_Investigates the philosophical relationship between Levinas and Heidegger in a nonpolemical context, engaging some of philosophy’s most pressing issues._.

What can we learn from reading Levinas alongside postcolonial theories of difference? With that question in view, Drabinski undertakes readings of Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, Edouard Glissant, and Subcommandante Marcos in order to rethink ideas of difference, language, subjectivity, ethics, and politics. Through these philosophical readings, he gives a new perspective on the work of these important postcolonial theorists and helps make Levinas relevant to other disciplines concerned with postcolonialism and ethics.

This essay explores a philosophical encounter between Frantz Fanon and James Baldwin framed by the problem of the affect of shame. In particular, this essay asks how the affect of shame functions simultaneously as the accomplishment of regimes of anti-black racism and the site of transformative, revolutionary consciousness. Shame threatens the formation of subjectivity, as well as, and as an extension of, senses of home and belonging. How are we to imagine another subjectivity, another relation to home, and so another (...) kind of social and political order? For both Fanon and Baldwin, imagining the future requires an engagement with memory and history that purges black subjects of shame. The two thinkers part ways at that moment, however, with Fanon advocating a forgetting of abject history and Baldwin arguing for a retrieval of meaning and place won through pain and suffering. At the heart of this parting of ways, then, lies a conflict over the meaning of history across the black diaspora and its relation to cultural production, which, in turn, reflects important, differing conceptions of home. (shrink)

Establishes the importance of Husserl's phenomenology for Levinas's ethics.

An extended discussion of Donna V. Jones, The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy: Négritude, Vitalism, and Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 217 pp.

In dialogue with key theorists of catastrophe and trauma--including Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, George Lamming, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Derek Walcott, as well as key figures in Holocaust studies--Glissant and the Middle Passage hones a sharp sense of the specifically Caribbean varieties of loss, developing them into a transformative philosophical idea. Using the Plantation as a critical concept, John E. Drabinski creolizes notions of rhizome and nomad, examining what kinds of aesthetics grow from these roots and offering reconsiderations (...) of what constitutes intellectual work and cultural production.Glissant and the Middle Passage establishes Glissant's proper place as a key theorist of ruin, catastrophe, abyss, and memory. Identifying his insistence on memories and histories tied to place as the crucial geography at the heart of his work, this book imparts an innovative new response to the specific historical experiences of the Middle Passage. - from the publisher. (shrink)

What does Édouard Glissant have to contribute to theorizing decolonization and a philosophy of difference? And how is this contribution tied to rethinking place (from Caribbean to Caribbeanness) and world (comprised of creolized culture and identity)? This essay takes up Glissant’s work in the context of questions of history and memory, with particular focus on how historical experience grounds philosophical work on place and world through articulations of identity, language, cultural production, and thinking after catastrophe. Drawing from a contrast with (...) Martin Heidegger and Walter Benjamin, this essay shows how Glissant’s critical concept “creolization” works as an expression of what I call “the afropostmodern,” and also as an important contribution to decolonial theories of world, culture, memory, language, and subjectivity after the Middle Passage. (shrink)

This essay tracks the movement in Édouard Glissant’s work from thinking relationality as creolisation to Relation as such, to a globalised sense of cultural contact and transformation he ca...

Édouard Glissant passed away on 4 February 2011 at the age of 82. A few words of memory. As a person and thinker, Glissant lived through, then reflected with meditative patience and profundity upon some of the most critical years in the black Atlantic: the aesthetics and politics of anti-colonial struggle, the civil rights movement in the United States, postcolonial cultural anxiety and explosion, the vicissitudes of an emerging cultural globalism, and all of the accompanying intellectual movements from surrealism to (...) negritude to existentialism to those varieties of high modernism and postmodernism for which Glissant himself is such a generative, founding resource. His life bears witness to those years, events, and movements with a poet’s word and a philosopher’s eye. And so Glissant, like all important thinkers, leaves for us an enormous gift – in his case, a new, enigmatic vocabulary of and for the Americas. . (shrink)

An examination of the question of influence in Senghor's work, with particular attention to the concept of assimilation - which I argue allows Senghor to responsibly adopt notions from French vitalist and life-philosophy traditions, despite their close ties to colonial and imperial histories.

This essay examines James Baldwin's conception of what he calls “black English” and its link to historical and cultural identity. I link Baldwin's defense of black English to his reflections on the sorrow songs and sound, which draws on long-standing accounts of musicality as the foundation of the African-American tradition. In order to demonstrate this relation to the tradition, the essay puts Baldwin's remarks in relation to Frederick Douglass's and W. E. B. Du Bois's description of the sorrow songs. I (...) also underscore how that relation to the African-American tradition marks an important set of tensions with mid-twentieth century black Atlantic theory, tensions which make sense of the Americanness of Baldwin's work. Across the essay, I claim that Baldwin's account of language has epistemological and ontological significance, which gives an interesting and important twist to Martin Heidegger's famous phrase that “language is the house of Being.”. (shrink)

This edited collection gathers together leading commentators on the work of Édouard Glissant in order to theorize the philosophical significance of his work.

"Jean-Luc Godard is nothing if not an enigma. His image has a life of its own, especially in its younger form: cigarette, sunglasses, smirk, rambling revolutionary slogans, and important books. It wasn’t just an image, we all know, for it reflected perfectly in iconic image the more substantial revolutionary recklessness with the camera we see from Breathless forward. Filmmaking is never the same after Godard. Images and their sequencing – Godard cloaked them in sunglasses and made them smirk. He made (...) them revolutionary. That’s his thing. And even the older Godard makes for an iconic photograph: rough facial hair, the artist’s glasses, smirk, and important books. His films continue to be unpredictable, compelling, and revolutionary...". (shrink)

The popular belief that religion is the same everywhere or that all religions are ‘at bottom’ identical in essentials is a widespread falsehood that is saved from being completely worthless by the fact that religion does exhibit a universal or common structure wherever it appears. This structure is intimately related to the structure of human life in the world. The enduring pattern that enables us to understand religions widely separated in both time and space depends largely on the fact that (...) man and the process of human life in the world have their own structures which remain, despite the undeniable variety introduced by vast differences of culture, ethnic features, geographical location, climate etc. Structure means pattern or form; it is reality significantly organised. It can be grasped as that which endures above and beyond changing historical details. Because human life has a structure, we are able to understand the wrath of Achilles or sympathise with the love of Abélard for Héloïse although we are separated from both by centuries of time. (shrink)

Despite the title, I do not intend to launch another expedition into the domain of epistemology. I wish instead to call attention to some problems which have arisen for philosophical theologians and philosophers of religion, as a result of two facts about the development of modern philosophy and its bearing on the analysis and interpretation of religious insight. Following these considerations, I shall propose in brief compass a programme for the future which I believe will prove fruitful for the philosophical (...) treatment of religious concerns. (shrink)

In these previously uncollected essays, Smith argues that American philosophers like Peirce, James, Royce, and Dewey have forged a unique philosophical tradition—one that is rich and complex enough to represent a genuine alternative to the analytic, phenomenological, and hermeneutical traditions which have originated in Britain or Europe. "In my judgment, John Smith has no equal today in combining two scholarly qualities: the analysis of philosophical texts with penetration and rigor, and the discernment of what it is in these texts (...) that matters. These qualities are in evidence throughout the essays in _America's Philosophical Vision._ Whether he is evaluating Rorty's view of Dewey; the pragmatic theory of experience and truth; theories of freedom, creativity, and the self; Royce's conception of community; or synoptic philosophic visions, Smith always succeeds in uniting a comprehensive understanding of philosophic writings with a sure grasp of their import for human culture and aspiration. It is a great benefit to students of American thought that these papers have now been collected into one volume."—James Gouinlock, Emory University. (shrink)

The fundamental relations that underlie cognitive comparisons—“same” and “different”—can be defined at multiple levels of abstraction, which vary in relational complexity. We compared response times to decide whether or not two sequentially‐presented patterns, each composed of two pairs of colored squares, were the same at three levels of abstraction: perceptual, relational, and system (higher order relations). For both 150 ms and 5 s inter‐stimulus intervals (ISIs), both with and without a masking stimulus, decision time increased with level of abstraction. Sameness (...) at lower complexity levels contributed to decisions based on the higher levels. The pattern of comparison times across levelswas not predictable solely from encoding times. The results indicated that relations at multiple levels of complexity can be abstracted and compared in working memory, with higher complexity levels requiring more processing time. We simulated the impact of relational complexity on response time using Learning and Inference with Schemas and Analogies (LISA), a computational model of relational comparisons based on dynamic binding of elements into roles in a relational working memory. (shrink)

John E. Smith; XI—Radical Empiricism, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 65, Issue 1, 1 June 1965, Pages 205–218, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristotel.

This review of Martin Jay’s recent published collection of essays examines his ongoing rethinking, supplementation, and revision of central themes—the negative and positive dialectics of historical totalization, the varieties and uses of conceptions of experience, the nature of visual cultures and scopic regimes, and the ambiguities of truth-construction in the public realm—that have been the focus of his major works since the 1970s. It argues that his more recent work indicates a gradual shift toward an affirmation of the kinds of (...) paratactic and deconstructive thinking of Adorno and Derrida as models for producing appropriate forms of historical consciousness and historical critique in the present, and it raises the question of how the issues of historical truth-telling, consensual collective identity, ethical action, and the cultural role of the critical intellectual are reformulated in this process. (shrink)