Labyrinth: An International Journal for Philosophy, Value Theory and Sociocultural Hermeneutics
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Patočka ist gestorben. Wir müssen etwas tun!"
Get PDFAn Interview with Klaus Nellen by Jakub Homolka about the rescued manuscripts of Jan Patočka and the establishment of the Patočka archive at the Institute of Human Sciences in Vienna
A mood for Philosophy
Get PDFIn this dialogue with Francois Laruelle Anne-Françoise Schmid suggests that Laruelle\u27s non-philosophy, which begins with an indecision, could be conceived as something that in the history of painting has been called figura serpentinata, "serpentine line". This line, which produces a kind of music by the use of concepts, is visible according her trough his whole work: from his first book on Ravaisson, Phenomenon and Difference (1971), through to his last one, The Last Humanity: A New Ecological Science, published in French in 2015 and expected to appear in English in 2018
Patočka, the meaning of the post-European spirit and its direction
Get PDFThe Europe that was born from Plato\u27s "care for the soul" can today no longer be recognized; it has been replaced by the self-management of the economic EU. How can we now come back to a Europe concerned about its soul, the others, and the world, reinventing itself as a new nation? Jan Patočka\u27s thoughts on post-Europe can show us the way.Starting from some clarifications on the definitely European initial meaning that Patočka detects in Socrates\u27 "care for the soul", the purpose of this article is to examine what in this European spirit can be saved in the post-European age, and to what extent a "European nation" can still make sense. This analysis leads us, building on the visionary texts written in the seventies by Patočka, to rethink the possibilities of a reformation of European reason, and a métanoïa of Post-Europe.
"Scum of the Earth": Patočka, Atonement, and Waste
Get PDFSacrifice, solidarity, and social decadence were essential themes not only for Patočka\u27s philosophical work, but also for his personal life. In the "Varna Lectures" sacrifice is characterized uniquely as the privation of a clear telos, as counter-escapist, and as sutured to a comportment of finite life that is non-causal and non-purposive. In his Heretical Essays a similar hope is expressed to extract meaningfulness from use-value, and to deploy a Socratic and Christian "Care for the Soul" that can counteract the decadences of our age. These interests and developments of the practice and notion of sacrifice point to Patočka\u27s double-hereticism, both of the post-industrial age of technological advancement, and of what had become the unthought-through (and therefore taken for granted) of the Christian tradition. In both senses, his theory of sacrifice is not unlike that of St. Paul, who saw the necessity of counter-acting the decadence and pompousness of the Corinthians by calling them to become "scum of the earth." This helps reveal how sacrifice presumes, in general, an operative notion of waste, and this paper seeks to lend further understanding to the relation between solidarity and sacrifice by developing, from out of Patočka\u27s own work, precisely how waste figures prominently in such a relation. Waste may be refused by merit of being deemed to have no value; waste can mark a layer of expenditure of using "something up" in a way that overlooks its societal surplus; and waste could depict whatever is, like a wasteland, uncultivable and barren. Waste then is employed in the essay as a heuristic tool for understanding how the normalization of the relation between solidarity and sacrifice is in need of being inverted, and how this inversion has consequences also for how solidarity can be considered in relation to atonement
Victims, Power and Intellectuals: Laruelle and Sartre
Get PDF In two recent works, Intellectuals and Power and General Theory of Victims, François Laruelle offers a critique of the public intellectual, including Jean-Paul Sartre, claiming such intellectuals have a disregard for victims of crimes against humanity. Laruelle insists that the victim has been left out of philosophy and displaced by an abstract pursuit of justice. He offers a non- philosophical approach that reverses the victim/intellectual dyad and calls for compassionate insurrection. In this paper, we probe Laruelle\u27s critique of the committed intellectual\u27s obligations to victims, specifically, through an examination of Sartre\u27s "A Plea for Intellectuals." We hope to show the value of Laruelle\u27s theory on victims, crime and power for imagining future-oriented intellectuals
La voix du philosophe Laruelle
Get PDFThe Voice of Laruelle, the philosopher(Abstract)What is a voice in the context of the arts and philosophy? In the space of the philosopher\u27s voice, in the complex grammar of his language is played his philosophical timbre, his own space, his particular voice, composed of concepts, articulated by the laws of coherence of the common philosophical language, with hypnotic specificities. These specificities are precisely the fruit of processes formerly called rhetoric, which I call non-hypnotics (of generalized hypnotic space), one of whose functions is just to speak in a double space: the common reference space of the reader or listener, and the conceptual virtual space peculiar to the philosopher. To the extent that the reader must pay increased and permanent attention to this double space, the philosophical trance effect, equivalent to the Ericksonian hypnotic trance, is facilitated. The difficulty of this double reading is the incessant passage from one code to another, which is also a hypnotic fascination. Heidegger prolongs and renews its structures and draws some effects from them, which provoke in the mind of the reader as an over-flow, a saturation effect, which itself favors the philosophical trance. Thus, each voice seeks to captivate the mind by confusing it with concepts, which seem at first sight familiar, but which reveal themselves with the use which is made, like formidable concepts to the power of unaccustomed fascination. One of the pleasures of reading Lareuelle\u27s philosophy is due to this type of fascination with the philosophical voice and its language. The Voice of Laruelle, the philosopherWhat is a voice in the context of the arts and philosophy? In the space of the philosopher\u27s voice, in the complex grammar of his language is played his philosophical timbre, his own space, his particular voice, composed of concepts, articulated by the laws of coherence of the common philosophical language, with hypnotic specificities. These specificities are precisely the fruit of processes formerly called rhetoric, which I call non-hypnotics (of generalized hypnotic space), one of whose functions is just to speak in a double space: the common reference space of the reader or listener, and the conceptual virtual space peculiar to the philosopher. To the extent that the reader must pay increased and permanent attention to this double space, the philosophical trance effect, equivalent to the Ericksonian hypnotic trance, is facilitated. The difficulty of this double reading is the incessant passage from one code to another, which is also a hypnotic fascination. Heidegger prolongs and renews its structures and draws some effects from them, which provoke in the mind of the reader as an over-flow, a saturation effect, which itself favors the philosophical trance. Thus, each voice seeks to captivate the mind by confusing it with concepts, which seem at first sight familiar, but which reveal themselves with the use which is made, like formidable concepts to the power of unaccustomed fascination. One of the pleasures of reading Lareuelle\u27s philosophy is due to this type of fascination with the philosophical voice and its language
Die "unermessliche Leichtigkeit und Zerbrechlichkeit des menschlichen Faktums." Jan Patočka und die Krise des Humanismus
Get PDFThe "immeasurable lightness and fragility of the human fact." Jan Patočka and the Crisis of HumanismThe article addresses Jan Patočka’s writings in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. The paper’s title – "The Immense Lightness and Fragility of the Human Fact" – is taken from a short, yet immensely crucial 1946 text of his that formulates a severe criticism of ideology/ideologies and eventually offers a profound questioning of humanist ideals. Accentuating his critique against the backdrop of Sartre\u27s and Heidegger\u27s contemporaneous challenges to humanism, the paper argues that Patočka debunks a misconceived "cult of the human being" and ideologies of progress while insisting on the integrity of a human life in confrontation with its inherent weakness and fragility
Political Correctness oder Tugendterror?
Get PDFPolitical Correctness or Virtue Terror?Discussing the different meanings of the concept of political correctness, the author argues that it is a part of a profound change in culture within Western democracies that has led to a differentiation and deepening of human and fundamental rights. At the same time, it is shown that political correct-ness was adopted by the political right and used as a fight against this differentiation of human and fundamental rights in the Western liberal democracies, in order to defame them by linking the corre-sponding prohibitions of discrimination and equality measures with virtue terror.
Self-Responsibility and Responsibility for Others
Get PDFBecause of the transcendent nature of the experience of my own self, responsibility for myself necessarily leads to responsibility for others. The aim of this paper is to approach this experience of the transcendence of the self and to show how it relates to a new sense of responsibility which transcends the self through a number of stages. First, the author outlines what might be called the "standard" view of authenticity in Husserl and how this particular view yields a certain view of responsibility as the ability to answer completely for "who" one is and "what" one does. Second, this standard view is challenged with another reading of the "self" in Husserl - one that emphasizes a necessary and productive division within the self. Thus, the author suggests that it is this second view of the self which is developed by Heidegger. Third, he demonstrates how this different view of the "authentic" self, that is inextricably linked to a "loss" of self, leads to a radically distinct view of responsibility for oneself, and for others
Verantwortung angesichts humanbiologischer Herausforderungen
No full textWith the advancement of the new biotechnologies the problem of responsibility is becoming particularly acute. Instead of giving an own definition of responsibility, the author proposes to take it as a heuristic concept based on some Husserlian ideas developed in the Krisis. This ideas, which have some similarity with Jonas\u27 principle of responsibility, are: first, responsibility as care for the vulnerable, second, responsibility in the context of a horizon of possibilities, and, third, responsibility for the own prerequisites as human being. By applying the hermeneutics of suspicion to some current issues, the author argues that the biotechnological revolution comes along with a shift of the cultures of recognition onto cultures of consumption. On the base of different arguments used in the biotechnological debates (arguments of status, of action relevance, of moral and right), three types of responsibility are revealed: the aporetic, the consecutive, and the quasi-hermeneutical responsibility, which enables a final controversy about their deficiency