Gianni Vattimo Research Articles

Essere Italiano

1.INTRODUCTION: VATTIMO'S POLITICAL LIBERALISMLike most late modern mainland European thinkers, Gianni Vattimo is sceptical of putative neutrality and independence of Enlightenment model of reason. Yet, whereas this suspicion in many of his contemporaries engenders a nostalgic mourning of overcoming of modern rational tropes and a tendency for irresponsible play, for him it gives birth to possibility of emancipation. His original contribution to field of philosophy arises from his attempt to reconstruct a rationality out of recognition of interpretative, hermeneutic understanding of truth. The aims of following discussion are to offer a better understanding of Vattimo's thought, to resolve a theoretical problem in his own work and, consequently, to offer a way out of a philosophical impasse about nature and practicality of a more general philosophical idea. The general idea is main concern of modernity. As Kant spurs one to do, one must only obey those edicts which can be rationalized and hence be one's own. Only in such a way can oppression of others be resisted.1 However, whereas modernity was concerned with legitimacy and reason, late modernity, when one is made aware that universal reason of Enlightenment itself is an interested, historical construction, is concerned with relationship between legitimacy and power.To understand Vattimo's philosophy is, then, to think through problems of our tradition: the finitude that characterizes all of us and that rules out any complete conquest of opacity that every person bears.2 This finitude is initially understood as weakening of Enlightenment project. When one's state, one's family, one's managers or others in general command, ask or plead that agent do something, she appeals to her conscience to ask whether there are good reasons, whether reason itself can validate request. If so, then agent acts according to his or her own will and is self-determined. The aim of Enlightenment was to liberate one from arbitrary wills, superstitions and ideology; to be age of criticism.3 Freedom was conceived as subject's independence from power. And liberalism as a political creed is protection and maintenance of independent subject because a system of rights, political virtues of tolerance, equality and free thought and institutions of public education and democratic participation allow for free thinking and acting subject.Vattimo is not a liberal in this sense, as he recognizes cultural constructivism inherent in liberal reason: But what is called 'world' is an outcome not only of interpretation but also of history: it is result of interpretative processes of others. Just like subject is not something primordial or original, neither is world that is always given as outcome of other interpretations.4 As Vattimo has aged so his thought has become ever more overtly political and ethical. He perhaps always believed that hermeneutics and phenomenology were political engagements, but from turn of century his thought has drifted away from interpretation and non-grounding of hermeneutics as koine to which all other philosophies are mere reflected ideologies and towards application or practical consequences of (broadly conceived) hermeneutics' philosophical preeminence.5One enlightening way to understand Vattimo's political position is to imagine him-as he often does in his own writings-in conversation with his contemporaries, Gadamer, Derrida, Rorty, Habermas and Apel, in order to differentiate himself in a negative sense of identification. He is not a pragmatist and not a proceduralist; nor is he a conservative, nor a relativist, although he does-in a very Hegelian attitude-find commonalities in all these positions. Vattimo's ethics and political philosophy arise out of his return and rejection of these possible positions. …

Vattimo at 80

This small volume of essays marks 80th birthday of philosopher Gianni Vattimo, which was celebrated on January 4 of this year. It not a broad, sweeping assessment of his work to date, nor an occasion to assemble his most noted friends, fans, and critics under one heading. More modestly, editor of this volume has endeavored to measure, however imperfectly, vitality of Vattimo's thought in this still young millennium, strength of Vattimo's philosophical pulse in a time of sustained crisis.What a birthday if not simultaneously celebration of an individual's singular existence within broader context of our shared finitude. This paradox stands at heart of Vattimo's hermeneutics: formulation of a unique interpretation within a shared horizon of experience; an interpretation always accompanied by uncanny suspicion that this undeniably human experience might fail to register experiences and voices of other individuals, societies, cultures and ages. Such a revelation can be classified as anarchic: realization that what binds us together understood (and endured) in a manner that inimitably one's own and resists any over-arching rule or principle. In a very deep sense, this spirit-anarchy understood in a methodological and decidedly non-violent key-is what animates Vattimo's entire corpus: a hermeneutic vocation that demands humility, a dose of skepticism, and an awareness that absolute truths threaten freedom of every individual. What sort of calling this? A call to academic rigor? Spirituality? Civic duty? One can say with confidence that Vattimo has answered these calls again and again throughout his life; yet, chord that resonates throughout this choir of appeals undeniably call to keep conversation open, to resist placing a definitive period at end of long discourse on Being. Vattimo's charge in Hermeneutic Communism-that task of philosophy today not merely to describe world, but to interpret it1-is thus not only an anarchic call, but in this specifically hermeneutic key, an ethical one.But what at stake in such a calling? Its impetus arises from crisis alluded to above, a crisis that constitutes horizon within which Vattimo's life and work has unfolded, a crisis that continues to invigorate Vattimo's work today as if Vattimo himself were response to its specific calling-as Vattimo would phrase it, a response to destiny (Geschick) of Being. 1936 a founding moment for Vattimo's philosophical, as well as biological, being. During this year Heidegger was actively writing what would later be published in 1950 as The Origin of Work of Art,where Vattimo notes that Heidegger's earlier notion ofBeing-in-theworld can be more properly understood as being in a world-that is, being in one of a plurality of contexts that shapes and directs human understanding. Such a perspective allows Vattimo to suggest that our age in a positive sense reflects a general aestheticization of experience due in great part to event-like quality of Being. 1936 also year when Heidegger was writing what would later become known as Beitrage zur Philosophie, a text notable not only for its further development of notion of das Ereignis,but also (and more importantly for this reflection on Vattimo's work) idea of a state of emergencyHeidegger calls the highest emergency [die Wot] : emergency of lack of a sense of emergency2 This is strongest where [the abandonment by being] most decisively hidden3 where reign of beings and of worldly objects dominates because it presents itself as our human mastery of such objects.Vattimo's philosophical interpretation of history of West-and its current form as a misplaced faith in human mastery over objects-is in this way an alternative response to same crisis addressed by Edmund Husserl in The Crisis of European Sciences, also published in 1936. …

Gianni Vattimo’s Media Philosophy and Its Relevance to Digital Media

1.TECHNOLOGY AND THE QUESTION OF VIOLENCE: APPROACHING VATTIMO'S MEDIA PHILOSOPHYTwo lines of questioning led me to discover and appreciate the work of Gianni Vattimo, and eventually to complete a doctoral dissertation on him. Both these lines have marked the way in which I have read Vattimo, and I will briefly outline them. One set of questions resulted from my interest in the question of disarmament and what was called economic conversion (turning 'swords into ploughshares') in the 1990s. As is known, in the late 1980s the nuclear pile-up on both sides of the iron curtain had created a situation in which it was believed that a full-blown nuclear exchange would lead to total destruction. The only way of securing a cold peace was to maintain a balance of power by ensuring that destruction was mutually assured (Mutually Assured Destruction, MAD). A nuclear weapon, therefore, was a new type of technology: not only a weapon of mass destruction-a category matched by much older military technologies such as the biological agents used in WWI-but a technology without a use. Because nuclear weapons systems were too destructive to be applied in an instrumental, purposeful fashion, destroying through their mere existence any purpose that might be given too them, they represented an incursion of irrationality at the very height of modern scientific achievement. Peter Sloterdijk's Critique of Cynical Reason appeared in 1983, the year the German Bundestag agreed, amidst great controversy, to deploy NATO mid-range cruise missiles on West German territory in order to maintain a state of MAD with the Warsaw pact. Recognizing the challenge this historical situation represented to the western tradition of thought, Sloterdijk's book contained a meditation on the in which he speaks of the atomic bomb as the real Buddha of the west, resting in its silos as the reality and purest possibility1 Sloterdijk referred to an older German writer who developed a powerful philosophical critique of nuclear weapons: Gunther Anders's essays on the nuclear question offered a phenomenological analysis of the Bomb that enquired into the ways in which human existence was challenged by this reality and purest possibility, including the very ways the West has thought about morality and technology. Anders's critique was embedded in a larger philosophy of modern technology published in the two volumes of Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen (The Outdatedness of Human Beings).2 The first of these contained an extensive and philosophical critique of television that turned out to be remarkably prophetic.3 Although a critic of Heidegger in many ways, Anders was among the thinkers who applied Heidegger's philosophy of technology, according to which the essence of technology is nothing technological but lies in a mutual challenging between man and Being that he calls the Gestell (enframing), to our historical experience of technology.While the danger originating in the Gestell was described by Heidegger as the metaphysical forgetting of Being, Anders was driven to draw historical conclusions of this forgetting in the context of the cold war, and in what he called the third industrial revolution that led to human beings' loss of control over the apparatuses they had themselves created.I first read about Vattimo's interpretation of Heidegger's understanding of modern technology as the height of metaphysics in Hans-Martin SchonherrMann's book on the political philosophy of modern technology.4 It was in Vattimo's thinking that the proximity between the metaphysical forgetting of Being, manifest in modern technology, presented me with a method by which to critically interrogate media technologies. Finally, Rafael Capurro, who translated Vatttimo's Fine della modernita into German and is the founder of the International Center for Information Ethics, was key in helping me see the significance of negative hermeneutics in addressing ethical problems of information and communication technologies. …

Theses on Weak Ecology

I. WEAK THOUGHT IS NOT A MERE INVERSION OF THE IDEAL OF STRENGTH ON THE UNDERSIDE OF METAPHYSICS. IT MARKS A SHIFT FROM METAPHYSICAL ECONOMY TO POSTMETAPHYSICAL ECOLOGY.1We live at a time of metaphysical backlash. Behaving as though deconstruction and weak thought were but minor blips on radars of Western intellectual tradition, unfortunate complications in a timeless pursuit of truth, or playful interludes between bearishly serious acts of system-building, metaphysics, realisms, and materialisms- prey to collective amnesia-compete with one another for title of best, most accurate, and comprehensive ontological framework. Two years ago, Gianni Vattimo responded to worrisome trend, which is still gathering steam, in article Need, What Metaphysics? There, he lamented that [a] spectre is haunting (late industrial) world: new (or old) need for metaphysics, for absolute truth, even for eternal life, and suggested asking whether there really is a (be it new or old) need for metaphysics.2 The need of metaphysics itself, experienced from within its systems, is insatiable. It will not rest until it has swallowed up all of raw existence and digested it into its categories. In turn, need for metaphysics can be only sensed from outside, once needed object has been lost, is lacking, and, through its absence, evokes nostalgia, sends spectral tentacles, announces returns and renewals, and so on. It is in register of unsuccessful, because aborted halfway, work of mourning that today's backlash gains strength and threatens to erase each and every erasure, dissolution, or of foundations announced by deconstruction and weak thought.The spectral return of metaphysics suspends thought from a kind of pendulum that has now swung back to default position of same, if only under sign of lack. The risk is that weak thought, too, would be swept away by this pendular movement unless it breaks with dogma of metaphysical monism admitting only or violence and uniformity. Vattimo's appeal to think the history of Being as guided by common guiding thread of reduction of strong structures . . . oriented towards ethics of non-violence3 needs to be accompanied by proviso that reduction and are qualitative, rather than merely quantitative, shifts. To approximate an ethics of non-violence, in other words, it is imperative to make a Hegelian leap from quantity to quality and to recast distinction between weakness and strength in terms of two largely incommensurate attitudes, which I would like to name ecological and economic.Note that ecology and economy at once respect and trouble onto-metaphysical monism I have just invoked in a critical key. With regard to each other, they are both same and other and neither same nor other, since they revolve around oikos (or dwelling), which lends first three letters to each word and at which they arrive from opposite directions of logos (articulation, reasoning, discourse, language, speech) and nomos (law, convention, division, distribution, allotment). If default position of contemporary metaphysics is economic or economist-a position that encompasses assumption of complete interchangeability of parts in whole; obsession with quantification and rankings; and imposition of more or less arbitrary conceptual and concrete partitions, barriers, walls, or separation fences onto world-then challenge addressed to its hegemony should involve ecological alternative that begins but does not end with a one-dimensional weakening or softening of dominant structures. Only proceeding in such a way will we be able to skirt traps that await anyone embarking on Nietzschean revaluation of all values: first, a symmetrical inversion that elevates low and brings down high (read: valorizes weakness over strength) and, second, a leveling down of differences observed through lens of a general and widespread indifference. …

“In spite of the death of God”: Gabriel Vahanian’s secular theology

AbstractWhat if secularity is a theological condition? What if secularity is the theological and societal experience of both biblical religion and the death of God? Beginning with The Death of God (1961), for half a century Gabriel Vahanian (1927–2012) developed a theory of secularity expressed as a distinctly theological saeculum: the shared world of human experience. Vahanian’s saeculum was positioned against what he identified as an “idolatrous concern about secular matters” (196) that resulted in “the idolization of religion” (196) expressed in technological religiosity representing “an unmistakable abdication of faith to reason—or unreason” (197). As outlined in No Other God (1966), Vahanian’s concern was with atheistic theologies that took the death of God and in his view denied it, “by sublimating it into a newfangled soeteriological concept” (4). Vahanian’s theological saeculum gives rise to a radical secular theology that begins in an iconoclasm of the self, includes an iconoclasm of the culture in which one finds oneself, and continually seeks a way to restate the biblical tradition into a post-Christian world. In his last book, Theopoetics of the Word (2014), Vahanian wrote, “You do theology not against the background of the death of God but in spite of it” (121). I have taken this as the epigraph for the discussion that follows. In this I write a radical secular theology via Vahanian’s Praise of the Secular, guided by my approach I term an annotative hermeneutics that arises from an engagement with the weak thought of the Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo. The radical, secular theology that follows occurs against the background of the death of God, the death of God announced by Nietzsche and the death of God so thoughtfully, so faithfully, traversed by Vahanian. It is a secular theology of annotative hermeneutics that arises from Vahanian but is not Vahanian’s. Rather it is where Vahanian’s secular theology may lead us. This paper is published as part of a thematic collection dedicated to radical theologies.

Kenosis, Dynamic Śūnyatā and Weak Thought: Abe Masao and Gianni Vattimo

The verb κενόω (kenos) means ‘to empty’ and St. Paul uses the word ἐκένωσεν (ekenosen) writing that ‘Jesus made himself nothing’ and ‘emptied himself’. Śūnyatā is a Buddhist concept most commonly translated as emptiness, nothingness, or nonsubstantiality. An important kenosis–śūnyatā discussion was sparked by Abe Masao’s paper ‘Kenotic God and Dynamic Śūnyatā’ (in 1984). I confront the kenosis–śūnyatā theme with Vattimo’s kenosis-based philosophy of religion. For Vattimo, kenosis refers to ‘secularization’: when strong structures such as the essence and the fulfilment of the Christian message are weakened. Parallels between Abe’s and Vattimo’s thought will be demonstrated with regard to themes current in East–West comparative philosophy: reality and emptiness, the overcoming of metaphysics, the position of the Self, the human and the divine, and the relationship between science and religion. The latter point is particularly timely because since the 1990s religious fundamentalism has pushed forward a curious ‘religion as science’ hypothesis. Both thinkers’ relationship with the idea of Nothingness will also be explored. Finally, Abe’s interpretation of śūnyatā will be presented as a form of ‘weak thought’. Both Abe and Vattimo design a religious attitude based on negativity without falling into the trap of anti-religious nihilism. Abe’s negation of the subject, which leads to a pluralism of beings, can very well be compared with Vattimo’s paradoxical ‘credere di credere’ (to believe to believe), through which Vattimo describes the attitude of an ego that has lost its own subjectivity. The person who does not believe but only ‘believes to believe’ is a sort of non-ego. I show that a ‘half-theistic’ way of thinking God based on kenosis can work in the service of plurality because it deconstructs the principle of reality based on faith and ‘fullness’.

A vocação niilista da hermenêutica filosófica de Gianni Vattimo radicada no processo da secularização cristã

The emergence of philosophical hermeneutics as the possible common language of contemporaneity forces us to reflect on the path of hermeneutics from its genesis and through its development. This article briefly covers this trajectory, in order to elucidate the close relationship between hermeneutics and nihilism, as well as place the ¨weak thinking” (pensiero debole) of the Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo as the expression of the nihilistic vocation of hermeneutics. Therefore, the article highlights the key role played by Gadamer in the emergence of what is properly called philosophical hermeneutics. From these foundations, it is intended to demonstrate the extent to which philosophical hermeneutics, rended by Vattimo as the Ontology of Actuality, finds its roots in the Christian secularization process. Christian secularization contributes to form some of the traits of the Western culture. These traits allow both the reading and interpretation of reality as enable a proper understanding of the importance and centrality of the Christian tradition to contemporary philosophical reflection, especially with regards to hermeneutics and nihilism.

John Caputo's post-metaphysical theology of the event

The paper reviews the primary aspects of theology of the event, developed by John Caputo, a key representative of modern continental philosophy of religion. His concept 'weakness of God' is of post-metaphysic nature and is underpinned by Jacques Derrida's deconstruction, Gianni Vattimo's 'weak thought' and Gilles Deleuze's logic of sense. Distinction drawn by the author between the event, as a pre-personal, transcendent sphere of possibilities and creative impulses, and the name which is unable to exhaust the wealth of the event and remains a mere conceptual approach to it, plays the key role in John Caputo's concept. Accordingly, Caputo perceives God as a special event, a 'weak force', a messianic call to love, justice and non-programmed future, which is devoid of any ontological status. Proceeding from this view, Caputo cardinally revises the classical Christian doctrines of God sovereignty, creation of the world and the atoning death of Christ.

God Returns as Nihilist Caritas

Gianni Vattimo refers his weak interpretation of metaphysics to its Christian provenance. He argues that his nihilist secularization theory divulges the full and ultimate meaning of Christianity. This model understands Christianity as God who ‘returns,’ not as an eternal (pre-modern) substance but as one who in his return reveals himself as becoming the current nihilist hermeneutic flux that is reality. Vattimo takes kenosis as the model of the destiny of ontology. God takes a distance from the eternal origin and lets go of his transcendent divinity. From this, Vattimo learns that truth becomes a purely ‘wordly’ matter without any external, c.q. metaphysical or sacred reference. The Good message is: there are only messages, no facts. God’s return has to be understood epistmo-theologically. Revelation is now completely accomplished in a nihilist, endless way: Christianity means keeping thought away from petrifying into truth, fact, and reality. This is pure Christian caritas in that it does away with the violence of metaphysics and the sacred and thereby discourages all human attempts toward violence. Redeeming though this may sound, perhaps Vattimo is too naive (as Girard claims) and too theologically shallow.

Argumentacja filozoficzna w sporze o sztuczne zapłodnienie we Włoszech w latach 2004-2014

In Italy for the last decade, a very interesting public debate has been conducted about artificial reproduction. An important step in this discussion was the adoption in 2004 of a special law regulating the use of the in vitro method. In 2014 the Constitutional Court canceled the prohibition, existing in this document, of the methods of heterological artificial reproduction. A very important part of the debate on the Tiber is different kinds of philosophical arguments. The most interesting or very representative voices in this discussion include statements of Oriana Fallaci, Vittorio Possenti, and Gianni Vattimo.

La parábola del rey filósofo y el pragmatista. Dos relatos sobre el fin de la filosofía, la democracia y la universidad

Does democracy, understood as the moral horizon of western culture, require the end of philosophy as the ultimate foundational knowledge? Do all the narratives of the end of philosophy include the defeat of truth in favor of opinion, a transformation and subordination of the philosophical discourse itself to the form of coexistence that is considered most just, most open, most inclusive? In other words, must the question about what type of philosophical vocabulary and approach best serves human freedom be the most fundamental philosophical question? We then should have to ask philosophy the same terrifying questions Lenin put to freedom: philosophy yes, but for whom? To do what? In this essay all these questions are investigated through two narratives that theorize the end of philosophy with more that four hundred years of difference: Thomas Hobbes in The Leviathan and Gianni Vattimo and Richard Rorty. The game of mirrors that is established in this text tries to be a reflection about the nature of the philosophical discourse and its implementation in the university system inside the context of democracy in the twenty-first century.

O teorii „myśli słabej” w pedagogice humanistycznej

The article refers to a philosophical idea of “weak thought”, grounded by Italian postmodern philosopher, Gianni Vattimo, which can be seen as a hermeneutical interpretation of cultural facts, including educational ones. Vattimo shows the idea of “weak thought” at the background of two big philosophical streams: dialectic and philosophy of difference. It is a type of reflection, which seeks normative anchorages for itself on the one hand, but gives them provisional status on the other hand, depriving itself of the privilege of universalistic claims. The abovementioned concept reveals the relationships between ethics and hermeneutics, in which the ethics of open continuation is privileged. It also underlines the possibility of weakening the colonizing power of the “strong” (modern and scientific) discourse in the pedagogy. Towards the truth (the truth devoid of the metaphysics) one can reach also through the unscientific path, which stands against the scientism and leads through the area of interpretation.

Da tolerância à caridade: sobre religião, laicidade e pluralismo na atualidade

ResumoAs questões da (in)tolerância entre as religiões e da liberdade de crença e de pensamento não são novas para a história, ou melhor, não são exclusivas desta época. Basta lembrar, para os propósitos aqui arrolados, uma obra do período iluminista, o Tratado sobre a tolerância de Voltaire, que tratava precisamente disto. Em contrapartida, mesmo vivendo numa era de consolidação de fenômenos de secularização, como Gianni Vattimo entende ser a nossa – e que tem a ver com liberdade, celebração e respeito às diferenças –, ainda se vislumbra a intolerância para com diferentes crenças religiosas, e o não respeito, especialmente por parte de setores de religiões majoritárias como o cristianismo, ao princípio de laicidade do Estado. Em diálogo com o pensiero debole (pensamento fraco) de Vattimo, analisarei a proposta deste autor de migração da ideia de tolerância para a de caridade, como meio de mover-se para além de uma relação metafísica com a verdade nas religiões para a noção pouco comum às práticas e discursos religiosos de uma verdade kenótica, isto é, esvaziada de pretensões de correspondência e, por conseguinte, de imposição sobre outras.

How to Weaken the EU Frame

Even though the European Union was created to avoid new wars within the continent and promote social integration, it has never questioned its political horizon. This is why legal scholars are continuously reminding us that until our constitution is ratified, the Union will continue to lack the political debate that is at the center of any mature democracy. But if the Union has now reached a new record of unpopularity it is because of this general neutering of politics, which allows technocrats to prevail over politicians and indifference over democracy. The logic behind our thesis is not that countries cannot leave the Union but that doing so would create more harm than staying. However, this does not imply there is no alternative; quite the contrary, a profound resistance to the Union has not only been discussed but also practiced throughout Europe.
 Author(s): Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala
 Title (English): How to Weaken the EU Frame
 Journal Reference: Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, Vol. 11, No. 1 (Summer 2015)
 Publisher: Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities – Skopje 
 Page Range: 81-83
 Page Count: 3
 Citation (English): Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala, “How to Weaken the EU Frame,” Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, Vol. 11, No. 1 (Summer 2015): 81-83.

Emergency, Climate Change, and the Hermeneutic Virtues

Hermeneutic thought is thought of weak, of those who are not satisfied with established principles imposed on them and who demand different rights, that is, other interpretations. In this politics of interpretation, conversation becomes realm where powerful describers of world can listen to requests of and perhaps change their selfish priorities. But if they do not listen, today can finally come together.1Some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in world. This opinion, which has never been confirmed by facts, expresses crude and naive trust in goodness of those wielding economic power and in sacralized workings of prevailing economic system. Meanwhile, excluded are still waiting. . . . The culture of prosperity deadens us; we are thrilled if market offers us something new to purchase. In meantime all those lives stunted for of opportunity seem mere spectacle; they fail to move us.2Emergency and Turn to HermeneuticsIn their 2011 book, Hermeneutic Communism: From Heidegger to Marx, Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala present an eloquent and thoughtful challenge to philosophy. We live, they argue, in world dominated by discourses of production, profit, and dominion,3 and by global, liberal capitalist establishment that authors call framed (that is, democracy whose parameters are predefined to serve entrenched interests). Philosophical conceptions of objectivity and serve as metaphysical foundations upon which rest oppressive and violent systems that relegate so many of world's people to poverty and powerlessness. Even word that might seem to imply an egalitarian and open process in which everyone's concerns can be heard, instead serves too often to mask closed discussion whose presuppositions inevitably favor powerful. As authors put it, If truth claims are also always claims of political power, that is, violence, and if this same violence is nothing else than 'silencing' of other interlocutor[s] through an apparent dialogue, truth and violence become interchangeable.4Vattimo and Zabala, following lead from Heidegger, diagnose our presentday ills as arising out of lack of emergency, that is, fact that nothing transformative or truly challenging to established ideas and frameworks is allowed to emerge in our carefully structured and restricted academic and public dialogues.5 The authors call on readers to take up Walter Benjamin's invitation to bring about real state of emergency, that is, to undermine established truths or winner's history and to find a way out from impositions of realism.6 In political terms, promoting state of means to promote voice of and marginalized, as occurs, for example, when we question prevailing discourses of wars on terrorism, drugs, and crime, and instead focus our attention on the daily violence of economic exclusion of powerless.7 In philosophical terms, to promote state of emergency means to put metaphysical realism behind us and to embrace hermeneutics, which Vattimo and Zabala see as having revolutionary political potential because it substitutes multiplicity of interpretations, especially those of powerless and marginalized, for monolithic discourses and institutions of our world.Hermeneutics as philosophical orientation begins from Heidegger's insight that human beings exist as thrown project, that is, that we are interpret- ers of world that we encounter on basis of culturally inherited interests, expectations, and cognitive instruments.8 In its openness to multiplicity of interpretations, hermeneutics becomes form of weak thought, in that it acts to weaken any claim to truth, and also in sense that it gives voice to interpretations made by those who are and marginalized. …

Overcoming Oneself as Subject in Dickinson's Poetry

Critics have discovered values and meanings Emily poems by placing them certain historical/cultural contexts or interpretive/theoretical frameworks. Among these contexts, major criticism suggests preference historicism. Such preference is demonstrated two trends of thought: first, after the dominance of modernist interpretation of work, it is time to examine its potential misplacement and place back to original historical and literary backgrounds; second, as different critical discourses should help bring out different signification of work, it is thus productive to explore connection with discourses of philosophy, science, or religion of time. DOMINANT HISTORICISM While calling modernist since met the aesthetic expectations of the modern era, Cristanne Miller nonetheless focuses discussion mainly on how contemporaries (such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Julia Ward Howe, etc.) had influenced both The Sound of Shifting Paradigms and Immediate U.S. Literary Predecessors. Mary Loeffelholz also argues that nineteenth-century American poetry always stands in place as background to and that the cultural work of the nineteenth century has most often been assumed as known than read for its possible surprises [...] (Dickinson's 'Decoration' 664, 669). Loeffelholz's purpose is to bring this foreground/background into question because it denies the two-directional influence and interaction between and those of contemporaries, such as Thomas Wentworth Higginson discussed Dickinson's 'Decoration' and Josiah Holland Really Indigenous Productions. However, if placing modernist context is problematic because it disregards interaction with contemporaries, it might be equally problematic to place the historical context of the nineteenth century without considering how might resist the historical influence of the nineteenth century. In other words, Loeffelholz's questioning of the foreground/background might end up being reversal of the model and not touched upon the inherent controversy of the relation between and its external contexts. On the second trend of thought, critics aim for discovering different through diverse critical discourses but still stay within the historical boundary mostly. What could be more exemplary of this trend of thought than Eliza Richards' statement, while quoting Loeffelholz, that historicism is certainly an au courant current studies today introduction of the book Emily Context (5). Jed Deppman is one of the few who attempt to explore the possibility of philosophical signification work. In Trying to Think with Emily Dickinson, he discovers some potential resonance between and ideas of some philosophers/theorists such as Bacon, Locke, Kant, Lyotard, Nietzsche, Nancy, Richard Rorty, Gianni Vattimo, and others. While Deppman recognizes that his idea of 'postmodern' may suggest to some readers, he nonetheless claims that historical context is absolutely required for one's best reading (10). In the review of Deppman's book, Melanie Hubard points out that ahistoricism is a weakness Deppman's approach because those postmodern thinkers are quite alien to Dickinson (no). It is intriguing that historical context seems to easily grant the legitimacy of one's critical approach as if the link between text and its historical context is simply natural and nothing arbitrary. Even though Deppman's approach is ahistorical its nature, he often finds recourse historicity. On the one hand, Deppman speculate[s] on sources of thinking (18). On the other hand, he claims that her reworking can actually predict the modernist ideas of Lyotard and Nancy (185). …

Nihilista radykalny. O diagnozach kulturowych Emila Ciorana

The author of the article tries to describe the philosophy of Emil Cioran as a radical diagnosis of European nihilism. The first part of the article is about threads of theodicy in Cioran’s writing. It shows their timeliness as an announcement of nihilism. Subsequently author analyzes Cioran’s reception of the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche. It turns out that Cioran is one of the most original interpreters of Nietzsche, but also one of his most radical continuers. The existential philosophy of Cioran rejects any metaphysical comfort and face the tragedy of human being. The last two paragraphs of the article are an attempt of a comparative interpretation of Cioran’s and Gianni Vattimo’s philosophy of nihilism. They reveal a similarity between both of philosophers who think of nihilism as a chance to recover from the illness called humanism, anthropocentrism or metaphysics.

Flaneuring with Vattimo: The annotative hermeneutics of weak thought

This article rethinks the future of continental philosophy of religion through a central, annotative reading of Gianni Vattimo’s Not Being God. The reading develops from Agamben on citation and Žižek on the short-circuit into a new reading strategy of annotation as a development of weak thought. It argues for what is termed the flânerie of the weak thought of annotation, rethinking the future of continental philosophy of religion as para-thought. The future envisioned is a future that flâneurs, annotates and is para- to both the religious and laicity and their associated strong claims and metaphysics. For Vattimo, weak thought helps us see that if we read Nietzsche as an announcement and not a claim, hermeneutics teaches us we cannot conceive ultimate objective truths. Therefore, after Heidegger, we reach the end of metaphysics and the age of weak thought, where we respond only to appeals and announcements.

Filosofia da Religião em Kierkegaard depois do anúncio da morte de Deus

O artigo reflete sobre a atualidade da filosofia da religião de Kierkegaard tomando como inspiração as comemorações dos duzentos anos de seu nascimento e considerando, especialmente, o contexto atual de leitura da obra do dinamarquês como posterior ao anúncio da morte de Deus. Como uma perspectiva de leitura para a filosofia da religião de Kierkegaard abordarei a interpretação de Gianni Vattimo para o anúncio da morte de Deus. Em seguida analisarei alguns aspectos do conceito de histórico como desenvolvido pelo pseudônimo Johannes Climacus no Interlúdio de Migalhas filosóficas e argumentarei que Kierkegaard pensa o Cristianismo de modo não-metafísico, o que aparece, também, em alguns aspectos da forma de sua escrita. Por fim, argumentarei que a kénōsis tanto dá unidade à filosofia da religião de Kierkegaard quanto fornece elementos para pensar sua atualidade.

TOWARD A WEAK ANTHROPOCENTRISM

AbstractIn his work on the moral status of nonhuman animals, David Clough rejects the theory of anthropocentrism while accepting its practical importance. He thus leaves theology in a dilemma: reflection on animals should not support the very concept that practical approaches to animals require. An alternative is a “weak anthropocentrism” along the line of Gianni Vattimo's “weak ontology.” A weak anthropocentrism is better suited to a Neoplatonic theory of participation, not the traditional framework of creation out of nothing, and it also can give new meaning to the idea of imago Dei and a Christocentric affirmation of nonhuman value.