"This is a study of the unlikely 'career' of anxiety in 19th and 20th century philosophy, above all. Anxiety is an affect, something more subtle, sometimes more persistent, than an emotion or a passion. It lies at the intersectiona of embodiment and cognition, sensation and emotion. But anxiety also runs like a red thread through European thought beginning from receptions of Kant's transcendental project. Like a symptom of the quest to situate and give life to the philosophical subject, like a (...) symptom of an interrogation that stove to take form in European intellectual culture, *Angst* passes through Schelling's romanticism into Schopenhauer's metaphysics, until it was approached existentially by Kierkegaard. Nietzsche situates it in the long history of producing an animal able to promise. Its returns in the 20th century allow us to grasp the connection between phenomenology's exploration of passivity, followed by interpretations of the human reality in a world and open to a call that it can hardly assume. The study thus begins with Kant; it probes late Idealism and Romanticism, the metaphysical vitalism that flickered with Schopenhauer, the aesthetics and religious senses of *Angst* in Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. It turns to three avatars of anxiety in the evolving psychoanalysis before exploring the return to rationalism and formalism in 20th century phenomenology, followed again by efforts to resituate human beings in world and body as well as, significantly, before the anxiogenic "other""--. (shrink)

This work locates multiple affinities between the philosophies of Nietzsche and Lévinas, finding that both questioned the nature of subjectivity and the meaning of responsibility after the 'death of God', and argued the goodness exists ...

The act of thought-thought as an act-would precede the thought thinking or becoming conscious of an act. The notion of act involves a violence essentially: the violence of transitivity, lacking in the transcendence of thought... Totality and Infinity The work of Emmanuel Levinas revolves around two preoccupations. First, his philosophical project can be described as the construction of a formal ethics, grounded upon the transcendence of the other human being and a subject's spontaneous responsibility toward that other. Second, Levinas has (...) written extensively on, and as a member of, the cultural and textual life of Judaism. These two concerns are intertwined. Their relation, however, is one of considerable complexity. Levinas' philosophical project stems directly from his situation as a Jewish thinker in the twentieth century and takes its particular form from his study of the Torah and the Talmud. It is, indeed, a hermeneutics of biblical experience. If inspired by Judaism, Levinas' ethics are not eo ipso confessional. What his ethics takes from Judaism, rather, is a particular way of conceiving transcendence and the other human being. It owes to the philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Buber a logos of the world and of the holy, which acknowledges their incom mensurability without positing one as fallen and the other as supernal. (shrink)

This is a study of the way in which Levinas approaches the experience of human expression from two perspectives: firstly, as a pre-thematic or pre-cognitive “experience,” which requires that he revisit Husserl's pre-objective intentionality and explore the relationship between the upsurge of sensation and its “intentionalization” as consciousness self-temporalizing. Thereafter, Levinas must contend with the implications of his own writing, which includes his claims for the face. This implies that he must grapple with criticism to the effect that he is (...) providing a hermeneutics of face-to-face encounters. Levinas acknowledges that his writing is a “dramatique des phénomènes” and not a phenomenology of actions. How, then, to avoid charges of arbitrary description? How to step outside the primordiality of “the phrase” or the conceptualization that threatens claims to “pure” phenomenology? This is really what is at stake in Levinas's second great work. In this essay, I explore the role that “substitution” plays in weaving together conceptuality and phenomenality. I contrast this with other forms of “dramatization,” from narrative witnessing, to minimalist sculpture. (shrink)

Combining Maurice Merleau-Ponty's 1960 course notes on Edmund Husserl's "The Origin of Geometry," his course summary, related texts, and critical essays, this collection offers a unique and welcome glimpse into both Merleau-Ponty's nuanced reading of Husserl's famed late writings and his persistent effort to track the very genesis of truth through the incarnate idealization of language.

Subjects and Simulations presents essays focused on suffering and sublimity, representation and subjectivity, and the relation of truth and appearance through engagement with the legacies of Jean Baudrillard and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe.

This book consists of transcripts from two lecture courses Levinas delivered in 1975-76, his last year at the Sorbonne. They cover some of the most pervasive themes of his thought and were written at a time when he had just published his most important—and difficult—book, _Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence._ Both courses pursue issues related to the question at the heart of Levinas's thought: ethical relation. The Foreword and Afterword place the lectures in the context of his work as (...) a whole, rounding out this unique picture of Levinas the thinker and the teacher. The lectures are essential to a full understanding of Levinas for three reasons. First, he seeks to explain his thought to an audience of students, with a clarity and an intensity altogether different from his written work. Second, the themes of God, death, and time are not only crucial for Levinas, but they lead him to confront their treatment by the main philosphers of the great continental tradition. Thus his discussions of accounts of death by Heidegger, Hegel, and Bloch place Levinas's thought in a broader context. Third, the basic concepts Levinas employs are those of _Otherwise than Being_ rather than the earlier _Totality and Infinity_: patience, obsession, substitution, witness, traumatism. There is a growing recognition that the ultimate standing of Levinas as a philosopher may well depend on his assessment of those terms. These lectures offer an excellent introduction to them that shows how they contribute to a wide range of traditional philosophical issues. (shrink)

The volume addresses these questions, contrasting Derrida's thought with philosophical predecessors such as Rosenzweig, Levinas, Celan, and Scholem, and tracing ...

This essay studies the unfolding of Levinas' concept of transcendence from 1935 to his 1984 talk entitled "Transcendence and Intelligibility." I discuss how Levinas frames transcendence in light of enjoyment, shame, and nausea in his youthful project of a counter-ontology to Heidegger's Being and Time. In Levinas' essay, transcendence is the human urge to get out of being. I show the ways in which Levinas' early ontology is conditioned by historical circumstances, but I argue that its primary aim is formal (...) and phenomenological; it adumbrates formal structures of human existence. Levinas' 1940s ontology accentuates the dualism in being, between what amount to a light and a dark principle. This shift in emphasis ushers in a new focus for transcendence, which is now both sensuous and temporal, thanks to the promise of fecundity. Totality and Infinity (1961) pursues a similar onto-logic, while shifting the locus of transcendence to a non-sexuate other. The final great work, Otherwise than Being or beyond Essence (1974) offers a hermeneutic phenomenology of transcendence-in-immanence. It rethinks Husserl's focus on the transcendence of intentionality and its condition of possibility in the passive synthesis of complex temporality. If the 1974 strategy 'burrows beneath' the classical phenomenological syntheses, it also incorporates unsuspected influences from French psychology and phenomenology. This allows Levinas to develop a philosophical conception of transcendence that is neither Husserl's intentionality nor Heidegger's temporal ecstases, in what amounts to an original contribution to a phenomenology both hermeneutic and descriptive. (shrink)

Provides multiple and accessible perspectives on trauma both as a condition and as a cultural phenomenon.

This essay discusses Jean-Luc Nancy’s Dis-Enclosure: Deconstruction of Christianity (2008). Nancy’s engagement with Christianity in this work contrasts with the so-called theological turn in phenomenology. This raises probing questions regarding the name of God and the sense of the “divine” in a demythified world, as well as the question of the exhaustion of Christianity and its self-deconstruction. I address Nancy’s exploration of the overcoming of nihilism and the possibility, and “look,” of a faith that is not tied to a god (...) or a master signifier, thereby moving beyond certain ‘orthodox’ oppositions between atheism and Christianity. I use Gérard Granel’s deformalization of phenomenology and the Gospel of James’s “Epistle of straw” to adumbrate a minimalist faith in the world, and I alsoinvestigate Jean Pouillon’s study of the senses of “croire” and Émile Benveniste’s archeology of credere in light of Nancy’s approach to faith. I close with reflections on Nietzsche’s psychology of “the redeemer.”. (shrink)

This essay discusses Jean-Luc Nancy’s Dis-Enclosure: Deconstruction of Christianity . Nancy’s engagement with Christianity in this work contrasts with the so-called theological turn in phenomenology. This raises probing questions regarding the name of God and the sense of the “divine” in a demythified world, as well as the question of the exhaustion of Christianity and its self-deconstruction. I address Nancy’s exploration of the overcoming of nihilism and the possibility, and “look,” of a faith that is not tied to a god (...) or a master signifier, thereby moving beyond certain ‘orthodox’ oppositions between atheism and Christianity. I use Gérard Granel’s deformalization of phenomenology and the Gospel of James’s “Epistle of straw” to adumbrate a minimalist faith in the world, and I alsoinvestigate Jean Pouillon’s study of the senses of “croire” and Émile Benveniste’s archeology of credere in light of Nancy’s approach to faith. I close with reflections on Nietzsche’s psychology of “the redeemer.”. (shrink)

In Nietzsche and the Shadow of God, his study of Nietzsche’s integral philosophical corpus, Franck revisits the fundamental concepts of Nietzsche’s thought, from the death of God and the will to power, to the body as the seat of thinking and valuing, and finally to his conception of a post-Christian justice. The work engages Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s destruction of the Platonic-Christian worldview, showing how Heidegger’s hermeneutic overlooked Nietzsche’s powerful confrontation with revelation and justice by working through the Christian body, (...) as set forth in the Epistles of Saint Paul and reread both by Martin Luther and by German Idealism. Franck shows systematically how Nietzsche “transvalued” the metaphysical tenets of the Christian body of believers. In so doing, he provides an unparalleled demonstration of the coherence of Nietzsche’s project and the ways in which the revaluation of values, amor fati, and the trials of eternal recurrence reshape the living self toward a creative existence beyond original sin—indeed, beyond an ethics of “good” versus “evil.” Bergo and Farah’s clear translation introduces this work to an English-speaking audience for the first time. (shrink)

This article reads Levinas’s “And God Created Woman” in light of its socio-political context, Mai soixante-huit. It explores themes from his “Judaism and Revolution,” in which he reframed concepts of revolution, exegesis, the revolutionary, and human alienation. Following these themes, which run subtly through his Talmudic remarks on women and indirectly on feminism, I examine his arguments about a “signification beyond universality” and the fraught relationship between formal equity in gender relations and the practice of justice, as embodied by the (...) Antigone-like Rizpah bath Aiah and analyzed in Levinas’s Talmudic reading “Toward the Other.” I summarize the Rabbinic debate about the meaning of an extra yod in the term often translated as “to create” in Genesis, turning to the significance of dissymmetry between the Hebrew names of “man” and “woman,” Ish and Isha. In light of this, Biblicist and psychoanalyst Daniel Sibony opens further insights into gender, naming, and identity. (shrink)

This article reads Levinas’s “And God Created Woman” in light of its socio-political context, Mai soixante-huit. It explores themes from his “Judaism and Revolution,” in which he reframed concepts of revolution, exegesis, the revolutionary, and human alienation. Following these themes, which run subtly through his Talmudic remarks on women and indirectly on feminism, I examine his arguments about a “signification beyond universality” and the fraught relationship between formal equity in gender relations and the practice of justice, as embodied by the (...) Antigone-like Rizpah bath Aiah and analyzed in Levinas’s Talmudic reading “Toward the Other.” I summarize the Rabbinic debate about the meaning of an extra yod in the term often translated as “to create” in Genesis, turning to the significance of dissymmetry between the Hebrew names of “man” and “woman,” Ish and Isha. In light of this, Biblicist and psychoanalyst Daniel Sibony opens further insights into gender, naming, and identity. (shrink)

We have now had some two decades of Levinas commentary. What remains to be said? Certainly one thing we have learned since Otherwise than Being is that Levinas’s philosophy and his talmudic and confessional writings nourish each other so profoundly that to approach Levinas without understanding the historyof Jewish philosophy — in its confrontations with neo-Platonism, Aristotle, Kant — is to risk misunderstanding Levinas. Insights into the interrelationships between Jewish thought and Levinas’s other humanism have been provided by thinkers like (...) Robert Gibbs, Claire Katz, Catherine Chalier, Shmuel Trigano, and Gérard Bensussan, to name but a few. But if one is not well versed in Jewish thought, will one be liable to abandon Levinas’s thought as an existentialized confessionalism? Perhaps. But I think the loss to philosophy would be considerable. (shrink)

This article approaches Levinas’s 1963 Talmudic reading entitled “Messianic Texts” in light of the metaphoric numbers 0, 1, and 2. “Zero” will refer to unforeseen silences in the Talmudic text in question (here, Rabbi Eleazar’s sudden silence in the debate about the conditions of redemption, as well as commentator Rashi’s silence on Talmudic discussions about a certain “identity” of the messiah. The number “one” concerns a textual hapax: Rabbi Hillel’s historicist dismissal of the messiah as promise and open future—a position (...) virtually anathema to rabbinics (inter alia) but nevertheless preserved by the Talmud. My metaphoric numbers strategy turns, finally, to the curious presence of “allegorical doubles” in the Bible, which Levinas describes as a configuration of textual “eidetics.” Using my three numbers (0, 1, 2) as an elementary analytic grid, I turn from Levinas’ “Messianic Texts” to André Neher’s biblical commentary on Levinas’s presentation—a commentary similarly concerning messianism but no longer in the Talmud. My purpose is dual: to sketch the context of this complex Talmudic reading, to offer one (idiosyncratic) reading-strategy focusing on two events of “silence,” the future anterior of the “messiah” who will have been but will come no more, and finally the play of identity-in-difference in the biblical doubles. Keywords: “Messianic Texts,” Vladimir Jankélévitch, André Neher, messianisms, world-to-come, the Samozvanetz. (shrink)

Starting from Mal d'archive and La bête et le souverain II, I explore what Derrida argues is the cleaved nature of Freud's concepts, and which he compares to the contradictory characteristics of every archive : to be revolutionary in its institution of the new and simultaneously to be or become conservative, even reactionary. For Derrida, Freud's later writing will tie the motivation to create an archive to the destructive logic of the death drive. An interesting example of Freud's cleaved concepts (...) first emerges in his early study of the brain. It is elaborated in his deconstructive approach to aphasia and to the acquisition of language. I argue in this essay that Derrida understood Freud's logic as present over the course of his entire life, and this, in a way that justifies my showing its presence in Freud's earliest neurological texts. I show that in its radicality, which includes an interactionist neurology based on inscription and archiving, opposition to 19th century cortico-centrism, and a rethinking of traditional “localizationism,” Freud's model of the brain and mind would have advanced understanding of the mental “archive” decades before this upheaval took place in neuroscience. (shrink)

This article is drawn from my translation of Zarader's *Heidegger et la dette impensée*. I explore both Zarader and J. Derrida's (De l'esprit) investigations into Heidegger's recourse to "Old Testament" and Judaic logics (including apophatics) in his quest for the origins of religiosity.

The thirteen essays collected in this volume investigate the possibility that the word “God” can be understood now, at the end of the twentieth century, in a meaningful way. Nine of the essays appear in English translation for the first time. Among Levinas’s writings, this volume distinguishes itself, both for students of his thought and for a wider audience, by the range of issues it addresses. Levinas not only rehearses the ethical themes that have led him to be regarded as (...) one of the most original thinkers working out of the phenomenological tradition, but he also takes up philosophical questions concerning politics, language, and religion. The volume situates his thought in a broader intellectual context than have his previous works. In these essays, alongside the detailed investigations of Husserl, Heidegger, Rosenzweig, and Buber that characterize all his writings, Levinas also addresses the thought of Kierkegaard, Marx, Bloch, and Derrida. Some essays provide lucid expositions not available elsewhere to key areas of Levinas’s thought. “God and Philosophy” is perhaps the single most important text for understanding Levinas and is in many respects the best introduction to his works. “From Consciousness to Wakefulness” illuminates Levinas’s relation to Husserl and thus to phenomenology, which is always his starting point, even if he never abides by the limits it imposes. In “The Thinking of Being and the Question of the Other,” Levinas not only addresses Derrida’s _Speech and Phenomenon_ but also develops an answer to the later Heidegger’s account of the history of Being by suggesting another way of reading that history. Among the other topics examined in the essays are the Marxist concept of ideology, death, hermeneutics, the concept of evil, the philosophy of dialogue, the relation of language to the Other, and the acts of communication and mutual understanding. (shrink)

This is a study of Freud's debt to -- and ironically, his attempted modification of -- Kant's "Copernican Revolution." Beyond Kantian constructivism, Freud extends the idealist conception of mind to embodiment, both acculturated and mecanistic, thanks to influences as diverse as von Helmholtz and Brentano. His remark to P. Haberlin that the "unconscious" was the best candidate for Kant's "thing in itself," is not as improbable as it first appears.

This article summarizes the Afro-centric ‘Copernican Revolution’ of Cheikh Anta Diop between 1960 and 1974, the dates on which he defended his thesis on the African identity of Egypt and argued his thesis, with Théophile Obenga, before the UNESCO Cairo Conference on the “General History of Africa.” I discuss both the unhappy reception, by European Egyptologists and others, of Diop’s ground-breaking, multidisciplinary research, as well as its gradual spread, among others, to Diasporic thinkers. One such thinker, Marimba Ani took a (...) further step by rethinking, in Africanist terms, the philosophical bases underlying the unfolding of what she probatively shows is the European Asili, as exemplified in its patterns of thought and affective-ideological patterns. I attempt to show, here, how Ani inherits and prolongs Diop’s “Copernican” displacement. (shrink)

Drawing on Heidegger's corpus, the work of historians and biblical specialists, and contemporary philosophers like Levinas and Derrida, Zarader brings to light the evolution of an _impensé_—or unthought thought—that bespeaks a complex debt at the core of Heidegger's hermeneutic ontology. Zarader argues forcefully that in his interpretation of Western thought and culture, Heidegger manages to recognize only two main lines of inheritance: the "Greek" line of philosophical thinking, and the Christian tradition of "faith." From this perspective, Heidegger systematically avoids any (...) explicit or meaningful recognition of the contribution made by the Hebraic biblical and exegetical traditions to Western thought and culture. Zarader argues that this avoidance is significant, not simply because it involves an inexcusable historical oversight, but more importantly because Heidegger's own philosophical project draws on and develops themes that appear first, and fundamentally, within the very Hebraic traditions that he avoids, betraying an "unthought debt" to Hebraic tradition. (shrink)

I propose to look at Levinas’ constellation of figures: recurrence, obsession, persecution, substitution and saying, in chapter IV of Otherwise than Being. This is the core of his 1974 work. I tarry with a remark that Levinas makes there, “Our analyses lay claim to the spirit of Husserlian philosophy […] But […] the present work ventures beyond phenomenology”. Substitution thus returns to Husserl’s passive syntheses, arguing that not everything about sensibility and affect is meaningful or enters into associations of intentions. (...) To dig beneath thematizing consciousness required that Levinas adapt Heidegger’s hermeneutic extension of phenomenology, with its pre-structures, to open phenomenology to interpretive dimensions of lived immediacy. The question of passivity would requires reading Husserl through Heidegger. The task of opposing responsibility to Heidegger’s fundamental ontology necessitates a return to Husserl’s phenomenology of passivity. (shrink)

Inspired by three monographs of Gladys Swain and Marcel Gauchet, my presentation traces the rise of the new science of psychiatry in Revolutionary France, with Philippe Pinel and his student J.-E. Esquirol. As the directors of the division of the aliénés in the Hôpital Bicêtre (Paris), Pinel and Esquirol pioneered a therapeutic programme that spread out between their “traitement moral” (reasoning with the passions) and an “energetic repression,” wherever necessary. The discipline they created sought to gain autonomy from medicine treating (...) diseases of the body, much as pathology would do in regard to physiology, some fifty years later. Using Canguilhem, Foucault’s teacher and significant influence, I show how the unfolding of a science of disorders (for Canguilhem, this was pathology) poses questions of taxonomy and runs the inevitable ‘risk’ of extensive fragmentation. This is what happens in France after Pinel. However, Pinel, above all, will have made one contribution that—by Swain and Gauchet’s argument—stands in stark contrast to the theses of the young Foucault. Rather than sequestering and excluding the fou by forcing him or her into exaggerated, discursive revelations or silence, Pinel and Esquirol “discover” the sense, or sens , at the heart of madness, notably in what Pinel called “manie intermittente.” Esquirol takes this discovery one step further, to discern in various attacks, a certain rationality. This rather modern conception of madness exerts a considerable influence on literature, criticism, philosophy, and medicine in their time. Hegel’s understanding of madness will come directly from Pinel, and it will see in folie the internal division of subjective Reason. From this characterization comes a therapeutics based on the conviction that one could often reintegrate the mad into society, and avoid prolonged sequestration and exclusion. Thus the presentation focuses on Swain and Gauchet’s question to Foucault ( Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique , notably), using the work of Pinel and Hegel to illustrate their claim. (shrink)

White on White/Black on Black is a unique contribution to the philosophy of race. The text explores how 14 philosophers, 7 white and 7 black, philosophically understand the dynamics of the process of racialization.