Philosophy, Violence, Metaphor

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

If we did not stop to think, it would be easy (and veridical) to describe Ann Murphy’s 2012 study Violence and the Philosophical Imaginary as an ‘intervention’ or an ‘event’ in philosophical studies in the continental tradition. But Murphy’s book does what all good works of philosophy do. It makes us stop to think. It asks us to stand back from where we find ourselves. It prompts us, or at least those of us trained in a certain lineage of modern thought, to step out from behind the lenses through which we have come to see, and which have become almost invisible to us (Murphy 2012, 14). As its title suggests, Murphy’s work takes seriously the role of metaphor in philosophical work, and the shaping of the Bimaginary^ of specific philosophical traditions: their ways of talking, writing, speaking, even declaiming. ‘So far, so good,’ someone trained in the continental tradition might say—and indeed, Murphy’s book is informed by a deep familiarity with the works of Derrida, Nancy, Lyotard, Le Doeuff and others within this tradition who have questioned the old philosophy-literaturerhetoric distinction. But Murphy’s book, here drawing more specifically on Le Doeuff, is also a work that is animated by a desire to ‘take stock’ of the preeminence of violent metaphors to describe ostensibly non-violent phenomena, processes or objects in contemporary thought (117). Rather than ignoring these phenomena, Violence and the Philosophical Imaginary sets out to ‘think through what is at stake in the proliferation of these images’ of violence (1). Far from being incidental to the main philosophical game, Murphy’s claim is that images of violence have a literally transcendental, foundational role in many postwar continental thinkers’ works. They become what Hans Blumenberg has called ‘constitutive metaphors’ for a subfield of inquiry, vital to conceptions of subjectivity, identity, representation and knowledge. These are each often conceived of as operating, SOPHIA (2016) 55:1–4 DOI 10.1007/s11841-016-0522-4