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This volume records a remarkable encounter in critical and
philosophical thinking: a meeting of two of the great pioneers in
contemporary thought, Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida, who are
also bound together by friendship and a complex relation to their
own pasts. More than a literary text with critical commentary, it
constitutes an event of central significance for contemporary
philosophical, literary, and political concerns.
The book consists of "The Instant of My Death, " a powerful short
prose piece by Blanchot, and an extended essay by Derrida that
reads it in the context of questions of literature and of bearing
witness. Blanchot's narrative concerns a moment when a young man is
brought before a firing squad during World War II and then suddenly
finds himself released from his near death. The incident, written
in the third person, is suggestively autobiographical--from the
title, several remarks in the text, and a letter Blanchot wrote
about a similar incident in his own life--but only insofar as it
raises questions for Blanchot about what such an experience might
mean. The accident of near death becomes, in the instant the man is
released, the accident of a life he no longer possesses. The text
raises the question of what it means to write about a
(non)experience one cannot claim as one's own, and as such is a
text of testimony or witness.
Derrida's reading of Blanchot links the problem of testimony to the
problem of the secret and to the notion of the instant. It thereby
provides the elements of a more expansive reassessment of
literature, testimony, and truth. In addressing the complex
relation between writing and history, Derrida also implicitly
reflects on questions concerning the relation between European
intellectuals and World War II.
This collection of essays and interviews, some previously
unpublished and almost all of which appear in English for the first
time, encompasses the political and ethical thinking of Jacques
Derrida over thirty years. Passionate, rigorous, beautifully
argued, wide-ranging, the texts shed an entirely new light on his
work and will be welcomed by scholars in many
disciplines--politics, philosophy, history, cultural studies,
literature, and a range of interdisciplinary programs.
Derrida's arguments vary in their responsiveness to given political
questions--sometimes they are vivid polemics on behalf of a
position or figure, sometimes they are reflective analyses of a
philosophical problem. They are united by the recurrent question of
political decision or responsibility and the insistence that the
apparent simplicity or programmatic character of political decision
is in fact a profound avoidance of the political. This volume
testifies to the possibility and the necessity of a philosophical
politics.
"Negotiations" assembles some of the most telling examples of the
intrinsic relationship, so often affirmed by Derrida in more
abstract philosophical terms, between deconstructive reading
practices and what is called the "political"--more precisely,
politics in an almost down-to-earth, pragmatic, and commonsense use
of the word. Among the many subjects covered in the book are: the
death penalty in the United States, the civil war in Algeria,
globalization and cosmopolitanism, the American Declaration of
Independence, Jean-Paul Sartre, the value of objectivity, politics
and friendship, and the relationship between deconstruction and
actuality.
This book explores several canonical works of philosophy,
psychoanalysis, and literature. The surprising juxtaposition of
Kant's moral philosophy, Freud's reflections on obsessional
neurosis, and Flaubert's peculiar late novel Bouvard et Pecuchet
forms the basis of a compelling argument linking each of these
central works around the problem of moral thought as it
fundamentally determines the modern subject in relation to time.
The book engages an area of emerging importance in contemporary
critical thought, the problem of ethics or "otherness" as a crucial
factor at play in speculative and literary works. The readings in
this book provide insight into the ways in which three fundamental
philosophical, psychoanalytic, and literary texts can be reread in
light of their confrontation with a seemingly inhuman force at the
heart of the foundation of the human subject.
Philosophical aesthetics has seen an amazing revival over the past
decade, as a radical questioning of the very grounds of Western
epistemology has revealed that some antinomies of aesthetic
experience-and in particular of the limits of the aesthetical-can
be viewed as a general, yet necessarily open model for human
understanding. In this revival, no text in the classical corpus of
Western philosophy has been more frequently discussed than the
complex paragraphs modestly inserted into Kant's Critique of
Judgment as sections 23-29: the Analytic of the Sublime.This book
is a rigorous explication de texte, a close reading of these
sections. First, Lyotard reconstitutes, following the letter of
Kant's analysis, the philosophical context of his critical writings
and of the European Enlightenment. Second, because the analytic of
the sublime reveals the inability of aesthetic experience to bridge
the separate realms of theoretical and practical reason, Lyotard
can connect his reconstitution of Kant's critical project with
today's debates about the very conditions-and limits-of
presentation in general.Lyotard enables us to see the sublime as a
model for reflexive thinking generally via his concept of the
"differend," which emphasizes the inevitability of conflicts and
incompatibilities between different notions and "phrases." The
Analytic of the Sublime, he points out, tries to argue that human
thought is always constituted through a similar incompatibility
between different intellectual and affective faculties. These
lessons thus highlight the analysis of a "differend of feeling" in
Kant's text, which is also the analysis of a "feeling of
differend," and connect this feeling with the transport that leads
all thought (critical thought included) to its limits.
Philosophical aesthetics has seen an amazing revival over the past
decade, as a radical questioning of the very grounds of Western
epistemology has revealed that some antinomies of aesthetic
experience-and in particular of the limits of the aesthetical-can
be viewed as a general, yet necessarily open model for human
understanding. In this revival, no text in the classical corpus of
Western philosophy has been more frequently discussed than the
complex paragraphs modestly inserted into Kant's Critique of
Judgment as sections 23-29: the Analytic of the Sublime. This book
is a rigorous explication de texte, a close reading of these
sections. First, Lyotard reconstitutes, following the letter of
Kant's analysis, the philosophical context of his critical writings
and of the European Enlightenment. Second, because the analytic of
the sublime reveals the inability of aesthetic experience to bridge
the separate realms of theoretical and practical reason, Lyotard
can connect his reconstitution of Kant's critical project with
today's debates about the very conditions-and limits-of
presentation in general. Lyotard enables us to see the sublime as a
model for reflexive thinking generally via his concept of the
"differend," which emphasizes the inevitability of conflicts and
incompatibilities between different notions and "phrases." The
Analytic of the Sublime, he points out, tries to argue that human
thought is always constituted through a similar incompatibility
between different intellectual and affective faculties. These
lessons thus highlight the analysis of a "differend of feeling" in
Kant's text, which is also the analysis of a "feeling of
differend," and connect this feeling with the transport that leads
all thought (critical thought included) to its limits.
For the Love of Psychoanalysis is a book about what exceeds or
resists calculation-in life and in death. Rottenberg examines what
emerges from the difference between psychoanalysis and philosophy.
Part I, "Freuderrida," announces a non-traditional Freud: a Freud
associated not with sexuality, repression, unconsciousness, and
symbolization, but with accidents and chance. Looking at accidents
both in and of Freud's writing, Rottenberg elaborates the
unexpected insights that both produce and disrupt our received
ideas of psychoanalytic theory. Whether this disruption is figured
as a foreign body, as traumatic temporality, as spatial
unlocatability, or as the death drive, it points to something that
is neither simply inside nor simply outside the psyche, neither
psychically nor materially determined. Whereas the close reading of
Freud leaves us open to the accidents of psychoanalytic writing,
Part II, "Freuderrida," addresses itself to what transports us back
and limits the openness of our horizon. Here the example par
excellence is the death penalty and the cruelty of its calculating
decision. If "Freuderrida" insists on the death penalty, if it
returns to it compulsively, it is not only because its calculating
drive is inseparable from the history of reason as philosophical
reason; it is also because the death penalty provides us with one
of the most spectacular and spectacularly obscene expressions of
Freud's death drive. Written with rigor, elegance, and wit, this
book will be essential reading for anyone interested in Freud,
Derrida, and the many critical debates to which their thought gives
rise.
For the past half century, Maurice Blanchot has been an
extraordinarily influential figure on the French literary and
cultural scene. He is arguably the key figure after Sartre in
exploring the relation between literature and philosophy.
This collection of 29 critical essays and reviews on art, politics,
literature, and philosophy documents the wide range of Blanchot's
interests, from the enigmatic paintings in the Lascaux caves to the
atomic era. Essays are devoted to works of fiction (Louis-Rene des
Forets, Pierre Klossowski, Roger Laporte, Marguerite Duras), to
autobiographies or testimonies (Michel Leiris, Robert Antelme,
Andre Gorz, Franz Kafka), or to authors who are more than ever
contemporary (Jean Paulhan, Albert Camus).
Several essays focus on questions of Judaism, as expressed in the
works of Edmond Jabes, Emmanuel Levinas, and Martin Buber. Among
the other topics covered are Andre Malraux's "imaginary museum,"
the Pleiade Encyclopedia project of Raymond Queneau, paperback
publishing, the work of Claude Levi-Strauss, Benjamin's "Task of
the Translator," Marx and communism, writings on the Holocaust, and
the difference between art and writing. The book concludes with an
eloquent invocation to friendship on the occasion of the death of
Georges Bataille.
In the first volume of his extraordinary analysis of the death
penalty, Jacques Derrida began a journey toward an ambitious end:
the first truly philosophical argument against the death penalty.
Exploring an impressive breadth of thought, he traced a deeply
entrenched logic throughout the whole of Western philosophy that
has justified the state's right to take a life. He also marked
literature as a crucial place where this logic has been most
effectively challenged. In this second and final volume, Derrida
builds on these analyses toward a definitive argument against
capital punishment. Of central importance in this second volume is
Kant's explicit justification of the death penalty in the
Metaphysics of Morals. Thoroughly deconstructing Kant's position
which holds the death penalty as exemplary of the eye-for-an-eye
Talionic law Derrida exposes numerous damning contradictions and
exceptions. Keeping the current death penalty in the United States
in view, he further explores the "anesthesial logic" he analyzed in
volume one, addressing the themes of cruelty and pain through texts
by Robespierre and Freud, reading Heidegger, and in a fascinating,
improvised final session the nineteenth-century Spanish Catholic
thinker Donoso Cortes. Ultimately, Derrida shows that the
rationality of the death penalty as represented by Kant involves an
imposition of knowledge and calculability on a fundamental
condition of non-knowledge that we don't otherwise know what or
when our deaths will be. In this way, the death penalty acts out a
phantasm of mastery over one's own death. Derrida's thoughts arrive
at a particular moment in history: when the death penalty in the
United States is the closest it has ever been to abolition, and yet
when the arguments on all sides are as confused as ever. His
powerful analysis will prove to be a paramount contribution to this
debate as well as a lasting entry in his celebrated oeuvre.
This book explores several canonical works of philosophy,
psychoanalysis, and literature. The surprising juxtaposition of
Kant's moral philosophy, Freud's reflections on obsessional
neurosis, and Flaubert's peculiar late novel Bouvard et Pecuchet
forms the basis of a compelling argument linking each of these
central works around the problem of moral thought as it
fundamentally determines the modern subject in relation to time.
The book engages an area of emerging importance in contemporary
critical thought, the problem of ethics or "otherness" as a crucial
factor at play in speculative and literary works. The readings in
this book provide insight into the ways in which three fundamental
philosophical, psychoanalytic, and literary texts can be reread in
light of their confrontation with a seemingly inhuman force at the
heart of the foundation of the human subject.
For the Love of Psychoanalysis is a book about what exceeds or
resists calculation-in life and in death. Rottenberg examines what
emerges from the difference between psychoanalysis and philosophy.
Part I, "Freuderrida," announces a non-traditional Freud: a Freud
associated not with sexuality, repression, unconsciousness, and
symbolization, but with accidents and chance. Looking at accidents
both in and of Freud's writing, Rottenberg elaborates the
unexpected insights that both produce and disrupt our received
ideas of psychoanalytic theory. Whether this disruption is figured
as a foreign body, as traumatic temporality, as spatial
unlocatability, or as the death drive, it points to something that
is neither simply inside nor simply outside the psyche, neither
psychically nor materially determined. Whereas the close reading of
Freud leaves us open to the accidents of psychoanalytic writing,
Part II, "Freuderrida," addresses itself to what transports us back
and limits the openness of our horizon. Here the example par
excellence is the death penalty and the cruelty of its calculating
decision. If "Freuderrida" insists on the death penalty, if it
returns to it compulsively, it is not only because its calculating
drive is inseparable from the history of reason as philosophical
reason; it is also because the death penalty provides us with one
of the most spectacular and spectacularly obscene expressions of
Freud's death drive. Written with rigor, elegance, and wit, this
book will be essential reading for anyone interested in Freud,
Derrida, and the many critical debates to which their thought gives
rise.
This collection of essays and interviews, some previously
unpublished and almost all of which appear in English for the first
time, encompasses the political and ethical thinking of Jacques
Derrida over thirty years. Passionate, rigorous, beautifully
argued, wide-ranging, the texts shed an entirely new light on his
work and will be welcomed by scholars in many
disciplines--politics, philosophy, history, cultural studies,
literature, and a range of interdisciplinary programs.
Derrida's arguments vary in their responsiveness to given political
questions--sometimes they are vivid polemics on behalf of a
position or figure, sometimes they are reflective analyses of a
philosophical problem. They are united by the recurrent question of
political decision or responsibility and the insistence that the
apparent simplicity or programmatic character of political decision
is in fact a profound avoidance of the political. This volume
testifies to the possibility and the necessity of a philosophical
politics.
"Negotiations" assembles some of the most telling examples of the
intrinsic relationship, so often affirmed by Derrida in more
abstract philosophical terms, between deconstructive reading
practices and what is called the "political"--more precisely,
politics in an almost down-to-earth, pragmatic, and commonsense use
of the word. Among the many subjects covered in the book are: the
death penalty in the United States, the civil war in Algeria,
globalization and cosmopolitanism, the American Declaration of
Independence, Jean-Paul Sartre, the value of objectivity, politics
and friendship, and the relationship between deconstruction and
actuality.
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