Radical Finitude Research Articles

Introduction: Of Rights, in Other Directions—Romantic Prepositions

Introduction:Of Rights, in Other Directions—Romantic Prepositions Kristina Mendicino There can be no talk of politics that does not also, implicitly or explicitly, address language in a way that exceeds all particular policies and objectives; and there can be none of community that does not also give word of the radical finitude and uncertainty that affect every communication. For whether one says, with Hannah Arendt, that "speech is what makes man a political being" (3); or whether community is what "gives rise" to "the gift of speech," as Maurice Blanchot suggests—: speech is at the same time "the gift of 'pure' loss that cannot make sure of ever being received by the other," and it is therefore imparted each time in such a way that it lacks all assurance of its aim or destination (Blanchot 12). Doing justice to issues of politics and community, as well as to justice itself, thus calls for attentiveness to the language of political theory—and especially to its unsure and unassurable purport—not least of all because foundational texts for law and right cannot but be fundamentally at a loss, when it comes to the unsettled status of their language, as well as their comportment towards other modes of speaking, towards speaking otherwise, and towards addressing—or failing to address—others. "Justice is language [Gerechtigkeit ist Sprache]," writes Werner Hamacher at the outset of his posthumously published collection of essays, Sprachgerechtigkeit, before considering another turn of phrase: "language is justice [Sprache ist Gerechtigkeit]" (7).1 Both versions of this most pronounced proximity between language and justice indicate [End Page 1143] several ways in which they may refer to one another, as well as the need to explicate this reference, whose implications remain to be unfolded "up to this day" (Hamacher 7). But if language and justice are mutually implicated, this is also not to say that either may be reduced to the other, nor that the relation or reliance that insists between them is not liable to assume restrictive forms that threaten to undermine the one as well as the other. Even the most emphatic insistence upon the linguistic character of politics in political theory cannot ensure against this possibility, to the extent that there is no limit that could prevent language—which comes before every speakable law and sanction—from speaking against itself. Reading Aristotle's interpretation of díke ('justice') as krísis ('decision') in the Politics (1253a) as the culmination of Aristotle's "presentation of the identity between living with one another and speaking with one another, of polis and logos," Hamacher draws the consequence that, for Aristotle, "the living essence that essentially exists as the communal being, as zoon politikón," is at once that essence which is "distinguished by language, as zoon logon echon" (8–9). Since, however, this language of the polis is conceived as a language of decision (krísis)—and since said decision must fall in favor of that which is advantageous for the polis, rather than that which is injurious, unjust, or just incompatible with politically sanctioned terms—the "decision for the decision-character of language" is also a "decision for the foreclosure of language against other modes of speaking," therefore a contradictory decision that speaks against language and justice alike (37). With regard to the same passage from the Politics, Geoffrey Bennington similarly observes: "Man is, then, the animal that he is, 'rational' or at least language-using, to the extent that his nature is to realize the end of nature by defining himself from the start as a practical member of a polis. It follows that a man who does not do so is not truly human … and that by not naturally being member of a polis, man comes back to another, denatured nature" (23). Whether the emphasis is placed upon language or nature, however, no case could legitimately be decided, but would have to fall outside of all such self-contradictory terms of jurisdiction. As Bennington's and Hamacher's analyses show, language—including the language of justice and rights—cannot but escape those restrictions to schemes for nature, decision, judgment, and authoritative "speech acts" whose articulation language also permits. Hence...

The Death of the Book: Modernist Novels and the Time of Reading. John Lurz. New York: Fordham University Press, 2016. Pp. iv+199.

Lurz nicely exposits Woolf’s drive to depict the important activity of the solitary mind turned toward things and events, yet participating in a community of voices, in the chapter on The Waves. Through three males and three females, we follow the variety of ways characters experience the flow of existence and try to give it some order. Regrettably, Lurz does not mention experiments by the Romantics a hundred years earlier (regardless of whether there may be any direct filiation) when he describes Woolf as envisioning a new kind of hybrid novel that mixes articulated stories and fragmentary pieces. The lead figure Bernard criticizes standard narrative form in his closing monologue as not commensurate with how we experience, in contrast to music, and senses a “deeper, nonlinguistic level of life” (144). The traumatic intrusion of death with the loss of Percival brings “deepened awareness of time’s passing” (152). Just as the friends each previously occupied a distinct temperamental or philosophical position vis-à-vis life, so their awakening to their own materiality and to the world varies. It can eventuate in finding oneself “alone in emptiness” (152), but in the case of Bernard it brings intensified attention to things, with a non-subject-centered account of experience, including influence of other minds and their works, realization of the suffering of others. A dissolution of subjectivity is sensed in changing aspects of the seascape and as a dispersal of self into the human community, while cosmological dimensions, too, impose “radical finitude” (157). A kind of victory occurs insofar as Bernard can split off his narrative consciousness and see himself or a friend as an object and challenge death by his altered attitude, which Lurz correctly sees as analogous to the endings of Recherche and Finnegans Wake.

The Prize and Price of Thinking and Thanking: False Life, Living On

The Prize and Price of Thinking and Thanking:False Life, Living On Gerhard Richter Thinking and thanking form an uneasy couplet. As Nietzsche, the great doubter and relentless interrogator of ingratitude, cautions us in Human, All-Too-Human: A Book for Free Spirits: “He who gives a great gift encounters no gratitude [findet keine Dankbarkeit]; for the recipient, simply by accepting it, already has too much of a burden [denn der Beschenkte hat schon durch das Annehmen zu viel Last].” (180, translation slightly adjusted) It is no accident, therefore, that Nietzsche later has Zarathustra say: “Great indebtedness does not make men grateful [nicht dankbar], but vengeful [sondern rachsüchtig]; and if a little charity is not forgotten, it turns into a gnawing worm [Nage-Wurm]” (89). There is a sense in which the thinking of thanking, and the act of thanking for thinking, are fraught with an irreducible overdetermination. The gift for which we are called upon to give thanks places a double burden on us: the fact of its magnitude (which may be out of all proportion to what we were prepared to receive) and the corresponding debt of gratitude that we come to owe to the one from whom we have received the gift. Perhaps we might say, pace Nietzsche, that the “gift,” when thought in the context of thanking, becomes visible in both its English and its German senses—that is, as a present and as a poison. If Nietzsche’s intuition is correct, our indebtedness also occasions something other than gratitude. It evokes resentment and persistent feelings of revenge, gnawing at us like a worm. There is no doubt about the pertinence of Nietzsche’s sentiment. Yet perhaps [End Page 1198] we should begin by taking a step back to contemplate specific circumstances that will cast the relationship between thinking and thanking into sharper relief. One such circumstance is the pivotal moment in which a thinker, poet, or artist receives the public honor of a prize and responds to this honor with a speech that records, and thinks through, his or her gratitude. Delivering a public speech to mark such an occasion makes visible the imbrication of the honoree’s own life and thinking with the life and thinking of an other. This being-with is a fundamental dimension of our being in the world. As creatures who dwell in Mitsein, we also think, speak, and write within more or less visible quotation marks. Even the thoughts that we, in moments of egoic grandeur, call our “own” tend to be mere evocations of other voices that participate in a spectral conversation inside of us. As such, the occasion of a prize speech invites the one whose life and work are being honored to reflect upon, and to make public, the traces of those others who have made the honoree’s life and work what they are. A prize acceptance speech, therefore, also calls into presence the inextricable relation between thinking and thanking, which is to say, the relation between the call issued by an other’s thinking and the gratitude that such an inheritance silently demands. This gratitude of and for thinking hardly can be reduced to the currency of an economic transaction, the mere repayment of an outstanding debt, which, once performed, would lift, from the one who has recorded this gratitude, the burden of debt and guilt (two interlaced concepts for which, as Nietzsche himself well knew, German tellingly employs but a single word, Schuld).1 What is it about contemplating the relation between thinking and thanking in the rhetorical contexts of a prize acceptance speech that sheds new light on a thinking life that is both inherited and created for another time, a time to come, a time that is still to be lived? And—from the perspective of the fragility and radical finitude of the life in which thinking and thanking meet—how do thinking and thanking inflect our relation to the idea of damaged life, possible survival, and modes of living on? Paul Celan’s 1958 “Speech on the Occasion of Receiving the Literature Prize of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen” bears the visible [End Page 1199] and invisible scars...

Acosmism, Radical Finitude, and Divine Love in Mendelssohn, Schelling, and Hegel

Acosmism, Radical Finitude, and Divine Love in Mendelssohn, Schelling, and Hegel

The Historicity of the A Priori

The contemporary analysis of human existence fills us all with a sense of fragility, with the power of dark instincts, with the suffering caused by mysteries and illusions, and with the finitude shown by all that is living, even where the highest creations of communal life arise from it.—Wilhelm Dilthey Browsing in a used bookstore in Berkeley, California around the time my close collaborator, George Atwood, and I had begun working on an ambitious project tentatively entitled ‘‘The Tragic and the Metaphysical,’’ I happened upon de Mul’s (2004) book, The Tragedy of Finitude: Dilthey’s Hermeneutics of Life—a chance encounter that proved to be highly relevant to our nascent project. This chance encounter and its relevance provide an example of what is perhaps the central theme in de Mul’s interpretation of Dilthey’s philosophy—the radical finitude and factical contingency of human life and of the philosophies that seek to comprehend it. In The Tragedy of Finitude, de Mul seeks to reconstruct Wilhelm Dilthey’s life project, his uncompleted Critique of Historical Reason, from texts appearing in his Collective Writings, published more than six decades after his death in 1911. In the process, de Mul both explicates centrally important though little-known aspects of Dilthey’s hermeneutics of human life and shows how these aspects presage later ideas in hermeneutic phenomenology, including especially those developed by Heidegger, Gadamer, and Derrida. De Mul, in my view, succeeds admirably in his aim, and his book is a magnificent, invaluable piece of philosophical and historical scholarship.

THE BODY OF SUBLIME KNOWLEDGE: THE AESTHETIC PHENOMENOLOGY OF ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER

THE BODY OF SUBLIME KNOWLEDGE: THE AESTHETIC PHENOMENOLOGY OF ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER

Libertad, igualdad, sostenibilidad. Por un ecofeminismo ilustrado

This article presents the proposal of an enlightened Ecofeminism and defines it as an ethic-political thinking about human relations to Nature. It aims at ecojustice and sustainability, which are characterized through the criticism of prejudice, through the principles of equality and autonomy, and through the nominalist conceptualization of gender, intercultural dialogue and the sensible acceptance of science and technique. The enlightened Ecofeminism universalizes virtues such as caring for the human and non-human Nature, and defends a compassionate moral towards the radical finitude of the world.

"o ánthropos arithmetízei":finitud intuitiva e infinitud simbólica en la Filosofía de la aritmética y la Crisis de Husserl

Desde su origen, la fenomenología de Husserl oscila entre una valoración positiva del cálculo técnico, para compensar la limitada capacidad de los seres humanos, y una denuncia de la ceguera que su desarrollo extraordinario ha ocasionado respecto de la verdadera naturaleza del pensamiento científico y filosófico, en su sentido de λ. Asimismo, respecto de la intuición, la fenomenología oscila entre una valoración positiva del carácter fundacional y auténtico de las representaciones intuitivas básicas y la observación de su finitud radical. En esta ocasión exploramos algunos rasgos de estas oscilaciones.

How I Learned To Love Radical Finitude: Reflections Prompted by Ralph Ellis

How I Learned To Love Radical Finitude: Reflections Prompted by Ralph Ellis

Die Störung der Metaphysik. Levinas gegen Heidegger

Although Levinas' il y a does not directly correspond to Heidegger's conception of being, his criticism of Heidegger's temporal ontology is nevertheless justified. With the reduction of every meaning (and being) to its temporal constitution, Heidegger excludes any possibility of transcendence beyond time. The problem of overcoming the radical finitude and historicity of meaning, which is ethically motivated, brings Levinas to the age-old question of metaphysics. However, taking Heidegger's thought seriously, Levinas is forced to look for an entirely new understanding of the metaphysical quest.

Tragic Entanglements: Between Hegel and Derrida

In an early text on Bataille, Derrida notes that Bataille's reinterpretation of Hegel “is a simulated repetition of Hegelian discourse. In the course of this repetition a barely perceptible displacement disjoints all the articulations and penetrates all the points welded together by the imitated discourse. A trembling spreads out which then makes the entire old shell crack.” There is no doubt that this remark refers not just to Bataille's reading of Hegel, but also to the way in which deconstruction intends to make the old shell of Hegelianism, and hence of the history of philosophy in general, tremble. By doing this, deconstruction can be said to open up a way of reflecting on contemporary culture that from Plato onwards had been foreclosed by the predominant tendency of philosophy.According to a famous saying by Hegel, philosophy grasps its own time in thought. This is to say that philosophy explicitly articulates the implicit self-understanding of the culture to which it belongs and out of which it emerges. If contemporary philosophy still faces the task of comprehending its own time, then it should develop a logic which is as philosophical as Hegel's, but which distinguishes itself from the latter by addressing the radical finitude of any effort to bring about meaning, truth, presence, harmony, stability, or justice. Such a logic should respond to the experience that the moments in which human life threatens to lose its dignity are not cancelled out by what is commonly called ‘progress’. To my mind, it is precisely this experience that deconstruction seeks to grasp in thought. I understand deconstruction as drawing attention to that which allows something — for instance a culture — to constitute itself, yet at the same time threatens to make it fall apart. Whereas philosophy can be said to have always shied away from the insight into the radical instability of whatever human beings may venture, Derrida, on the other hand, can be considered to take this very instability as the guiding principle of his philosophy. On the basis of such a principle, the ways in which human life organizes itself will no longer be interpreted in terms of increasing self-actualization, autonomy, or control, but rather by addressing the conflicts from which the various modes of human self-organization may not be able to disentangle themselves.

In the Shadow of Hegel: Infinite Dialogue in Gadamer's Hermeneutics

This paper explores the place of Hegel in Gadamer's hermeneutics through an analysis of the idea of dialogue. It is argued that infinite dialogue cannot be understood as a limited Hegelianism, i.e., as the life of spirit in language that does not reach its end. Rather, infinite dialogue can be understood only by taking the Heideggerian idea of radical finitude seriously. Thus, while infinite dialogue has a speculative element, it remains a dialogue conditioned by the occlusion in temporal becoming. This idea is developed further by contrasting Gadamer's position with that of Blanchot, who also stands under the shadow of Hegel.

True Relations: Essays on Autobiography and the Postmodern (review)

Reviews G. Thomas Couser and Joseph Fichtelberg, eds. True Relations: Essays on Autobiography and the Postmodern. Westport: Greenwood, 1998.184 pp. ISBN 0-313-30509-9, $55.00. To begin with a mechanistic metaphor, as I read Joseph Fichtelberg's introduction to this collection on autobiography the "error light" somewhere in the back of my mind began to flicker. What made me a little nervous was the dichotomous way in which the editors frame the debate on postmodernism and autobiography. Pitting Kant as the "internist," upholder of the hermetically-contained subject, against Foucault the "marginalist," whose notion of the subject disappears into its materials and practices, if only for the sake of developing a clear context or even an ideological position for the preeminence of postmodernity, would seem to me to be wrong. Such a move does not survive careful readings of either Kant or Foucault and appears to be based on a common misrepresentation of the term subject as one evolving idea rather than several. The central problem here lies in not having made a distinction between subjectivity and individualism; indeed, in either glossing the difference between the two or else conflating them for ideological purposes. By placing Kant in a Leibnitzian tradition of the autonomous subject (one that Alain Renaut, for example, quite convincingly rejects), one can trace a simple tradition of the subject as "monad" which then postmodernist thinking (enter Foucault) succeeds in undoing. Certainly Kant's readings on the radical finitude of the subject and on its delineation as an active and imaginary agency offer us a more complex version of subjectivity than Fichtelberg represents. Moreover, there is ample evidence of Foucault's indebtedness to Kantian notions of subjectivity via Nietzsche and Heidegger, even if Foucault's focus is oriented toward the external manifestations of the subject in practices or as negotiated relations of power. The point is that Kantian thinking has crucially influenced contemporary theoretical complications of the idea of subjectivity which bear on central themes developed in this text, but which are not even to be located in the footnotes. The essays that follow are a testimony to the complication rather than the abandonment of the subject. This complication underscores the necessity of a clear distinction between subjectivity and individualism —what is not accomplished in the introduction. Indeed, if anything is being abandoned, it is the monadistic notion of the modern individual as subject in favor of a relational activity that can only be understood within the multiform range of its associations and material effects. What this book does accomplish—and the editors' selections and 116 biography 22.1 (Winter 1999) organization do this well—is to resituate the subject in a postmonadistic tradition, one that quite possibly leads to new "post modern" rereadings of the Kantian "subjectum" through theories that bridge the "inner" and "outer" dimensions of subjectivity in areas as diverse as ethnicity, gender, and cultural construction. Timothy Dow Adams's essay—"Photography and Ventriloquy in Paul Auster's The Invention of Solitude"—presents the essential features of how postmodern thinking problematizes the autobiographical subject both in terms of its relations to the Other and in terms of the connection between imago and text. Auster 's work exemplifies a mode of autobiography in which the "I" manifests itself through an archeology of the Other, in this case Auster's father and his son. Although alluding to insights developed by Paul de Man on autobiography and the specular image, Adams does not pursue further theoretical developments on specularity and identity in Lacanian intersubjective logic. The deafening silence throughout the book regarding Lacan in particular calls for a considerable act of reinvention of categories to circumnavigate such notions as the imaginary and symbolic, self/Other, the "fragmented body," and so on. Marie Lovrod's essay on sexual abuse survivor narratives also demonstrates the need for a more precise theoretical vocabulary for the fragmentation of identity that occurs when violation of the body undermines the narratives that structure and authorize the self. Although the essay collects powerful evidence for the latter in the works of several autobiographical narratives, Lovrod does not rise above the level of annotation precisely because the essay lacks a sufficientlyworked -out...

Wittgenstein: A Religious Point of View? (review)

702 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 33:4 OCTOBER t99 5 appears more as an anomalous figure in the spirit of Kierkegaard than a thinker of the mainstream. For Jaspers, philosophy is a vehicle to provoke a spiritual sense of the wonder of existence rather than an autonomous vocation which strives to recast its questions in increasingly radical ways. Most typically, Jaspers's emphasis on darker aspects of the human predicament--guilt, anxiety, and death as the seminal existential motifs--does not exclude a more positive vision of Existenz as revealed through transcendence . The limits do not provoke a discourse of radical finitude which skirts the edges of presence, but instead indirectly point toward a transcendent mystery, or the "encompassing" (19-2o). If there is an aspect of Jaspers's philosophy that remains inadequately addressed in either volume, it is his preoccupation with the role of tragedy in the post-war era? In light of the premier importance that Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger all grant to tragedy, Jaspers's passionate treatment of this topic in the context of the catastrophe of Western Europe merits far closer attention. Does not the issue of tragedy provide indispensable dues to chart the landscape of twentieth-century thought, and to amplify the differences which prevail in the portrait of politics as displayed by such diverse philosophers as Jaspers and Heidegger, Derrida and Levinas? FRANK SCHALOW DiUard University Norman Malcolm. Wittgenstein: A Religious Point of View? Edited with a response by Peter Winch. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, a994. Pp. xi + 14o. Norman Malcolm at the outset of this, his posthumously published last book, focuses on the question: What did Wittgenstein mean when he said to his friend M. O'C. Drury, "I am not a religious man, but I cannot help seeing every problem from a religious point of view"? It was the right question. But Malcolm then--again on the first page of his book-proceeded to place restrictions on it, which were quite foreign to the spirit of Wittgenstein 's remark and which virtually crippled it. (1) He took Wittgenstein to be speaking of not social, psychological, or presumably even personal problems, but only of philosophical ones. (2) He chose to say that in Wittgenstein's later philosophy "there is not strictly a religious point of view, but something analogous to a religious point of view" (1, Malcolm's emphases). There is no reason to think that Wittgenstein would have accepted either of these restrictions on his remark. Nor does Peter Winch accept them in his forty-page discussion, which follows Malcolm's text in this book. In the upshot Malcolm finds "four analogies between Wittgenstein's conception of the grammar of language and his view of what is paramount in a religious life" (92). In both, he says, Wittgenstein emphasizes "an end to explanation," a sense of an "illness" pervading the human situation, "an inclination to be amazed at the existence of some ' Karl Jaspers, TragedyIs Not Enough, trans. Harald A. T. Reiche, Harry T. Moore, and Karl W. Deutsch (Boston: Beacon Press, 1952), 31-4O,93- io5_ BOOK REVIEWS 703 thing," and "doing, acting [having.] priority over intellectual understanding and reasoning " (92). But are such "analogies" really the crux of the "religious point of view" in terms of which Wittgenstein said that he could "not help seeing every problem"? When we recall that Wittgenstein's later philosophy was a proibund attack upon what he regarded as the idolatry of science, logic, and mathematics (an idolatry of which he himself, in the Tractatt~,, was partly guilty), and that he was also bent on undermining the accompanying subjectivized and privatized view of the human mind, as well as the scientistic reading of religious beliefs and primitive religions, we may be inclined to see his philosophy as clearing the way for the simple noninstitutionalized Tolstoian faith which he himself accepted. Philosophy and religion were on the same track in his mind (and not merely related by "analogies") when he wrote: "All that philosophy can do is to destroy idols. And that means not creating a new one--for instance, as in the 'absence of an idol' " (MS 213, 89). Peter Winch...