ABSTRACTThe remarkable philosophical present-day turn to Paul pays a lot of attention to the particular role played by the famous distinctions that structure Paul’s rhetoric such as the distinction between faith and law, life and death, and spirit and flesh. These distinctions lead to the question of whether Paul endorses a dualism or not. In this essay, the author investigates Badiou’s and Agamben’s readings of Paul and asks whether one cannot find a form of dialectics rather than dualism in these (...) readings. The concept of the exception seems to corroborate this suggestion. To examine whether this suggestion makes sense, the author first discusses Badiou’s focus on the antidialectics of death and resurrection as well as the dialectical remnants in Badiou’s reading of Paul. Subsequently, the author analyses Agamben’s dialectical account of the Pauline terms katargein, chrēsis and charis. (shrink)

In order to develop a hermeneutic-phenomenological analysis of testimony, this essay will first argue that testimony is “said in many ways” without being homonymous and that contemporary epistemological approaches to testimony are not capable of accounting for all paradigmatic forms of testimony. Second, it is argued, following and extending the work of Paul Ricoeur, that by emphasizing the sense of engagement or Bezogenheit as a basic characteristic of testimony, we may find another approach to testimony that offers a phenomenological alternative (...) to the observational model of witnessing and the accompanying conception of testimony as report. Third, this approach is further developed and analyzed in terms of the four elements of testimony, namely, subject matter, witness, act of testifying, and addressee. (shrink)

Ricoeur’s hermeneutics provides us with an important and original account of the meaning and the implications of the “ontological turn” that has taken place in hermeneutics since Heidegger’s work. By means of the pair ontologisation and hermeneutisation, which is borrowed from Jean Grondin, this paper examineshow Ricoeur rethinks the relation between being and language. Distancing itself from Nancy’s critique of Ricoeur’s hermeneutics, this paper first shows thatRicoeur’s hermeneutic ontology should not be understood as a “secondary” form of hermeneutics. Rather, it (...) provides us with a critical revision of Heidegger’s “primordial” hermeneutics that is centered on the notion of announcement. Secondly, it shows how, by this revision, Ricoeur does not only develop an alternative to Heidegger’s accounts of announcement and attestation, but also to Derrida’s account of equivocity. (shrink)

In Le Sens du monde, Nancy argues that “some value of scintillating phenomenality remains invincibly attached” to Badiou’s notion of the event. This paper examines to what extent Nancy’s comments still apply to Badiou’s phenomenology of the event developed in Logiques des mondes. In particular, although Badiou provides a thorough account of the event from the perspective of the consequences it enables, I show on the basis of Nancy’s suggestion that he tends to neglect an account of the event from (...) the perspective of its occurrence and its passage. (shrink)

This volume explores the issues at the center of many historical and contemporary reflections on community and sociality in Continental philosophy. The essays reflect on the thought of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Levinas, Arendt, Derrida, Badiou, Fanon, Baldwin, Nancy, Agamben and Laruelle. Continental Perspectives on Community brings the different approaches of these thinkers into conversation with each other. It discusses the possibility of how the concept of community can extend beyond the one and beyond any sense of unity and totality. Additionally, the (...) book shows how notion of community in plurality is at the heart of ethical and political reflections on alterity and race, of political philosophical reflections on the exception, and of ontological reflections on what it means for humans to be social. In this way, it offers an important contribution to the examination of how a community can be thought today. This book will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working on social, political, and cultural issues in Continental philosophy. (shrink)

_Phenomenological Perspectives on Plurality_ offers twelve essays that discuss how the question of plurality is thought in contemporary continental philosophy. Its essays investigate how this issue influences topics in ontology, aesthetics, and social and political philosophy.

"Hans-Georg Gadamer is one of the most important philosophers of the post-1945 era. His name has become all but synonymous with the philosophical study of hermeneutics, the field concerned with theories of understanding and interpretation and laid out in his landmark book, Truth and Method. Influential not only within continental philosophy, Gadamer's thought has also made significant contributors to related fields such as religion, literary theory and education. The Gadamerian Mind is a major survey of the fundamental aspects of Gadamer's (...) thought, with contributions from leading scholars of Gadamer and hermeneutics from around the world. Thirty-eight chapters are divided into six clear parts: Overviews Key Concepts Historical Influences Contemporary Encounters Beyond Philosophy Legacies and Questions. Although Gadamer's work addresses a remarkable range of topics, careful consideration is given throughout the volume to consistent concerns that orient his thought. Important in this respect is his relation to philosophers in the Western tradition, from Plato to Heidegger. An indispensable resource for anyone studying and researching Gadamer, hermeneutics and the history of twentieth-century philosophy, The Gadamerian Mind will also be of interest to those in related disciplines such as religion, literature, political theory and education"--. (shrink)

Investigating Subjectivity examines the importance of a phenomenological account of the subject for the nature and the status of phenomenology, for different themes from practical philosophy and in relation to issues from the philosophy of ...

Investigating Subjectivity examines the importance of a phenomenological account of the subject for the nature and the status of phenomenology, for different themes from practical philosophy and in relation to issues from the philosophy of mind.

Both Agamben and Nancy introduce the notions of ban and abandonment to understand the contemporary experience of the loss of tradition. Whereas Nancy reinterprets hermeneutics in light of this abandonment, Agamben tries to move beyond this account of abandonment. In this article, I examine how these two positions are related and to which conceptions of hermeneutics and tradition they give rise. First, I explore how the notion of abandonment provides an alternative to Gadamer’s account of hermeneutics, which focuses on the (...) belonging to tradition. Subsequently, I discuss which accounts of hermeneutics and tradition Nancy develops in his discussion of ban and abandonment. Finally, I discuss how Agamben tries to move beyond Nancy’s account of the ban by suggesting that the ban of tradition be broken along the lines of thought he finds in the work of Benjamin. I conclude by showing how this latter suggestion might give rise to a third figure of hermeneutics that discovers, beyond belonging to the past and being banned from the past, the ‘potentialization’ of the past. (shrink)

The last two volumes of Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer series are concerned with developing a theory of use. This article offers a critical assessment of the two concepts, use and form-of-life, that form the heart of this theory: how do these two notions offer a solution to the problem of bare life that forms the core of the Homo Sacer series? First, the author describes how the original problem of bare life is taken up in The Use of Bodies and (...) how the notion of use offers an important additional characteristic of bare life. Second, inspired by Foucault’s analysis of ancient Cynicism, the author discusses in which sense the type of ‘solution’ Agamben offers to the problem of bare life might be seen as an heir to ancient Cynicism and how this interpretation clarifies his connection of form-of-life and exile. Third, the author critically assesses the different usages of use that we can find in Agamben, by comparing how Franciscan usus, Pauline chrēsis and Platonic chrēsis are taken up in his analysis. Fourth, following Foucault, the author deepens the Platonic sense of use and its relation to taking care of justice. The article concludes with a critical assessment of Agamben’s reading of Plato’s myth of Er, in which the motifs of use, exile, and care are gathered. (shrink)

One of the key concepts of Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics is the notion of distanciation. In this article we show that Ricoeur introduces this notion as a correction of Heidegger’s focus on being-in and Gadamer’s emphasis on belonging . Ricoeur argues that distanciation does not lead to the uprooting of our belonging to a tradition. Rather, distanciation is an integral part of the dynamics that constitutes tradition. We discuss the different senses in which Ricoeur understands distanciation as a positive and productive (...) aspect of tradition. In particular, we discuss the ontological aspect of distanciation. In his discussion of both the long way of hermeneutics and the creative dimension of distanciation in fiction, Ricoeur argues that it is distanciation that opens up the possibility of understanding our own being-in-the-world. This involvement of distanciation in the disclosure and understanding of being allows us to show that distanciation determines what “kind” of being is understood: what is interpreted in hermeneutics and disclosed in poetics is never being as such, but “being-interpreted” and “being-as,” respectively. This leads us to a description of the difference between Ricoeur’s and Heidegger’s thought concerning the ontological dimension of their hermeneutics. (shrink)

In Remnants of Auschwitz, Agamben introduces a particular conception of bearing witness to overcome the problems contained in an account of language that depends on the voice or the letter. From his earlier work, it is clear that his critique of the voice and the letter is not only directed to ancient and medieval metaphysics, but also concerns Heidegger's account of the voice and Derrida's account of the letter and writing. Yet, if Agamben is correct in claiming that bearing witness (...) offers an alternative to Heidegger's voice and Derrida's letter, it is remarkable – a fact unnoticed in the available literature – that Agamben does not discuss how these conceptions of the voice and the letter are intrinsically connected to the problem of testimony for Heidegger as well as Derrida. To show how this lack of attention to bearing witness in Heidegger and Derrida affects Agamben's critique, this article proceeds as follows. First, we interpret Agamben's critique of Heidegger's conception of the voice and Derrida.. (shrink)

In both “Answering for Sense” and “Sharing Voices,” Jean-Luc Nancy offers an account of the poet as an interpreter of the gods. The voice of the poet in both Homer’s Iliad and Plato’s Ion is intrinsically and originally doubled. Although there is no divine voice outside of the poet’s voice, the divine voice speaks in the poet’s voice and the poetic voice gives a voice to that of the goddess or the muse. What exactly is at stake in this phenomenon (...) that we encounter here in the poet, namely that of gods making us speak? How is it related to the threshold of speech and communication that Nancy invokes in Adoration, when he also mentions the gods that make us speak? In this essay, I want to think with Nancy to see what is at stake in the figure of a voice on the threshold of speech and communication. I consider how the figure of the gods that make us speak is brought into play to elucidate the threshold of language and how this figure, as that which makes us speak, somehow offers the crossing of this threshold. To this end, I want to discuss three different figures or scenes in which the gods make us speak. In the first part of this article, I explore in more detail Nancy’s own account of the poet as interpreter of the divine voice. What does it mean for the poet to give a voice to the goddess and to desire this giving a voice? What is the demand or call to which the poet in giving a voice answers? To further the analysis of this divine interpreter, I want to compare this interpreter with two other ones which arise in two other basic scenes in which the gods make an interpreter speak. The first concerns the scene of the calling of the prophet Jeremiah in the book of the same name. The second concerns Saint Paul’s reflections on the glossolalist in the First Letter to the Corinthians. By exploring the differences between these three divine interpreters, I aim to further elucidate and assess the phenomenon of the interpreter and the double voice that characterizes Nancy’s poet. (shrink)

In this short introduction, the guest editors present the main themes of the special issue.

In this article, I will explore the archeology of the concept of attestation in Ricoeur’s work. In a brief discussion of his early reflections on Husserl’s concept of the ego, I show how the dialectic of trust and suspicion enters Ricoeur’s hermeneutic concerns. I argue that this dialectics remains present in his account of attestation. By a brief confrontation with Heidegger’s notion of attestation as developed in Being and Time, I show that the uniqueness of Ricoeur’s account of attestation is (...) to be found in this dialectic of trust and suspicion that he reinterprets in his later work in light of the concept of attestation. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe remarkable philosophical present-day turn to Paul pays a lot of attention to the particular role played by the famous distinctions that structure Paul’s rhetoric such as the distinction between faith and law, life and death, and spirit and flesh. These distinctions lead to the question of whether Paul endorses a dualism or not. In this essay, the author investigates Badiou’s and Agamben’s readings of Paul and asks whether one cannot find a form of dialectics rather than dualism in these (...) readings. The concept of the exception seems to corroborate this suggestion. To examine whether this suggestion makes sense, the author first discusses Badiou’s focus on the antidialectics of death and resurrection as well as the dialectical remnants in Badiou’s reading of Paul. Subsequently, the author analyses Agamben’s dialectical account of the Pauline terms katargein, chrēsis and charis. (shrink)

The theory of use with which Giorgio Agamben concludes his Homo Sacer-series is introduced as an alternative to the concept of care. This article critically examines the ontological status of use a...