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La radicalité du manger chez Levinas
No full textNous vivons aujourd’hui dans un monde où notre manière de manger est mise à la question du point de vue moral. Nous avons besoin d\u27une éthique du manger, nous avons à juger du bien ou du mal des différents points de vue – carnivorisme, végétalisme, véganisme, etc. – et à différents niveaux – libéralisme et élevage, droits des animaux, etc. La surconsommation et le gaspillage alimentaire posent toujours problème dans la société capitaliste contemporaine et provoquent des crises économiques et environnementales. Mais nous posons rarement la question fondamentale de savoir ce qu’est le manger ou, plutôt, celles de savoir quel est le rapport, dans l’acte de manger ou dans l’alimentation, entre le mangeant qui vit du mangé et le mangé qui nourrit le mangeant, comment le mangé se transmue en mangeant et, surtout, la question de savoir si le manger n’est pas un acte spécifiquement humain. Ces questions sont essentielles à quiconque se demanderait ce qu’une “éthique du manger” désigne du point de vue philosophique1. Nous voudrions ici tenter de répondre à cette série de questions. Notre but est de montrer que le sujet (le mangeant) et l’objet qu’il mange (le mangé) ne sont pas distincts l’un de l’autre et que la dichotomie qu’on dresse entre eux n’a lieu qu’après une opération subjective et artificielle, d’origine humaine. Cette dichotomie est au fondement de la hiérarchie qui prévaut dans le monde anthropocentrique, et que nous voudrions questionner.Le texte propose une analyse de l\u27acte de manger chez Emmanuel Levinas. Plus spécifiquement, nous nous concentrons sur le manger et le travail. Le manger et le travail sont deux types d’appropriation possibles du monde par l’ipséité. Notre but est de décrire les deux types d’appropriation du monde chez Emmanuel Levinas et de les comparer. On en tirera des possibles conséquences pour une pensée écologique dans la conclusion parce que le manger éfface les frontières entre l\u27humain et le non-humain. Il s\u27agit d\u27un essai écologique de déconstruire le rapport entre l’humain et le monde, qui se montre dans l’acte de manger
The Interrelation of Dialectic and Hermeneutics in Paul Ricœur’s Early Philosophy of the Self
Full text linkWhile Ricœur\u27s œuvre is commonly known as hermeneutic philosophy, it is evident that he also deals with major problems dialectically - a discipline often put in opposition to hermeneutics. In this paper, I offer an interpretation of the relationship between dialectic and hermeneutic regarding Ricœur\u27s early theory of the self, which he developed in the 1960s, beginning with the second volume of his Philosophie de la volonté, Finitude et Culpabilité. I argue that hermeneutic and dialectic refer to each other by combining a structural model of reflexive self-consciousness and a mediation of consciousness with a transcendent other. Only their interrelation allows for a sufficient theory of concrete reflexion.
The Seduction of Metaphors
Full text linkNietzsche’s metaphor of seduction suggests that language catches philosophers in the trap of metaphysics. Nietzsche uses the poetic powers of language to fight against this metaphysical language. However, his use of the metaphor of truth as a woman seems to seduce him back in metaphysics. Metaphors become seductive because of their rhetorical and performative power. One must therefore be wary of the seduction of metaphors when attempting at revaluating the metaphysics of language. Hélène Cixous undertakes such a task, using a poetic language in order to escape the metaphysical dualisms embedded in language without falling back into its traps
Where is the Place for Black Atlantic Literature and Authorship?
Full text linkIn the wake of Black Atlantic terror, enslavement, colonialism and violence, is there a place for literature? Where is there a place for the author? In other words, to rethink poet Muriel Rukeyser’s question, where is there a place for Black Atlantic literature and authorship? Proposing Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic as the window through which to answer these questions, this essay focuses on the place for/of literature and authorship as Gilroy thinks them through an engagement with Richard Wright’s life and work, and also through the work of other Black Atlantic authors, primarily C.L.R. James, Toni Morrison, Aimé Césaire and Édouard Glissant. These figures show that the Black Atlantic author must persist in tenaciously writing through and within the violence that defines their experiences, revealing the necessity of such literature and the importance of producing such a literary practice. This essay poses that there is no place for Black Atlantic authorship if the author is not grappling, writing, and “living with,” as Toni Morrison would suggest, the unspeakable violence and absolute terrors of experience—scenes of horror must be (re)made through cultural production or there can be no poesis. This process of transformation amid (dis)location is grounded in the Black Atlantic experience of terror and diaspora, about which Gilroy writes, concluding his final chapter with an analysis of the Jewish diasporic experience. Because this essay engages a Jewish poet’s provocation in order to think the Black Atlantic, it is crucial to interrogate both the significance of this invocation and Gilroy’s assessment of the intimate interconnection and solidarity between the Black and Jewish experiences. 
Thinking with Glissant
Full text linkIn Spring 2022, the Theory Center Reading Group at Indiana University- Bloomington was devoted to the work of Martinican writer and thinker Édouard Glissant. We focused on his Poetics of Relation (Poétique de la Relation 1990, English tr. 1997), while also engaging with the recently translatedTreatise on the Whole-World (Traité du Tout-Monde, 1996, English tr. 2020). An award-winning fiction and poetry writer, Glissant (1928-2011) is arguably the most influential Caribbean thinker of the 20th century, who over the course of his career developed a unique aesthetic and philosophical lexicon that has shaped the language and perspectives of successive generations of theorists in poststructuralism, postcolonialism, and globalization. His works cover virtually all genres and forms, from lyrical poetry to scholarly studies, from historical and experimental fiction to philosophical essays and political manifestos on topics as enduring and as urgent as slavery, racism, (neo)colonialism, creolization, and the “chaos-world.” Concepts such as opacity, Relation, “archipelagic” and “trembling” thinking, rhizomatic identity, and the “Whole-World” generated conversations with thinkers like Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Derek Walcott, Abdelkebir Khatibi, Achille Mbembe and others. Moreover, Glissant and his late idea of the “entour” have also influenced a younger generation of scholars in environmental humanities, intermediality and visual arts, and alter-globalization. In 2020, the Glissant Translation Project started publishing Glissant’s works in English in a comprehensive manner, attesting to the growing interest in his work far beyond the confines of his native Antilles and a Francophone audience to readers across the globe
Raymond Aron and the \u27Sense of Compromise\u27 in Democracy
Full text linkThis article seeks to explore the relevance of compromise in Raymond Aron’s essays. The concept of compromise has never been subjected to critical scrutiny in his works. The paper offers a new interpretation of R. Aron’s democratic theory by arguing that “the sense of compromise”, mainly set out in Democracy and Totalitarianism, is a foundational and pivotal concept to highlight the specifics of his liberal thought and his understanding of democratic pluralism.It aims to provide a critical analysis, presenting a focused exploration of three types of compromise, broken down into three areas (the political-pluralist compromise; the economic compromise; the foreign policy compromise). In each of these cases, key qualities and limitations of compromise solutions for deadlocked controversies are outlined.The article argues that, for R. Aron, economic compromise is the easiest to achieve.The paper further discusses possible criteria that can help to discriminate moral from immoral compromises. It concludes that “the sense of compromise” is inseparable from any serious attempt to think afresh R. Aron’s democratic theory
Glissant and the Politics of Coordination
Full text linkThis is an ironic moment for Edouard Glissant’s growing community of readers. So many are discovering Glissant’s work for the first time, myself included, in part because a fervent commitment to a politics of recognition now dominates in many corners of the humanities. This is ironic largely because while the choice to engage with Glissant might be motivated by an all too generalized logic of recognition, to read Glissant is to learn about how the basic premises underpinning this logic are deeply misguided. The politics of recognition, as a term of art, after all, is built on the conceptual planks made available by the standardizing impulses of the nation-state form and capitalism combined. Glissant, on the other hand, is nothing if not a theorist calling fervently for a path forward that does not depend on the complicities found in the conceptual imperialism inherent to the bureaucratic standardizing practices that bolster both the nation-state and contemporary capitalism. Glissant calls instead for an approach that offers the philosophical building blocks for a politics of coordination, which is described in Patchell Markell’s book, Bound by Recognition (2003) as a politics of acknowledgement. This politics entails forgingan alternative approach to the self and other, to identity and place, and to social orders in general than what the politics of recognition espouses
Ontological Magma: Between Difference and Relation
Full text linkÉdouard Glissant undertakes a radical rethinking of ontology. The relations of creolization have key political and cultural consequences: they destabilize the Eurocentric foundations of knowledge; they affirm hybridity; they dislocate the colonial systems of power. Yet they also have another, perhaps even more consequential ambition. As Glissant says in Poetics of Relation, creolization contains an “attempt to get at Being.” Relation operates at the ontological level as a process of creation of a different constitution of being. Relation, which names the “new and original dimension allowing each person to be there and elsewhere,” the diffracted “totalité-monde,” the event by which “[t]he elementary reconstitutes itself absolutely,” brings forth an ontological autopoeisis and reframing of the world
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Full text linkContributor biographies for special issue Thinking with Glissan
Merleau-Ponty and Derrida on Husserl’s Origin of Geometry
Full text linkAbstract: A number of claims made by Derrida concerning Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of Husserl will be carefully considered and evaluated here. First, Derrida’s claim that Merleau-Ponty’s mis-interprets Husserl’s letter to Lévy-Bruhl will be challenged. Secondly, Derrida’s claim that his criticism of Husserl’s phenomenology can be applied just as well to Merleau-Ponty’s will be challenged. Thirdly, it is a careful consideration of textual evidence that will be used to support these challenges. Finally, Merleau-Ponty’s late lectures will take us back to the Lévy-Bruhl letter and finally to Merleau-Ponty’s own phenomenology of language, one that integrates perception and language and yet that still privileges not eidetic essences or linguistic expression but perception as its primary term.