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The Curiosity at Work in Deconstruction
Full text linkBeginning with Jacques Derrida’s Beast and the Sovereign, I identify two forms of curiosity: 1) scientific curiosity, which proceeds through objective dissection and 2) therapeutic curiosity, which proceeds through observational confinement. Through an analysis of Derrida’s treatment of both sorts of curiosity, I notice and develop a third, deconstructive form of curiosity. Through repeated turn to the work of Sarah Kofman, I characterize this third curiosity as, by turns, linguistic, animal, and critical. As linguistic, this curiosity is a penchant for wordplay and a keenness for the unsteady reservoirs of signification, resisting any clean dissection of meaning or the confinement of terms. As animal, it tracks a scent, regularly suspending its paw, as if to emphasize the meandering and precarious quality of knowledge. And as critical, it combats the illusions of pure revelation and instead draws attention to the conjuring trick, the systematic substitution of signs, undergirding it. Finally, I consider in what way Derrida’s resistance to philosophy may be read on the grounds not of a singular wonder but of multiple curiosities
Art, Mysticism, and the Other: Kristeva’s Adel and Teresa
Full text linkKristeva\u27s Teresa My Love concerns the life and thought of a 16th century Spanish mystic, written in the form of a novel. Yet the theme of another kind of foreigner, equally exotic but this time threatening, pops up unexpectedly and disappears several times during the course of the novel. At the very beginning of the story, the 21st century narrator, psychoanalyst Sylvia Leclerque, encounters a young woman in a headscarf, whom Kristeva describes as an IT engineer, who speaks out, explaining that "she and her God were one and that the veil was the immovable sign of this \u27union,\u27 which she wished to publicize in order to definitively \u27fix it\u27 in herself and in the eyes of others." In this paper I ask what difference Kristeva discerns between these two women, a distinction that apparently makes Teresa\u27s immanence simultaneously a transcendence, but transforms a Muslim woman in a headscarf immediately into an imagined suicide bomber. Despite the problematic aspects of this comparison, we can learn something from them about Kristeva\u27s ideas on mysticism and on art. Both mysticism and art are products of the death drive, but whereas the suicide bomber and the animal directly and purely pursue death (again, on Kristeva\u27s view) Teresa and Adel remain on its outer edge and merely play with mortality.
Levinas and the Anticolonial
Full text linkOver the last two decades, the various attempts to “radicalize” Levinas have resulted in two interesting and often separated debates: one the one hand, there is the debate regarding the relationship between Levinas and colonialism and racism, and on the other hand, there is the debate regarding the relationship between Levinas and Judaism. Whether scholars interested in issues of colonialism disregard Levinas\u27s Judaism or use his "subaltern" identity to challenge European hegemony, they do not take seriously the Jewish content of Levinas\u27s thought. In this essay, I challenge the prevailing postcolonial orinetation of the Levinas-colonialism conversation, approaching Levinas\u27s phenomenology from an anticolonial perspective. I will use Frantz Fanon’s dualistic understanding of the colonial world to evaluate the adequacy of Levinas’s phenomenology in describing the ontological structure of the colony and the historical experience of the colonized within it. Levinas’s incomplete understanding of the Holocaust as colonialism contributes to his failure to recognize the dividing line of colonial ontology, the zone of nonbeing, the non-human status of the colonized, and ultimately contributes to the insufficiency of his phenomenology to describe the colony. Because my purpose is not to reject Levinas’s thought in general but to encourage a new approach to his work, in the conclusion I will gesture toward the need for an anticolonial reading of Levinas’s project for Jewish education.
Créoliser Marx avec Ngugi Wa Thiong’o
Full text link En mettant en question l’utilisation par les colonisés de la langue des colonisateurs et en appelant au retour aux langues africaines, l’écrivain kényan Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o a produit sans doute la critique la plus radicale et la plus audacieuse qui soit, de la colonisation de l’esprit. Cet article le met en conversation avec Karl Marx dans l\u27esprit de la pensée de Jane Anna Gordon sur la créolisation de la théorie politique
Creolizing Political Institutions
Full text linkThis essay engages the contributions to the forum by Nathalie Etoke, Kevin Bruyneel, Michael Neocosmos, and Sonia Dayan-Herzbrun to consider what it means to creolize political identities, political memory, and political institutions
The Fifth Antinomy: A Reading of Torture for a Post-Kantian Moral Philosophy
Full text link"Where is it decreed that enlightenment must be free of emotion? To me, the opposite seems to be true. Enlightenment can properly fulfill its task only if it sets to work with passion." - Améry, At the Mind\u27s LimitsThis statement, which concludes the preface to the 1977 reissue of At the Mind’s Limits, conveys the philosophical ambition of the book: to advance the enlightenment project, while revising the way we understand this project. The idea, rejected here by Améry, that the enlightenment “must be free of emotion” owes most to its foremost proponent, Immanuel Kant. This paper picks up on this implicit allusion to Kant, and elaborates on Améry’s revision of the enlightenment by making the confrontation between them explicit.
Sketches Toward an Ontology of Non-Dwelling: Mara Salvatrucha 13, Radical Homelessness, and Postglobality
Full text linkIn 1988, the California state legislature passed the California Street Terrorism Enforcement and Prevention Act (STEP), which allowed courts to “enhance” the sentences of offenders who have been proven to "promote, further, or assist in any criminal conduct by gang members." It bundled together criminality, policing, and incarceration in ways that drew upon the fears of the black/latino Others that were imminent in panics surrounding the “crack epidemic” and inner-city crime. Jumping to April 2016, the Salvadoran government has passed strikingly similar legislation, which centers on reclassifying gang-associated crimes as terroristic; in essence under their new laws gang affiliation is a terrorist. This, too, has been enacted in the midst of panic about gang violence and low-level warfare between gangs and the Salvadoran state. The adoption of US-style anti-gang approaches by the Salvadoran government is not new. In 2003, the right-wing government passed mano dura [“iron fist”] policies that sought to address increases in gang associate crime with zero-tolerance, tough-on-crime measures. Law enforcement received expanded leeway to target and arrest gang members, especially those from Mara Salvatrucha 13 (MS-13) and Barrio 18. Despite the lack of sustained reductions in violent crime, the mano durapolicies have remained and will only be exacerbated by the new legislation.
The Hidden Source of Hermeneutics: The Art of Reading in Hugh of St. Victor
Full text linkIt might be surprising to find in a journal of contemporary philosophy a text that is mostly about Hugh of St. Victor (1096-1141). The hermeneutic question, however, did not begin only yesterday. While this question has its actual sources in Origen (concerning the meaning of Scripture) and Saint Augustine (the firmament of Scripture), it is in the Didascalicon or The Art of Reading by Hugh of St. Victor that it first finds its clearest formulation and its most methodical development. This “hidden source of hermeneutics” allows for a questioning of the foundations of the hermeneutics of the text from its outset (in weighing the short route versus the long route), and also for a return of hermeneutics, or better to turn it, to its primordial origin: a hermeneutics of the “world” or of “creation” [liber mundi], rather than of the “text” and of “Scripture” [liber Scripturae]. A “Catholic” hermeneutics of “the body and the voice” should, in my opinion, take the place of the “Protestant” hermeneutics of “the meaning of the text” (Ricœur) and the “Jewish” hermeneutics of the “body of the letter” (Levinas). This thesis, which is stated and developed in my book Crossing the Rubicon, has its roots and justification in this historical essay on Hugh of St. Victor.
Force Inside Identity: Self and Other in Améry’s “On the Necessity and Impossibility of Being a Jew”
Full text linkIn a statement too strong even to summarize his own views, Jean-Paul Sartre famously declares in “Existentialism is a Humanism” that “man is nothing other than what he makes of himself.” It is bad faith, according to him, to attribute what I am to my family, culture, condition, etc., because through awareness of what I am and have been, I can determine whether what I am will continue into the future. Human being, as a result, is nothing but what he or she has chosen or decided. In “On the Necessity and Impossibility of Being a Jew,” Jean Améry rejects that view.He explicitly rejects the idea that “I am what I am for myself and in myself, and nothing else.” In doing so, he is one of a group of Jewish thinkers, including Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida, who reject Sartre’s ideas about Jewish identity and identity more generally, ideas expressed particularly in Reflections on the Jewish Question but amplified by views expressed in “Existentialism is a Humanism” and Being and Nothingness.Those in the group go out of their way to express their gratitude to Sartre for writing on “the Jewish question” after the war--Sartre who wrote because he saw no mention of the 77,000 Jews in France who were deported and murdered by the Nazis.
Pain as Yardstick: Jean Améry
Full text linkOne of the best known and most widely accepted premises regarding the experience of pain and suffering is its singular, private nature. Pain’s violence isolates us from everything else, embedding us completely within our own suffering so that there is nothing else but pain: no world or objects, no relationship with other people, no past or anticipation of the future. An utter withdrawal. But pain’s isolating force is dual: it affects not only those who suffer, but also those who are not in pain. Thus, it is precisely in pain – the exemplary state in which we need others with us to offer their help and sympathy – that we find ourselves in solitude; and it is precisely in the state of pain that we leave others to suffer alone.