Philosophy Today

This response to Falguni Sheth’s and Ann Murphy’s readings of my book, Contesting the Politics of Genocidal Rape: Affirming the Dignity of the Vulnerable Body, pursues the questions they raise regarding the domestic implications of establishing rape as a crime against humanity, the problematic distinction between genocide and ethnic cleansing, the politics of autonomy, the trafficking in shame, the relationship between violence and vulnerability, and the possibility of an ethics of vulnerability, by focusing on the disruptions created by ICTY Kunarac case. These disruptions blur the distinction between wartime and peacetime rape, challenge the difference between genocide and ethnic cleansing, expose the norms of patriarchal privilege embedded in ontologies of autonomy and invulnerability, reveal the relationship between an ontology and ethics of vulnerability and show how shame, as Pharmakon, can transform the shocked conscience of humanity invoked in contemporary human rights documents into political action.

The image of home has a central place in the thought of both Heidegger and Hegel. In Hegel, being at home (Beisichselbstsein) is central to Hegel’s reformulation of Kantian freedom. The notion of home and dwelling is also a central notion in Heidegger’s thought, especially his later thought. This paper examines their respective uses of the term and argues that the different ways they conceive the problem of home or dwelling reveals their different conceptions of modernity.

Heidegger’s discussions of beauty in the 1930s and ’40s arguably have more to do with a confrontation with Hegel than with a revisiting of the question of how best to analyse our experience of the beautiful. Beauty, for Heidegger as for Hegel, takes its definition from truth. At issue is a forcible rewriting of the harmony of the faculties to which Kant appeals in his defence of pure aesthetic judgements. The highest truth, and the truth of beauty, lies in a proper understanding of harmony, whether as the comprehensive reconciliation of the absolute Idea or as the non-closure in which truth as unconcealment remains contested by concealment. While neither Hegel nor Heidegger abides by the subjectivism of Kant’s aesthetics, insisting instead that beauty is more than a mere feeling, Hegel’s beauty as reconciliation and Heidegger’s beauty as strife both attest to the ongoing sway of Kant’s harmony of the faculties.

This essay is a renewal of Hölderlin’s poetic question as raised again philosophically by Heidegger, and is an attempt to frame the issue anew bringing Hegel into the conversation. At stake, first, is the way in which poetry and philosophy respectively—or perhaps in conjunction—are able to address the chief question of the time as a question of “truth.” What is it that poetry and the poet properly and uniquely do in relation to their time? Does the poet think, and how does she think poetically in language? And, crucially, how does poetic thinking differ from philosophical thinking? But at stake is also, second, the way in which philosophy can—and should—itself speak of poetry. Significantly, both Heidegger and Hegel propose a thoroughly new way of addressing the question of poetry in philosophy.

The purpose of this essay is to look at the ethical concerns and sensibilities that emerge out of Hegel and Heidegger’s respective interpretations of Antigone. Curiously, both of them turn to this ancient Greek tragedy in order to lay out the foundations of ethical life and the complexities of such a life in the present historical moment. The argument here in the end is that both Hegel and Heidegger find the lesson of the radical singularity defining ethical life to be a key to what one sees in Antigone. Both see this above all in the role of death in the tragedy. Both focus upon questions of mourning, burial, and of the dead body. My suggestion is that birth too needs to be understood as confronting us with the problem of our being in the singular, our being an idiom among other idioms.

In this paper, I contend that both Hegel’s and Heidegger’s philosophies can be regarded as attempts to overcome Cartesian subjectivism and to by-pass traditional oppositions between subjectivist and objectivist accounts of the ‘I.’ I explore Hegel’s notion of the ‘I,’ stressing how Hegel takes up Kant’s ‘I-think,’ freeing Kant’s philosophy from its subjectivism. Then, I submit that Heidegger, in the twentieth century, was similarly concerned with the overcoming of subjectivism, and that an analysis of his notion of mineness (Jemeinigkeit) and its development in the context of Heidegger’s thought can support this argument. Finally, I suggest that Hegel’s and Heidegger’s analyses can be used to elaborate an alternative and more flexible model of the ‘I,’ which avoids individualism, allows thinking of the formation of the self as a collective enterprise, and thus provides the conceptual resources to transform our identity without losing it.

What are the ontological commitments in Hegel and Heidegger’s discussion of the self? In this essay I approach these continental thinkers with a question from analytic philosophy, to see how they might respond. In different ways Hegel and Heidegger try to locate the question (and its goal of one final language with a definitive list of ontological commitments) within a prior discourse about the conditions of the possibility of any local ontological commitments. The priority they claim can be clarified by distinguishing conditions of possibility from conditions of actuality.

Topography or topology is a mode of philosophical thinking that combines elements of transcendental and hermeneutic approaches. It is anti-reductionist and relationalist in its ontology, and draws heavily, if sometimes indirectly, on ideas of situation, locality, and place. Such a topography or topology is present in Heidegger and, though less explicitly, in Hegel. It is also evident in many other recent and contemporary post-Kantian thinkers in addition to Kant himself. A key idea within such a topography or topology is that of triangulation—an idea that appears explicitly in the work of Donald Davidson. Triangulation captures the idea of the topographical domain as constituted through the mutual relatedness of the elements within it, and as only to be understood through the mapping out of such relatedness—in the case of the topographical domain that is the world, through the relatedness of self, other, and thing.

In this response to Andrew Benjamin, I examine the manner in which Working With Walter Benjamin interweaves destruction and inauguration to account for the ‘othering’ of the social order. The question of where to locate the normative index of a radically altered social and political world is particularly at issue. While Professor Benjamin argues that the ontological fabric of human relationality bears a ‘counter-measure’ to State sovereignty and capitalism, I insist on the power of concrete historical struggles against oppression to prefigure and orient a transformed world.

This paper responds to Andrew Benjamin’s recent text on Walter Benjamin by interrogating both philosophers’ conceptualizations of violence. Walter Benjamin remains one of the twentieth century’s most prescient thinkers of violence and analyses of his work, I argue, must reckon with this aspect of his work in order to ground the possibilities his texts hold for the contemporary world.

In this essay, I comment on Andrew Benjamin’s recent book, Working with Walter Benjamin. I claim that in this book, Professor Benjamin has done a great deal to illuminate certain complicated aspects of Walter Benjamin’s philosophy. In particular, I focus on his distinction between theology and religion, his treatment of divine violence and the ways that it differs from any human actions, and the nature of what Professor Benjamin calls counter-measures, that is measures which not only challenge but actually unmake certain aspects of our contemporary sense of reality and temporality.

The aim of this response is twofold. It is to reinforce the argument that the concept of life is central to Walter Benjamin; secondly, it is to clarify some of the elements involved in thinking philosophically about the political.