Filozofija i društvo/Philosophy and Society

Patrick Gamsby, Henri Lefebvre, Boredom, and Everyday Life, London: Lexington Books, 2022

2024-12-27T11:31:50+00:00

Editor's note

2024-12-27T11:46:28+00:00

Editor's note

Derrida and his Shadow

2024-12-28T08:49:25+00:00

Rerouting the tradition of defiant putdown, his name is a shibboleth for troubled intervention, still unearthing values stubbornly uninterrogated by other branches of philosophical enquiry. He drew from Carl Schmitt the persistent atmospherics of hostility to politicize social aspects of aggregation and Mitsein. The oeuvre of Jacques Derrida thus continues to stir hostility, generating implications of seething mistrust for the textual and institutional strategies of a “Derridean” workspace. This is not the first time that philosophy has been exposed to bad faith or phobic taunts. Since Socrates’s countdown, we know, as Arendt alerts us, that philosophy continually faces state hostility. What provokes different types and gradations of philosophical hostility, prompting a perceptible level of anger—to this day, dispensing the calculated dosages of mistrust that issue from other philosophers and civic cohorts? Or is hostility—and the anger that it breeds, whether historically latent or effective, part and parcel of the philosophical profile—a course of action? Are philosophers, while rhetorically armed to the teeth, basically unarmed warriors, politically hungry, as in the differently deposed cases of Plato and Heidegger? It could certainly be the case that what attracts hostility is mainly a question of the objects that are brought into play. But there’s something more at stake. To a large degree, the themes handled by Derrida were fuelled by pathologies and repetition compulsion, continually running up against a politics of disavowal. Sometimes the themes he’d chosen were exposed to critical belittling, seen as beside the philosophical point, “trivial” or aberrant, like Nietzsche’s forgotten umbrella or Genet’s floral perversions. Other times, the themes one chooses become contagious or form the groundwork for an autoimmune attack on its premises. One’s own work flares up against itself or succumbs to medico-philosophical disruption when it names a symptomatology that attacks the host-work. The constitution of a text is involved in the vulnerability it uncovers and pursues, never safely aloof from its encroaching object. Drawing on unconscious strata of his influence and invasive attachments, including the unfurling of dream-logic, the essay seeks to locate the overall tone of Derrida’s provocation, sounding a non-thematic instance hard to pin down, as in Kant’s apocalyptic tone, of which he wrote.

The Death of the People

2024-12-27T11:53:01+00:00

Death, Derrida suggests in Politics of Friendship, is a question of numbers. Yet, death is also always “mine,” which is why Heidegger can say that “the dying of Others is not something which we experience in a genuine sense; at most we are always just ‘there alongside’.” Between my death and the death of everyone, between the one and the infinitely many, I have found myself wondering about a different measure, a more limited and distinct grammatical — or arithmetic — register, in which is raised the question of our death. The death, not of humanity, nor quite the death of all others, but the death of the people, the death of we who count and count for and on each other (or imagine we do). This is where Derrida’s calculability or incalculability of death intervenes at its most opaque, it seems to me. Somewhere between the one and the very many, the universal many of humanity, between what Heidegger calls “mineness” (which, when it comes to death, remains a possibility) and the death of (all) others, there would be found the death of we, the people.

Literature as a Mode of Thought: Derrida’s Institution of Différance

2024-12-27T13:34:14+00:00

In this article, I argue that literature represents a privileged modality for thinking institutionality in Derrida’s work and, moreover, that literature represents a model for institutions. The first section presents Derrida’s understanding of literature as anti-essentialist and a mode of experience which resists the transcendence of identity. In the second section, I propose that literature attends to its own fragility, lacking any definite foundation or external referent. I then consider the political implications of this position, demonstrating that literature not only encourages us to attend to its own fragile foundations, but also the foundations of socio- political institutions in general. It achieves this attention through its specific relationship to performative language. In the fourth section, I argue that literature reveals institutions as an effect of différance; rather than understanding différance as an infinite delay, institutions emerge in the process of différance. Literature underscores the inescapability of institutions. Our aim, as Derrida stresses, should not be to do away with institutions, but to form a new relation to institutions. I conclude by outlining some of these implications for literature as an institution which can serve as a model for the new relation to institutionality that Derrida valorises.

On the Economical Politics of Invention

2024-12-27T14:06:48+00:00

This article tackles the question of invention in Jacques Derrida’s thought of deconstruction according to two perspectives. In the first part, drawing on “Psyché: Invention of the Other”, it examines its economic implications; in the second part, drawing on “A World of Welcome” and on the confrontation with Emmanuel Levinas, it examines its political im- plications. The problem at stake in both perspectives is the role of an idiomatic schematics (a sophistication of Kantianism, as Derida puts it) in fostering the potential invention of a counterinstitution. In the second part, while interrogating Derrida’s views on the possibility and means to deduce a politics from an ethics, we will encounter the current geopo- litical scenario, and notably the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The Enigma Of Validity: Speculations on the Last Paragraph of Donner Le Temps II

2024-12-27T14:29:13+00:00

In the final paragraph of the concluding session of the seminar Donner le temps II, Jacques Derrida enunciates—but does not develop—what I shall term the “enigma of validity.” Following a close reading of Heidegger’s On Time and Being, the session abruptly ends with a promise to analyze a certain transition: from the es gibt (“there is,” “il y a”) to the es gilt (“it is valid,” “il vaut,” and “il doit”). This suggest that a set of questions organized thematically around the gift—prominent among these is the idea of a Being that is there and gives itself as a gift—needs a supplement. The enigma of validity pertains to the emergence of a normative vocabulary divided into value, obligation, and interest. In this paper, I will trace some of the clues Derrida leaves in Donner le temps II and other texts, arguing that the “mystery of normativity” is bound to the ambiguous status of legality within metaphysics. Validity, as the mystical foundation of normativity, functions simultaneously as a metaphysical shortcut to secure self-reference in philosophical thought and as the impossibility of any foundational grounding (Grundlegung).

Singularity, Violence and Universality in Derrida’s Ethics: Deconstruction’s Struggle with Decisionism

2024-12-27T14:44:20+00:00

The starting point of the paper is Derrida’s early discussion of Lévinas, focusing on the suggestion that violence is paradoxically magnified in Lévinas’s attempt to articulate ethics as first philosophy within a metaphysics ostensibly free of violence. The next step is an examination of Derrida’s thoughts on Lévi-Strauss and Rousseau in Of Grammatology. Derrida’s comments on names and violence in Lévi-Strauss establish that ethics emerges through a distinction between the “good” interior and the “bad” exterior. Derrida’s subsequent remarks on Rousseau bring up his view of pity as a pre-social morality and the emergence of a social world that enacts violence upon the fullness of nature and the spontaneity of pity within a system of organized, competitive egotism. In his engagement with Celan, Derrida explores a poetics that conveys the sense of a particular, singular self as essential to ethics—defining itself in its separation yet inevitably caught up in universality. This theme develops into an examination of mass slaughter around the Hebrew Bible story of the “shibboleth”, highlighting the violent consequences of exclusionary conceptions of identity. In The Gift of Death, Derrida discusses the relationship between Paganism, Platonism, and Christianity through Patočka’s perspective, then returns to Judaism via Kierkegaard’s discussion of Abraham and Isaac. Derrida’s reflections on secrecy, the sacred, ethical paradox, the violence of ethical absolutism, and the aporetic nature of ethical decisions converge around a discussion of political decisionism in Schmitt and the broader ethical significance of decisionism, as it also appears in Benjamin.

After the Birth/Death of Kant/Derrida

2024-12-27T12:29:44+00:00

In this paper I explore some points of cross-over (as well as points of difference) between Kant’s framing of critique and Derrida’s deconstruction of this frame. I begin by situating the question concerning “where we stand now” in terms of some of Kant’s late (unpublished) thoughts on metaphysics and “Fortschritt” (stepping-forward and progress) in his “What Real Fortschritte has Metaphysics Made in Germany since the Time of Leibniz and Wolff?” I show how Kant inadvertently tears open a deconstructive space at the center of critique (a framing of a metaphysics of the future, of the to-come [Zukunft] which never properly comes) while eschewing an attempt to walk through it. With this in mind, I then read Derrida’s picking up of this tear in his discussions of the Parergon, Ergon and the hors d’oeuvres—the starter outside and before the main work—in The Truth in Painting. My aim is to unravel a view in which we can say simultaneously, perhaps metaphorically but also methodologically, that Derrida’s death frames Kant’s birth, and that the birth of deconstruction frames the death of critique.

De l’Aufhebung, il y en a toujours’ La lecture derridienne de Hegel avant Glas

2024-12-27T12:47:51+00:00

Cet article vise à reconstruire le rapport de Jacques Derrida à la philosophie hegelienne telle qu’il s’est établi avant la parution de Glas (1974). À la fin des années 60, dans un contexte philosophique marqué par l’anti- hégélianisme, une première réception de l’œuvre de Derrida s’est contentée d’affirmer l’opposition entre idéalisme spéculatif et déconstruction. Bien qu’accepter cette opposition soit devenue l’interprétation la plus répandue de la position du philosophe français envers Hegel, il est possible de découvrir dans son œuvre des affinités d’importance entre les deux penseurs. Pour ce faire, nous analysions les textes de Derrida consacrés à Hegel avant 1974: Le problème de la genèse dans la phénoménologie de Husserl, “De l’économie restreinte à l’économie générale. Un hégélianisme sans réserve” et “Le Puits et la pyramide. Introduction à la sémiologie de Hegel”. Nous démontrons que malgré un apparent rejet explicite de la pensée dialectique, Derrida a toujours reconnu sa pertinence, déclaré qu’une rupture unilatérale était impossible et, au moins au début de sa carrière, conçu la possibilité d’une interprétation deconstructive de la pensée de Hegel.

Therapy Culture and the Production of Subjectivity in Neoliberalism

2024-11-28T10:51:47+00:00

This article explores the relationship between neoliberalism and the phenomena of “therapy culture”. We define therapy culture as a consequence of the spread of ideas, discourses, and practices from psychology and psychotherapy into various realms of society. Previous studies, drawing from cultural sociology, Marxism, and governmentality theory, have failed to adequately address how therapy culture integrates subjectivity with the institutions of the neoliberal mode of regulation. We begin with a historical overview of therapy culture’s evolution through the twentieth century and its role in neoliberal economic reforms. Our analysis then delves into conceptualizing the neoliberal mode of regulation, emphasizing the role it gives to subjectivity. Finally, we propose a theoretical framework integrating Foucault’s “technologies of the self” and Lacan’s concept of “fantasy” to conceptualize the relationship between neoliberalism and therapy culture. By relying on this framework, we will conclude that therapy culture serves as a governmental technology through which neoliberalism integrates subjectivity into the process of capital accumulation.

Normative Decision Theory and Reindividuation of the Outcomes

2024-12-27T10:55:46+00:00

This article examines and critiques efforts to preserve the requirements of normative decision theory from counterexamples by reindividuating outcomes. Reindividuation is often employed in response to counterexamples that challenge even the most fundamental requirements of rationality, such as transitivity. These counterexamples demonstrate that even basic rationality requirements can appear to be violated in seemingly rational ways, thus casting doubt on their plausibility. Reindividuation seeks to preserve these requirements by refining the objects of preference in more detailed terms. However, John Broome has pointed out that this strategy can lead to the issue of making the requirements vacuous. We will explore counterexamples to transitivity and demonstrate how reindividuation can lead to this problem of emptiness. Following that, we will review significant attempts to address this problem, showing that they fall short and that any direction we take either makes the requirements too permissive or leaves them unjustified. In the final section, we suggest a less conventional solution: rejecting finer individuation and accepting that the requirements of rationality are not universal. Finally, we point out several established approaches to decision theory that allow for domain-specific requirements.

A New Solution to the Rational Voter Paradox

2024-12-27T11:09:03+00:00

The rational voter paradox suggests that there is no incentive for a rational individual to vote if the expected benefits are outweighed by the costs. However, the probability of an individual vote deciding the outcome of an election is typically small, making the expected benefits negligible. In response to the paradox, this paper proposes a novel solution based on Goldman’s causal responsibility approach, which asserts that voters make a partial causal contribution to the electoral outcome even if their vote is not decisive. The paper integrates the logic of Condorcet’s jury theorem into the causal responsibility approach, arguing that this leads to solving the rational voter paradox.