108 research outputs found
David Farrell Krell, Intimations of Mortality. Time, Truth, and Finitude in Heidegger's Thinking of Being
No full textLacoste Jean-Yves. David Farrell Krell, Intimations of Mortality. Time, Truth, and Finitude in Heidegger's Thinking of Being. In: Revue Philosophique de Louvain. Quatrième série, tome 85, n°68, 1987. pp. 555-557
David Farrell Krell, Intimations of Mortality. Time, Truth, and Finitude in Heidegger's Thinking of Being
No full textLacoste Jean-Yves. David Farrell Krell, Intimations of Mortality. Time, Truth, and Finitude in Heidegger's Thinking of Being. In: Revue Philosophique de Louvain. Quatrième série, tome 85, n°68, 1987. pp. 555-557
Postponements
No full textNietzsche's allusions to women were once taken as evidence of his unmitigated misogyny. However, drawing on notes and sketches for a drama on the intertwined themes of woman, sensual love, and tragic death in Nietzsche's notebooks, David Farrell Krell reveals that Nietzsche's views on women were quite complex and that he wrestled with the meaning of woman throughout his philosophical career. Taking as his point of departure Jacques Derrida's deconstructive reassessment of Nietzsche's styles in Derrida's recent book Spurs, Krell traces the philosopher's deferred efforts to come to terms with the idea of woman. Chapter One focuses on the poem "The Plaint of Ariadne" and shows the vital role played by this mythic figure in Nietzsche's Dionysian philosophy. Subsequent chapters introduce the variant female personifications of Ariadne as they emerged in notes for the unwritten play: Corinna, the principal female character in a proposed drama about Empedocles; Pana, the object of Zarathustra's love; and Galina, a shadowy persona connected with the later sketches of a scenario for Zarathustra's death. Krell concludes that in Nietzsche's writings there was no stable pattern or final resolution for the confrontation of woman with sensuality and death-only indefinite postponement. Dramatic images of women in five graphic works by Edvard Munch enhance this insight- ful study. An appendix includes the relevant German texts
Of Memory, Reminiscence, and Writing
No full textMemory, reminiscence, and writing have been a central issue throughout the history of Western philosophy. Socrates' wax tablet of the soul, Aristotle's signet ring impressing memories in the mind, Descartes' ceraceous pineal gland, Hobbes' and Locke's tabula rasa, Freud's "mystic writing pad" of the psyche, and the contemporary neurophysiologist's computer storage depot—all are variations on the theme of how we remember. Identifying typography, iconography, and engrammatology as the basic characteristics of these models, in Part One David Farrell Krell traces the history of memory from Plato to the present. Turning in Part Two to the deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence by Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida, Krell finds that the traditional models of memory and reminiscence, which promised to recollect and restore the past to full presence, have broken down. Emerging from their writings, he concludes, is a new and more modest appreciation of memory as being always on the verge of a never present past. Readers in philosophy, cognitive psychology, and literary theory will be challenged by this provocative book
On the ethics of (object) things
No full textThis paper attempts to answer the question why things matter to us, i.e. why things are, as things, morally significant. It argues that one possible answer would be that things are morally significant because they embody values and interests which enrol us into particular programmes of action, as argued by Winner and actor network theorists. It suggests that this might be a good and important provisional answer but that we need to move beyond such an anthropocentric view of the ethics of things. We need to ask why things are morally significant as such. It then proceeds to outline a decentred ethics of things using the work of Heidegger to argue that things are significant because they 'world'. From this analysis and the work of Levinas it proceeds to present some suggestive outlines of what a decentred ethics of things might contai
Derrida and economics : the economics of depression
No full textDerrida and Economics analyses two essays of Jacques Derrida on the
Public and Democracy, alongside other essays reflecting these
political works. However, Derrida's political thought will be taken
seriously by emphasising Economics before Politics. Economics will be
viewed as a detour, a detour inflecting every attempt to present a
meaningful political position or stable political realm. For Derrida,
economics has the force of an oblique ruse.
Derrida ADd BconoDdcs aligns Derrida's view of economics with the
Eighteenth Century realisation that a stable SOciety, analogous to
the Antique ideal of the Polis, is neither a common goal nor a proper
object for Political philosophy. Here, Classical economics emerges as
an oblique attempt to construct the conditions for the possibility of
a political body through economic relations. This epistemological 'en
passant' is familiar, in Britain, as Adam Smith's' Invisible Hand'.
For Derrida, the equi valent Continental ruse is distinguished by a
faith in 'dialectical idealisation'; a process bent upon securing an
idealised po 11 tical space, but unable to limit its more speculati ve
drifts.
If Classical economics represents an attempt to construct the
possibility of the Body Politic, Derrida's political essays
deconstruct this possibility. His emphasiS upon the 'possible'
highlights the effects of risk and competition in an economy that
could never comfortably be identified wi th a stable Polt tical realm.
For Derrida, economics is not simply an attempt to secure or rewrite
more direct Political discourses. As he argues, its every detour is
haunted by the possibility of speculative failure. Derrida argues an
enthusiasm for economics can also imply a preoccupation with the
finitude of the Body Politic. This observation allows him to comment
upon the valorisation of death or redundancy in certain poli tical
discourses; i. e. those analyses that, in the throes of Depression,
remain devoted to the idea of redundancy as though to the object of a
renewed political will
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