An original reading of Blanchot's thought with far-reaching philosophical and literary implications.

This article is a response to Robert Bernasconi’s critical philosophy of race. I start by speaking of the specific style in which life and philosophy are related in his work. I argue that he devises a political phenomenology which considers the lived experiences of racialization and inquires into their historical conditions, which have become “practico-inert” in facticity. Bernasconi’s thesis that the history of race is not determined by racial essentialism and his account of race as a border concept call for (...) an expansion of the notion of race that will better serve the cause of the global fight against racism. (shrink)

This essay proposes to read Jean-Luc Nancy’s references to creation ex nihilo as both an intervention in the French debate concerning eventness, and as a transformative rethinking of the status of phenomenality. Nancy’s position is roughly triangulated relative to key remarks from other thinkers and, above all, its distinctive components (temporality, negativity, spatiality) are elucidated through historical glosses. Articulating the overall architecture of this theory serves to illustrate the Heideggerian access to the event debate. It also deepens aspects only elliptically (...) alluded to in Nancy’s own writing. (shrink)

Eternal return is the paradox that accounts for the interplay between difference and repetition, a dynamic at the heart of Deleuze's philosophy, and Blanchot's approach to this paradox, even and especially through what it elides, further illuminates it. Deleuze draws on Blanchot's characterisations of difference, forgetting, and the unlivable to depict the ‘sense’ produced via eternal return, which, for Blanchot, is where repetition implicates or ‘carries’ pure difference. However, for Deleuze, difference and the unlivable are also developed by the living (...) repetition or ‘contraction’ of habit, which results in his distinctive characterization of ‘force’, ‘levity’, and sense in eternal return. (shrink)

Already in his earlier works Levinas proposes a distinct phenomenological project which takes into consideration the radicality of the other and otherness by questioning intentionality and the validity of intersubjectivity within intentional consciousness. His move “towards Heidegger and against Husserl” was due primarily to Heidegger’s Dasein analysis, understanding of Being and being-with. However, in his major work, Totality and Infinity, Levinas proposes a new perspective on reading intersubjective relations with the Other which strongly contrasts with the Heideggerian concept of intersubjectivity. (...) This paper addresses the question of the Other, intersubjectivity and ethics in the writings of Levinas and Heidegger respectively. It considers Levinas’s critique of intersubjectivity as provoked and developed by Heidegger’s analytic of Dasein, and concentrates on Levinas’s specific understanding of intentionality in his account of metaphysics, metaphysical desire and the Other. It also takes up the question of temporality as a necessary condition for intersubjective relation and explores its implication for the self and the Other in Levinas’s and Heidegger’s respective philosophies. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology, Volume 10, Edition 2, October 2010: 23-32. (shrink)

RÉSUMÉ Cet article analyse le problème de la souffrance dans l'œuvre de Lévinas à la lumière de la critique nietzschéenne de la compassion. Il s'agit dans un premier temps de montrer que, bien que la description que fait Lévinas de la souffrance éthique soit similaire à l'idée nietzschéenne de la souffrance tragique ou inutile, les premiers écrits de Lévinas se concentrent aussi sur les dangers politiques qui resultent de la conception nietzschéenne du corps et de sa vision tragique de la (...) souffrance. Dans un second temps, cet article se propose de montrer que la souffrance éthique telle que la décrit Lévinas ne correspond pas à la façon dont Nietzsche décrit la compassion comme étant une forme de nihilisme. Il soutient au contraire l'idée que la souffrance éthique chez Lévinas permet d'aller plus loin dans la conception qu'a Nietzsche de l'amitié et de la vie ABSTRACT This article analyses the problem of suffering in Lévinas's work in the light of Nietzsche's critic of compassion. It argues, in a first step, that although Lévinas's description of ethical suffering is similar to Nietzsche's description of suffering as tragic or useless, Lévinas's first writings also focus on the political dangers associated with Nietzsche's conception of the body and of a purely tragic conception of suffering. In a second step, this article shows that the question of ethical suffering, such as Lévinas describes it, does not match Nietzsche's conception of compassion as being a form of nihilism, but, on the contrary, allows for the radicalization of some of Nietzsche's views on friendship and of life. (shrink)

How to speak of the relation between psychoanalysis and deconstruction? Might the truth of the former be evinced by the very work of the latter, always already at work in the questioning of the subject in the former? Taking up the thought of Maurice Blanchot in confronting the truth of analysis (which Lacan links to myth), this paper aims to disclose this secret truth in its very default, (re)inscribing the fundamental myth of psychoanalysis not as that of Oedipus, but rather (...) that of Narcissus and Echo. In complicating the reflections of Lacan, Leclaire, and Legendre in contestation with themselves through the mirror of Blanchot’s writings, the absent and unspeakable truth of analysis is lured out by a linguistic, abyssal play of mirrors. Thus, perhaps, might the difference between deconstruction and psychoanalysis be seen as echoing or (re)doubling a difference internal to each itself. (shrink)