This paper explores the relationship of mourning and the gift in the work of Jacques Derrida. I argue that mourning is not a Derridean gift, but mourning does open us to the gift. Reading the works of Aristotle, Cicero, and Kierkegaard on friendship and love to the dead in the wake of Derrida’s Politics of Friendship makes this relation among mourning and the gift apparent for he presents mourning as the opening to a democracy to-come whose logic is the gift. (...) Through these accounts, I maintain that in preparing us for the gift, mourning the dead other can help us to relate better with the living other in ethical, political, and ontological terms. (shrink)

Abraham has played a prominent role in recent developments in phenomenology and, in particular, continental philosophy of religion. This paper examines the importance that the scene of Genesis 22 plays in both Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Marion’s contributions to continental philosophy of religion. Specifically, I argue that Derrida and Marion turn to this scene of the binding of Isaac in order to describe the way in which our ethical life is structured religiously around the theme of sacrifice. In this, sacrifice (...) brings an impetus to ethical life that includes a comportment to the other but also extends beyond the other to include the givenness of phenomena themselves. (shrink)

This is a phenomenological description of what is happening when we experience the death of another that interprets surviving or living on after such death by employing the term event. This term of art from phenomenology and hermeneutics is used to describe a disruptive and transformative experience of singularity. I maintain that the death of the other is an experience of an event because such death is unpredictable or without a horizon of expectation, excessive or without any principle of sufficient (...) reason, and transformative or a death of the world itself. (shrink)

Søren Kierkegaard used his literary, philosophical, and theological voice to reintroduce Christianity to Christendom. In this effort, he repeatedly uses the Apostle Paul's first letter to the church in Corinth. Though some have noted the importance of 1 Corinthians for Kierkegaard, they have not explained this importance nor this letter's role in Kierkegaard's corpus. This essay seeks to fill this gap in Kierkegaard scholarship by explaining the role this letter plays in Kierkegaard's Climacean authorship. Paul's battle with the Corinthian view (...) of wisdom and Kierkegaard's battle with Hegelian philosophy, which seeks to go beyond faith through speculative thinking, share similarities that engender both their works. In their battles with their respective foes, both develop a Christocentric epistemology that displaces the import of human understanding and cognitive content with the person Jesus who inverts their opponents' epistemic values by salvifically redefining wisdom and knowledge. This epistemology of a different kind is an offense, foolishness, and absurd to their opponents because it cannot be intellectually grasped by human understanding, but rather in and through the passion of faith, which places the individual in relation with Jesus. For both authors, this relation is the essential point for the Christian life. (shrink)

Since Heidegger, at least, the theme of the event has become a focal point of current debate in continental philosophy. While scholars recognize the important contributions that Jacques Derrida has made to this debate, the significance of his considerations of the death of the other for his conception of the event has not yet been fully appreciated. This essay focuses on Derrida’s efforts to develop the notion of the event in reference to the death of the other through his engagement (...) with Paul Celan in “Rams—Between Two Infinities, The Poem.” I argue that Derrida’s approach results in a three-fold contribution to the debate about the character of the event. Derrida turns to one of Celan’s poems in an effort to find the kind of speech that attests to the event in its singularity, and in this turn, he develops not only the structure of the event’s appearance in the death of the world when the other dies but also the ethical impetus that accompanies this event of the death of the other, namely a call for workless mourning. Through Derrida’s contribution, we learn that the concern for the event not only includes novel approaches to ontology but also attempts to weave together ontological, ethical, as well as existential concerns. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article meditates on the Christian command to love the neighbor as yourself by focusing on how both Jacques Derrida and Søren Kierkegaard have read this command. I argue that Derrida, failing in his faithfulness to Kierkegaard, makes a mistake when he includes this command in the Greek model of the politics of friendship in his Politics of Friendship. Such a mistake is illumined by Kierkegaard’s understanding of the neighbor in this command from Works of Love because this understanding helps (...) to develop Derrida’s vision of a democracy and politics that resists the hegemony of the masculine and remains open to the event of a non-hierarchical relation to the other. (shrink)