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Displaying: 1-11 of 11 documents


1. Philosophy Today: Volume > 59 > Issue: 3
Thomas Sheehan

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Emmanuel Faye’s Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy is so freighted with mistranslations, misinterpretations, the wrenching of sentences from their context, and perverse rewritings of Heidegger’s texts that it raises questions about (1) whether Faye intentionally rewrote and misinterpreted Heidegger or is simply a sloppy scholar; and (2) whether he is a competent reader of any philosophical texts, and especially Heidegger’s. Detailed evidence is provided of the countless errors, falsifications, and howlers that populate his books and lectures. However, the question of whether Faye is a fraud or simply incompetent is left to the reader’s judgment.

2. Philosophy Today: Volume > 59 > Issue: 3
Alain Badiou, C. J. Davies

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In this article, Badiou analyzes and rejects a classical model of politics based on state representation. He envisions a new model of politics without representation and claims that this new model is more closely tied to the ethical.

3. Philosophy Today: Volume > 59 > Issue: 3
Janar Mihkelsaar

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What is at stake in the antagonistic limits of society is the limit form of relation between dichotomous concepts. By determining this relation, Laclau and Mouffe’s “political articulation” and Agamben’s sovereign decision institute a particular type of order. In contrast to Laclau and Mouffe, however, Agamben aims to render the subversive interplay of binary concepts “inoperative.” What, I contend, is at issue in this disagreement is neither pessimism nor optimism, neither totalitarianism nor democracy, but rather the question of how to conceive social antagonisms. When, namely, the limit type of relation between negativity and positivity, life and law, shows itself as such, then the antagonistic relation reveals itself as “pure antagonism.” This is why Agamben deems it necessary to deactivate the empty form of relation which political articulation and sovereign decision express. Agamben’s inoperativity, however, does not found an undivided society, but rather proposes to rethink antagonisms as “the form-of-life.”

4. Philosophy Today: Volume > 59 > Issue: 3
Jennifer Rosato

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At the start of Totality and Infinity, Emmanuel Levinas announces his project as one that will respond to the challenge of moral skepticism. Meanwhile, in a section titled “Skepticism and Reason” near the end of Otherwise than Being, Levinas interprets the recurrence of skepticism within philosophical reflection as a positive sign of the saying that refuses to be absorbed in the said. Here, I discuss the relationship between these two discussions of skepticism, and argue that Levinas’s appeal to a variety of skepticism about language and reason is an important part of his answer to the moral skeptic. After first distinguishing between two challenges raised under the specter of moral skepticism at the start of Totality and Infinity, I demonstrate that Levinas answers both challenges, in part by appeal to the skepticism that he approves in “Skepticism and Reason.”

5. Philosophy Today: Volume > 59 > Issue: 3
Jack Marsh

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Levinas’s so-called ‘Eurocentric’ statements still remain a source of puzzlement. In this article, I reconstruct his own account of what it means to be disinterested, focusing on what I call (a) motivational purity, and (b) justified context transcendence. I then perform an immanent critique of his position. I demonstrate 1) if taken on its own terms, Levinas’s account of (a) is self-defeating; 2) the will and concept in fact show up in Levinas’s positive description of ethical selfhood, such that his account of (b) is ultimately question-begging. I conclude by drawing out the consequences these internal problems hold for both Levinas’s chauvinist statements and his overall philosophy.

6. Philosophy Today: Volume > 59 > Issue: 3
Tere Vadén

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Martin Heidegger and Slavoj Žižek represent the two major anti-liberal European revolutions of the twentieth century, the Nazi and the October revolutions. Both revolutions ended badly, but neither Heidegger nor Žižek retreats from the revolutionary position, simply because it is an indelible part of their philosophy, where the finitude of the world and human being necessitate a partisan truth. By reintroducing the concept of the subject, Žižek wants to present a correction that cures Heidegger’s politics. Unfortunately, the resurrection relies on a sleight of hand: the subject to be reintroduced tries to be at the same time ahistorical and leftist. Žižek finds in Heidegger’s reading of Anaximander signs of ahistorical subjectivity, but this interpretation is based on a misconstrual of Heidegger’s notion of alêtheia. On the other hand, by analysing Heidegger’s two famous passages mentioning the extermination camps, we find the factual blind-spots in Heidegger’s ontological gaze.

7. Philosophy Today: Volume > 59 > Issue: 3
Emile Bojesen

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This paper is an attempt to sketch out the conceptual possibility of what is given the name remuant existence. That is to say, a changeable, restless and fickle existence. The word remuant, no longer in common use in the English language, is an adjective. Its meaning offered here is used to designate what will be considered the qualifying attribute of existence, which is to make the point that existence is remuant existence. Existence is a common noun and thereby grammatically a universal but if it cannot exist without being remuant its nominal universality is of no significance. The universality of existence does not mean anything; only remuant existence has meaning. The articulation of this concept, and those which are concomitant with it, is primarily an untangling of the remuant from the critique of presence and of the subject offered by Jacques Derrida, whose influence remains visitant throughout.

8. Philosophy Today: Volume > 59 > Issue: 3
Jennifer Gaffney

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This article examines Jacques Derrida’s criticism of the significance Hannah Arendt attributes to her mother tongue in, “What Remains? The Language Remains.” I begin by developing Derrida’s claim in The Monolingualism of the Other that despite Arendt’s suggestion otherwise, the German language can and did go mad. I argue that his criticism, while powerful, overlooks the political concerns at work in Arendt’s commitment to her mother tongue. I turn to Arendt’s analysis of language in Eichmann in Jerusalem to show that by distinguishing Eichmann’s “empty talk” from the mother tongue, she suggests that our primary language is integral to political life insofar as it reminds us of our radical singularity and our responsibility to the world. With this, I maintain that Derrida’s decisive intervention in this discourse does not settle the question of the mother tongue; instead it raises new questions concerning the political significance of our relation to language.

book reviews

9. Philosophy Today: Volume > 59 > Issue: 3
Evelyn Burg

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10. Philosophy Today: Volume > 59 > Issue: 3
Oliver George Downing

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book discussion: bonnie honig, antigone, interrupted

11. Philosophy Today: Volume > 59 > Issue: 3
Keri Walsh, Vasuki Nesiah, Emily Wilson, Stefani Engelstein, Olga Taxidou

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