One can love and not forgive or out of love decide not to forgive. Or one can forgive but not love, or choose to forgive but not love the ones forgiven. Love and forgiveness follow parallel and largely independent paths, a truth we fail to acknowledge when we pressure others to both love and forgive. Individuals in conflict, sparring social and ethnic groups, warring religious communities, and insecure nations often do not need to pursue love and forgiveness to achieve peace (...) of mind and heart. They need to remain attentive to the needs of others, an alertness that prompts either love or forgiveness to respond. By reorienting our perception of these enduring phenomena, the contributors to this volume inspire new applications for love and forgiveness in an increasingly globalized and no longer quite secular world. With contributions by the renowned French philosophers Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Marion, the poet Haleh Liza Gafori, and scholars of religion, psychoanalysis, Islamic and political philosophy, and the Bible and literature, this anthology reconstructs the historical and conceptual lineage of love and forgiveness and their fraught relationship over time. By examining how we have used--and misused--these concepts, the authors advance a better understanding of their ability to unite different individuals and emerging groups around a shared engagement for freedom and equality, peace and solidarity. (shrink)

In this article I discuss Claudia Card's treatment of war rape in relation to her discussion of the victim's moral power of forgiveness. I argue that her analysis of the victim's power to withhold forgiveness overlooks the paradoxical structure of witnessing, which implies that there is an ungraspable dimension of atrocity. In relation to this ungraspable element, the proposal that victims of atrocity have the power to either offer or withhold forgiveness may have little relevance.

Entre les postes et le mouvement analytique, le principe de plaisir et l'histoire des télécommunications, la carte postale et la lettre volée, bref le transfert de Socrate à Freud, et au-delà. Cette satire de la littérature épistolaire devait être farcie - d'adresses, de codes postaux, de missives cryptées, de lettres anonymes, le tout confié à tant de modes, de genres et de tons.

"In this densely imbricated volume Derrida pursues his devoted, relentless dismantling of the philosophical tradition, the tradition of Plato, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger--each dealt with in one or more of the essays. There are essays too on linguistics (Saussure, Benveniste, Austin) and on the nature of metaphor ("White Mythology"), the latter with important implications for literary theory. Derrida is fully in control of a dazzling stylistic register in this book--a source of true illumination for those prepared to follow his (...) arduous path. Bass is a superb translator and annotator. His notes on the multilingual allusions and puns are a great service."--Alexander Gelley, Library Journal. (shrink)

This essay examines Claudia Card's notion of misplaced gratitude, which she explores in one of her last papers, “Gratitude to the Decent Rescuer.” Whereas typically philosophers have been interested in the problems of the failures to honor obligations of gratitude, Card is more interested in the opposite fault of misplaced gratitude. Her interest reflects her social indignation and her fundamental commitment to opposing oppression, exploitation, and injustice in all its forms. The phenomenon of misplaced gratitude becomes visible from this perspective, (...) where one catches sight of what oppression does to people. The essay looks at the question, What does Card's analysis of misplaced gratitude tell us about her own philosophical methods and contributions? It discusses her engagement with both care ethics and Beauvoir's phenomenology of oppression to clarify the centrality of misplaced gratitude for Card's work in developing an ethics of oppression. (shrink)

Why do feminist philosophers read Kant? Because of his misogyny and his disdain for the body, Barbara Herman has described Kant as the modern moral philosopher whom feminists find most objectionable. But that unhappy status alone would not justify a separate entry on Kant in this volume. Immanuel Kant is the figure in modern philosophy who most clearly articulates the Enlightenment program that reason is the vehicle for humanity's progress towards emancipation from unjust authority, a program that epitomizes the self‐understanding (...) of the Western culture of modernity. Kant's paradigm of objectivity, which formalizes the universal and necessary conditions for knowledge, provides a philosophical justification for the view that cognitive and moral judgments must be disinterested and impartial. This assumption about the impartiality of knowledge is deeply entrenched in academic disciplines. The quest for objectivity undergirds prevailing methodologies in the natural and social sciences as well as in philosophy. The assumption that knowledge is impartial informs the practices of daily life as well – e.g., in how one evaluates newspaper reporting or jury decisions. Feminist philosophers seek to come to terms with these features of modernity. They debate whether Enlightenment conceptions of progress and rationality offer tools for women's emancipation and empowerment, or whether this philosophical inheritance itself has contributed to the historical subordination of women in Western society. (shrink)

The phenomenon of misplaced gratitude becomes visible from this perspective, where one catches sight of what oppression does to people. Only then can one see that if, for example, a woman is grateful for not being battered by her husband, her gratitude is misplaced because it is based on socially normative beliefs and practices that in themselves undermine the possibility of justice and moral integrity. One finds the problem of misplaced gratitude on the edges of Claudia Card's scathing and brilliant (...) critique of feminist care ethics as a form of slave morality. One of Card's achievements was to sustain a passionate engagement with issues of oppression coupled with close philosophical scrutiny. Care ethics risks including too much—as in the risk of caring for abusers. Misplaced gratitude is also dangerous because of its tendency to bind one to the abuser, and thereby to make one become complicit in one's own abuse. (shrink)

" "Positions brings together three interviews with Derrida, outlining his central concerns and ideas.

Responding to questions put to him at a Roundtable held at Villanova University in 1994, Jacques Derrida leads the reader through an illuminating discussion of the central themes of deconstruction. Speaking in English and extemporaneously, Derrida takes up with unusual clarity and great eloquence such topics as the task of philosophy, the Greeks, justice, responsibility, the gift, the community, the distinction between the messianic and the concrete messianisms, and his interpretation of James Joyce. Derrida convincingly refutes the charges of (...) relativism and nihilism that are often leveled at deconstruction by its critics and sets forth the profoundly affirmative and ethico-political thrust of his work. The “Roundtable” is marked by the unusual clarity of Derrida’s presentation and by the deep respect for the great works of the philosophical and literary tradition with which he characterizes his philosophical work. The Roundtable is annotated by John D. Caputo, the David R. Cook Professor of Philosophy at Villanova University, who has supplied cross references to Derrida’s writings where the reader may find further discussion on these topics. Professor Caputo has also supplied a commentary which elaborates the principal issues raised in the Roundtable. In all, this volume represents one of the most lucid, compact and reliable introductions to Derrida and deconstruction available in any language. An ideal volume for students approaching Derrida for the first time, Deconstruction in a Nutshell will prove instructive and illuminating as well for those already familiar with Derrida’s work. (shrink)

These two lectures by Jacques Derrida, 'Foreigner Question: Come from Abroad' and 'Step of Hospitality/No Hospitality', derive from a series of seminars on 'hospitality' conducted by Derrida in Paris, January 1996. The book consists of two texts on facing pages. 'Invitation' by Anne Dufourmantelle appears on the left clarifying and inflecting Derrida's 'response' on the right. The interaction between them not only enacts the 'hospitality' under discussion, but preserves something of the rhythms of teaching. The book also characteristically combines (...) careful readings of canonical texts and philosophical topics with attention to the most salient events in the contemporary world, using 'hospitality' as a means of rethinking a range of political and ethical situations. For example, Antigone is revisited in light of the question of impossible mourning; the trial of Socrates is brought into conjunction with the televised funeral of François Mitterrand. (shrink)

"One of the major works in the development of contemporary criticism and philosophy." -- J. Hillis Miller, Yale University Jacques Derrida's revolutionary theories about deconstruction, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and structuralism, first voiced in the 1960s, forever changed the face of European and American criticism. The ideas in De la grammatologie sparked lively debates in intellectual circles that included students of literature, philosophy, and the humanities, inspiring these students to ask questions of their disciplines that had previously been considered improper. Thirty (...) years later, the immense influence of Derrida's work is still igniting controversy, thanks in part to Gayatri Spivak's translation, which captures the richness and complexity of the original. This corrected edition adds a new index of the critics and philosophers cited in the text and makes one of contemporary criticism's most indispensable works even more accessible and usable. (shrink)

Printbegrænsninger: Der kan printes 10 sider ad gangen og max. 40 sider pr. session.

Cet ouvrage aurait pu s'intituler " matière et vie ". L'auteur nous guide sur le long chemin qui va des constituants élémentaires d'un jeune univers, dans lequel la vie est évidemment absente, jusqu'aux formes complexes de la matière. Il explique comment et pourquoi la matière se complexifie dans le coeur des étoiles de premières générations, dans la nébuleuse protosolaire, sur la jeune Terre envoie de différenciation, dans les premiers océans terrestres. Il décrit ce que l'on croit savoir, mais aussi passe (...) en revue tout ce que l'on ignore à propos de la génération spontanée des premières cellules vivantes. Lorsque la vie apparaît, l'histoire de la matière devient dépendante de l'évolution biologique. Après trois milliards d'années environ, celle-ci conduit à l'apparition de l'homme, seul être vivant capable de faire évoluer la matière. Ce livre propose ainsi une fresque d'une réelle ampleur, sans équivalent à ce jour, écrite pour être accessible à tous. Et pourtant, les questions abordées relèvent de nombreuses disciplines, comme l'astrophysique, la biologie, la chimie, le génie génétique et l'histoire des techniques. (shrink)

Is there, today," asks Jacques Derrida, "another 'question of religion'?" Derrida's writings on religion situate and raise anew questions of tradition, faith, and sacredness and their relation to philosophy and political culture. He has amply testified to his growing up in an Algerian Jewish, French-speaking family, to the complex impact of a certain Christianity on his surroundings and himself, and to his being deeply affected by religious persecution. Religion has made demands on Derrida, and, in turn, the study of (...) religion has benefited greatly from his extensive philosophical contributions to the field. Acts of Religion brings together for the first time Derrida's key writings on religion, along with two new essays translated by Gil Anidjar that appear here for the first time in any language. These texts are organized around the secret holding of links between the personal, the political, and the theological. In these texts, Derrida's reflections on religion span from negative theologyto the limits of reason and to hospitality. Acts of Religion will serve as an excellent introduction to Derrida's remarkable contribution to religious studies. (shrink)

This volume is a collection of twenty-three interviews given over the last two decades. It illustrates the extraordinary breadth of Derrida's concerns, touching upon such subjects as the teaching of philosophy, sexual difference and feminine identity, the media, AIDS, language and translation, nationalism, politics, and Derrida's early life and the history of his writings. Often, as in the interviews on Heidegger, on drugs, or on the nature of poetry, these interviews offer something available nowhere else in his work. The informality (...) of the interview process frequently leads to the most succinct and lucid explications of many of the most important and influential aspects of Derrida's thought. Sixteen of the interviews appear in English for the first time, including an interview conducted especially for this volume, concerning the recent exchange of letters in the New York Review of Books. (shrink)

In Archive Fever , Jacques Derrida deftly guides us through an extended meditation on remembrance, religion, time, and technology--fruitfully occasioned by a deconstructive analysis of the notion of archiving. Intrigued by the evocative relationship between technologies of inscription and psychic processes, Derrida offers for the first time a major statement on the pervasive impact of electronic media, particularly e-mail, which threaten to transform the entire public and private space of humanity. Plying this rich material with characteristic virtuosity, Derrida constructs (...) a synergistic reading of archives and archiving, both provocative and compelling. "Judaic mythos, Freudian psychoanalysis, and e-mail all get fused into another staggeringly dense, brilliant slab of scholarship and suggestion."-- The Guardian "[Derrida] convincingly argues that, although the archive is a public entity, it nevertheless is the repository of the private and personal, including even intimate details."-- Choice "Beautifully written and clear."--Jeremy Barris, Philosophy in Review "Translator Prenowitz has managed valiantly to bring into English a difficult but inspiring text that relies on Greek, German, and their translations into French."-- Library Journal. (shrink)

An edition of three essays by the leading French philosopher and theorist Jacques Derrida on the ethical, political and linguistic issues posed by the act of 'naming'. Passions: An Oblique Offering is a reflection on the question of the response, on the duty and obligation to respond, and on the possibility of not responding - which is to say, on the ethics and politics of responsibility. Sauf le nom (Post Scriptum) considers the problematics of naming and alterity, or transcendence, (...) raised inevitably by a rigorous negative theology. Much of the text is organised around close readings of the poetry of Angelus Silesius. The final essay, Khora, explores the problem of space or spacing, of the word 'khora' in Plato's Timaeus. Even as it places and makes possible nothing less than the whole world, 'khora' opens, dislocates and displaces all the categories that govern the production of that world, from naming to gender. (shrink)

The "Nightcap," a relatively nonintrusive and "user-friendly" sleep monitoring system, was used by 11 subjects on 10 consecutive nights in their homes. Eighty-eight sleep mentation reports were obtained after spontaneous awakenings from Nightcap-identified REM sleep and 61 were obtained from NREM awakenings. Sleep mentation was recalled in 83% of REM reports and 54% of NREM reports. The median length of REM reports was 148 words compared to 21 words for NREM reports. Twenty-four percent of the REM reports were over 500 (...) words long; no NREM reports over 500 words were obtained. REM report lengths were lowest during the first 15 min of the REM cycle and longest 15–45 min into the period. In contrast, 7 of the 9 NREM reports more than 100 words long occurred within the first 15 min of NREM periods. The Nightcap thus appears to be an effective and efficient method of collecting large numbers of sleep mentation reports with correlated sleep staging under normal ecological conditions. (shrink)

Waking hallucinations suggest mechanisms of dream initiation and maintenance. Visual association cortex activation, yielding poorly attended-to, visually ambiguous dream environments, suggests conditions favoring hallucinosis. Attentional and visual systems, coactivated during sleep, may generate imagery that is inserted into virtual environments. Internally consistent dreaming may evolve from successive, contextually evoked images. Fluctuating arousal and context-evoked imagery may help explain dream features.

Nielsen's concept of “covert REM sleep” accounts for more of the complexity in sleep psychophysiology than its conceptual predecessors such as the tonic-phasic model. With new neuroimaging findings, such concepts lead to more precise sleep psychophysiology including both traditional polysomnographic signs and neuronal activity in greater proximity to the actual point sources and distributed networks which generate dreaming. [Hobson et al.; Nielsen].

"The four essays in this volume constitute Derrida's most explicit and sustained reflection on the art work as pictorial artifact, a reflection partly by way of philosophical aesthetics (Kant, Heidegger), partly by way of a commentary on art works and art scholarship (Van Gogh, Adami, Titus-Carmel). The illustrations are excellent, and the translators, who clearly see their work as both a rendering and a transformation, add yet another dimension to this richly layered composition. Indispensable to collections emphasizing art criticism and (...) aesthetics."--Alexander Gelley, Library Journal. (shrink)

A rich exploration of the idea of friendship and its political consequences, past and future, by the most influential of contemporary philosophers. Until relatively recently, Jacques Derrida was seen by many as nothing more than the high priest of Deconstruction, by turns stimulating and fascinating, yet always somewhat disengaged from the central political questions of our time. Or so it seemed. Derrida's "political turn," marked especially by the appearance of Specters of Marx, has surprised some and delighted others. In (...) The Politics of Friendship Derrida renews and enriches this orientation through an examination of the political history of the idea of friendship pursued down the ages. Derrida's thoughts are haunted throughout the book by the strange and provocative address attributed to Aristotle, "my friends, there is no friend" and its inversions by later philosophers such as Montaigne, Kant, Nietzsche, Schmitt and Blanchot. The exploration allows Derrida to recall and restage the ways in which all the oppositional couples of Western philosophy and political thought—friendship and enmity, private and public life—have become madly and dangerously unstable. At the same time he dissects genealogy itself, the familiar and male-centered notion of fraternity and the virile virtue whose authority has gone unquestioned in our culture of friendship and our models of democracy The future of the political, for Derrida, becomes the future of friends, the invention of a radically new friendship, of a deeper and more inclusive democracy. This remarkable book, his most profoundly important for many years, offers a challenging and inspiring vision of that future. (shrink)

This study investigated the relationship between dream emotion and dream character identification. Thirty-five subjects provided 320 dream reports and answers to questions on characters that appeared in their dreams. We found that emotions are almost always evoked by our dream characters and that they are often used as a basis for identifying them. We found that affection and joy were commonly associated with known characters and were used to identify them even when these emotional attributes were inconsistent with those of (...) the waking state. These findings are consistent with the finding that the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, associated with short-term memory, is less active in the dreaming compared to the wake brain, while the paleocortical and subcortical limbic areas are more active. The findings are also consistent with the suggestion that these limbic areas have minimal input from the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in the dreaming brain. (shrink)

Sleep researchers in different disciplines disagree about how fully dreaming can be explained in terms of brain physiology. Debate has focused on whether REM sleep dreaming is qualitatively different from nonREM (NREM) sleep and waking. A review of psychophysiological studies shows clear quantitative differences between REM and NREM mentation and between REM and waking mentation. Recent neuroimaging and neurophysiological studies also differentiate REM, NREM, and waking in features with phenomenological implications. Both evidence and theory suggest that there are isomorphisms between (...) the phenomenology and the physiology of dreams. We present a three-dimensional model with specific examples from normally and abnormally changing conscious states. Key Words: consciousness; dreaming; neuroimaging; neuromodulation; NREM; phenomenology; qualia; REM; sleep. (shrink)

Sleep researchers in different disciplines disagree about how fully dreaming can be explained in terms of brain physiology. Debate has focused on whether REM sleep dreaming is qualitatively different from nonREM (NREM) sleep and waking. A review of psychophysiological studies shows clear quantitative differences between REM and NREM mentation and between REM and waking mentation. Recent neuroimaging and neurophysiological studies also differentiate REM, NREM, and waking in features with phenomenological implications. Both evidence and theory suggest that there are isomorphisms between (...) the phenomenology and the physiology of dreams. We present a three-dimensional model with specific examples from normally and abnormally changing conscious states. Key Words: consciousness; dreaming; neuroimaging; neuromodulation; NREM; phenomenology; qualia; REM; sleep. (shrink)

The chapter presents Bergson’s conception of philosophy as a way of life, as a thinking that seeks to make contact with the creativity of life as a whole. This endeavor to alter our vision of the world, and ultimately, our action and sense of being in the world, seeks to operate a “conversion of attention.” For Bergson, such a conversion is tied in with what he calls the “true empiricism” that allows us to experience and think change as that which (...) makes up living reality as a whole. Bergson conceptualizes this move beyond the human in terms of sympathy, a term employed both descriptively, to develop the notion of a sympathetic whole of life in which philosophy as a way of life resituates the self, and prescriptively, as urging us to overcome our estrangement from “the ocean of life” to which we owe our existence. This effort of sympathy takes the form of a spiritual exercise. Not limited to mere contemplation of the world, it transforms the manner in which we perceive the reality of duration and thus opens the path for a different way of living. (shrink)

The animal that therefore I am (more to follow) -- But as for me, who am I (following)? -- And say the animal responded -- I don't know why we are doing this.

This volume reflects Derrida's engagement in the late 1970s with French political debates on the teaching of philosophy and the reform of the French university system. While addressing specific contemporary political issues, the essays deal mainly with much broader concerns. With his typical rigor and spark, Derrida investigates the genealogy of several central concepts which any debate about teaching and the university must confront. Thus there are essays on the 'teaching body', both the faculty corps and the strange interplay in (...) the French tradition between the mind and body of the professor; on the question of age in teaching, analyzed through a famous letter of Hegel; on the class, the classroom, and the socio-economic concept of class in education; on language, especially so-called 'natural languages' like French; and on the legacy of the revolutionary tradition, the Estates General, in the university. (shrink)

Completing the translation of Derrida’s monumental work Right to Philosophy (the first part of which has already appeared under the title of Who’s Afraid of Philosophy?), Eyes of the University brings together many of the philosopher’s most important texts on the university and, more broadly, on the languages and institutions of philosophy. In addition to considerations of the implications for literature and philosophy of French becoming a state language, of Descartes’ writing of the Discourse on Method in French, and of (...) Kant’s and Schelling’s philosophies of the university, the volume reflects on the current state of research and teaching in philosophy and on the question of what Derrida calls a “university responsibility.” Examining the political and institutional conditions of philosophy, the essays collected here question the growing tendency to orient research and teaching towards a programmable and profitable end. The volume is therefore invaluable for the light it throws upon an underappreciated aspect of Derrida’s own engagement, both philosophical and political, in struggles against the stifling of philosophical research and teaching. As a founding member of the Research Group on the Teaching of Philosophy and as one of the conveners of the Estates General of Philosophy, Derrida was at the forefront of the struggle to preserve and extend the teaching of philosophy as a distinct discipline, in secondary education and beyond, in the face of conservative government education reforms in France. As one of the founders of the Collège International de Philosophie, he worked to provide a space for research in and around philosophy that was not accepted or legitimated in other institutions. Documenting and reflecting upon these engagements, Eyes of the University brings together some of the most important and incisive of Derrida’s works. (shrink)

In “The Bioethics of Environmental Injustice: Ethical, Legal, and Clinical Implications of Unhealthy Environments,” Ray and Cooper (2024) initiate needed discourse on environmental justice and the...

The paper deals with the contributions of Jacques Herbrand to logic and philosophy in historical context.

Bergson was a pre-eminent European philosopher of the early twentieth century and his work covers all major branches of philosophy. This volume of essays is the first collection in twenty years in English to address the whole of Bergson's philosophy, including his metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of science, philosophy of life, aesthetics, ethics, social and political thought, and religion. The essays explore Bergson's influence on a number of different fields, and also extend his thought to pressing issues of our time, including (...) philosophy as a way of life, inclusion and exclusion in politics, ecology, the philosophy of race and discrimination, and religion and its enduring appeal. The volume will be valuable for all who are interested in this important thinker and his continuing relevance. (shrink)

This volume contains the speech given by Derrida at Emmanuel Levinas’s funeral on December 27, 1995, and his contribution to a colloquium organized to mark the first anniversary of Levinas’s death.

This volume brings together four of Jacques Derrida's essays on Maurice Blanchot's fictions: "Pace Not(s)," "Living on," "Title To Be Specified," and "The Law of Genre.".

Vor allem die philosophische Religionskritik fokussiert sich zu oft auf die Kritik an der Annahme der Existenz Gottes. Dabei gerät aus dem Blick, dass Religionen nicht allein in Überzeugungen bestehen, sondern komplexe soziale Praktiken darstellen, die das Leben ihrer Gläubigen strukturieren, orientieren, stabilisieren und/oder irritieren. Die hier versammelten Beiträge thematisieren diesen Aspekt von Religion in Auseinandersetzung mit dem von Rahel Jaeggi konzipierten Modell einer "Kritik von Lebensformen". Dieser Band liefert damit einen Beitrag sowohl zur Religions-, als auch zur Sozialphilosophie."-- Back (...) cover. (shrink)

This article argues for the reassessment of Indrabhuti’s Jnanasiddhi in the light of newly discovered primary witnesses and previously unnoticed relations to other works. Presumably composed in the late eighth to early ninth century CE, it belongs to the earlier phase of Tantric Buddhism, a transitional period between the predominance of the Yoga- and Mahayogatantras to the later Yoginitantras, and relates to a variety of important scriptures of this formation. While this article briefly discusses the origins, authorship, contents and context (...) of the Jnanasiddhi, including a brief overview of its modern scholarship, it also highlights its intertextual relations with and notable influences upon other tantric works of major importance. The Jnanasiddhi stands out as a tantric scripture of paramount importance, and we attempt to demonstrate the necessity of its reassessment with recourse to hitherto neglected but nonetheless vital sources that have only recently come to light. (shrink)