Sense in Competing Narratives of Secularization: Charles Taylor and Jean-Luc Nancy

In this article, using the recent work by Charles Taylor in A Secular Age as my point of departure, I will argue that Jean-Luc Nancy enables us to think past the competing binary of atheistic and religious experience and allows us to surpass the present narratives of secularism. In A Secular Age, Taylor himself seeks a middle ground between atheism and religion, arguing that it is possible to open ourselves to the cross-pressures of modern existence that find us caught between scientific atheism and a need for spiritual and religious guidance. Here, Taylor finds a way of picturing ourselves within a secular age, remaining faithful to scientific rationalism, but still open to religion and a sense of a higher good. However, as I shall demonstrate, in his thesis Taylor misrepresents the Continental philosophical tradition (particularly Nietzsche and post-structuralism) that has itself sought to understand these cross-pressures of existence. Taking this misrepresentation, and specifically his reductive and colloquial analysis of Nietzsche, Camus, and Derrida, as my point of departure, I provide an alternative manner of thinking through the work of these writers, one that leads to a detailed analysis of Jean-Luc Nancy and his project the deconstruction of Christianity. In this analysis I argue that Nancy provides a manner of thinking that remains open and allows an experience of freedom, without seeking to close that sense of openness with explanation, nor maintaining that sense of openness with a conception of the divine.     

The outside of phenomenology: Jean-Luc Nancy on world and sense1

In this essay, I examine Jean-Luc Nancy's notion of the sense of the world in relation to the phenomenological investigation of the life-world in Husserl and the worldhood of the world in Heidegger. My aim is to address the reasons why Nancy stresses the need for a different thinking that goes beyond the phenomenological gesture in order to approach the sense of the world. What is at stake in this other gesture is the overcoming of the way in which phenomenology privileges seeing as the mode of access to the phenomenon, which is but one sense among many and which, as one sense among many, fails to bring thought into relation with the plural- isation of sense. The second part of the essay interprets the pluralisation of both sense and world in terms of Nancy's turn to art, which by touching upon the limit of philosophy, turns the latter into the praxis of the exposition of sense. Pluralisation betokens Nancy's attempt to think the finitude of the world as that which spaces itself out into multiple, singular and shared.     

Phenomenological futures in dispute: Emmanuel Levinas,Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy

This discussion consists of five sections, beginning with a pair of citations marking up a politics of inclusion, and exclusion in philosophical discussion. The second section, focusing on the first part of this essay's title, ‘Phenomenological futures in dispute’, locates three inflections of the notion of the future, in the context of an encounter between phenomenology and Marxism. The third section proposes two rewritings of the subtitle, in terms of thematics, as opposed to using proper names as indices for theoretical orientations. The first rewriting retrieves Heidegger's notions of tradition, as both transmission and inheritance. This opens up a givenness of a futural horizon to alternating versions of futures; the second rewriting then offers modes of evaluating these alternating futures, in a contestation between a patriarchal, a differentiated, and a neutral mode of transmission. A fourth section raises some further questions of methodology, indicating the manner in which a rethinking of religion and of theology returns within phenomenology. In an inconclusive summary, the paper returns to the point of departure, the first version of a relation of non-relation, in a disputed connection to be set out between philosophy, a politics of exclusion, and psychoanalytical accounts of political investment. The paper seeks to locate a relation of non-relation, both in the failed encounters between Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy, with respect to phenomenology and its futures, and in the re-emergence, as non-relation, of the formative function within phenomenology of religious precursors, preconditions and commitments.     

A Critical Reading of Jean-Luc Marion's Interpretation of Anselm's Ontological Argument

In this essay, I qualify Jean-Luc Marion's anti-ontological interpretation of Anselm's argument. Marion claims that the argument is not ontological but in line with Dionysian apophatic theology. To substantiate his anti-ontological reading, Marion suggests that the main regulative idea of the Proslogion is bonum. The final regulative idea, however, is gaudium, since gaudium, not bonum, leads the argument to the beatific vision. If we reformulate the Proslogion focusing on gaudium, we find that Marion's analysis misses the evident ontological aspects of the argument, such as the tradition of prayer and hermeneutics. Since Anselm promulgated the argument within the Benedictine tradition of Bec, the practice of prayer or meditation is the legitimate context of the argument. However, because of his emphasis on the structure of call and response over the ontological and hermeneutical aspects of revelation, his analysis neglects the importance of the hermeneutic relation within which the Proslogion is born.     

Interview with Jonathan Asser

In this interview, Jonathan Asser recounts how working in prisons with violent male inmates was the inspiration behind ‘Starred Up’, his acclaimed film about a young man who enters adult prison for the first time. The film offers an insight into the innovative Shame/Violence Intervention (SVI) that Asser pioneered whilst working as a group therapist at HMP Wandsworth. Asser’s approach included getting members of his groups to acknowledge the shame they felt before these feelings became unbearable and escalated into violence. Drawing on the ideas of American psychiatrist James Gilligan, Asser found he was able to work with the most violent and institutionalised prisoners by developing a technique that relied on a particular use of his counter-transference. Asser also talks about the personal experiences that led him into working therapeutically with this client group.