safely proceed without undue hazard to the criminal law and criminal process. (shrink)

In his “Marxism and the Post-Modern Condition” Raulet examines the relation between modernity, post-modernity, and the aesthetics of the sublime. I would like to make a modest clarification. Raulet argues that I counterpose the Kantian sublime, which is based on incommensurability of powers [Vermögen], to the Hegelian dialectic which totalizes them. Thus I place myself in a position of being able to oppose totalitarianism only by means of a politics of terror. Both equations (speculative discourse = totalitarianism; and (...) class='Hi'>philosophy of the sublime = terrorism) need to be dissolved. Let us briefly recall the objections to these equations. (shrink)

Looking back at the "War on Terror" and its policies, actions, and the violence that followed, this book analyzes the resulting changes in international power structures and the relationship between citizens and their representatives. It defines our shortcomings in opposing this type of violence by demonstrating how the notion of legitimate violence has been broadened. -/- The impact of the "War on Terror" on the public view of Liberalism is explored, as well as its effects on the role (...) of state authorities in our lives. Thus, this book names the lessons we ought to learn from the actions taken against terrorist organizations. (shrink)

In international political language, within the framework of globalisation, there is nowadays a new and reversed usage of the terms and concepts “terror” and “terrorism”. I shall analyse these new meanings in political discourse as well as their implications in international politics. To some extent (and according to the needs of the moment, i.e. the needs of the powerful), the old and traditional meaning of those terms now still apply to conflicts and situations considered as local and inoffensive globally, (...) or as having no global reach or dimension, such as the conflict and terrorism in Sri Lanka or in Nepal. In such “local” conflicts, the larger context of state terror(ism) may still be in view and (in)directly acknowledged. On the other hand, following the paranoia instituted by the “nine-eleven” re-foundational moment of history, the new-fangled usage of, and the recent meanings credited to those terms now roughly apply to the complex vaguely denoted as “Arabic-country-ethnicity-religion-and/or-Islam”. State terror is now considered to be exclusively defensive and justified in advance. However, it still includes para-statal terror and international “anti-terror strategies”, together with wars, torture, extraordinary renditions, extraterritoriality and extra-legality of detention, secret detention, man-made droughts, pollution, climate change, famines, forced migrations, terror against women and feminicide, trafficking of humans, sex-tourism etc. I consider language as being not only the possibility for evening-out differences and conflicts through necessary and welcome negotiations, but also as providing a possible space for conflict. Language can be (but needn’t be) as much a weapon as any other. I will therefore explore the politics of language, as i believe that the political (but not politics) “precedes” language. This is not only a question of freedom of speech, but a question as to who, for what purposes and under which conditions lays out those rights and that freedom. (2004). (shrink)

ABSTRACT The history of spectacle terror lynching remains one of the darkest and least explored political events in American history. In this article, I explore the aesthetic relation of this history to the formation of notions of public action and political assembly. I argue that the history of spectacle terror lynching establishes both a past and present form of public sovereignty. As such, I attempt to examine questions of what public action means with regard to a political context (...) of antiblack violence. I conclude that lynching festivals constitute not only a form of politics but a form of public sovereignty that is still in play in our notion of the public. At heart this notion informs not only antiblack forms of racism but antiblack forms of genocide. (shrink)

This essay examines Czech philosopher Jan Patočka’s phenomenology as a philosophy of freedom. It shows how Patočka’s phenomenological conceptof worldliness, initially cast within a largely philosophical framework as the domain of human action and transcendence, turned toward a philosophical history of the modern age, viewed as increasingly post-European. Patočka hoped for the moral renewal of a fallen modernity, led first by non-Europeans after the era of decolonization and then by a “solidarity of the shaken” during the dark 1970s of (...) Czechoslovak normalization. The essay starts and concludes by considering the relation between his thought and his dissidence, a link that is more tenuous and indirect than some commentators suggest. (shrink)

This essay examines Czech philosopher Jan Patočka’s phenomenology as a philosophy of freedom. It shows how Patočka’s phenomenological conceptof worldliness, initially cast within a largely philosophical framework as the domain of human action and transcendence, turned toward a philosophical history of the modern age, viewed as increasingly post-European. Patočka hoped for the moral renewal of a fallen modernity, led first by non-Europeans after the era of decolonization and then by a “solidarity of the shaken” during the dark 1970s of (...) Czechoslovak normalization. The essay starts and concludes by considering the relation between his thought and his dissidence, a link that is more tenuous and indirect than some commentators suggest. (shrink)

I argue against the Doctrine of Double Effect’s explanation of the moral difference between terror bombing and strategic bombing. I show that the standard thought-experiment of Terror Bomber and Strategic Bomber which dominates this debate is underdetermined in three crucial respects: (1) the non-psychological worlds of Terror Bomber and Strategic Bomber; (2) the psychologies of Terror Bomber and Strategic Bomber; and (3) the structure of the thought-experiment, especially in relation to its similarity with the Trolley Problem. (...) (1) If the two worlds are not identical, then it may be these differences between the two worlds and not the Doctrine of Double Effect to explain the moral difference; (2a) if Terror Bomber and Strategic Bomber have the same causal beliefs, then why does Terror Bomber set out to kill the children? It may then be this unwarranted and immoral choice and not the Doctrine of Double Effect that explains the moral difference; (2b) if the two have different causal beliefs, then we can’t rule out the counterfactual that, had Strategic Bomber had the same beliefs as Terror Bomber, she would have also acted as Terror Bomber did. Finally, (3) the Strategic Bomber scenario could also be constructed so as to be structurally equivalent to the Fat Man scenario in the Trolley Problem: but then the Doctrine of Double Effect would give different answers to two symmetrical cases. (shrink)

A long‐standing aim of cinema – in particular of ‘extreme’, ‘unwatchable’ or ‘feel‐ bad’ cinema – has been to acquaint viewers with extreme suffering. In this article I first offer an explication of that aim in terms of recent work in philosophy of mind, then exploit the resulting framework to examine claims to the effect that a new technological development, Virtual Reality, provides cinema's best shot at achieving that aim.

An abiding concern in Žižek’s writings is with a central taboo of the modern age: the taboo of terror. We disavow terror only at the cost of accepting implicitly the violence and terror contained in the global capitalist logics and the fantasmatic structures that support them. The ongoing ideological attempts to neutralize the status of the capitalist economy, Žižek argues, are simultaneously accompanied by increasingly violent and authoritarian measures taken for its reproduction. Moreover, by failing to politicize (...) the economy and its constitutive violence, Western democracy is being reduced steadily to technocratic forms of administration. Focusing on recent work – and, in particular, The Defense of Lost Causes – this paper seeks to address Žižek’s cultivation of a new type of politico-philosophical engagement that does not shrink from the dimension of terror. (shrink)

This is a new discussion in the philosophy of terrorism of the morality of Humanity, Palestine and Israel, right and wrong, liberalism, free riders, narratives, definitions of terrorism, objections to definitions not mentioning innocents, the question of who the innocents are, intentional action, objections having to do with definitions, inquiry, prejudice, pure inquiry, and advocacy, and other innocents. The discussion was prompted by a forthcoming paper by Tamar Meisels of Tel Aviv University 'Can Terrorism Ever Be Justified?', which paper (...) and the final reply to it by Ted Honderich will appear in a book edited by Stuart Gottlieb, Debating Terrorism and Counter Terrorism. Tamar Meisels' book, The Trouble With Terror, has lately been published by Cambridge University Press. She also has a paper in the collection Israel, Palestine and Terror edited by Stephen Law and containing various replies to Honderich. Another Meisels paper to which you can turn, The Trouble With Terror: The Apologetics of Terrorism -- A Refutatio n. There is also a Honderich reply to other objections, in this case by the German philosopher Georg Meggle. (shrink)

Shortly before his death in 2004, Jacques Derrida provocatively suggested that the greatest problem confronting contemporary democracy is that ‘the alternative to democracy can always be represented as a democratic alternative ’. This article analyses the manner in which certain manifestly anti-democratic practices, like terror and torture, come to be taken up in defense of democracies as a result of what Derrida calls democracy’s ‘autoimmune’ tendencies.

This essay focuses on James Baldwin's treatment of the Atlanta child murders in The Evidence of Things Not Seen, a book that began as a series of reports for Playboy magazine. Returning to the United States from France, Baldwin not only reported on the child murders, but offered a treatise on terror as well: a treatise that distinguishes an imagined or remembered menace from a terror that might be considered constitutive, ontolological. This terror persists, Baldwin maintains, as (...) the negative cause of African American existence. Insistently political, the kernel of nonbeing to which Baldwin's thought appeals is not the grand abstraction of death but the becoming-abstract of abduction and permanent disappearance. Baldwin's essay on the Atlanta child murders thus seeks not only to bear witness to the plight of the missing children, but of the persistence of this “terror of being destroyed” as well. This essay revisits Baldwin's late work, often dismissed as either lackluster polemic or as sermonizing reportage, as no less apocalyptic a work of Pauline witnessing than The Fire Next Time. (shrink)

Christine Battersby is a leading thinker in the field of philosophy, gender studies and visual and literary aesthetics. In this important new work, she undertakes an exploration of the nature of the sublime, one of the most important topics in contemporary debates about modernity, politics and art. Through a compelling examination of terror, transcendence and the ‘other’ in key European philosophers and writers, Battersby articulates a radical ‘female sublime’. A central feature of The Sublime, Terror and Human (...) Difference is its engagement with recent debates around ‘9/11’, race and Islam. Battersby shows how, since the eighteenth century, the pleasures of the sublime have been described in terms of the transcendence of terror. Linked to the ‘feminine’, the sublime was closed off to flesh-and-blood women, to ‘Orientals’ and to other supposedly ‘inferior’ human types. Engaging with Kant, Burke, the German Romantics, Nietzsche, Derrida, Lyotard, Irigaray and Arendt, as well as with women writers and artists, Battersby traces the history of these exclusions, while finding resources within the history of western culture for thinking human differences afresh The Sublime, Terror and Human Difference is essential reading for students of continental philosophy, gender studies, aesthetics, literary theory, visual culture, and race and social theory. (shrink)

This volume of twelve essays focuses on two interrelated issues. First it addresses the historical and cultural determinants that have given rise to what frequently has been described as 'the French exception': the unusually conflictual French political process inherited from the revolutionary past in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and its accompanying avant-gardism in artistic, literary and philosophical practice, both of which distinguish France from other European countries. Second, the contributors assess the exhaustion of this tradition in recent years - (...) noted prominently on the occasion of the celebration of the bicentennial of the Revolution in 1989 - in a progressive 'normalization' of French society that has been the final outcome of the liquidation of the colonial empire, the collapse of Marxism as a social force. (shrink)