Tout Autre Research Articles

Every Wholly Other: Postsecular Pluralism in Isabel Rocamora'sFaith

In this article, I undertake a close reading of Isabel Rocamora's 2015 film installation Faith, which shows, on three separate screens, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim men simultaneously performing their morning prayers in three distinct, historically significant sites in the Judean desert. Setting the cinematic and installation properties of the work into dialogue with a number of philosophers (Levinas, Derrida, Cavell), film theorists (Bazin, Deleuze, Chion), and art theorists (Fried, Elkins), I argue that it adopts a postsecular approach to religious pluralism. That is, without being a religious artwork, Faith nevertheless deconstructs the conventional liberal secular approach of universalist neutrality towards inter-religious relations and instead configures the relations between the human figures in the work according to an alterity that requires not cognitive certainty but inter-human faith. The work is thereby consistent with Derrida's notion that tout autre est tout autre (every other is wholly other).

Where Is Richard Kearney Coming From? Hospitality, Anatheism, and Ana-deconstruction

After reviewing the recent publications of Richard Kearney, appearing between 2017 and 2021, including an anthology of his essential writings over his career, and covering topics such as hospitality, God, religion, anatheism, theopoetics, hermeneutics, and touch, there follows a critical engagement with Kearney's work, one that sets out in particular how, despite the very considerable overlap in our work, as fellow travelers in continental philosophy of religion and hermeneutics, our positions differ on what we mean by God and by welcoming the tout autre.

In Search of Lost Prose

In Search of Lost Prose Alain Badiou English Translation by Jacob Levi and Lucy Bergeret March 25, 1984, a quarter century ago. Let us imagine Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe on the banks of the Neckar, near the tower. It is here that we can situate Lacoue's French translation of the definition of poetry that Paul Celan proposes in The Meridian. A translation that follows, and at least in certain places opposes, the translations by Blanchot, André du Bouchet, and Jean Launay: Poetry, Ladies and Gentlemen—: that infinite speaking of pure mortality and the in-vain. [La poésie, Mesdames et Messieurs—: ce parler à l'infini de la mortalité pure et de l'en vain.] (qtd. in Poetry 105) Poetry is thus: a knotting of speaking, the infinite, and death. April 13, 1984, the same spring, in Barcelona. In a translation of Celan, this time Lacoue situates a definition not of poetry, but love. This definition lies in the space between the first and last lines of the poem, "Les Globes," from the collection The No-One's-Rose [Die Niemandsrose]. The first line: In the eyes all awry—read there: [Dans les yeux fourvoyés—là, déchiffre] The last lines: All things,even the heaviest, werefledged, nothingheld back.[Toutmême le plus lourd, allait [End Page 1254] voler, rienne retenait.] (qtd. in Poetry 106) After which Lacoue concludes, "it defines love" (106). Love: a visionary blindness [un aveuglement extra-lucide], a decoding of existence where everything is uprooted for the sake of the invisible, where restraint no longer exists. I would like to suggest that poetry and love are ultimately fused together [fusionnés] under the name of "prose." And that "prose" designates the inscription or emergence [laisser-venir] of the phrase, contra so-called "poetry," which we can also call poetry without love. For Lacoue, the destiny of thought can and even must pass through these five terms: 1) the phrase, which comes from elsewhere, and is "what has spoken within me—in the distance, elsewhere, almost outside—for a very long time [ce qui se prononce en moi—loin, ailleurs, presque dehors, depuis très longtemps]" (Phrase 11). 2) Love, which eliminates the restraints that caused the dispersion of the phrase. 3) Poetry proper, which inscribes in speaking the phrase as the edge [comme lisière] of the infinite and death. 4) So-called "poetry," which pompously declares restraint, and flees the phrase. 5) Prose, also called "literature," which is para-phrase, it is poetry in unrestrained love and the renunciation of so-called "poetry." When I say, "in search of lost prose," as an allegory for the destiny of Lacoue's life and thought, it is in this sense: in the beginning, there is corrupting "poetry." To renounce this implies love as unrestraint, and poetry as experience. Hence the phrase can become the prose that it always was, which gives meaning to justice, the only justice: just prose. Or further still: so-called "poetry" is divine rhetoric, it is judgment and prayer. But if God is silent (as he is today), if we can only love on Earth and only speak on the verge of death, then we are delivered, Lacoue tells us, from "the irresistible magnetism that [God] brings to language," we are delivered from prayer. Thus, Lacoue concludes, "we can get a glimpse of a wholly other [tout autre] poetry, and this is perhaps what Celan ultimately saw, and which drove him to despair." This wholly other kind of poetry is prose, which makes possible the phrase. It is indeed this glimpse that, alas, drove Lacoue to despair, just as it did Celan. The bridge to prose is lacking, but it is nonetheless indicated to us by these two brilliant martyrs. Martyrs of poetry as prose. But let us retrace this journey. In the beginning, yes, there is fallacious "poetry," submissive prayer or ferocious judgment, the corruption of love. There is, to cite the words of Phrase XIX: [End Page 1255] this bitter falsification, this evasivediscourse, these residues (or this excess) of "poetry"which have ruined our most just prose. (Phrase 114) Lacoue adds these crucial parentheses: (I do...

Northrop Frye and American Fiction by Claude LeFustec

Reviewed by: Northrop Frye and American Fiction by Claude LeFustec Mervyn Nicholson Claude LeFustec. Northrop Frye and American Fiction. University of Toronto Press, 2015. 238 pp. $55.00. Tackling Big Americans Northrop Frye is so remote now that a kind of introduction is needed when discussion of Frye comes up. Claude LeFustec's study of Frye and American literature is unusual in its use of Frye. At one time, literary studies regularly drew upon the ideas of Northrop Frye, but that is not so common today. Frye's ideas—his concepts of imagination, myth, the social function of literature, archetype, metaphor, mode (literary history), genre, his approach to plot construction, and his study of cosmology—all were once familiar reference points. Then deconstruction swept all that away, as it also swept away structuralism and pretty much everything else. Beginning at Yale, the Vatican of English studies, deconstruction became suddenly hegemonic, the new law for everyone, especially graduate students. But power is fickle, and the New Historicism swept deconstruction away in turn—deconstruction in its more Neanderthal formations, of the "il n'y a pas de hors-texte" or "tout autre est tout autre" variety, at least. Gender and postcolonial studies surged along with New Historicism—a relief after the sameness of deconstruction in its extreme phase. But Frye's ideas have actually never had the proper hearing they deserve, because they were—are—caricatured and reduced to caricature. Something about Frye's ideas made academics uncomfortable from the beginning. One has the sense that he was driven out, not just left behind like an error that has been corrected. One area of Frye that has slowly made a comeback—or first arrival, since it never had much attention—is the late Frye, the Frye of his Bible [End Page 205] books in particular.1 And it is this Frye that Professor LeFustec is interested in and that she draws upon for her thoughtful discussion of work by canonic American novelists (Hawthorne, James, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Kerouac, Morrison). This Frye is the Frye of "interpenetration," "excluded initiatives," "otherness of spirit," and above all of "kerygma"—concepts that LeFustec draws upon. This late Frye sounds religious and deals with belief and responds, fairly directly, to the more nihilistic anxieties of postmodernism. I say that these parts of Frye sound religious, because in so many ways "religion" is a misleading category to attach to Frye's thought, and LeFustec notes her caution about the religion label. Frye knew a lot about religion, but he was not a "believer" in the usual sense (or an atheist in the usual sense). He was preoccupied, to borrow one of his titles, with "the secular scripture," not just with the "sacred" version thereof. Still, Frye's understanding of the divine is sort of the containing form of his entire project. When David Cayley asked him what his own "myth" was, he replied: "creation." The title of one of his late and most original books is Creation and Recreation. The divine is the power to create. Frye has to be understood by way of his reading of Blake, and hence Fearful Symmetry (his first book) is the primary text for understanding Frye generally. Frye's ideas evolved and expanded, but they did not deviate from the basic principles laid out in his earliest writing. Fearful Symmetry is essentially about the meaning of the word "God"—or the re-meaning of that word, in a radical, Blakean re-creation of how to understand the divine, what the divine is. In The Critical Path, Frye argues that the crisis of belief that develops in the nineteenth century—basically the focus of LeFustec's study—is a crisis about how to understand the language of belief and not about whether God exists or not or what doctrines are the right doctrines. Hence the "God" word does not mean an external being, a ruler, or magical/supernatural authority figure dwelling in a realm beyond our reality. God—the divine—is an aspect of ourselves, of human beings, of our experience in the world we live in. "God is not a sorcerer," as Paul Tillich puts it—God acts in and through human...

Sexual Difference in/and the Queer beyond of Ethics

In her recent book, Are Lips Grave? A Queer Feminist on Ethics of Sex, Lynne Huffer offers daring call for reconsideration of rifts between feminist and theory in order to develop queer feminist ethics of eros (Huffer 2013, 44). Arguing that sexual ethics lies at fractured nexus between feminist and theory, Huffer seeks both to restore a claim to an feminism and to transfigure ethics as erotic living (22). This project is clearly staged in book's titular chapter, which provocatively brings together Michel Foucault's and Luce respective reformulations of sexual ethics with so-called antisocial theory of Leo Bersani and Janet Halley. To my mind, one of most invaluable contributions of Huffer's book is her reclamation of philosophy of sexual difference—a philosophy that many feminist and theorists alike have dismissed as irredeemably essentialist, conservative, heteronormative, and even homophobic, transphobic, and racist.1 For Huffer, however, Irigaray's … absence from theory is evidence of forgetting of her radical feminist practice as an always already method (2013, 42). Taking off from Huffer's feminist rereading of Irigaray, I want to further ethics by exploring relationship between ethics and sexual difference as it has been thought in European philosophy. First, I offer critique of conflation of queerness and negativity in antisocial theory and abdication of responsibility it ultimately entails. Following both Irigaray and Jacques Derrida, I then argue that sexual difference is wholly other (tout autre) to the ethical as it has been thought within phallogocentrism and, thus, I contend that justice demands fidelity to this radical otherness of sexual difference. Queerness, I suggest, names precisely this of ethical—that is, sexual difference itself—and, thus, ironically, both and feminist theory must struggle for heteros of sexual difference, beyond any distinction between she/he, hetero-/homosexual, friendship/love, or sex/eros.

Derrida and the Power of Words

One must constitute a lexicon. Not a dictionary of scholarly terms, an anthology of chosen words that determines a thinking, that founds a school, but a collection of statements that allows ordinary or natural language to cast itself as philosophical language. According to a certain reading of Derrida, rethinking philosophy, its history, its texts, its authors, rethinking the metaphysical discourse of philosophy comes down to constituting a new lexicon, providing oneself with, as it were, new weapons or new tools for moving forward, for acting or for writing. Of course, this lexicon is open. It can go from a word to a phrase, from ‘deconstruction’ to ‘every (bit) other is an other [tout autre est un autre]’, for example, but also from an argument (such as ‘the supplement of (at) the origin’) to an entire text. Now, what interests me in the construction of a lexicon is the power it gives to the word, or even more, as Derrida himself would say, the recognition of the power of words: the power to say, obviously, the power to do, as well as the power to undo, to counter, to contradict, and especially this quasiphantasmatic power to bring about [de faire venir]. There is always a spectral dimension in the name, in the word that names something or someone. Before designating a thing, an object already there, already thought or represented, the word summons, calls or brings something into existence. And what interests me in this summoning gesture, in this spectrality of the name, is that it always occupies a paradoxical, liminal or, as Derrida says, an ‘abyssal’ space. It is an intermediary space that gives all of its meaning to the lexical function of a philosophical language. One must take on the lexical construction of the power of words. Since this power, this force, this

The Flipside of Violence, or Beyond the Thought of Good Enough

This essay attempts to answer three types of question concerning the images of violence found in deconstructive discourse. First, there is the question of confusion between real violence and transcendental violence. Second, there is the question of a lack of vigilance in regard to real violence. And finally, third, there is the question of the need for a moral principle of non-violence. The response to the first type of question lies in the recognition that the violence Derrida attributes to the transcendental level of experience (in “Violence and Metaphysics” for example) lies in the openness of experience. This openness amounts only to the potential for real or factual violence. The response to the second type of question lies in the recognition that more vigilance is needed since the transcendental level cannot be characterized in mundane terms, and that resistance to the mundane means no images of factual violence. Finally, the response to the third and most difficult question lies in an examination of Derrida’s statement that “tout autre est tout autre.” Through this statement we approach something like a principle, even a moral principle. The statement presents us with an imperative to respect every single other as if he, she, or it were absolutely other.

In Mallarmé’s Harness? André du Bouchet and Stéphane Mallarmé

In Mallarmé’s Harness? André du Bouchet and Stéphane Mallarmé Michael Sohn Christian Prigent, arguing for "une poétique qui se voudrait réduite, comme on dit, à sa plus simple expression," asserts that "'simple,' ça n'a rien à voir avec [. . .] un dépouillement puritain blanchi sous le harnais post-mallarméen (l'héritage d'André Du Bouchet—une autre allure, évidemment, déjà!)."1 At first glance, it seems difficult to object to such a characterization of André du Bouchet. Du Bouchet's fixation on the page as a meditative object and as a surface for words, his obsession with language as both container and content, his romance with ellipsis, with a syntax stretched out over a poem's entire length and punched full of holes—all these features resonate with a certain Mallarmé. In fact, du Bouchet seems closest to the Mallarmé whose "acte toujours s'applique à du papier,"2 to the Mallarmé who bases whatever theoretical or "metaphysical" assertions on a material practice as such susceptible to the "envol tacite d'abstraction"3 that characterizes his texts on writing and on the book. That the relation between the poets knots at this level explains to a large degree the difficulty in pinning down how du Bouchet's work—his poetry, his use of the page, his understanding of language—specifically engages with or skirts Mallarmé beyond the unavoidable fact that to be a poet in France is to already write "sous le harnais post-mallarméen."4 True, both poets understand writing as existing materially "au hasard, toujours, d'un morceau de papier à portée de la main,"5 the book as the material strata of ink and paper folded over and into itself, of the word as a splay of letters against the white of the page, and that page providing a space—"paroi de grotte" or "jour," "espacement de la lecture"—in which we apprehend as much as read the words whose relation to their sense, become as sensual as intellectual, seems displaced or delayed. Yet the relation between the poets functions [End Page 117] more disjunctively than conjointly, as if each similarity reestablished a distance and a difference that as such reaffirmed the relation.6 Clearly, du Bouchet's texts operate in a poetic and "material" space influenced by Mallarmé—by "Un coup de dés," certainly, but also by Mallarmé's prose reflections on language, on writing and on poetry. Yet this space is already profoundly different, as if adjacent, making it difficult to clearly distinguish difference from similarity. To summarize a bit schematically, the poets' works most clearly seem to abut and to differ in terms of what I might too quickly call "spatial meaning," implying that du Bouchet's work configures meaning other than discursively. This leaves open the question of how this type of meaning does or does not echo what Mallarmé in "La Musique et les Lettres" calls the "totale arabesque" and "l'omniprésente Ligne espacée de tout point à tout autre pour instituer l'Idée."7 The difference and the similarity take place on and about the page, in notions of spatial disposition enacted in how they place their words or in how they "spatialize" their syntax (not to mention the poetic sequence in du Bouchet or the implications of such in Mallarmé's "volume"). We cannot, then, really raise the question of a meaning made spatial without simultaneously raising the question of the page, of the book, of the white paper in and against which the words, regardless of their configuration, are visible. This visibility constitutes the point where the poets touch as well as distinguishes, in the end, their respective difficulty. In fact, each thinks poetry and language in the same general direction, although they arrive in very different "spaces." They both seat language—and, to a degree, writing—deep in the voice. Du Bouchet sees there the way to avoid a "vouloir d'éternité,"8 to circumvent discursive meaning, to recognize "[d]ans cette déperdition de la parole [. . .], sans que jamais elle s'y exténue, l'aboutissement qui n'a de cesse, et, écrite ou non—elle aurait pu ne...

The Ethics of Love in Spinoza and Kierkegaard and the Teleological Suspension of the Theological

analysis of love has been neglected more than almost any other subject in philosophy. Irving Singer1 singular epiphany of God in the face of three men wandering in the desert! One can, of course, separate out of this or isolate from it the idea of God. One can think it or know it while forgetting the circumstances. Religions and theologies thrive on this abstraction just as mystics do on this isolation. But so do wars of religion. Emmanuel Levinas2 In a momentary reflection on the deep psychological reasons that have landed him in such hot water, Socrates, an undoubtedly shrewd thinker, remarks to his religious interlocutor thus: Is this, Euthyphro, why I am a defendant against the indictment: that whenever someone says such things about the gods, I receive them somehow with annoyance.3 At this early point in the dialogue Euthyphro had not said anything all too alarming, so we should not judge Socrates' remark as stemming from some preposterous religious claim, but rather as a natural burst from a discerning philosophical mind that could tolerate little in the way of theological or onto-theological saying. This annoyance, however, does not lead to an undermining of ethics as many might think. On the contrary, as exemplified by the person of Socrates, the of theology promotes a heightened ethical sensitivity. Of course, given Socrates' daimonia, we all know the abandonment is only apparent. Could it not be better conceived as a teleological suspension of the theological in order to meet the other as tout autre? This essay is not directly concerned with Socrates, however, and while it may reasonably lead readers to question whether we would not all be better off from forgoing discourse on God, its explicit focus is more subdued. What I wish to argue is that the theological question-the question of God-or, more specifically, questions regarding the nature and being of God, onto-theo-logical questions in Heidegger's sense,4 are, at best, irrelevant to an ethics of love and the promotion of such an ethic. At worst, they may undermine the possibility of an ethics of love. An ethics of love thus requires a teleological suspension of the theological. Note that I am not arguing for the irrelevance of God per se. Of God per se I have nothing to say and humbly remain silent. I am suggesting instead that we begin our ethical quest with love without God, and if it happens that we then decide to affirm God, let us be sure that it is not God without love. Analogous to Husserl's epoche, which puts the question of the external world in suspense but does not thereby deny its existence, the teleological epoche of the theological brackets the existence of God in order to focus on the more pressing-the higher-concern of loving others, all others. I shall develop my argument by considering what I take to be two profound visions of an ethics of love, both of which can clearly be seen as founding their ethical theories on God, i.e., Spinoza's Ethics and Kierkegaard's Works of Love. Of course, the God of Spinoza and the God of Kierkegaard, could not, it would appear, be more different. former is the one and only substance, a divine immanence, equivalent to nature, lacking a will and known through reason; whereas the latter is a transcendent God of will, absolutely different from creation or nature, and absolutely beyond reason. Spinoza's conception of God is pantheistic and naturalistic, akin to more Eastern theological conceptions, and favorable to scientists, such as Albert Einstein, who said: The God I believe in is the God of Spinoza.5 In contrast, Kierkegaard's God is personal and revelatory, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Moses. Thus, we would appear to be justified in surmising that such different conceptions of God would yield significantly different ethical perspectives. When we explore the texts, however, we shall see, remarkably, that this could not be farther from the truth. …

Association between intestinal parasitic infections and type of sanitation system in rural El Salvador

To identify demographic, behavioural and environmental determinants of intestinal parasitic infection, evaluate the impact of a variety of dry sanitation systems on intestinal parasitic infection, and evaluate the safety of using stored biosolids in agriculture in order to guide future sanitation interventions in rural areas of El Salvador. Interviews were conducted with 109 households in eight communities where double-vaulted and solar urine-diverting desiccating latrines, pit latrines or no latrines were used. Faecal samples from 499 individuals were tested for enteric helminths and protozoa. Users of solar desiccating latrines had the lowest prevalence of enteric parasite infection. Double-vault, urine-diverting desiccating latrines effectively reduced the transmission of some pathogens, but may not achieve the conditions sufficient for the complete destruction of the more environmentally persistent pathogens, Ascaris lumbricoides and Trichuris trichiura. Contact with inadequately treated latrine biosolids was associated with an increased risk of Ascaris infection. Solar latrines were associated with the overall lowest prevalence of enteric parasitic infections. Members of households where latrine biosolids were used in agriculture had a higher prevalence of infection than those where biosolids were buried. We therefore recommend the promotion of solar latrines in rural areas of El Salvador over other dry sanitation systems, and recommend that stored biosolids not be used in agriculture.

Deconstructing the Rational Respondent

Tout autre est tout autre.1 It is fair to say that one of primary concerns of continental philosophy has been to set out a phenomenology and ethics of alterity. In other words, it has aimed to understand and respond to experience of otherness in such a way that response is not itself indicative of a collapse of that otherness into sameness-a response that is thus to be markedly different from that typical of what Levinas calls a philosophy of same or traditional metaphysics.2 This new response (which Levinas, for instance, has described as a constitutively ethical witnessing and welcome) is thus to be a response that respects and sustains alterity, that accepts a responsibility to this alterity as alterity, but a responsibility that is far from that of following such strict injunctions as to leave well enough alone or to ghetto-ize. It is a responsibility that is always already a response and a responding. Interestingly, in trying to clarify just what response to alterity should entail, one emblematic respondent has been focus of intense discussion within continental philosophy: Abraham and his response to call of God.3 Whilst I will not explicate this story in detail here (suffice it to say that this is story of Abraham and his response to God of offering up his son Isaac in sacrifice),4 what does need mentioning is Abraham's response to this call. Now, this has been extensively glossed by John Caputo, so it is to one of his narratives that I will turn: Abraham, voice called out, in Hebrew (I assume). Me voici [here I am], Abraham responded.5 What Caputo stresses here (and is further stressed by Abraham's French) is that Abraham is on the receiving end of a command, a call, an obligation. It might be a from who knows where,6 but it is a message that he feels obligated to respond to, that he feels he has a duty to respond to. At same time though it is a message-or, better, a trial-that asks him (and us) to proceed, as Jacques Derrida puts it, savoir, sans avoir, sans voir.7 Now whether Abraham himself proceeded rightly under these circumstances is not my concern here (although I have suggested elsewhere that he did in fact fail trial).8 What, however, I do see as pertinent is point that Abraham was simply not able to make a decision as to best way to proceed via any mode of rational calculation, insofar as rational calculation requires knowledge and that which called Abraham was not able itself to be known or assessed by him. Abraham's response, then, is a response made under condition of undecidability, a condition that Derrida argues is inextricably linked to that of responsibility of respondent toward alterity. That is, Derrida argues that far from our response to alterity being best achieved through a mode of rational calculation, we as respondents to alterity have a responsibility-indeed a duty-to not respond simply in this manner.9 Now this of course would seem to fly in face of arguments left to us by that paradigmatic thinker of ethico-political duty, Immanuel Kant. In apparent contrast to Derrida, Kant argues for ethical response to be based in rational calculation, where duty of response is to act in line with moral law.10 This, then, is scene for my argument. More specifically, this essay will examine these issues of respondent and his/her duty to respond under ethico-political law through contrasting work of Immanuel Kant and Jacques Derrida. In addition, through my clarification of both Kantian and Derridean respondents, their respective duties to respond, and frameworks underlying their respective responses, I will draw on Abraham as emblematic respondent towards alterity. Overall, then, this essay will elucidate question of ethico-political respondent and his/her duty of and in response, Derrida's critique of Kantian argument, and, finally, some possible outcomes of this critique with regards to our thinking of respondent and his or her duties toward other, and other others. …

A Mêlée without Sacrifice

In this essay I want to explore a certain community of writing, namely the one between Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy. The ongoing dialogue between the two on the subject of community has left in their writings only traces (with the exception of the first essay in Derrida's Voyous): implicit allusions or short references to be found mainly in footnotes. Those allusions turn mainly around the question of fraternity. Derrida claims that it is necessary to deconstruct the concept of community, to severe it from its genealogical ties. It is, according to Derrida, such a deconstruction of the concept of community that is missing in Nancy's work and that might still lead his thinking in the direction of a certain fraternity.1 Nancy, on his part, answers that he agrees with Derrida's critique of community as fraternity but adds that he already thinks beyond it and thus he reproaches Derrida for not getting at a deconstructed concept of community which could be used to think our being-with anew. Given the double movement of deconstruction (reversal and displacement),2 one could explain the "dialogue" as follows: while Derrida claims that Nancy skips the first phase (that he uses an old concept to name something new without analyzing the genealogical ties of that concept), Nancy claims that Derrida remains stuck in the first phase (that he does not sketch a new, displaced concept-as he did for example with "writing"). Because the two movements are necessary for a full deconstruction of a concept, it is my view that one can read Derrida and Nancy together, with one another in the strong sense of the term, as two sides of the same discourse. In this essay, however, I would like to read Nancy against Derrida. I want to underline a difference, maybe even an opposition, in their way of thinking the singular plural, the singular in the plural, or the plurality of singularities. To do so, I will oppose what I want to call Derrida's politics of sacrifice to Nancy's ontology of offering. Derrida on the Singular Plural Derrida has expressed in many places his reserve not only toward the word community, but also toward the thing itself (Pts 366). One reason for his reserve is that communities tend to neutralize differences and reduce the incommensurable alterity of the other by thinking it under the figure of the brother, the same, the next of kin, the neighbor, the fellow man. By severing the bond that binds the one to, or excludes the one from, a group, Derrida's deconstruction of community wants to make way for an experience of the other which would respect its incommensurable singularity. But one must also ask what kind of plurality remains when singularity is thought in such a radical way. In Derrida's work, singularity is another name for the tout autre (the wholly other) and is associated with two values which Nancy distinguishes from singularity, namely the absolute and the secret, or the absolute secret. Both words serve to describe that which is separated, isolated, remote, inaccessible. What is absolutely secret is the alterity of the other, its singularity: "The secret is not only a thing, a content that would have to be hidden or kept behind oneself. The other (autrui) is secret because he is other. ... A singularity is essentially secret, isolated" (PM 296). Or in Husserlian terms, the alter ego is other because he can never be given to me en personne (leibhaftig) in an originary presentation, but always only in an analogical appresentation (or presentification).11 can never gain a direct access to the subjective face of the lived experiences of the other as they are lived by him. This secret-that is the other-is absolute and must be distinguished from conditional secrets, secrets that can be uncovered or deciphered, secrets waiting under a veil, in a crypt, in a book or in one's heart to be unveiled, decoded or expressed. This thought of singularity as absolute secret introduces a heteronomical and dissymmetrical bend in the space where the one and the other-the absolute other-"meet" (PA 258). …

Towards culturally responsive and responsible teaching of urban design

The era of globalisation is characterised by demands for ecological and cultural sustainability. Those demands request reintroduction of indigenous voices and values, recognition of the local and awareness about the particular. The post-colonial sensitivity asks for partnerships, rather than patronage. In that context internationalised design education needs to consider some new questions: Are Western ways of thinking (including analysis and design methods) directly applicable to the East? To what extent do educational, design and design research methods belong to the cultural contexts that have shaped them? Does the otherness of Oriental cultures demand new approaches? How to educate designers capable not only to recognise, but also to celebrate the difference of the other? Can, and should, design education of and for the other be deliberately and manifestly different from the usual practice? This paper argues that design education, research and practice should recognise the origins and the limits of their own theories, acknowledging that they carry both idio-lects and socio-lects. It also argues that the other can, and sometimes should remain the other – even that Derrida's tout autre. The paper is illustrated with examples from the author's own teaching and research experiences in cultures significantly different from his own.

Possible and Impossible, Self and Other, and the Reversibility of Merleau-Ponty and Derrida

Derrida has recently been preoccupied with what has come to be termed aporias. In particular, he has described the paradoxes that afflict notions like giving, hospitality, forgiveness, and mourning. he argues that the condition of their possibility is also, and at once, the condition of their impossibility. In this essay, I will attempt to reveal the shared logic upon which these aporias rely, and also to raise some questions about their persuasive efficacy. I shall argue that of the two polarities evoked by each of Derrida's possible-impossible aporias (e.g., giving as possible, and giving as impossible), the impossible term of the opposition invariably posits a separation between two radical singularities, or in somewhat more controversial terms, between a self and an other who is wholly other (tout autre). While I will suggest that Derrida emphasises this impossible aspect of giving, hospitality, forgiveness, and mourning, Merleau-Ponty's abiding emphasis upon the intertwining of self and other provides the resources to challenge this emphasis, and even to reverse it. While Merleau-Ponty rarely directly addresses the kind of aporias that concern Derrida, his chiasmic account of embodiment, and his emphasis upon the body-subject's propensity to seek an equilibrium within its environment, better accounts for the possible side of the aporias that Derrida describes. In the process, Merleau-Ponty's later philosophy also allows for a more politically efficacious idea of responsibility towards the other than the position to which I will argue that Derrida is tacitly committed. Despite the fact that two of Derrida's recent texts-Memoirs of the Blind, and Le Toucher: Jean-Luc Nancy-have sympathetically engaged with the work of Merleau-Ponty there remain some important differences between these theorists that are worth examining. Firstly, however, a sustained exegesis of Derrida's possible-impossible aporias is required. The Gift The aporia that surrounds the notion of the revolves around the paradoxical thought that a genuine cannot actually be understood to be a gift. In his text Given Time, Derrida suggests that the notion of the contains an implicit demand that the genuine must somehow reside outside of the oppositional demands of giving and taking, and beyond any mere self-interest or calculative reasoning (GT 30). According to him, however, a is also something that cannot appear as such (GD 29), as it is destroyed by anything that proposes equivalence or recompense, as well as by anything that even proposes to know of, or acknowledge it. This may sound counter-intuitive, but even a simple thank-you for instance, which both acknowledges the presence of a and also proposes some form of equivalence with that gift, can be seen to annul the (cf. MDM 149). By politely responding with a thank-you, there is often, and perhaps even always, a tacit presumption that because of this acknowledgement one is no longer indebted to the other who has given, and that nothing more can be expected of an individual who has so responded. Significantly, the is hence drawn into the cycle of giving and taking, where a good deed must be accompanied by a suitably just response. As the is associated with a command to respond, it becomes an imposition for the receiver, and it even becomes an opportunity to take for the giver, who might give precisely in order to receive the acknowledgement from the other that they have in fact given. There are undoubtedly many other examples of how the gift can be deployed, and not necessarily deliberately, to gain advantage. Of course, it might be objected that even if it is psychologically difficult to give without also receiving (and in a manner that is tantamount to taking) this does not in-itself constitute a refutation of the logic of genuine giving. According to Derrida, however, his discussion does not amount merely to an empirical or psychological claim about the difficulty of transcending an immature and egocentric conception of giving. …

The honesty of the perplexed: Derrida and Ibn 'Arabi on 'bewilderment'

In this article, I consider the positive manner in which both Ibn 'Arabi and Derrida approach the idea of perplexity (in Arabic, hayrah) - for Ibn 'Arabi, it is a prelude towards an encounter with the Real. If rational constructs are an obstacle toward our understanding of Allah - and if bewilderment means the disabling of our rational faculties - then bewilderment is no longer a sign of spiritual failure and disarray, but rather a possibility of truer knowledge about God. In this respect, I consider for comparison what Derrida already has written about the tout autre - how we only truly glimpse the Other when we are confused. For both deconstructive and Sufi alterities, the basic point remains the same: When we are confused, we see things that we miss when we think we know what we are doing. We see the difference of difference.

The descent of the doves

This essay is a critique of Derrida’s ethical works, using Camus’s last novella The Fall as a critical sounding board. It argues that a danger pertains to any such highly self-reflexive position as Derrida’s: a danger that Camus identified in The Fall, and staged in his character, Jean-Baptiste Clamence. Clamence is a successful Parisian lawyer, on top of his personal and professional life, whose equanimity is troubled after he is the unwitting passer-by as a young woman suicides one night on the Seine. After this time, he comes to consider all his former virtues as concealed vices. He also becomes acutely aware of what he terms the ‘duplicity’ of human beings as such. In Part I, I consider how Clamence’s fall from innocence can be read ‘with’ Derrida’s deconstructive registration of a ‘double bind’ pertaining to our standing vis-à-vis what he terms ‘logocentrism’. I argue that Derrida’s is a post-lapsarian philosophy, which challenges all attempts to construct closed conceptual systems that would confer an epistemic and/or moral certitude upon their expositors. In Part II, I then enter into a more detailed exposition of Derrida’s ‘later’ works broaching friendship, the invitation, the gift, and other ‘matters moral’. I read these texts in the light of an examination of what is involved, for Camus, in being a ‘judge-penitent’ (what Clamence in The Fall calls his profession). I suggest that Derrida runs the risk of a certain ‘puritanism of difference’ in his moral reflections, which defend the aporetic formulation: ‘ tout autre est tout autre’ [every other is every bit other] ( The Gift of Death). The problem is that, while Derrida’s position allows one (everywhere) to say what one is against, it problematizes any affirmative moral stance. Like Clamence, who assumes the right to judge everyone else because he has subjected himself to a severe penitence, I suggest that we have a right to wonder whether Derrida’s deconstructive critique of metaphysics can validate only endless repetitions of itself.

Le Roman dans l'histoire, l'histoire dans le roman. Hommage à Jean Sgard [2] (review)

228 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 10:2 Le Roman dans l'histoire, l'histoire dans le roman. Hommage à Jean Sgard [2]. Recherches et travaux, no. 49. Grenoble: Université Stendhal, 1995. 259pp. FFr 60. ISSN 0151-1874. Published by the Université de Grenoble in an ongoing series entitled Recherches et travaux, this forty-ninth volume, the second of two in honour of Jean Sgard, brings together disparate methods, materials, analyses, and positions, within a thematic or subject framework. The tabula gratulatoria that precedes the brief biographical introduction and bibliography by the volume editors, Catherine Volpilhac-Auger and Françoise Létoublon, gives some idea of the reach and respect in which Jean Sgard and his publications are held by the international community of scholars. The twenty essays that compose the collection, grouped together here under the theme—le roman dans l'histoire, l'histoire dans le roman—constitute a general survey of current studies in eighteenth-century fiction that is at the same time remarkably faithful in its diversity to this broad rubric. Like all such Festschriften, the interest and acuity of the chapters vary greatly. Through Montesquieu, Marivaux, Prévost, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Laclos and other lesser figures, traditional and unexpected approaches to the "relations ambiguës entre histoire et roman" (p. 5) weave a point counterpoint of description , interpretation, and analysis. Thus Michel Gilot's opening salvo, "Une tout autre histoire?", which serves as preface to the content, describes the longstanding and wide-ranging discussion of the novel and history in relation one to the other, but also the writing of fiction and the problems of historiography as they confront the representation of events and human life. To what extent—the question is as open today as it was in the eighteenth century—are history and fiction two sides of the same coin? These essays for the most part serve as examples of the many ways in which fiction and history are the inseparable components of all narrative texts. On one side of the equation stand the effects of the Nouvelle Héloïse on the lives of many of Rousseau's contemporaries, or in terms of history and the modern reader, Rétifs Vie de mon père used for its documentary value by Emmanuel Leroy-Ladurie in La Vie rurale en France (vol. 2). On the other side Jean Oudart in "Femmes à Histoire" analyses Prévost's Histoire de Marguerite d'Anjou where historical sources and pure invention in the person of Milady Nevill play upon the same stage. Other essays range from source studies anchored in erudition and traditional scholarship (Catherine Volpilhac-Auger, "Comment peut-on être troglodyte?"; Françoise Létoublon, "Cyrus le Grand et le Grand Cyrus. L'Histoire comme Orient romanesque"; Robert Granderoute, "Byzance, Justinien et son Général dans le Bélisaire de Marmontel") through the combinary techniques of mixing fact and fiction (Gunnar von Proschwitz, "Le Charles xn de Voltaire. Histoire ou roman?"; Henri Coulet, "L'Émigré: sens de L'Histoire et sens du roman") to close readings, interdisciplinary and transtextual analyses (Jean Marie Goulemot, "De quelques aventures romanesques d'une robe de chambre"; Bernadette Fort, "Le roman dans la critique de la peinture d'histoire: Diderot et Fragonard"; Aurelio Principato, "Les Liaisons dangereuses ou Clarisse remodelé"). REVIEWS 229 In thematic terms of course the thread of time joins most of these essays, however refracted the historical components may be. Catherine Langle's "En marge de l'Histoire: l'idéal monastique" sets side by side the decline of the monastic ideal in real terms and the rise of the monastic motif through the eighteenth century, particularly in libertine novels. The Utopian and literary space of the latter in texts such as Vénus dans le Cloître, in which "l'auteur pense son histoire en deux temps" (p. 222), expresses a "réclusion subvertie par le plaisir, une possibilité d'échapper à l'histoire et à ses avanies ... en se soustrayant au temps historique par le retrait dans un temps intime" (p. 223). Thus does the libertine novel respond to the failure of the monastic ideal as an escape from historical time. Robert Favre places internalized time differently within the context of...

Indignation Toward Evil

So, one must take risks. That's what is. I use this word a very grave sense. There would be no otherwise, without But for the risk be worth the trouble, so speak, and for it be really something risky or risking, one must take this risk with all possible assurance . . . What I am calling here assurance or insurance are all the codes, the values, the norms . . .that regulate philosophical discourse: the philosophical institution, the values of coherence, truth, demonstration, and so forth. Jacques Derrida . . . seen hope open like any iris the light. Richard Powers Experience and risk correlate discursively and existentially. The word experience derives from pers, an Indo-European root from which come the Greek peira-to venture or to journey-and the Latin periculum-to experiment or to risk. Risk, turn, derives from the Latin resecare, which refers the dangers faced by ships journeying through the seas - specifically the threat of being ripped and torn apart by rocks. A sibling term is signum, which, too, signifies a ripping or a cutting. A sign is a cutting into stone, a marking of paper, or a piercing of the air with the shock waves of speech. Consequently, Derrida is twice correct when he claims that without risk there would be no experience. First, there would be no experience without the possibility of the incision of signification, without the marks of the graphic and the phonic; the sign, experience, depends upon the differing and deferring tear of differance. Second, there would be no without the courage continue on the face of undecidability-of not always knowing where make the cut-and the face of the possibility of being wounded by the aleatory-those unforeseen events that may leave a person dust and ashes. Life is, indeed, a journey, an ad-venture, the constant coming toward the to come, a moving ahead into the uncertainty of the incessant flux of a thrown existence. One only makes the trip with fear and trembling, hoping come through as unscathed as possible. Unfortunately, life is usually more scathing than not, and, therein, lies the One always risks suffering, bearing the flesh or the spirit the marks of tragic and/or culpable evil-the constant declension of a semiotics of affliction. So one may, indeed, reference in a very grave sense, quite often the very sense of the grave, for death is the impossible possibility that haunts human existence through the specters of violence, oppression, disease, catastrophes, hungry mouths, homeless bodies, broken promises, aborted dreams, and damaged minds. Life is a risk, and, perhaps, Camus is correct when he opines that the question of suicide is the first philosophical question. In other words, is the risk worth it? Derrida would respond that question the affirmative, with two caveats. First, one should take the risks of life concurrently with identifying the meanings and paradigms that offer a secure milieu within which take those risks. These meanings and paradigms are the assurance, the insurance, that serves as the inescapable contextualization for confronting perilous experience. With the aid of rational worldstructures or horizons of foreseeability, one is better able discover or create a reflective equilibrium between and expectations, between cosmos and chaos. Second, one must be willing risk one's horizons of foreseeability, welcome the in-coming of the impossible, that which shatters previous structures and opens one the tout autre.1 As long as one both risks within the constellation of meaning, truth, and coherence and risks those very constellations themselves, the risk ensues undecidability as an affirmation and not a negation. Interestingly enough, Derrida prescribes at this point, mutatis mutandis, an approach that has found expression various philosophicotheological attempts at developing a theodicy, a coherent and comforting explanation for the why and where of evil. …

Reading Life Signs in Jean Genet’s “Atelier d’Alberto Giacometti” and “Ce qui est resté d’un Rembrandt…”

Reading Life Signs in Jean Genet’s “Atelier d’Alberto Giacometti” and “Ce qui est resté d’un Rembrandt. . Cynthia Running-Johnson S CHOLARS WRITING on Jean Genet’s relatively little-commented essay, “ Ce qui est resté d’un Rembrandt déchiré en petits carrés réguliers, et foutu aux chiottes” (1967), almost always link it to his “Atelier d’Alberto Giacometti,” published a decade earlier.1They focus on the subject and theme which the two share: in each, the narrator meditates upon the idea of the fundamental equivalence of all human beings, and includes the telling of an event in his life—a “ révélation” — which led him to reflect upon this notion. The two pieces are typically grouped also because of the closeness of their periods of composition. Genet produced “ L’Atelier” between 1955 and 1957 (White 404) and as early as 1957 was writing what was to be a large work on Rembrandt (Moraly, La Vie 248). According to the title of the second essay and information provided by Genet’s biographers, this manuscript was even­ tually “ déchiré . . . et foutu aux chiottes” and its remains reassembled as “ Ce qui est resté. . . .” 2 In both essays, Genet recounts an incident of seminal importance in his life; it took place around 1953, four years before the publication of “ L’Atelier.” Seated across from a repugnant older man in a train, Genet met his fellow traveler’s gaze and was suddenly struck by the thought— one which he had “ bien sûr” heard before but had never so immediately experienced (“ Ce qui” 25)—that they, and all people, were basically identical. Genet’s biographers have noted the influence of this event upon his development as a writer. According to Jean-Bernard Moraly, the incident freed Genet from the eroticism of his poetry and fiction and enabled him to write “ une œuvre objective,” that is, his theater (Moraly, “ ‘Ce qui’ ” 106).3Edmund White, in a more nuanced appreciation of the intersections between Genet’s writing and events in his life, situates the episode as one which, whether literally or emblematically, permitted Genet to enlarge the scope of his work—to, in part through his drama, become “ the poet of the dispossessed of the world” (404).4 “ L’Atelier” and “ Ce qui est resté. . .” have been connected, then, through their content, themes and period of origin, and viewed in light of 20 Sp r in g 1995 R unning-Johnson Genet’s move into theater. However, the two essays also differ from each other in important respects. It is revealing to read these dissimilarities not only in the context of Genet’s concentrated writing of drama in the fif­ ties, but in relation to later developments in his life and work. I will explore the philosophical and formal differences between the two essays in the context of changes which the author underwent beginning in the mid-sixties: his self-distancing from his status as a literary figure and his movement into the political arena. I will begin with a short description of “ L’Atelier” as a basis for examining “ Ce qui est resté. . . which is more perplexing and, in its enigmatic twists and turns, more meaningful in relation to the author’s later work. In “ L’Atelier d’Alberto Giacometti,” Genet subtly inter­ twines his presentation of the Swiss sculptor and painter with a portrait of himself, investigating the aesthetic and philosophical approaches which he indicates that he and Giacometti share. Genet implies that both he and the artist search for and display in their work an irreducible “ point précieux” of solitude and wounding which he sees as common to all people—“ [leur] solitude d’être exactement équivalent à tout autre” (51)—through a method of creation involving repetition, constant refine­ ment, and density of form. The author explains these ideas in part by recounting the incident which took place in the train. In the later essay, “ Ce qui est resté. . . Genet takes this event and enlarges upon it to form the greater portion of the piece: an eleven-page column of text in which he reflects upon the episode and its implications for his life. This meditation is...