Introduction: Talking 'bout my generation -- Part I: Looking for difference -- Levinas, multiculturalism, and us -- In respectful contempt : Heidegger, appropriation, facticity -- Whistling in the dark : two approaches to anxiety -- Part II: After Levinas -- The price of being dispossessed : Levinas' God and Freud's trauma -- The mortality of the transcendent : Levinas and evil -- Is ethics fundamental? : questioning Levinas on irresponsibility -- Part III: After Heidegger -- Intransitive facticity : a question (...) to Heidegger -- Demons and the demonic : Kierkegaard and Heidegger on anxiety and sexual difference -- Dissensus communis : how to keep silent "after" Lyotard -- Conclusion: In search of visibility. (shrink)

Rudi Visker's book is not only a lucid and elegant survey of Foucault's corpus, from his early work on madness to the History of Sexuality, but also a major intervention in this debate.

My title echoes Levinas' 1951 “Is ontology fundamental?” – a seminal piece that paved the way for his justly famous Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being. I suggest that the characteristically enthusiastic, uncritical reception of these works may not be due primarily to their originality and sheer intellectual brilliance, but rather to something in Levinas' position that deeply resonates with the spirit of our times and our preoccupation with the fate of “the Other.” My claim, however, is that accepting (...) a Levinassian ethics, in which the Other has priority over the self, comes at too high a price, for it implies definitions of otherness and selfhood that fail to address precisely the problems that prompted preoccupation with otherness in the first place. I suggest that our struggles with racism, sexism, cultural bias point to frictions in (inter-)subjectivity that are inappropriately ethicized when treated, ala Levinas, simply as examples of an unwillingness to open up to the Other. In Levinas' universe, it is impossible not to hear the Other's appeal, but I argue that this view ignores the existence of a dimension of selfhood that cannot be absorbed into intersubjectivity. A metaphysical loneliness is thus implied here that our age seems unwilling to bear, preferring to cover it up with an ethics that makes us always responsible – that is, in response, connected to the Other. I develop this criticism by analyzing what I call a non-privative notion of irresponsibility whose roots are neither ethical nor ontological. (shrink)

Although the relation between philosophy and psychoanalysis has never been an easy one, the recent turn in contemporary philosophy toward the other seems to have bridged the gap that once separated the two. With notions like the other-in-the-self having become almost self-evident in recent philosophical parlour, it would indeed seem that there is no longer any deep disagreement between the psychoanalytic and the philosophical approach to the relation between the same and the other.And yet this article argues that such optimism (...) is misplaced. More often than not, what lies hidden behind the apparent hospitality with which philosophy welcomes psychoanalysis is but another, and more subtle form of resistance: instead of trying to reduce the other to the same, contemporary philosophy inverts the procedure and reduces the same to the other.Julia Kristeva’s The foreigner in ourselvesis analysed as a case in point and contrasted with a Freudian and Lacanian reading of the narcissism of minor differences, that points to quite different conclusions. (shrink)

I should like to thank Professor Rorty for the care that he took in replying to my question and for kindly remembering that we had a similar discussion before. Although I do not recall all the details of that exchange1, I remember leaving him as puzzled as I am now by his renewed impression that my resistance to part of his work has a Levinasian provenance. Hence I could only welcome the invitation by the editors of Ethical Perspectives to include (...) in this issue an English translation of a recent piece in which I tried to clarify my resistance to Levinas.Oddly enough, as will become clear in the course of the following pages, at least part of my opposition to Levinas seems to be motivated by an attempt to do justice to what I consider to be Rorty’s major point in his Contingency, Irony and Solidarity: the idea that people are dependent on what he there aptly calls ‘final vocabularies’ — the set of words to which they have recourse when trying to justify their actions or their beliefs or even the meaning of their lives. Such vocabularies, I take it, were not meant to be ‘final’ in the sense that they could never change, but “in the sense that if doubt is cast on the worth of these words, their user has no non-circular argumentative recourse”.Hence Rorty’s idea that, as he puts it in the present paper, the West in approaching the non-West should “get rid of rationalistic rhetoric” and rather think of itself as “someone with an instructive story to tell.” The West, that is, should not give up what Rorty believes to be of prime importance in its own story , but merely detach from it that part which Rorty thinks it doesn’t need in order to remain in touch with that story and which can only cause embarrassment to those who find themselves in other stories.The story of the West is for Rorty but another final vocabulary — and thus, as they all are, a “product of time and chance” — but the realization of this contingency should not lead to the ironist’s conclusion that what is contingent is not worth living for. Since Rorty thinks that contingency does not exclude commitment, he finds himself at odds both with the ironist’s despair that there is nothing which is not contingent, and with the ‘metaphysician’s’ hope that we could still get in touch with something ‘bigger than us’. (shrink)

Whereas Arendt's work has been traditionally received, both by its critics and its admirers, as of one piece, this article uses her proposals for some sort of `organic representation' in On Revolution as a lever to break open that unity and show that it comprises two lines of thought that as such contradict one another. On the one hand her misgivings about representation betray a political version of the metaphysics of presence Derrida has taught us to deconstruct. On the other (...) hand her concept of political freedom and of the role of the public realm goes against the very presuppositions of that metaphysics. That this tension goes unnoticed is largely due to the weight Arendt attached to the theme of participation. By shifting that weight to some of the less prominent themes in her work, I try to give it a different relief, more apt to confront the difficult pluralism of our times. (shrink)

Confronted with the face of the Other, the subject according to Levinas loses all its titles. But by the same token it also reaches its truest and most proper core. Indeed, what properly constitutes a subject cannot be understood outside the horizon ofthat ('initial') dispossession. A horizon which for Levinas ultimately refers to the Good which has chosen us before we could choose it: it is thanks to this prior unfreedom that we can at all be free. But what if (...) there would be more than one 'Good' and hence more than one 'dispossession'? Through an analysis of the concepts of 'face' and 'form', I will show why Levinas cannot raise that question and in what sense there is a price to be paid for that omission. (shrink)

Transcendence, Levinas tells us, is not a failed immanence. It presupposes an Exteriority that cannot be integrated into a totality. Such is its excellence: a surplus that rends Being's monism and allows for a pluralism that is not a "missed union". In the first sections of this article I show how the ethical relation with the Other is the only one that, for Levinas, satisfies the conditions he thus imposes on a metaphysical — i.e. transcendent — relation. I subsequently link (...) this 'return' to Plato's idea of a 'Good beyond Being' to the problem of Evil. If Evil is the refusal of the Good, we should, of course, first understand what it means that, as Levinas contends, the Good has chosen us before we could choose it. Are we to think of this 'election' as a command or as an invitation? Concretely: is the appeal of the Other something one cannot not hear, or does it only have the force to disturb those who "retain it"? In other words: should one think of Evil in terms of a choice for irresponsibility which is already situated in the horizon of a responsibility one cannot refuse; or should what in the former case is called Evil, not rather be thought of in terms of a deafness that is sui generis and not the privation of a hearing that ought to be there? Could there not be an irresponsibility that is not the refusal of responsibility, and that, instead of being situated within ethics, would rather complicate our way of conceiving the ethical relation? In the last section I oppose to Levinas's way of conceiving the relation between transcendence and immanence a different approach: the Good is inevitably incarnated and thus pluralized to a point where it becomes difficult to still present it as the Good. Incarnating the transcendent is not merely wrapping it in a context which leaves it unaltered. The incarnans is not just the envelope for the incarnatum. It is its "originary supplement" (Derrida). But then, inevitably, the relation between 'the' Good and 'Being' becomes anti-platonic: transcendence becomes mortal and fragile. It can bleed! It is in terms of such bleeding that we ought to look at some of the conflicts that trouble our societies — multiculturalism being one example amongst others. (shrink)

which deliberately imitates Rorty's style), I take issue with the plea for liberalism advocated in his Contingency, Irony and Solidarity by turning a number of his own arguments against him. In particular, I show how Rorty's tendency to think of the 'liberal ironist' as the 'hero' of that book rhetorically obfuscates that the trust of his own argument would rather seem to point to a 'non-ironic non-liberal' individual in the role of the hero. I suggest that what has prevented Rorty (...) from coming to such a conclusion himself, is not just his predilection for 'liberalism', but also a confusion between two notions of ethnocentrism - to which he pointed himself in later writings, without, however, drawing the necessary consequences. Key Words: aletheia • ethnocentrism • finitude • Heidegger • irony • Kierkegaard • liberalism • Rorty. (shrink)

Those who are familiar with the development of contemporary philosophy and in particular of phenomenology, may have frowned at the prospect of having to sit through a praise of visibility. Indeed, if there is any praise to be sung, it is not the visible but the invisible that should be its subject. The realm of the visible suffers from an intrinsic defect: it lacks the depth to resist the movement of appropriation implied in seeing, or more generally in perceiving. It (...) does not dispose of whatLevinas would call the infinity that could help it withstand the gaze that catches it and helps it contest the subject of that gaze its power. There is not enough of the event in it to “summon the subject outside of its autarky.” “The flat phenomenon and the subject to which nothing ever happens form a pair,” Rudolf Bernet writes in a paper with the telling title “Le phénomène et l’invisible (le regard).” It seems indeed left to the invisible to remediate the shortcomings of the eye that sees. Its task is to divest the subject who sees of a handicap it cannot compensate for on its own, — of a kind of Midas complex: whatever it encounters in the light that it throws on things, is fatally robbed of its alterity, leaving the seeing or perceiving subject alone in a solitude that is but the reverse side of the power by which it subjects whatever crosses its way. “The exteriority of light,” Levinas writes in this vein, “does not suffice for the liberation of the I that is its own prisoner.”. (shrink)

Those who are familiar with the development of contemporary philosophy and in particular of phenomenology, may have frowned at the prospect of having to sit through a praise of visibility. Indeed, if there is any praise to be sung, it is not the visible but the invisible that should be its subject. The realm of the visible suffers from an intrinsic defect: it lacks the depth to resist the movement of appropriation implied in seeing, or more generally in perceiving. It (...) does not dispose of whatLevinas would call the infinity that could help it withstand the gaze that catches it and helps it contest the subject of that gaze its power. There is not enough of the event in it to “summon the subject outside of its autarky.” “The flat phenomenon and the subject to which nothing ever happens form a pair,” Rudolf Bernet writes in a paper with the telling title “Le phénomène et l’invisible (le regard).” It seems indeed left to the invisible to remediate the shortcomings of the eye that sees. Its task is to divest the subject who sees of a handicap it cannot compensate for on its own, — of a kind of Midas complex: whatever it encounters in the light that it throws on things, is fatally robbed of its alterity, leaving the seeing or perceiving subject alone in a solitude that is but the reverse side of the power by which it subjects whatever crosses its way. “The exteriority of light,” Levinas writes in this vein, “does not suffice for the liberation of the I that is its own prisoner.”. (shrink)

In order to understand the place of death in our contemporary western societies, we need to understand what we mean by death. A number of proposals from philosophy, ordinary life and religion will be examined, focussing especially on the link between death and anxiety . Concrete examples are developped with a positive bias toward the customs and mores of ordinary people . Without taking the position of the religious believer, the religious approach to death is analysed and the question is (...) raised as to how one can understand its crisis. (shrink)

In the first two drafts of The Origin of the Work of Art Heidegger introduces a distinction between an art-work and an art-object, the latter no longer being art in the proper sense of the term. An artwork has, in Heidegger's understanding, a verbal meaning: a work 'works', it opens up a world of its own and sets off such a world against what he calls 'earth'. The temple, for example, is the locus of such a strife between earth and (...) world, and it stops being an artwork "when the God [who took it for abode] has fled". At that point, it turns into a mere object, at best a testimony to a bygone age. This analysis leads us to what we call the problem of transition: is the true locus of art not to be situated in the gap between what Heidegger calls artwork (true art) and art-object (the death of art)? An analysis of sections 16 and 47 of Being and Time reveals a similar take in Heidegger on transition — in both cases (the broken equipment, the corpse) he resorts to a 'no longer/not yet' that we compare with the 'still (at work)/already (an object)' in the case of art. In all three examples the moment of transition is a passage from one mode of being to another and as such precludes the possibility of a third position between these two poles. After having shown by way of an analysis of junk and the corpse, how one could make a case for such a 'third' whose status cannot be reduced to that of a mere in-between, we turn again to art and show how Levinas' and Blanchot's analyses of art rest on concepts (the 'il y a', the 'second night' etc.) that disengage art from the ontologising function it had in Heidegger. Art extracts things from the perspective of the world and allows us an oblique glimpse on the materiality of a being without beings. The artwork enframes this being and forces it into a presentation (Darstellung) that Heidegger all too readily dismissed as re-presentation. (shrink)

Starting from an ambiguity in the title of the recently published journal Economics and Philosophy, this article tries to comment on the task of a philosophy of economics from a more or less continental point of view (no claim to uniqueness being involved however).Seen in this light, the general philosophical relevance of such topics as the reading of economic texts, the choice between absolutism or relativism in the history of economic thought, the relation between ethics and economics, is open to (...) reassessment. Although all of these themes have been subject to heated debates, they hitherto seemed to belong to that most isolated of all domains — the one reflected upon by economic philosophy. We believe however that, as it stands, these themes reveal a problematics not unfamiliar to that of philosophy at large. This becomes clear by focusing the analysis on the discourse on primi-tiveness in Alfred Marshall's Principles of Economics (1890¹-1920⁸), a text the importance of which for the development of economic theory is undeniable. Indeed, the main concept brought to the fore by this analysis — the autoreferential structure of economics — raises questions that call for a metatheoretical treatment, — questions very similar to the ones raised in recent work of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, among others. Our main objective being to prepare the field for such a metaphilosophy of economics, only some rough indications are given. Foucault's remarks on co-constitution and Derrida's comments on original retardation could be used to counter a tendency to objectivism characteristic of the human sciences and of economics in particular, by reinscribing the problem of the authority of (human) science in its Utopian structure. (shrink)

Multiculturalism is not a recent phenomenon. From the moment a different world appears, a different culture in which the evidence of the cultural world in which I participate is put out of play, we are confronted with the problem of a split between the world as such and my world, which is only one among others, and we find ourselves compelled to seek a solution.One such solution would be to try to deny the split by restricting the meaning of `world' (...) to one's own world alone; another one would be to welcome the split as allowing us to understand that humanity must ultimately be sought beyond all particularism. But it is not by looking at such classical solutions which, though unsatisfactory, are still with us, that we will understand what might be new in this multiculturalism that so commands our attention.What is new is neither the problem posed by it nor the solutions we have found for it, but our fascination with the phenomenon. It is indeed only very recently that the word `multiculturalism' itself has begun to take over from that other key word which fascinated us for so many years: we no longer expect `postmodernism' to provide the answers to all our enigmas, but multiculturalism.This fascination is somewhat surprising. In order to understand it, we will have to try not to let it captivate us. And perhaps it has already captivated us as soon as we see in it only the name of a problem to which we must find a solution as soon as possible. Hence a series of counter-questions: What is it about multiculturalism that manages not only to fascinate us, but also to make us believe that our fascination merely points out the urgency of a problem that only concerns us to the extent that it concerns others? Whence the tendency to treat the multicultural as something that primarily deals with the existence — ethical or political — of the other, and hence as something that implicates us in an intrigue that interpellates us only in that dimension of our existence that we are content to call our ethical or political responsibility?Multiculturalism would put us `in response' to the other. It would thus be of concern to that part of our subjectivity in which we find ourselves linked to others. But it would not cut deeper than that. As if our fascination for the other would not engage us in another aspect of our being, as if our `non-intersubjective' subjectivity had nothing to do with it, as if our very existence were only implicated in the multicultural by the threads of an intersubjectivity which are only the warp of a subjectivity already there, and ultimately unaffected by it. Let us pause for a moment to consider what is seductive about this logic of the `as if', for it is in this logic that most ethical and political approaches to the multicultural seem to find their point of departure. (shrink)

Ondanks een hardnekkige mythe die aan de basis ligt van een al even hardnekkige leespraktijk, is de naam van de auteur geen garant voor de eenheid van het werk dat onder die naam verschijnt. Wat men misleidend een oeuvre noemt, is vaak door meer dan twee handen gemaakt en bestaat uit tegen elkaar ingaande denkbewegingen die men onrecht doet door er een proces van rijping en groeiend inzicht onder te willen schuiven. Foucaults ‘oeuvre’ vormt hierop geen uitzondering. Ook daarin zijn (...) breuken en die reiken zo diep dat ze dwars doorheen de naam van de auteur lopen. Zoals mijn titel aangeeft, beperk ik mij hier tot één van die breuken – die tussen de archeologische en de genealogische werken. Ik wil laten zien dat de twee posities die ‘Foucault’ daar inneemt onverzoenbaar zijn en zich situeren aan weerszijden van een van de talloze breuklijnen in het speelveld waarop de hedendaagse wijsbegeerte haar stukken verschuift. (shrink)

This paper situates Arendt's ideal of political participation at the cross-roads of two entirely opposite traditions of thought: the one, anti-representationist, the otherpleading for something stronger than mere representation. The first leads Arendt into playing off participation against representation in order to avoid the loss of presence that she fears the latter will entail. Whereas this line of thought seems to derive from what contemporary thought has deconstructed under the heading 'metaphysics of presence', Arendt's work at the same time shows (...) traits that unmistakeably belong to a tradition that is irreconcilable with the presuppositions of such a metaphysics. In fact, her view of freedom as an inner product of the public realm, forbids the latter to merely mirror, express or harmonize the antecedent freedoms of the private sphere. It should rather change these freedoms by transforming them and forcing them into a structure that has an independence of its own. This anti-expressivism seems to share its presuppositions with what we nowadays recognize as 'the symbolic' (in the sense the term has taken with Lévi-Strauss and others, like Claude Lefort). Not having that notion at her disposal, Arendt manages to balance these two contradictory legacies by the weight she puts on the ideal of participation, and she 'succeeds'in doing this so well that she may not have noticed how they are at work in her own texts. In the second part of the paper the author shifts that weight to a number of quasi-concepts that Arendt did not or could not take beyond the level of metaphor, like the daimon in The Human Condition or the short passage on masks in On Revolution. Connectingthese two to an ontological analysis of the difference between the private and the public, he then attempts to delineate a new conception of the public realm that, surprisingly, might salvage the meaning and sense of the separation between the social and the political Arendt was notoriously criticized for, even by those who were otherwise sympathetic to her ideas. In conclusion, the relevance of what the author calls 'the monumental recognition' of appearing in public is indicated by showing its potential as a response to some of the difficulties that have set contemporary multicultural societies ablaze. (shrink)

According to Richard Rorty , irony and solidarity are attitudes which work against rather than promote one another. From Rorty s perspective, irony is an inappropriate response to the discovery of our contingency. It prevents us from developing the ethnocentric attitude which Rorty advocates on the grounds that it allows for a sense of solidarity that is not in conflict with the ideal of negative freedom. As I will briefly indicate in the body of this article, the problem with this (...) proposal is that it leaves out of consideration a different type of irony which, instead of requiring external ethnocentric correction, could help us in correcting some of the biases in Rorty s self-avowed ethnocentrism. (shrink)

Interculturalism and multiculturalism seem to be finished. ‘Transculturalism’ is now the order of the day, an idea which, apart from referring to a break with the classical conception of culture, also indicates in which direction a solution should be sought: in the mutual intersection, penetration, interweaving and overlapping between the cultural forms and lifestyles cutting through the various national or ethnic cultures which are now seen to be less monolithic and less hermetic than they had appeared through multicultural spectacles. In (...) short, métissage is in, and we all find ourselves in a big melting pot where the political problem no longer consists in combining the different ingredients but in giving shape to the combination which has already come about de facto — and by ‘shape’, transculturalism is not simply referring to the syncretism of bringing old, already existing elements together, but rather means to establish something new.Multiculturalism, according to the champions of transculturalism, has never succeeded in doing this. Instead of leading to cultural contact, it produced a flourishing of cultural separatism, a kind of totalitarian particularism which carried ‘retribalization’ even into education: instead of grouping plants according to Linnaeus’ classification scheme, Mexican- American children now follow their ‘own’ rediscovered ethnobotanical principles.Multiculturalism, then, seems on the one hand to be outdated by facts which it cannot very well place within its own concept of culture . And, on the other hand, multiculturalism seems to have led to a fiasco when it has been able to impose itself politically: “Instead of plurality we find particularism; instead of citizenship, a dictatorship of minorities.” Authors such as Welsch in Germany, Finkielkraut in France, or Procee in the Netherlands are thus in search of a new concept of culture which would be able to curb multicultural violence.Since the plausibility of their ‘transcultural’ alternative seems to depend on the extent to which one is convinced by their critique of multiculturalism, I will begin by examining this critique , then go on to formulate another critique which concerns multiculturalism as well as transculturalism , and which is mainly centred on what I take to be a mistaken concept of alterity and difference which one finds in both conceptions and which links them together. (shrink)

In his final interview Foucault surprised many a reader by stating that the whole of his philosophical development had been influenced by his reading of Heidegger. Until now this Foucault /Heidegger relation has been left largely unexplored, and the few articles that discussed it, took first and foremost an interest in finding parallels between the works of these thinkers. Our title, however, indicates that a different, non-doxographical approach is at stake here : the move from Foucault to Heidegger for which (...) we argue is motivated by the aporia into which Foucault's project worked itself by aspiring to be not only a genealogy but also a critique. In our first section Foucault's peculiar type of framework relativism is shown to have made it impossible for him both to stick to his most interesting philosophical concept (“order”) and to derive a critique from it which would differ from an expression of his personal whims. It is suggested, however, that this aporia is due not to the concept of "order" itself, but to the type of critique Foucault wanted to derive from it. In the remainder of the article we look for a way to reinscribe this concept into the project of a critique of objectivism. We therefore turn to Heidegger. At first a parallel between alètheia and Foucaultian “truth” is sketched. But our interest evidently lies not in the parallel as such, but in the differences that become hightlighted by the attempt to find as strict a parallel as possible. Furthermore, our questioning does not restrict itself to differences between Foucault and Heidegger, but focuses on the fissures in the work of each of them (for this reason we refer to their works by putting their author's name in quotation marks, e. g. "Foucault", thereby suggesting that their texts involve various parallellograms of forces). Thus, to prepare for the critique of objectivism we were unable to find in “Foucault”, the article goes on to outline a deconstruction of “Heidegger”. We touch on Heidegger's anti-epistemologism, on his resistance to mimesis, and on the latent subject-phobia which seems to have crept into his writing after the “Turning”. It is suggested that these problems call for a new reading of “Heidegger”, and that such a reading would not only throw an unexpected light on authenticity, both in Being and Time and in the later Heidegger, but would also enable us to analyse technological “enframing” as the highest danger in a way which may be still Heideggerian, but which differs from the argument Heidegger himself offers in The Memorial Address and The Principle of Reason. This way of problematizing the “order” or technology twists us out of Foucault's aporia, by opening up a domain which is no longer that of a politics but of an ethics of truth. (shrink)