Returning (to) the gift of death: violence and history in Derrida and Levinas

The purpose of this paper is to establish a proper context for reading Jacques Derrida’s The Gift of Death, which, I contend, can only be understood fully against the backdrop of “Violence and Metaphysics.” The later work cannot be fully understood unless the reader appreciates the fact that Derrida returns to “a certain Abraham” not only in the name of Kierkegaard but also in the name of Levinas himself. The hypothesis of the reading that follows therefore would be that Derrida writes The Gift of Death not as an attempt to re-present Kierkegaard’s Abraham either rightly or wrongly but as an effort to do with Kierkegaard’s Abraham what is possible with his thought in a broadly Levinasian/Derridean framework. That the reading he provides of the Abraham story would not be recognizable to Kierkegaard is not the principal point of Derrida’s effort; his aim is to demonstrate that Levinas should not have been so hasty to dismiss Kierkegaard but could have recovered his interpretation of Abraham for purposes that Derrida and Levinas both share.     

Michel Henry's Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience and Husserlian Intentionality

In his essay 'The Pit and the Pyramid: Introduction to Hegel's Semiology', Jacques Derrida claims that there is a privilege of speech over writing inherent in Hegel's theory of signs. In this paper, I examine Derrida's criticism. While it is to Derrida's credit that he focusses on an area of Hegel's philosophy that has hardly been analysed, his reading is problematic in several regards. After presenting Derrida's main arguments, I pose three questions, the first of which belongs to the realm of subjective spirit, the second to objective spirit, and the third to absolute spirit. I shall then show that Hegel makes several statements in favour of a privilege of writing over speech - statements that are not merely parenthetic or marginal. Moreover, those claims that Hegel makes toward any privilege of speech are in the wrong place, namely, subjective spirit, for them to represent his final point of view.     

Categories of Life: The Status of the Camp in Derrida and Agamben

This essay is an exploration of the relationship between Agamben's 1995 text, Homo Sacer, and Derrida's 1992 “Force of Law” essay. Agamben attempts to show that the camp, as the topological space of the state of exception, has become the biopolitical paradigm for modernity. He draws this conclusion on the basis of a distinction, which he finds in an essay by Walter Benjamin, between categories of life, with the “pro‐tagonist” of the work being what he calls homo sacer, or bare life—life that is stripped of its humanity and value. Five years earlier, in 1990, Derrida had given a lecture at UCLA (later published in its entirety as “The Force of Law”) in which he had analyzed the very same essay by Benjamin and had highlighted the distinction between “base life” and “just life.” The implications of his analysis show a discomforting prox‐imity between Benjaminian messianism and the Nazi “final solution,” a conclusion that Agamben dismisses entirely. In this paper, however, I demonstrate that the structures of the two works are quite similar in many important ways. I argue that, though the broad scope of Agamben's work is original in many respects, and I would not wish to reduce Agamben's work to Derridean repetitions, he nevertheless utilizes much more of Derrida's analysis, specifically with respect to the categori‐zation of life, than he would like the reader to believe.     

A TRINITARIAN GRAMMAR OF SIN

This essay offers a critical reading of David Kelsey's hamartiology in Eccentric Existence. I elucidate Kelsey's “trinitarian grammar of sin,” which charts how human lives characteristically “miss the mark” of God's creating, consummating, and reconciling ways of relating to us. Kelsey uses this dynamic pattern of divine relating to illuminate the appropriate responses of the Christian life—faith, hope, and love—and their fundamental distortions. I commend three major contributions of Kelsey's hamartiology: his parsing of the relationship between sin and moral evil, his overturning of modernity's anthropocentric paradigm of sin, and his reconstruction of original sin. I conclude with three clusters of questions relating to: first, Kelsey's root paradigm of sin as idolatry, second, his use of impurity and stain language to describe original sin, and third, what is at stake in crafting theological anthropology in the analytical style of Eccentric Existence.     

Questions of Proximity: “Woman's Place” in Derrick and Irigaray

This article reconsiders the issue of Luce Irigaray's proximity to Jacques Derrida on the question of woman. I use Derrida's reading of Nietzsche in Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles (1979) and Irigaray's reading of Heidegger in L'Oubli de l'air (1983) to argue that reading them as supplements to one another is more accurate and more productive for feminism than separating one from the other. I conclude by laying out the benefits for feminism that such a reading would offer.     

Beyond the politics of positionality: deconstruction and feminism

Abstract

The article commences with a discussion of Derrida's alleged anti-feminist position. We argue that, given his distinction between ‘reactive’ and ‘maverick’ feminism, this is an over-simplification. A correlation is drawn between the latter form of feminism and deconstruction by showing that both maintain a relation to the ‘beyond’ of the established logocentric system. The second section of the article deals with the placing of woman in Derrida's Spurs. It is shown that Derrida affirms Nietzsche's idea of the ‘Dionysiac woman’ who is, like the maverick feminist, not totally determined within the phallogocentric system. Woman, in Derrida's reading, becomes that which is not fully determinable. We conclude that this undecidability, rather than hindering its political activity, helps feminism in dealing with the diversities within the movement.     

The Life of Spirit: The Self and Sanctification in Søren Kierkegaard's The Sickness unto Death

Danish theologian and philosopher Søren Kierkegaard is often overlooked as an author in the Christian spiritual tradition. This paper answers Christopher Barnett's call to investigate themes of Christian spirituality in Kierkegaard's writing. In this paper, I argue that we can construct of vision of sanctification from Kierkegaard's The Sickness unto Death. While Kierkegaard does not directly deal with themes of sanctification in The Sickness unto Death, Kierkegaard's pseudonym Anti-Climacus does demonstrate the ‘spiritless’ life of despair. The ‘spiritless’ life, as Anti-Climacus defines it, is a life that is not truly a ‘self’. Anti-Climacus systematically demonstrates four categories of despair, and all people not living in faith, whether they realise it or not, fit into one of these categories of ‘spiritless’ existence. I argue that by constructing the opposites of Kierkegaard's categories of despair I demonstrate that a ‘spirit-filled’ life exemplifies a vibrant Christian life of sanctification.     

Buddhist Conceptual Rhyming and T.S.Eliot's Crisis of Connection in TheWaste Land and ‘Burnt Norton’

In this essay, I elaborate a reading of the Buddhist allusions throughout T.S. Eliot's poetry as being not confessions of Buddhist faith or merely syncretic experiments, but rather ‘conceptual rhymes’ with the crisis of personal connection that preoccupies Eliot across multiple texts. In the Buddhist concepts of pratītya-samutpāda, ?ūnyatā, sa?sāra, and the pretas, Eliot finds thematic resonances with his own emotional and psychological concerns and so alludes to these concepts in ‘The Fire Sermon’ section of The Waste Land and ‘Burnt Norton’ of Four Quartets as part of his characteristic poetic collage. By examining the connection between Eliot's personal poetic practice and the cross-cultural traditions upon which he drew, my argument intervenes in a long-standing debate regarding the meaning of Asian religio-philosophical influences in the poet's key texts. Moreover, by close reading the third movement of ‘Burnt Norton’ for Buddhist allusions, I attempt to refocus scrutiny of Buddhism in Eliot from the oft-discussed ‘Fire Sermon’ section of The Waste Land to Eliot's later Four Quartets, which remains under-examined for its Buddhist influences by scholars who instead attend to the latter text's more pronounced Vedic references.     

Kant and the Discipline of Reason

Kant's notion of ‘discipline’ has received considerable attention from scholars of his philosophy of education, but its role in his theoretical philosophy has been largely ignored. This omission is surprising since his discussion of discipline in the first Critique is not only more extensive and expansive in scope than his other discussions but also predates them. The goal of this essay is to provide a comprehensive reading of the Discipline that emphasizes its systematic importance in the first Critique. I argue that its goal is to establish a set of rules for the use of pure reason that, if followed, will mitigate and perhaps even eliminate our tendency to make judgments about supersensible objects. Since Kant's justification for these rules relies crucially on claims he has defended in the Doctrine of Elements, I argue further that, far from being a dispensable part of the Critique as commentators have tended to claim, the Discipline is, in fact, the culmination of Kant's critique of metaphysics.     

Derrida's “Antigonanette”: On the Quasi‐Transcendental

In this article, I rely both on Derrida's 1974 work Glas, as well as Derrida's 1971–72 lecture course, “La famille de Hegel,” to argue that the concept of the quasi‐transcendental is central to Derrida's reading of Hegel and to trace its implications beyond the Hegelian system. I follow Derrida's analysis of the role of Antigone—or, as the lecture course has it, “Antigonanette”—in Hegel's thought to argue that the quasi‐transcendental indicates a re(con)striction of empirical difference into the transcendental, which is thereby only ever provisionally transcendental. I then argue that the economy of difference indicated by the quasi‐transcendental is neither a general economy, nor is it in each case singular, but rather it ambivalently oscillates between these two. Finally, I treat the temporality of the quasi‐transcendental, arguing that the economy of difference indicated by the quasi‐transcendental is not prior to the re(con)striction of empirical difference, but is paradoxically produced by it by being retroactively constituted. I take up this analysis for the sake of describing what I contend is the quasi‐transcendental structure of constitutive exclusion, a way of understanding the conceptual structure of political bodies, and the political structure of concepts.     

Hospes: The Wabash Center as a Site of Transformative Hospitality

Abstract. The Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion is a place of hospitality and its staff the epitome of the “good host.” This essay explores the meaning of hospitality, including its problematic dimensions, drawing on a number of voices and texts: Jacques Derrida's Of Hospitality; Henri M. Nouwen's Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life, N. Lynne Westfield's Dear Sisters: A Womanist Practice of Hospitality, Arthur Sutherland's I Was a Stranger: A Christian Theology of Hospitality, and Kathleen Norris's “Hospitality.” Beginning with the claim that hospitality is concerned with power and grace, the essay explores the relationship between hospitality and teaching, and the modes by which the Wabash Center helps teachers both find their identities and heal.     

NIETZSCHE,THE CROSS,AND THE NATURE OF GOD

In this essay, I treat of a type of moral objection to Christian theism that is formulated by Friedrich Nietzsche. In an effort to provoke a negative moral‐aesthetic response to the conception of God underlying the Christian tradition, with the ultimate aim of recommending his own allegedly ‘healthier’ ideals, Nietzsche presents a number of distinct but related considerations. In particular, he claims that the traditional theological interpretation of the crucifixion of Jesus expresses the tasteless, vulgar, and morally objectionable character of God, thus rendering Him unworthy of belief. In response to Nietzsche's worries, I first of all argue that his account of the origins of the belief in God is both prima facie implausible and historically false. At the same time I recognize that Nietzsche is expressing, in his typically bombastic manner, a genuine and widely held worry about what the crucifixion, as an event in salvation history, says about the nature of God. In response to this worry, I draw on the work of Wilhelm Dilthey in order to support the contention that the concept of divine transcendence, which underlies Nietzsche's concern, has its proper place within the Greek metaphysical tradition, rather than in Christian faith. Building on the work of Franz Rosenzweig and Jürgen Moltmann, I outline a conception of God that more accurately reflects the claim that the cross is the definitive revelation of the divine nature while at the same time foreclosing on the possibility of the kind of response that Nietzsche articulates.     

In Search of the Self's Grounding Power: Kierkegaard's The Sickness unto Death as Dogmatics for Unbelievers

Kierkegaard's The Sickness unto Death can be read as an attempt to present the Christian message in a way that makes sense for unbelievers without violating the integrity of the Christian faith. This is done by exploring the psychological implications of the lack of faith in a way that is supposed to make sense even for those who take offence at the Christian message and do not accept the anthropological implications of the story of the incarnation as their basic point of orientation. It is argued that this attempt is successful, and that this can be demonstrated both by the consistency of the argument and the breadth of its Wirkungsgeschichte.     

THE IMAGO DEI AS THE MIND OF JESUS CHRIST

In this essay I examine David Clough's interpretation of the imago Dei and his use of “creaturely” language in his book On Animals: Volume 1, Systematic Theology. Contrary to Clough, I argue that the imago Dei should be interpreted as being uniquely human. Using a neuroscientific approach, I elaborate on my claim that while Jesus is the image of God perfected, the imago Dei is best understood as having the mind of Christ. In regards to language, I make the case that using terms such as “creature” when referring to nonhuman animals is problematic in that it can serve to alienate human beings from their capacity to image God. In addition I argue that “creaturely” language raises concerns for the African American community given Western Christianity's history as it relates to their valuation of black bodies and human enslavement.     

HEGEL'S LEGACY

Answering the challenge of G. W. F. Hegel's idealism and its perceived logocentrism has arguably been a defining feature of nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century continental philosophy. Today, in the midst of a Hegel renaissance, Hegel's legacy within continental philosophy is far more ambivalent. In this essay, I cut across debates about the status of Hegel's idealism in order to offer a reflection on the legacy of Hegel by reconstructing a Hegelian notion of legacy. I develop this notion in response to Jacques Derrida's discussion of inheritance in Specters of Marx (1993). Both Hegel and Derrida articulate the structure of legacy, inheritance, and history on the basis of the strictures of gathering. For both, gathering is an act of memory that determines a legacy as a legacy, a history as a history. Gathering determines an event, norm, idea, or institution as something to be passed on for a future to come. While Derrida concludes that inheritance implies decision, Hegel's recollection provides the basis for what I will call a critical history, which contributes to any such decision in crucial ways.     

The Moral Argument for the Existence of God and Immortality

This essay tries to show that there exist several passages where Kierkegaard (and his pseudonyms) sketches an argument for the existence of God and immortality that is remarkably similar to Kant's so‐called moral argument for the existence of God and immortality. In particular, Kierkegaard appears to follow Kant's moral argument both when it comes to the form and content of the argument as well as some of its terminology. The essay concludes that several passages in Kierkegaard overlap significantly with Kant's moral argument, although Kierkegaard ultimately favors revealed faith over natural theology in general and Kant's moral faith in particular. Whereas Kant uses the moral argument to postulate the existence of God and immortality, Kierkegaard mainly uses it as a reductio ad absurdum of non‐religious thinking.     

The Rise of the Machines: Deleuze's Flight from Structuralism

In this paper, I offer an account of the conceptual shift that occurs between the work completed by Gilles Deleuze prior to 1969 and his later work with Félix Guattari, beginning in 1972 with Anti‐Oedipus. Against previous interpretations, which have concentrated on the developments initiated by Deleuze, I argue for the primary importance of Guattari's influence, especially his insistence on a theory of “machinic processes.” The importance of these processes is made manifest in Deleuze and Guattari's move away from theories of structuralism. In order to carry out this task, I offer a close reading of Guattari's essay “Machine and Structure.” This essay was first written as a review of Deleuze's acclaimed work in Difference and Repetition and Logic of Sense and formed the basis for Deleuze and Guattari's first meeting. In the concluding sections of the paper, I show how the integration of the concept of the machine allows Deleuze and Guattari to develop a theory of the unconscious that operates outside of the boundaries traditionally set by structuralist analysis.