Crisis and Meaning: F. Kafka and the Law

Traditional empiricism, the stout defender of the senses, is by all accounts sick. But perhaps a certain empiricist legacy is still fighting for life. Without seeking a resurrection of empiricism, the aim of this paper is to engage in what Levinas calls a ‘rehabilitation of sensation’. I want to resist theorizations of our life that would seek to exclude our sensible relations with things and with others from any intrinsic involvement with our understanding of them; to resist conceptions that regard sensibility as something in itself dumb and brute, something (as tradition would have us have it) ‘merely animal’. However, the trajectory of this discussion will not remain in every part faithful to its Levinasian inspiration. And it will not leave the traditional conception of animality intact either. In what follows, what my five-year-old daughter calls our ‘humanality’ will not be elaborated in terms of (trans)formations of life that Levinas, with the tradition, calls a ‘break’ from ‘animality’ or from ‘the animal condition’. Every other, I want to affirm, is every bit an animal.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 2. Aristotle, Ethics, rev. edn, trans. J.A.K. Thomson (London, Penguin: 1976), VI.iv.1140a19‐20. 3. David Wills, ‘Thinking Back: Towards Technology, via Dorsality’, parallax, 10:3 (2004), pp. 36‐52 (p. 38). 4. David Wills, ‘Thinking Back’, p. 51, fn.1. 5. Dorsality: Thinking Back through Technology and Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming spring 2008). 6. ‘There are individuals walking along. Somewhere (usually behind them) the hail rings out’, or ‘The hailed individual will turn round. By this mere one‐hundred‐and‐eighty‐degree physical conversion, he becomes a subject.’ [my emphasis] ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation)’, in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), pp. 170–86 (p. 174). 7. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), pp. 65–66. 8. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 262. 9. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 85. 10. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 86. 11. Jacques Derrida, L'animal que donc je suis (Paris: Galilée, 2006). 12. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 132. 13. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 152. 14. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, The Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York, London: Routledge, 1994), p. 53. 15. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 213. 16. See ‘Techneology or the Discourse of Speed’, in The Prosthetic Impulse, ed. Marquard Smith and Joanne Morra (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), pp. 237–63. 17. Jacques Derrida, Deconstruction Engaged: The Sydney Seminars, ed. Paul Patton and Terry Smith (Sydney: Power, 2001). 18. Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews, trans. Jennifer Bajorek (Cambridge: Polity, 2002). 19. Jacques Derrida, ‘Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of “Religion” at the Limits of Reason Alone’, in Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (London, New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 40–101. 20. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 169. 21. Jacques Derrida, Deconstruction Engaged, p. 76. 22. Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), pp. 3–35; 36–49. 23. Jacques Derrida, Politiques de l'amitié (Paris: Galilée, 1994); Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London, New York: Verso, 1997). 24. David Wills, ‘Full Dorsal: Derrida's Politics of Friendship’, Postmodern Culture, 15:3 (2005). 25. An avenue developed by Derrida in ‘“Perhaps or Maybe”, Jacques Derrida in conversation with Alexander Garcia Düttmann, ICA, 8 March 1996’, PLI Warwick Journal of Philosophy, 6 (Summer 1997), pp. 1–18. 26. Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, pp. 30; 29. 27. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, in The Anti‐Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols and Other Writings, trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 69–152 (p. 131). 28. ‘Every art [tekhnē] is concerned with bringing something into being, and the practice of an art is the study of how to bring into being something that is capable either of being or not being, and the cause of which is in the producer and not in the product. For it is not with things that are or come to be of necessity that art is concerned, nor with natural objects (because they have their own origin in themselves). And since production is not the same as action, art must be concerned with production, not with action. There is a sense in which art and chance operate in the same sphere, as Agathon says: Art has a love for chance, and chance for art.’ [our emphasis] Aristotle, Ethics, VI.iv.1140a.6–20. 29. Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, p. 197. 30. Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, p. 105. 31. Jean‐Luc Nancy, Corpus (Paris: Métailié, 1992); L'Intrus (Paris: Galilée, 2000). 32. Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978). 33. David Wills, ‘Jasz Annotations: Negotiating a Discursive Limit’, paragraph, 21 (1998), pp. 131–49. 34. See David Wills, ‘Notes Towards a Requiem or the Music of Memory’, Mosaic, 39:3 (2006), pp. 27–46. 35. David Wills, Prosthesis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 11. 36. See Wills, Prosthesis, p. 88ff.

Of the many enigmatic references in Ulysses, Joyce's allusions to Baruch Spinoza present yet another elusive and underana lyzed aspect of the novel.1 In the Ithaca episode, Leopold Bloom first identifies Spinoza as one of the anapocryphal illustri ous sons of the law and children of a selected or rejected race.in his discussions with Stephen (U 17720-21). Next/Bloom lists Thoughts from Spinoza (maroon leather) as one of the books on the shelf in his and Molly's bedroom (U 17.1372). Furthermore, in Penelope, Molly remembers Bloom tediously expounding the philosophy of Spinoza to her in the past (U 18.111546). These references, as well as the nar rative structure of Ithaca, suggest significant points of correspon dence between the novel and tenets of Spinoza's philosophy, thereby raising questions about the importance of the philosopher and his work for Joyce and Ulysses.2 This essay emphasizes just two of the many components of Spinoza's philosophy reflected in Ulysses. First, Bloom's moments of revelation parallel the types of spiritual insight afforded to the Spinozan prophet Both Bloom's and Spinoza's revelations arise through contemplation of the infinite, a property variously resid ing in nature, in textual exegesis, and in the Other. While the theories of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari have, at times, been applied to explain the nature of the unknowable in Ulysses,3 Spinoza's philosophy actually offers a particularly apt and revealing frame for interpreting Ithaca, The inspiration experienced by Bloom and analyzed by Spinoza is fundamentally ambivalent: while it offers a source of infinite replenishment, it is paradoxically predicated upon the experience of irreparable foreclosure, the infi nite void. Moreover, in Ulysses, this interdependent illumination and certain loss not only reside in the inspiration derived from the con templation of physical matter and the literary text but also constitute the interpersonal. As such, they inform questions of ethics, which are

Posthuman Ecologies and the More-than-Human World

This lucidly written book looks at the interpretative audacity of five major "overreaders"—Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Emmanuel Levinas, Slavoj Žižek and Stanley Cavell—and asks what is at stake and what is to be gained by their approaches to literature and film.

As a novelist, essayist, critic and theorist, Maurice Blanchot has earned tributes from authors as diverse as Jacques Derrida, Giles Deleuze and Emmanuel Levinas. But their praise has told us little about what Blanchot's work actually says and why it has been so influential. In the first comprehensive study of this important French writer to appear in English, Gerald Bruns ties Blanchot's writings to each other and to the works of his contemporaries, including the poet Paul Celan. Blanchot belongs to the generation of French intellectuals who came of age during the 1930s, survived the Occupation, and flourished during the quarter-century or so after World War II. He was one of the first French intellectuals to take a systematic interest in questions of language and meaning. His focus in the mid-1930s on extreme situations - death, madness, imprisonment, exile, revolution, catastrophe - anticipated the later interest of the existentialists. Like Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and Adorno, Blanchot was a self-conscious writer of fragments and he has given us one of the most developed investigations that we have on the fragment as a kind of writing. In a series of close readings, Bruns addresses the philosophical and political questions that have surrounded Blanchot and his writings for decades. He describes what is creative in Blanchot's readings of Heidegger's controversial works and examines Blanchot's conception of poetry as an inquiry into the limits of philosophy, rationality and power.

Moving the focus away from the exposition of one particular thinker, this unique book offers a constructive, postmodern approach to contemporary Jewish thinking combined with analysis of modern Jewish thought, reflections on Jewish law, mysticism, history, and theology. This exploration of postmodernism in Judaism and its relevance as a moral standard concentrates on three basic elements in postmodernism: attention to Other, using the text as a prism for generating alternate realities, and recognition of the impossibility of absolute knowledge. While guarding against Jewish dogmatism, this approach simultaneously stimulates Jewish creativity. Modern and postmodern approaches to Judaism that are examined include those of Leo Baeck, Martin Buber, Hermann Cohen, Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, and Franz Rosenzweig. Recent contributions include thinkers such as Eugene B. Borowitz, J. David Bleich, David Novak, and Edith Wischograd. The varied chapters in the book will appeal to a diverse scholarly audience. Jewish scholars and people interested in modern Jewish thought will appreciate the range of concerns addressed in the text. The book assumes that readers have little knowledge of either Judaism or postmodernism so these terms are explained, which make the work accessible to the ordinary reader. The book challenges the modernism of mainstream contemporary Jewish ethics, therefore, all readers will learn to acknowledge the influence and value of the emerging postmodern approach to Jewish moral thought.

This dissertation argues that Herman Melville’s Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876) is a universalist poem which analyzes the necessity, political potentiality, and challenges of intersubjectivity to the creation of more democratic human relationships beyond the walls of individualism and of traditional communities such as those organized around the notions of nation-state, ‘race’, culture, religious affiliation, or sexual identities. My argument is that, in Clarel, Melville conceives what I have termed ‘intersubjective universalism’ as an ethicopolitical process subjected to the potentialities and limitations of those who may either develop or neutralize it: human beings conditioned by their fears, egocentric behaviors, and ultimately, by their imperfect, limited, human nature. In this respect, Clarel, I claim, gives continuity to Melville’s recurrent exploration of the dangers, beauties, and interlacing of the (im)possibilities of intersubjectivity, universalism, and democracy, always torn between the democratizing potentiality the author located in interpersonal relationships and the bleak realization that human beings might never materialize such democratic project. My dissertation is divided into two chapters, which correspond to the two principal axes of my study: the defense and articulation of the intersubjective universalism I conceive in Melville’s Clarel from a theoretical perspective, on the one hand, and my interpretation of Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land as a universalist poem, representative of Herman Melville’s political literary project, on the other. In order to justify my defense of Clarel as a universalist poem, my dissertation incorporates the points of view of contemporary theorists such as Hannah Arendt, Etienne Balibar, Zygmunt Bauman, Martin Buber, Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, Ernesto Laclau, Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Luc Nancy, Martha Nussbaum, and Linda Zerilli, among others, whose analyses on community, intersubjectivity, interpersonal relationships, global ethics, and universalism, from the perspectives of poststructuralism, sociology, philosophy, or politics, have been enabling to my own work.

The book explores the codependency of monotheism and idolatry by examining the thought of several prominent twentieth-century Jewish philosophers—Hermann Cohen, Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, and Emmanuel Levinas. While all of these thinkers were keenly aware of the pitfalls of scriptural theism, in differing degrees, they each succumbed to the temptation to personify transcendence, even as they tried either to circumvent or to restrain it by apophatically purging kataphatic descriptions of the deity. Jacques Derrida and Edith Wyschogrod, by contrast, carried the project of denegation one step further, embarking on a path that culminated in the aporetic suspension of belief and the consequent removal of all images from God, a move that seriously compromises the viability of devotional piety. The inquiry into apophasis, transcendence, and immanence challenges recent attempts to harness the apophatic tradition to construct a viable postmodern negative theology. Not only are these philosophies of transcendence guilty of a turn to theology that defies the phenomenological presupposition of an immanent phenomenality, but they fall short on their own terms, inasmuch as they persist in employing metaphorical language that personalizes transcendence and thereby runs the risk of undermining the irreducible alterity and invisibility attributed to the transcendent other. Apophatic theologies, accordingly, must be supplanted by a more far-reaching apophasis, such that the much-celebrated metaphor of the gift would give way to the more neutral notion of an unconditional givenness that allows the apparent to appear as given without presuming a causal agency that would turn that given into a gift.

Emmanuel Levinas, considered the premier voice of ethics in the twentieth century, continues to manifest significant and continuing impact on twenty-first century postmodern scholarship providing a challenging communicative argument that displaces the privileged view of in the study of ethics. Agency assumes that an autonomous individual acts upon human life through self-generated volition. Levinas begins by countering the assumption the primacy of self-willed agency, detailing a phenomenological alternative--responsiveness to the Other. The I finds identity in response to the Other. Understanding the self as derivative rather than originative moves concern for the Other and the historical situation into privileged territory. The I or self emerges as a by-product, a responsive derivative construction. Levinas's ethics begins with answering the call of responsibility from the face of the Other, attentive to the call of the Other that shapes the identity of the I as a by-product. The uniqueness of Levinas's argument is akin to Marx's turning Hegel upside down. Levinas reframes the self from a willful agent to a responsive creation, moving from a traditional focus on autonomy and independent agency to interhuman responsive action responsible for the Other (Arnett, Dialogic Ethic 'Between' Buber and Levinas: A Responsive Ethical 'I'). Levinas argues that ethics is first philosophy, turning upside down conventional assumptions willfulness and beginning origins of the self. Levinas posits a phenomenological alternative to conventional self-construction, leaving us with alternative assumptions responsiveness and the construction of the I. His argument for communicative consideration is the origin of the self, which he begins with the Other, not self-will. Jacques Derrida, profoundly influenced by Levinas, cited Levinas's close friend Maurice Blanchot on the importance of Levinas's voice: However, we must not despair of philosophy. In Emmanuel Levinas's book [Totality and Infinity]--where, it seems to me, philosophy in our time has never spoken in a more sober manner, putting back into question, as we must our way of thinking and even our facile reverence for ontology--we are called upon to become responsible for what philosophy essentially is, by welcoming, in all the radiance and infinite exigency proper to it, the idea of the Other, that is to say the relation with autrui. It is as though there were here a new departure in philosophy and a leap that it, and we ourselves were urged to accomplish. (Blanchot qtd. in Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas 8-9) For postmodern scholars, Levinas repositioned philosophy and the study of ethics--moving metaphysical theoretical discussion to attentiveness to phenomenological reality. The reality Levinas envisioned was phenomenological, not metaphysical. Ethics for Levinas is a phenomenological reality--one attends to the Other, not out of theoretical dictum, but from the call of a phenomenological reality witnessed as a trace in the face of the Other. This essay frames Levinas's argument--the responsive construction of the self--and its application to the study of communication and rhetorical studies, offering communicative insights that interpret otherwise than conventional Western assumptions the self. This essay engages books on Levinas in order of difficulty of engagement with attention to increasing complexity of Levinas's project. To that end, this essay begins with two books about Levinas (Manning's Interpreting Otherwise than Heidegger and Derrida's Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas), moving to a transcript of a radio interview with Levinas (Ethics and Infinity), ending with two major works of Levinas (Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence and Totality and Infinity). This essay outlines Levinas's counter-argument concerning the privileged position of the self in Western culture, underscoring major ideas that shape his work and offering entrance into Levinas's thought from invitational to more demanding primary reading. …

It is hard to think of many contemporary European philosophers who have not endorsed the denunciation of existentialism for being a humanism that was initiated by Heidegger and has been perpetuated in the anti-humanism of structuralists such as Louis Althusser and Roland Barthes. Concerned with the way in which both languages and systems produce individuals as subjects, structuralism took over from existentialism both academically and perhaps even in terms of public attention. Structuralism sought to arrive at a stable and secure knowledge of a system or a structure by charting differences within that structure and, significantly, it sought to do so without any references to subjectivity and consciousness, which were, as we have seen, a significant part of existential phenomenology. However, it was not long before structuralism was itself being challenged by poststructuralism in the late 1960s. Philosophers such as Michel Foucault (at least in his middle and later work), Jean-Francois Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida were all important in this regard, challenging the “centrist” assumption of structuralism that an understanding of one key or central element of the structure – whether it be kinship laws, the workings of language, the educational system, or the devices employed in a literary text – allows for an explanation of the entire system. Poststructuralism also cast into question structuralism's rather strict determinism, instead insisting on the role of unpredictable and random forces in the genesis of any structure, law or norm.

Giorgio Agamben and the films of Tony Scott; Emmanuel Levinas and the films of Michael Haneke; Jean-Luc Nancy and Claire Denis; Slavoj Žižek and Kieslowski; Gilles Deleuze and Godard (or Alain Badiou and Godard, Jacques Derrida and Godard, Jean-François Lyotard and Godard). Linkages come readily to mind for a philosophically-inclined viewer when looking at certain kinds of film. When Michael Haneke’s Caché (France, 2005), for example, finally reveals who is the blackmailer, who is filming the guilty, with the answer, ‘no one’, some cannot help but think of Levinas. His idea of a universal responsibility before the Other that comes with human existence as such, seems to chime with Caché’s refusal to apportion the usual roles of good and bad, yet without at the same time denying that a terrible wrong has occurred. To exist before another is to be guilty, to be responsible for that Other’s life. No one is guilty because every one is guilty.

an approach that Christopher Dyer describes as“pauper-centered.”Drawing on a wide range of resources, the authors avoid reducing the poor to an undifferentiated mass by inferring from their sources the life circumstances of identifiable paupers, including unmarried mothers, apprenticed youth, and age-differentiated single women. Two themes are prominent throughout the volume: the symbiotic relationship between the poor and the non-poor, and the way in which this reciprocity is marked, over time, by a shift towards accountability. The second part,“Forms of Poor Relief,” features a strong contribution by Susan Broomhall in which she uses records of the Paris HôtelDieu and its governors to outline the transition from a religiously-based response to an increasingly secularized program reliant on administrative machinery. Reciprocity also evokes the moral question of worth which underlies the third part,“Textual and Visual Representations.” The discursive power of poverty as a signifier is evident, as Mark Amsler shows, in the “re-reading” of the poor in light of the voluntary poverty of groups such as the Waldensians. By contrast, Scott’s study of a fourteenth-century poem, “La voie de povreté et de richesse,” offers a secular reformulation of the issue, showing how this didactic expression of the anxiety of the recently-married protagonist frames poverty as a question of moral turpitude set against the laudable goal of pursuing material wealth. Three plates of manuscript illustrations accompany Scott’s analysis of this little-studied poem, though a fourth, referred to as this volume’s frontispiece, is missing. Scott and her colleagues have brought together an impressive breadth of perspectives on poverty which spans four centuries and ranges over questions of age, gender, religion, and social and economic change. Given the high quality of the writing, and with its consistent emphasis on giving identity to the poor, this book will be valuable to any reader wishing to better understand the complex texture of poverty in pre-modern England and France. North Dakota State University Paul Homan Stewart, Jon, ed. Kierkegaard’s Influence on Philosophy: Francophone Philosophy. Farnham: Ashgate, 2012. ISBN 978-1-4094-4638-5. Pp. 266. £65. As this volume shows, the French intellectual tradition concurs with Kierkegaard’s heterogeneous profile since its prominent authors are difficult to compartmentalize, as they often blend literary criticism, philosophy, theology, or “simple” writing. Newmark’s “Sylviane Agacinski: Reading Kierkegaard to Keep Intact the Secret” underlines the legacy Agacinski has bestowed upon the philosopher’s work. She evokes the figure of Abraham in Kierkegaard’s work as the symbol of “the most profound love of human finitude” (18). In “Roland Barthes: Style, Language, Silence,” Westfall demonstrates how Barthes and Kierkegaard were analogous in their predilection to blur the lines between autobiography, fiction, and philosophy. Llevadot (“Georges Bataille: Kierkegaard and the Claim for the Sacred”) highlights Kierkegaard’s 250 FRENCH REVIEW 88.1 Reviews 251 admiration of Abraham, the “unknown God” (59). They share a desire to radicalize Christian religion. Greenspan’s “Maurice Blanchot: Spaces of Literature/Spaces of Religion” emphasizes the ambivalence of Blanchot toward Kierkegaard. Blanchot’s quarrel is directed at the fraudulent notion of the“mask”: Kierkegaard wishes to reveal himself,while writing about solitude.José Miranda Justo’s“Gilles Deleuze: Kierkegaard’s Presence in his Writings”underscores Deleuze’s articulation of four“propositions”in relation to Kierkegaard’s works: repetition as an overture; the divergence between repetition and the laws of nature; repetition in contrast to moral law; and, “memory criticism” (86). Timmann Mjaaland (“Jacques Derrida: Faithful Heretics”) indicates that Derrida was influenced by the premise of religion in the philosopher’s writings. “Jacques Ellul: Kierkegaard’s Profound and Seldom Acknowledged Influence on Ellul’s Writings,” by Pike Cabral, reveals the belief Kierkegaard and Ellul share: that individualism is the path to faith,in opposition to Christendom,which prevents its achievement. Irina (“Pierre Hadot: Philosophy as a Way of Life: Hadot and Kierkegaard’s Socrates”) accentuates the connection between both authors in relation to ancient Greek philosophers . The modern individual can lean on their writings to resolve his struggles. Hanson (“Emmanuel Levinas: An Ambivalent but Decisive Reception”) stresses that Levinas was somewhat reluctant to praise Kierkegaard. Levinas was particularly in disagreement with him...

December 31, 2007. On a day when it is common to reflect on the events of the year just ending, some, no doubt, asked if this was the year when an important movement in social theory ended. This, 2007, was the year Jean Baudrillard died. His passing marks the disappearance of the last of the notables of the postwar traditions of French social thought. Only Claude Levi-Strauss, approaching 100 years, survives Baudrillard, but he has long been silent as a writer. To be sure, Baudrillard was not the greatest figure in the movement--even allowing that French social thought, as a philosophical dispensation, defied the very idea of greatness. Great or not, so many of its important personages died before their time--Michel Foucault, most strikingly (1984), but also Nicos Poulantzas (1979), Roland Barthes (1980), Jacques Lacan (1981), Michel de Certeau (1986), Louis Althusser (1990) Felix Guattari (1992), Gilles Deleuze (1995), Emmanuel Levinas (1995), and Jean-Frangois Lyotard (1998). A few died closer to Baudrillard's time--Pierre Bourdieu (2002) and Jacques Derrida (2004). It was not that they were all young in death but that their followers desired more from them and mourned their silences. One marks the incompleteness and idiosyncrasy--the oddball irregularity--of such a list by adding names of others who had little to do with tout Paris in the 1960s and after: Erving Goffman (1982), Edward Said (2003), and Richard Rorty (2007)--each of whom engaged the French from the remove of North America. Goffman's absent Self, Said's orientalized English novel, and Rorty's contingent philosophy beyond the mirror of nature were eerily close to French preoccupations in their days. They shared an appreciation for the eclipse of the strongly centred modern culture. Aside from the early translators and heirs of the French in North America, in the early period after 1968, only Immanuel Wallerstein's The Modern World-System, I (1974), with its indebtedness to Ferdinand Braudel and Fanon, could be described as critical of the centre--a critic working in, if not of, North America. The French movement had everything to do with the death of an old order and the discovery of loss, mourning, and absences. In the years before his death, Derrida allowed publication of an English language col lection of his funereal orations (The Work of Mourning, 2001). The collection is apt to the question of endings for reasons other than Derrida's own seriousness about the centrality of death to the work of philosophy--a disposition he took in large part from Ldvinas, hence Heidegger. Neither Derrida nor any of the French of this time were strictly devoted to a line. Instead, they took up a philosophical, literary, political, even scientific, attitude that stood them at odds with modernity's prevailing ideology of centres, sources, subjects, ends, and progresses. Derrida's decentring thought--again not a method but an orientation--began with the ubiquity of absence. This, of course, is exactly what made the movement so inscrutable in much of North America, especially those loosely united states of mind to the south that cling still and anxiously to a philosophy of positive truth and a politics of normal progress. If there is a single starting point for the French philosophy of absences it is neither Heidegger nor Freud, important though they were in the formation of the various divergences within, and characteristic of, the movement. It was, oddly, a thinker whose enduring ideas were something of an afterthought in a small, if distinguished, academic life. Ferdinand de Saussure's Course in General Linguistics comprises the posthumous notes from his course in general linguistics at Geneva from 1906-1911. Gathered by loyal students after his death, Saussure's structural linguistics were literally written from death by a man who, in life, was and remains a missing person. Little is known of his life, except that he spent a number of years in Paris, early in his career, before retiring to his native Geneva. …

Over the past decade there has been a burgeoning of work in philosophy of religion that has drawn upon and been oriented by “continental” sources in philosophy—associated with figures such as Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Luc Marion, Gilles Deleuze, and others. This is a significant development and one that should be welcomed by the community of Christian philosophers. However, in this dialogue piece I take stock of the field of “continental philosophy of religion” and suggest that the field is developing some un-healthy patterns and habits. The burden of the paper is to suggest a prescription for the future health of this important field by articulating six key practices that should characterize further scholarship in continental philosophy of religion.