Blamelessly, most commentators attempt to deduce the political theory of Levinas from his interhuman philosophy. In contrast to the perceived state of ethical life in contemporary politics, the attractiveness of the asymmetric obligations owed by the ego to the Other make the deductive project seem urgent. But an inductive analysis of Levinas’ philosophy yields troubling prerequisites, including rigorous theocracy and a form of sociability in which no epistemological clarity is permitted that could determine in situ interpersonal duties. Such unfamiliar politics (...) enable the celebrated ethical relation of self for the Other. Designed as a polemic with the presumption that politics not ethics is first philosophy, the insights of the inductive analysis of Levinas’ thought will come as no surprise to observers who worry that power and sovereignty cannot be summarily excluded from social or even ethical relations. (shrink)

Quentin Meillassoux’s speculative materialism rests on the historical claim that European philosophy since Kant is “correlationist” in its denial that thought can know being as it is in itself rather than merely for us. But though the claim is central to Meillassoux, it has not been much explored in the literature on his work. This paper argues that Nietzsche does not fit so easily into Meillassoux’s story. Though there are certain superficially correlationist elements in Nietzsche’s thought, part of his core (...) project is an ethically motivated rejection of the issues with respect to which realism and correlationism are alternatives. Thus, rather than denying that thought can access being in itself, Nietzsche aims to leave behind ways of thinking within which the question of thought’s access or lack of access matters. This means that Meillassoux loses some of the motivation for his positive position. (shrink)

How does the clinical encounter work? To tackle this question, the present study centers on the paradigmatic clinical encounter, namely, psychoanalysis, paradigmatic in that it is structured by the encounter itself. Our question thus becomes: how does the clinical encounter work, when its only modality is speech? By reading Jacques Lacan and Emmanuel Levinas together, we better identify how speech sets up as subjects those who address one another and how this subjectivation touches the suffering body specifically. In this framework, (...) a definition of the encounter is put to work: The encounter of a sufferer and a listener, that is, the clinical encounter, is the opening of an inter-human space beyond suffering. This conception of the encounter permits a specifying of the violence it avoids—respecting the transcendence of the other irreducibly other—but also the violence that it mobilizes—through a presumption of subjectivity imposed upon the other, by which the subjectivation at work in the encounter is, by definition, a subjection to the other. This outlines, then, an ethics of the clinical encounter: a relationship of man to man commanded by one sensing body to another, i.e. a minimal and therefore radical ethics that is structured as a sensible ethics between speaking bodies. (shrink)

This paper makes the point that Kierkegaard’s ideas concerning individuality cannot be understood clearly without placing them in the context of what I am calling ontological isolation. This means the radical deprivation by selfhood of every aspect of reality, to the point where not even the possibility or illusion of reality is available to the self. In this context the self is required to become itself, forming itself in and out of its own absolute nothingness, ontological destitution, or wrongness. With (...) this form of isolation as our investigative key, we unlock what Kierkegaard means by his command to become a self, where becoming itself, in absence of prior possibility, constitutes the reality of self, and why Kierkegaard places crucial emphasis, contrary to the tradition, on the priority of negativity. By having the self originate itself in “absolute difficulty,” or that wherein the act itself, or pure doing without result, is primary, Kierkegaard now replaces metaphysics with ethics in order of priority, and places the self inseparably in a world that responds directly to that act. I show here a parallel between Kierkegaard’s approach to ethical action with that of artistic creation of a kind of world, the work of art. In doing so I reveal the inadequacy of interpretations that would impose traditional forms of isolation, social and cosmic, on Kierkegaard, as some of his critics do, or that would place Kierkegaard’s ethics within traditional developmental models, as many of his sympathizers do. (shrink)

Prior to A Process Model, Gendlin’s theoretical and practical work focused on the interfacing of bodily-felt meaningfulness and symbolization. In A Process Model, Gendlin does something much wider and more philosophically primary. The hermeneutic and pragmatist distinction between the concept of experience, on the one hand, and actual experiential process, on the other, becomes for Gendlin the methodological basis for a radical reconceptualization of the body. Wittgenstein’s formulation of “meaning” as “language-use in situations” is spelled out by Gendlin in embodied (...) terms, yielding a profound new grasp of language, meaning, situation, language-use and culture as interactional body-process. Gendlin, in building his text, answers the pragmatist critique of a wrong progression of thinking where the results of an inquiry are read back to be its premises. With his central concept “eveving” Gendlin shows how the seeming determinacy of preceding structure is opened in the actual occurring. He thereby elaborates a new conception of continuity where the possibility for responsive novelty is emergent in the event itself. The conceptual development of the text itself instances this kind of emergent novelty. We will somewhat follow Gendlin’s own path in using language-in-situations as entry-point into his more fundamental process-thinking, thereby asking ourselves how to engage his new kind of model. In the last part, we introduce some of the philosophical roots of Gendlin’s A Process Model. (shrink)

In the two volumes which make up Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Deleuze and Guattari propose new concepts of “machine” and “organism.” The problem of the relationship between machines and organisms has a long philosophical history, and this essay treats their work as a contribution to this debate. It is argued that their solution to this problem is found in their difficult concept of the “body without organs,” a concept that is given some much-needed clarification in the essay. The first section details (...) Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the machine, examining the ways in which it differs from the traditional concept as described by Canguilhem: their machines do not have predictable movements, but instead produce events; they do not have a purpose; they are able to reproduce themselves. The second section details their conception of the organism through their account of Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire: organisms are bodies which normalize and which create hierarchies; they also do not have a purpose; they have a “unity of composition.” The final section argues that their concept of the “body without organs” shows us how to understand the relation between the two transformed concepts, and defines the body without organs as the becoming-machine of the organism. (shrink)

Hans Jonas accuses Heidegger of “never bring[ing] his question about Being into correlation with the testimony of our physical and biological evolution.” Neither the early nor later Heidegger has a “philosophy of nature,” Jonas charges, because Naturphilosophie demands a new concept of matter, a monistic account of cosmogony and evolution, and the grounding of ethical responsibility for future generations in an ontological “first principle.” Jonas’s ontological rethinking of Darwinism allows him to overcome the nihilism that a mechanistic interpretation of evolution (...) forces upon us: a nihilism allegedly shared by Heidegger. I imagine a Heideggerian response to Jonas, and ask whether the dream of recovering a synthesis between cosmogony and moral insight has been irrecoverably shattered by modern natural science. (shrink)