Special Issue: Heidegger & Co.
Philosophy, Metaphysics, Democracy
Gianni Vattimo
Translated by Paul Kottman
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
We confront the problem of the relationship between philosophy
and politics at a moment which, at least in my opinion, is characterized by two "epochal" events with all the risks which the use of that
term entails. On the one hand, philosophy has lived through, and is
still living through, that process which Heidegger called the "end of
metaphysics": namely, the dissolution of the pretenses' of foundational thought, the so-called "crisis of reason"––which, although
perhaps over-emphasized or reduced to a generic slogan, is a fact
that is difficult to ignore. On the other hand, on the side of politics,
the fall of real socialism has cast a pall of discredit over ideological
politics of a "deductive" or global kind, leaving behind a largely
"Popperian" liberalism, which endeavors to think the political pragmatically in terms of small steps, or trial and error. Even if there is
no causal connection between the one and the other, these two events
are obviously connected. Already before the fall of real socialism,
the crisis of metaphysics (in the Heideggerian sense) had also developed in connection with the waning of the political conditions for a
universalistic thought: for instance, the end of colonialism, the emerging voice of other cultures and the parallel emergence of cultural
anthropology, or the discrediting of the myth of a unilinear progress
of humanity, guided by the most civilized West. (This crisis, too, was
"practical" before it was "theoretical"; witness the first world war.)
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Jean-Luc Nancy, Myth, and Literature
Jed Deppman
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
Jean-Luc Nancy stands out among recent theorists of community for
his willingness to use myth and literature as important analytical
categories. One of his more striking and fundamental theses is that
even though literature does not have an identifiable essence, somehow in the way that it "interrupts" myth it reproduces the truth of
community, the very truth of how we are together.
Readers of Nancy know that such a claim can be understood
in several ways: as a thesis on the ontology of literariness, a phenomenological description of the act of reading, a postmodern
(anti)constitutive theory of community, even (were it drawn out) a
negative statement about the possibility of effective political activity
in the time of late capitalism. These and other possibilities are usually in play when Nancy invokes myth and literature, and this multivalence is one reason that he has attracted more attention from
political than from literary theorists. Another obvious reason is that
his use of literature always seems to some extent opportunistic––more the consequence of his proximity to Derrida and post-structuralism than the result of any real engagement with literary texts.
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Il faut
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe
Translated by Jeff Fort
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
"To write, the exigency to write": the formulation is from Maurice
Blanchot. What is at stake in it, and one can hear this right away, is
the very essentiality of what we no longer have the nerve to name
"literature." Without making a stir, almost modestly, but in a way
that is altogether decisive. By means of this imperative without content, what was known as "literature"––a term which has authorized
so many immense pretentions and inspired poses––is given over to
its own naked existence as a fact and to a sort of duty without reason, much as the Rimbaud of A Season in Hell claimed to be given
over to the earth and to a crude reality. In a register which, despite
appearances, is quite close to this, when Beckett was asked by a
newspaper survey the question "Why do you write?", he gave this
lapidary response: "It's all I'm good for" [Bon qu'à ça].
In order to say this exigency, we have in our language––that is,
in this French which Hölderlin spoke a little and with which, in any
case, he punctuated his late sketches and the last reworkings of his
greatest poems––we have a formidable locution: "it is necessary" [il
faut]. Formidable but, undoubtedly, irreplaceable.
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Superseding Deconstruction: Blanchot, Hegel, and the Theory of Epochs
Raj Sampath
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
Traces of Hegel's metaphysics and shadows of his teleology of history haunt much poststructuralist thought. Hegel's ghost lingers in
such works as Michel Foucault's Madness and Civilization (1961)
and The Order of Things (1966), Gilles Deleuze's Difference and
Repetition (1968) and The Logic of Sense (1969), Jacques Lacan's
The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1964) and Écrits
(1966), Jacques Derrida's Edmund Husserl's Origin of Geometry: An
Introduction (1961) and Of Grammatology (1967), Michel Serres's
The System of Leibniz (1968), and Jean Baudrillard's Consumer Society (1970). This is a strange and controversial proposition. For
these thinkers––among others––were responsible for a series of powerful critiques; under explicit attack, were the humanist, metaphysical,
and teleological foundations of the human sciences of the nineteenth
and twentieth-centuries. In short, these thinkers dismantled some of
the deepest presuppositions that underpin the "Philosophy of History." Thus how can one possibly substantiate a correlation between
the critiques made by contemporary French thought and Hegel's
'metaphysics'? No doubt, 'poststructuralism' has left an indelible mark
on our contemporary theoretical imagination and its opaque temporal horizon. But this mark also conceals a deep anxiety over
Hegelianism and its legacy. For poststructuralism not only affects
our attitudes on the 'historical present' but the question of how one
temporalizes the historicity––or ‘historical finitude’––of any philosophy of history (Hegelian or otherwise).
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Vocation and Voice
Giorgio Agamben
Translated by Jeff Fort
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
The title of my paper attempts, with its etymological figure, to think
in another language a German term that appears in certain decisive
passages of Hölderlin and Heidegger. This term is the substantive
Stimmung. If it is true that we can think only by way of language, if,
as Wittgenstein put it, every philosophical interrogation can be presented as an interrogation of the meaning of words, then translation
is one of the eminent means by which man thinks his words.
Now, as a great philologist once remarked, the German word
Stimmung is precisely one of those words that we tend to define as untranslatable. "This does not mean," this same philologist adds,
"that phrases such as 'in guter Stimmung sein' could not easily be
rendered by 'to be in a good mood' or by the French 'être en bonne
humeur'; 'die Stimmung in diesem Zimmer' by 'the atmosphere in
this room'; 'Stimmung hervorrufen' by 'to create an atmosphere'; 'die
Seele zu Traurigkeit stimmen' by 'to dispose the soul to sadness', etc.
But what is missing in the main European languages is a term that
would express the unity of the feelings experienced by man face to
face with his environment (a landscape, nature, one's fellow man),
and would comprehend and weld together the objective (factual)
and the subjective (psychological) into one harmonious unity...
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Review Essay
Safranski's Heidegger: Notes on the Philosophical Ramifications of Biography
Peter Eli Gordon
A review of Safranski, Rüdiger. Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil. Translated from the German by Ewald Osers. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).
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Volume 10.2 is available at JSTOR. Qui Parle is edited by an independent group of graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley and published by Duke University Press.