Volume 28, Issue 3, July 2020, Page 313-316.

The essay situates and dissects Derrida’s two catalytic interventions into Heidegger’s thought on time and history—the seminar Heidegger: The Question of Being & History and the essay Ousi...

25 years after the publication of Derrida’s Politics of Friendship (Politiques de l’amitié, 1994), this edited collection gathers 23 critical chapters that revisit this underappreciated text. Engaging closely with Derrida’s text, the contributors analyse, extend and critique the work. They reconsider the place this book occupies in Derrida’s political philosophy and its potential for contemporary politics, when the promises and perils of political friendship have reappeared.

The essay examines the articulation of the figure of the beast in Plato’s thought on the city and soul, in the Republic and other dialogues. The constitutive correspondence or homology of the city and soul comprises Platonic psycho-politics, a space defined by the thērion: monster and animal at once. The thērion operates within the tripartite division of the soul and the tripartite division of the city. Its various figurations, from wolf to hydra, seem to constrict this figure to the margins (...) of metaphor; the trope of this liquid metaphor however guides the Platonic psycho-political project. It is a project of a metamorphosis, an open transformation, undertaken in order not merely to define, but to effectuate justice in the city and soul. (shrink)

The essay thematises the question of care in conditions of total power – not merely _extra muros_, in the everyday life of the Third Reich, but in its most radical articulation, the concentration camp. Drawing inspiration from Todorov’s work, the essay engages with Levinas, Agamben, Derrida and Nancy, to investigate Heidegger’s determination of _Da-sein_’s horizon through a solitary confrontation with death. Drawing extensively on primary testimonies, the essay shows that when the enclosure of the camp became the _Da _of existence, (...) care assumed a radical significance as the link between the death of another and the death of oneself. In the face of an apparatus of total power and its attempt to individuate and isolate death, the sharing of death in the figure of care remained one’s most inalienable act of resistance and the last means to hold on to death as something that could be truly one’s own. (shrink)

Jan Patočka thought travels on the parallel rails of a-subjective phenomenology and the care of the soul. For the most part, their parallel supportive function remains unproblematic. However, in order to appreciate the significance of Patočka’s contribution to the history of philosophy and the stakes of its undertaking, the alignment of the rails must be tested: how can a phenomenology, which strives to dislocate the subject from its experiential privilege, attempt to bring the soul into both the onto-epistemic as well (...) as the ethico-political epicentre? By revising Platonism, Patočka wagers an ambitious, fragile answer, which opens nothing less than the space of freedom. (shrink)