"L’écriture philosophique de Sarah Kofman a eu pour enjeu « la vie comme texte ». De L’enfance de l’art (1970) à L’imposture de la beauté (1995, posthume), la philosophe a exploré cette question dans un geste de lecture audacieux par lequel elle confronte philosophes anciens (Empédocle, Héraclite, Platon), modernes (Descartes, Kant, Rousseau, Kierkegaard, Comte, Marx) et contemporains (Sartre, Blanchot, Derrida). Sarah Kofman convoquait aussi dans toutes ses analyses deux interlocuteurs privilégiés, Freud et Nietzsche. La littérature, l’idéologie, le féminin, le rire, (...) les rapports à l’art et à la psychanalyse, l’autobiogriffure furent les « voies de traverse » par lesquelles celle qui, enfant, avait survécu à la Shoah, reconduisit la philosophie « au cœur de la vie ». Plus de vingt-cinq ans après la parution de Rue Ordener, rue Labat et du Mépris des Juifs en 1994, n’est-il pas temps de prendre la mesure de cette œuvre philosophique?Cet ouvrage réunit, dans une perspective transdisciplinaire et internationale, philosophes, littéraires, historiens, historiens de l’art et psychanalystes autour du travail de la philosophe. Multipliant les approches et les interprétations, faisant droit aux questions historiographiques et archivistiques liées à son œuvre, ces lectures entendent donner toute son actualité critique à la voix unique de Sarah Kofman."--Page 4 de la couverture. (shrink)

Avec trois entretiens de Jean-Luc Nancy Cosa volante : l'art n'est ni un objet, ni un ensemble de composantes formelles, encore moins schème et substance. L'art les arts plutôt, dans leur pluralité différentielle élève la question d'une forme en formation. Cette forma formans traverse de part en part la pensée des arts de Jean-Luc Nancy où importe surtout l'approche de ce qui, dans l'art, fait sens (sensibilité, intelligence, sensation, sensualité). A travers touches, intensités, vibrations, timbres, tonalités, colorations, grains, résonances, rythmes, (...) il s'agit de voir comment les arts donnent forme au monde. Cet ouvrage explore plusieurs motifs du travail de Nancy : sa réflexion sur l'iconologie "chrétienne" au sein de sa "déconstruction du christianisme", la question de ses "étranges corps étrangers", les modalités de ses ekphraseis, sa poétique cinétique, entre autres. Trois entretiens avec le philosophe constituent des moments privilégiés de cet échange autour de la question de l'art. (shrink)

The question of the foreigner remains, as is well known, a pressing issue, now more than ever, even as “we allow the intolerable to happen : not just death, suffering, deportation, nameless woe, but also the imbecilic destruction of Europe and the Mediterranean’s chances in the new world to come,” as Jacques Derrida already noted in August 1995. This article retraces his seminars and public interventions as he calls for another concept of hospitality, thus wresting it away from fantasies of (...) blood and autochthony, even from the notion of a common language. Indeed, his emphasis on hostipitality gives rise to another experience of citizenship and of the political, of responsibility before the other. Lastly, the relationship between unconditional hospitality and non-knowledge also helps explain why a politics that tries to measure up to it necessarily implies poetic invention. More so than other aspects (geopolitics, urban planning, social work, international law) that are affected by the problem of hospitality, hospitality’s poetic dimension may well reveal itself to be the most crucial of all. (shrink)

This article examines the relationship that Jacques Derrida and Sarah Kofman developed throughout their lifetimes, both as close friends and as philosophers who shared many common research interest...

Autour de la grande conference de Jacques Derrida, intitulee Justices, prononcee en 2003 et demeuree inedite en francais a ce jour, cet ouvrage collectif convoque certains des meilleurs specialistes de son oeuvre. Il s'agit moins ici de commemorer ou de dresser un etat des lieux que de penser, a partir de Derrida et avec lui, ce qui vient et de repondre a l'appel, aux appels pluriels qui resonnent dans son travail philosophique. Sont ainsi examines les principaux legs de sa pensee (...) dans les differents domaines (philosophie, politique, science des religions, esthetique, litterature) qu'elle a profondement transformes. Autant de reponses et de responsabilites, autant de provocations a lire et a relire l'oeuvre de Jacques Derrida a sa hauteur, comme elle nous y engage toujours. Avec les textes de: Gil Anidjar, Philip Armstrong, Fernanda Bernardo, Mireille Calle-Gruber, Danielle Cohen-Levinas, Gianfranco Dalmasso, Francoise Dastur, Jacques Derrida, Silvano Facioni, Edoardo Ferrario, Jerome Lebre, Georges Leroux, Michel Lisse, Rene Major, Marie-Louise Mallet, Serge Margel, Joana Maso, Ginette Michaud, J. Hillis Miller, Raoul Moati, Jean-Luc Nancy, Evando Nascimento, Francois Nault, Laura Odello, Jean-Michel Rabate, Marta Segarra, Peter Szendy, Chantal Talagrand, Francesco Vitale et Hent de Vries. (shrink)

"La poétique de Celan- a profondément incisé la réflexion de Derrida, lui devenant indispensable pour repenser les questions de la date, de la crypte et du secret. De Schibboleth à Béliers et à son dernier séminaire, La bête et le souverain, Derrida s'est aussi intéressé au poème celanien comme lieu d'une souveraine solitude, d'une souveraineté autre, peut-être, quand il parle de lui-même. Cet essai tente d'analyser la portée du deuil et de la dette contractée par le philosophe à l'endroit du (...) poète. De la rencontre entre Celan et Derrida, nulle archive ne saura témoigner. Le verbe "témoigner" évoque une sorte de mot de passe secret entre eux : "Niemand/ zeugt für den/ Zeugen" et "Die Welt ist fort, ich muss dicte tragen". Ces deux vers, Jacques Derrida incitait ses lecteurs à les apprendre par coeur pour deux raisons : d'abord, pour méditer sans fin le rapport à la langue, à l'idiome plutôt, de Celan, creusant, enibuissant, retournant sa langue dans la langue allemande ; ensuite, pour mesurer relever, dit Derrida la nécessaire et impossible épreuve de la traduction, cette question qui est non seulement l'un des enjeux les plus importants de la "déconstruction" mais aussi le foyer d'une éthique de la lecture."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

This paper has been translated from the French by Cosmin Toma. It focuses on Jacques Derrida's very last lecture, given in Rio de Janeiro, on the 16thof August 2004, which Derrida drew from his ‘Le parjure et le pardon’ (‘Perjury and Forgiveness’) seminar held at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), in Paris, from 1997 to 1999. In reference to this final lecture in which Derrida deals with ‘forgiveness,’ ‘truth’, ‘reconciliation’, ‘testimony’ and ‘genre’, the paper also takes (...) up the question of justice as well as of what he calls the ‘worst violence’ via testimonial writings by Sarah Kofman and Antjie Krog so as to rethink forgiveness. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Perjury and Pardon, Volume 1 by Jacques DerridaRalph ShainDERRIDA, Jacques. Perjury and Pardon, Volume 1. Translated by David Wills. Edited by Ginette Michaud and Nicholas Cotton. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2022. 368 pp. Cloth, $45.00This is the translation of a volume in the posthumously published series of Derrida's lecture courses. The most important of these are the early Heidegger: The Question of Being and (...) History (1964–65) and Theory and Practice (1975–76), no parts of which were published by Derrida. Substantial portions of the first volume of the lectures on Perjury and Pardon were published as separate essays, so the main question concerning this book is what it adds to the published portions.For those readers who are familiar with Derrida's most famous work and are curious about his deconstructive ethics ("ethics beyond ethics") and have not read any of the essays drawn from this book (such as "To Forgive: the Unforgiveable and the Imprescriptible," "Literature in Secret," and "Typewriter Ribbon"), this is a good place to approach the topic. One will find here many of Derrida's classic moves, such as the deconstruction of texts, concepts, and traditions. One will find conditions of possibility that are also conditions of impossibility, concepts that are contaminated from within by their opposites, and appeals to the experience of the impossible and to the distinction between a general and restricted economy.One will also find here those points that seem to be Derrida's weakest, such as the insistence on the privacy of the mental, a rather wobbly treatment of the separation between intending and causality, and the [End Page 545] claim, important for Derrida's "poetico-performative" theory of truth, that all constatives depend on a prior performative—a promise to tell the truth, always already contaminated by failure and hence a "perjury." (The first and third of these are also found in Derrida's published work.)The topics in this book are helpful in situating Derrida vis-à-vis other thinkers, especially those in the Frankfurt School. Derrida's concept of an impossible, paradoxical pardon might be compared with Adorno's concept of utopian moments. The promise of truth implicit in every constative might be compared with Habermas's quasi-transcendental ideal speech situation.Even if one has read one or more of the published portions, if one is unsure how they fit together, these lectures will allow one to see how they cohere. In the third session Derrida provides an outline of the project, which he qualifies with the comment that "I am aware of the grossly schematic character of this outline." Grossly schematic, yes, but grossly schematic outlines are very helpful. Here's the gist of the outline: "stubbornly tracking down in the Biblio-Koranic tradition a logic of economy, an economy, a sublime ruse which... comes to contradict and undermine a demand for finite-infinite forgiveness, forgiveness without condition, the aneconomic forgiveness that is nevertheless at the heart of this same thinking... showing that on the supposed Greek side, the aneconomic notion of forgiveness comes to organize the aneconomic logic and 'syngnomic' rationality of a so-called Greek culture." In short, the concept of forgiveness that is derived from the monotheistic traditions of forgiveness claims not to be pragmatic or goal oriented, but Derrida shows that it is, whereas the Greek concept that is the closest equivalent, and is supposed to be entirely pragmatic, has moments that exceed any limited economy. (If this still sounds opaque, see Derrida's essay on Bataille and general economy in Writing and Difference.)Even those who are well versed in deconstructive ethics and have read the published parts of this book may still find it quite interesting. Derrida's verbal elucidations of the typescript are transcribed from recordings and placed in footnotes. There are quite a few of these, and some of them are interesting. The editorial apparatus will allow one to confirm that one has indeed read all of the published parts, which one should not take for granted since a couple of them are in relatively obscure venues. The readings of texts are of variable interest, but even in the... (shrink)

Jean-Luc Nancy stands as one of the great French theorists of "deconstruction." His writings on philosophy, politics, aesthetics, and religion have significantly contributed to the development of contemporary French thought and helped shape and transform the field of continental philosophy. Through Nancy's immense oeuvre, which covers a wide range of topics such as community, freedom, existence, sense/ touch, democracy, Christianity, the visual arts and music, and writing itself, we have learned to take stock of the world in a more nuanced (...) fashion. In this collection, contemporaries of Nancy and eminent scholars of continental philosophy, including Giorgio Agamben, Étienne Balibar, Ginette Michaud, Georges Van Den Abbeele, Gregg Lambert and Ian James, have been invited to reflect on the force of Nancy's "deconstruction" and how it has affected, or will affect, the ways we approach many of the most pertinent topics in contemporary philosophy. The collection also includes Jean-Luc Nancy's previously unpublished 'Dialogue Beneath the Ribs', where he reflects, twenty years after, on his heart transplant. Nancy Now will be of critical interest not only to scholars working on or with Nancy's philosophy, but also to those interested in the development and future of French thought. (shrink)

A cultural infrastructure of shared morality is necessary for the success of market economics. Traditional views maintain that religion is the nurturing source of the morality, which grows in the culture. The Progressive revolution aims to overturn Traditional morality and impose its social justice morality on culture. This article dissects and critiques the multifaceted Progressive revolution in the United States, while contrasting it with the Traditional view. It argues that the ultimate aim of the Progressive revolution is to redefine the (...) human person through identity politics as a collective entity, which essentially liquidates the individual, conforms the person to social justice morality, and establishes socialistic economics. (shrink)

In the quest for identity and healing, what belongs to the humanities and what to clinical psychology? Ginette Paris uses cogent and passionate argument as well as stories from patients to teach us to accept that the human psyche seeks to destroy relationships and lives as well as to sustain them. This is very hard to accept which is why, so often, the body has the painful and dispiriting job of showing us what our psyche refuses to see. In (...) jargon-free language, the author describes her own story of taking a turn downwards and inwards in the search for a metaphorical personal 'death'. If this kind of mortality is not attended to, then more literal bodily ailments and actual death itself can result. Paris engages with one of the main dilemmas of contemporary psychology and psychotherapy: how to integrate findings and insights from neuroscience and medicine into an approach to healing founded upon activation of the imagination. At present, she demonstrates, what is happening is damaging to both science and imagination. (shrink)

This article studies the material production and consumption of the national community in 19th-century America. More particularly, it concentrates on the intersection between particular technologies of transportation, representation and dissemination in the spatial and imaginary formation of the American nation in the 1860s. Through an analysis of the contradictory mechanism of placement and displacement, identity and difference at the heart of a particular state-sanctioned field of national production the construction of America's first transcontinental railroad in 19th-century California the essay highlights (...) what tends to remain hidden in narrowly defined `cultural' (textual) approaches to nationhood: its involvement in racial, gendered and class-related divisions between private and public space, home and travel, labour and capital, technology and nature. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Nice Tattoo What is Art? Art World Theory: Art is Participation in the Art World Formalism: Art is the Result of Formal Properties Working Together Expressionism: Art Elicits an Emotional Response from the Viewer What Do These Theories Accomplish for Tattoos? Tattoos as Performance Art The Human Canvas Tattoos, Mortality, and Deep Meaning.

This chapter focuses on one of the common fallacies in Western philosophy: appeal to tradition (ATT). ATT means to ignore the evidence that we should change because we have been doing something for a long time. ATTs are tremendously useful fallacies. ATTs hinge on sentimental tendencies and unwillingness to change, and are particularly dangerous when they prevents change. ATT seems to suggest that there is something good about tradition that trumps any other concerns. The problem is that since tradition has (...) nothing to do with morality, it is really easy for ATT to be used to justify anything, from continuing to tell children that Santa exists to preventing an oppressed group of people from voting. Perhaps at the core of ATT is belief that family and cultural traditions are important. In some ways, ATT is a popular fallacy of grandmothers all over the world. (shrink)

Jar Jar Binks might be the most hated individual in the Star Wars universe. He should feel a great deal of guilt over his actions in the Senate, though well meaning, because they caused so much strife. This chapter considers how Darth Vader would reflect on his own actions: it is unlikely that he feels particularly good about inadvertently provoking Leia's confession of love. The chapter now talks about Immanuel Kant. Kant's ethics are focused on intentions, the reasons why people (...) choose to act as they do. Jar Jar was, like most of the Senate, a victim of Palpatine's deceptions. The author highlights that it is fair to say that Jar Jar did not make the choice to grant Palpatine emergency powers because he could not do otherwise. So, even though the consequences were grave, and Jar Jar's decision hasty, he can be absolved for what he did. (shrink)

Les institutions - et en premier lieu l'Eglise - où s'exprimait et se vivait l'expérience du sacré se sont peu à peu effritées. Mais le sacré déborde le cadre des institutions et il en reste des vestiges, entre autres, dans la littérature. C'est dans l'oeuvre de Cioran que Sara Danièle Bélanger Michaud les a cherchés. Emil Michel Cioran (1911 - 1995) est un philosophe et essayiste d'origine roumaine qui a vécu en France à partir de 1937. Il est principalement (...) connu pour ses aphorismes et pour son recueil De l'inconvénient d'être né, paru en 1973. Dans son essai, l'auteure présente son oeuvre comme une manifestation de la quête du sacré et une nouvelle manière de l'habiter. Elle écrit : " Qu'il soit question de sa quête spirituelle (ou de son ratage spirituel), de ses rencontres avec l'absolu, de ses expériences d'extase, de son obsession pour le doute ou encore de sa nature religieuse à rebours, c'est toujours en même temps du sacré dont il est question ". (shrink)

In the last two decades, some authors in the philosophy for children movement have theorized that the community of philosophical inquiry can be a form of spiritual practice, of the care of the self, or a wisdom practice (De Marzio, 2009; Gregory, 2009, 2013, 2014;Gregory & Laverty, 2009). Yet, it is unclear if philosophy for children is, by itself, a form of spiritual education, or if it requires some sorts of modification to be one. And, if it is or can (...) be a form of spiritual education, we can interrogate in what ways and to what extent is it one. It is these questions that this text aims to explore. To do so, we will first clarify the meaning of spiritual education through the presentation of two authors who have explicitly written on that topic. The first is Parker J. Palmer, who has developed a perspective on what it means to reclaim the spiritual roots of education, derived from his study and practice of Quaker spirituality. The second is Pierre Hadot, who has explored how the practice of philosophy in Western antiquity was a form of spiritual exercise. From our presentation of these two authors will emerge a particular perspective of what spiritual education means. In the last section of the text we will use this presentation to examine in what ways philosophy for children can be a form of spiritual education and if requires adaptations to be one. (shrink)

This chapter deals with one of the common fallacies in Western philosophy, inappropriate appeal to authority (IAA). IAA has many different facets. At its core, it is a fallacy that assumes that because someone is an authority, we should listen to that person. The problem with IAA is that it ignores content in favor of credentials and power. There are a few different ways in which IAA can occur. IAA seems to be the result of a flaw in human thinking. (...) Social cognitive theory, a theory that helps explain human action, notes that humans tend to act like each other. The tendency to listen to authorities who are not authorities explains why celebrities are able to sell us stuff. The important thing to remember about IAA is that it is not just a fallacy that comes up in arguments that do not matter. (shrink)

Le constat est maintenant partout: la puissance du fondamentalisme religieux, la montee des populismes de droite comme de gauche, le discredit de la classe politique, le rejet de la construction europeenne, rendent caducs les schemas anciens. En particulier l'idee que la democratie, a force de bienveillance, peut tolerer toutes les differences, toutes les croyances. Oui! Il y a des croyances insupportables et intolerables. Non! Le populisme n'est pas une illusion qui se dissipera d'elle-meme avec un peu de pedagogie et de (...) bonne volonte. Non! La politique internationale n'obeit pas aux chartes du droit international. Il faut denoncer la tyrannie des bons sentiments, la politique de l'emotion et de la compassion. Non que la bienveillance soit un sentiment indigne, mais nous devons cesser de croire qu'on peut batir sur elle une communaute politique. (shrink)