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Displaying: 21-40 of 871 documents


“it must be done”: critical reflections on derrida’s theory and practice

21. Symposium: Volume > 27 > Issue: 1
Robert Briggs

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This article seeks to characterize deconstruction (and “theory” generally) as a practical activity in order to assess its potential effects in view of Marx’s 11th Thesis on Feuerbach. Taking its cue from Derrida’s reference to the “inner edge of philosophy” in Theory and Practice, the article juxtaposes Derrida’s ostensibly philosophical approach with the contentious, historiographic approach taken by Ian Hunter. Reflecting on the activity of deconstruction from the outer edge of philosophy, as it were, the discussion first reviews Derrida’s diagnosis of the philosophical impulse to monopolize authority over all theory and practice, then interprets this move via Hunter’s “empirical” attempt to situate and analyze different modes of philosophizing as concrete exercises in self-problematization. The discussion highlights the surprising convergences in Derrida’s and Hunter’s arguments before adopting this view from the outer edge of philosophy in order to reassess where and how deconstruction’s practical effects may be registered.

regular articles/articles variés

22. Symposium: Volume > 27 > Issue: 1
Deborah Achtenberg

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Shestov and Levinas share a preference for Jerusalem over Athens—specifically, for a movement of spirit other than knowledge that is not oriented toward the past, as knowledge is, but toward the new. They characterize that movement differently: Shestov opts for faith and the exercise of creative powers based on his interpretation of Adam and Eve eating of the tree of knowledge, while Levinas prefers a suspension in which we marvel at the created other, an idea, influenced by Husserl on suspension, which presages Levinas’s later notion of welcoming or being cored out by the absolute other.
23. Symposium: Volume > 27 > Issue: 1
Alex Obrigewitsch

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The question of communism as a real political possibility, if not the most necessary political possibility, seems entirely foreign or strange in our world today. Just as striking is the claim that communism is inextricably linked with literature. But both of these claims are made by the often-overlooked and as-yet untranslated French thinker and political activist Dionys Mascolo. By examining and explicating Mascolo’s strange (re)conception of communism, with the aid of the thought of his friend Maurice Blanchot concerning communication and friendship, this article will explore another communism, between politics and literature—a communism of the future, a communism of thought, which approaches human need in a manner radically different from the common conception of communism.
24. Symposium: Volume > 27 > Issue: 1
Annemarie Mol, Ada Jaarsma

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This interview, conducted over email, is an exchange between Annemarie Mol, a philosopher and Professor of Anthropology of the Body at the University of Amsterdam, and Ada Jaarsma, associate editor of Symposium. While the questions reflect Jaarsma’s interests in Mol’s account of “empirical philosophy” and its import for contemporary Continental philosophy, Mol’s responses raise questions, in turn, about how phrases like “Continental philosophy” betray geographical and canonical presumptions. Reflecting on the import of wonder, of reading, of intervening in philosophy’s set tropes, and of decentring the subject, Mol draws readers into an array of ways to reconsider the cultural repertoires and social realities by which philosophical activities take place.

25. Symposium: Volume > 27 > Issue: 1

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26. Symposium: Volume > 26 > Issue: 1/2
Lorraine Markotic

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27. Symposium: Volume > 26 > Issue: 1/2
Alain Beaulieu

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This article aims at understanding the North-American reception of Foucault’s Folie et déraison. After showing how American conceptions of social control facilitated the integration of Foucauldian thinking in North-American academia, I examine the ways by which the advocates of anti-psychiatry and the historians of psychiatry read Folie et déraison, which became emblematic for French Theory. I then present various Anglo-American critiques of Folie et déraison and defend the persistence of a “Foucauldian spirit” against the sci-entifization of psychiatry. All this allows for an assessment of the legacy of Folie et déraison in the North American debates.

28. Symposium: Volume > 26 > Issue: 1/2
Donald Ipperciel

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This article argues that philosophical hermeneutics, despite its onto-logical character, can inform higher education teaching in a meaningful way. After discussing theoretical aspects of philosophical her-meneutics, focus will turn to pre-understandings and historically effected consciousness. These concepts will lead to hermeneutics’s transformative nature, with the notion of openness serving as a com-mon thread. The review of three further concepts of philosophical hermeneutics—hermeneutical experience, authentic dialogue, and Bildung—will provide insight into openness as a vanishing point without being a culmination. Parallels to Mezirow’s method of trans-formative learning will be drawn and the concept of Bildung, central to philosophical hermeneutics, will be considered through the Hum-boldtian lens to better extract its practical implications, which lay beyond Gadamer’s theoretical focus. Finally, the last section will cement the applicative intent of the article by presenting concrete teaching practices that 􀏔low from philosophical hermeneutics.

29. Symposium: Volume > 26 > Issue: 1/2
Antonio Calcagno

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The phenomenologist Gerda Walther posits the possibility of a new social act, which she terms telepathy. It is marked by an intimate in-terpersonal union in which ego and alter ego become capable of sharing in the identical lived experience, though distant from one another. Here, there is no fusion or collective identi􀏔ication; rather, in-dividuals, though they live the experience and mind of the other, never lose or transcend their own individuation. Unlike the act of empathy, there is no analogical transfer. This article defends the possibility of a restricted sense telepathy. The author argues that four conditions must be ful􀏔illed for telepathy to occur: recognition of a social drive; a partially willed act of mind that results in the assump-tion of a certain stance, but it also comes upon us as an experience; constitution of subjects as persons marked by a “fundamental es-sence”; and I-splitting.

30. Symposium: Volume > 26 > Issue: 1/2
Léna Silberzahn

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A growing body of work approaches the current environmental devastation from the perspective of a “crisis of sensitivity”: our inability to care for the living around us is said to be a failure of perception and feeling. The article explores several versions of the narrative of modern insensitivity through a study of Günther Anders and Jane Bennett, highlighting the limitations of such approaches. I suggest the notion of a desensitization apparatus to specify and politicize the diagnosis of a “crisis of sensitivity”.

31. Symposium: Volume > 26 > Issue: 1/2
Benjamin Brewer

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This paper reconstructs Oskar Becker’s phenomenology of race, a project he called “paraontology.” For Becker, a fervent National So-cialist, paraontology provided a phenomenological account of “na-ture”—a realm of ahistorical essences encompassing both the “super-historical” truths of mathematics and metaphysics and the “sub-historical” forces of “blood and soil.” The impetus for this reconstruc-tion is the re-emergence of this term in contemporary Black studies, where it is used to problematize ontology’s usefulness for thinking black life. This paper asks what the possibility of such an iteration shows about Becker’s project and its investment in non-historical repetition, arguing it reveals a profound disavowal of the historical at the heart of Becker’s project rather than a phenomenological disclosure of the natural.

special section: african/a philosophy today

32. Symposium: Volume > 26 > Issue: 1/2
Bado Ndoye, Delia Popa, Jim Vernon

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33. Symposium: Volume > 26 > Issue: 1/2
Dalitso Ruwe

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While essential work in Africana philosophy that illuminates the perils of Western constructs of race and racism has been laid out, scholarship is yet to excavate genealogies of Africana critiques of Western slavery as distinct philosophical themes that can contribute to the understanding of slavery from the vantage of the subjugated. This article is a call for more theorizations of such genealogies.
34. Symposium: Volume > 26 > Issue: 1/2
Norman Ajari

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To be Black means to have ancestors whose humanity has been de-nied by slavery, colonialism, neo-colonialism, and segregation, as well as by many theories elaborated in order to justify and intensify these modes of domination. To be Black also means having to face the enduring legacies of these systems and theories, which predomi-nantly manifest through overexposure to violence and death. Today, premature death and habituation to loss remain constitutive fea-tures of Black experience. Dignity, often de􀏔ined as the inherent value of every single human being, has been a core concept in ethics since Kant, at least. But in both philosophy and modern politics, the claim of respect for the dignity of people has coexisted with deep antiblack-ness. However, apart from the Western understanding of dignity stands another tradition. The concept of dignity is pervasive in Black radicalism, Caribbean philosophy, and African thought since the 18th century. This article draws inspiration from the legacy of these thinkers to elaborate an ethics centred on the speci􀏔icities of racial-ized life.
35. Symposium: Volume > 26 > Issue: 1/2
Mohamed Amer Meziane

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This article sketches an archaeology of the racial divide between North Africa and “Black Africa” by examining how it belongs to the emergence of modern geography during the nineteenth century. It argues that the de-Africanization of North Africa is inseparable from the racial identi􀏔ication of “Africa proper”—to quote Hegel’s word—with a dehumanizing concept of Blackness. The second part of the article tries to move beyond archaeology in order to analyze counter-geographies of decolonization. It does so by focussing on the ways in which the continental Pan-Africanism of the Algerian revolution has deployed a practical criticism of the divide between North and Black Africa through Fanon.
36. Symposium: Volume > 26 > Issue: 1/2
Souleymane Bachir Diagne

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It is important to read afresh today the meaning of the Negritude movement without reducing it, as is often the case, to a counter-essentialism in response to the essentialism of the discourse of coloni-alism; to realize that Senghor, Césaire, and Damas were 􀏔irst and foremost global philosophers, that is, thinkers of the plural and decentred world that the Bandung conference of 1955 had promised. Thus, their different perspectives converge as the task of thinking a humanism for our times based on a non-imperial universal, a univer-sal of encounter and translation founded on equality. And, consequently, a socialism that is, in its different translations, a force of emancipation, but also of humanization and spiritualization of the earth. That task is still ours.
37. Symposium: Volume > 26 > Issue: 1/2
Vincent Lloyd

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What does “life” mean in the protest slogan “Black Lives Matter”? This article draws on a close reading of Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal to offer an answer to this question. In his poem, Césaire carefully examines the ways racial and colonial domination distort life. He identi􀏔ies various false accounts of life complicit in domination, and he points toward an alternative. The article com-pares Césaire’s alternative to accounts of life put forward by Gilles Deleuze and Michel Henry, suggesting that Césaire pushes his cri-tique in a similar direction, but goes further.
38. Symposium: Volume > 26 > Issue: 1/2
Thomas McGlone, Jr.

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In this article, I analyze a concept central to the work of the Beninese philosopher Paulin Jidenu Hountondji: pluralism. Hountondji’s pluralism consists of both a theoretical pluralism, which emphasizes the importance of plurality and debate within philosophy and science, and a politico-economic pluralism, which arises in opposition to the dominative tendencies of cultural nationalism and the capitalist world-system. I contend that at the heart of both Hountondji’s theoretical and politico-economic pluralism rests a concept of negative pluralism, a political principle derived from Hountondji’s immanent critique of his own historical conjuncture. I conclude that Hountondji’s negative pluralism offers a distinct and compelling ac-count of plurality as neither innately nor instrumentally ideal. Instead, Hountondji’s negative pluralism allows us to identify, through a critique of existing political structures, forms of political compul-sion and economic exploitation which function as obstacles to universal emancipation.

39. Symposium: Volume > 26 > Issue: 1/2

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rethinking phenomenology with edith stein

40. Symposium: Volume > 25 > Issue: 2
Antonio Calcagno

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