Violence and “Hyperbologic”: Lawlor on Time’s Relation to Metaphysics

In his recent work, Leonard Lawlor draws attention to the problem of “violence,” which is the “problem that provides the most food for thought.” This emphasis on the problem of violence and its connections to metaphysics understood as philosophy has been remarkably consistent over his career, and thinking through responses to “violence” has sustained Lawlor’s continued effort to think about what he calls “violent” relations between event and repeatability and ground these upon a critical phenomenology. This contribution to the discussion of Lawlor’s work focuses on his most recent book, From Violence to Speaking Out (2016), so as to suggest three important directions for this project and for philosophy’s response to violence. I first briefly trace the theme of violence in From Violence to Speaking Out , contextualizing it against the rest of his work, so as to draw out what he means by violence and its provocation to philosophy, with special attention to the way that the violence in question is figured as disrupting the transcendental and confronting philosophy with what Lawlor calls the “ultratranscendental.” Second, I link it to the theme of time by tracing Lawlor’s point about violence in relation to the breaking up of the transcendental subject from Kant into Heidegger. Third, I link these points to the negative movement of the dissolution of modes of repeatability. This dissolution is captured in a kind of “speaking‐out” that Lawlor detects in Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze and Guattari, involving an excess over and above expression, which Deleuze calls “hyperbologic.”