Frank Chouraqui | Leiden University (original) (raw)

Books by Frank Chouraqui

Porosity Between Politics and the Economy, 2022

A lively, engaging and expansive analysis of embodiment and the philosophies that have helped us ... more A lively, engaging and expansive analysis of embodiment and the philosophies that have helped us to understand the complexities of lived bodies in their cultural, racial and gendered forms. Bodies and their powers and capacities constitute both cultural and power relations and are still not well understood. The Body and Embodiment serves as an excellent introduction to and overview of this most productive concept.
— Elizabeth Grosz, Jean Fox O'Barr Women's Studies Professor, Duke University

Chouraqui has a grand and powerful vision of his subject matter and his guidance is opinionated. I am not aware of any book quite like it. The combination of a detailed exposition of key ideas, together with a user-friendly guide to primary sources, makes this book invaluable. It is an important, beautifully conceived and exciting book, and the author is an entirely reliable guide.
— Alva Noë, Professor of Philosophy, University of California Berkeley

Chouraqui’s The Body and Embodiment: A Philosophical Guide is both historical and thematic. His presentation is extremely clear and well written. It deals with both the Continental and the Analytic traditions. Chouraqui addresses different trends in the current field of philosophy. It is sufficiently clear for an Introduction and adequately nuanced for a more sophisticated audience. Unlike most works of this level of seriousness, The Body and Embodiment was written with an eye to use in courses, readings from primary sources appear in each chapter.
— Bernard Flynn, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, Empire State College, State University of New York

Fordham University Press, Jan 2014

Journal Articles by Frank Chouraqui

Human Studies, 2021

This essay argues that the deontological view of morality is connected to extreme and massive for... more This essay argues that the deontological view of morality is connected to extreme and massive forms of violence through a kind of phenomenological necessity. In the first main section, I examine one family of such violence, which usually comes under the label of “religious violence”. I argue that it is not the religious element but the disqualification of context from the realm of justification which characterizes such violence. In the second main section, I examine the phenomenology of duty to conclude that duty, by definition, denies any normative relevance to context. In the third main section, I use this sketch of a phenomenology of duty to propose a hypothesis about the underpinnings of the connection between mass violence and duty, namely, that the notion of duty carries with it the exclusion of moderation, and places the agent before an impossible situation that can only be resolved by violence.

Odradek: Studies in Philosophy of Literature, Aesthetics and New Media Studies, 2020

This article argues that a common trope in Philip Roth’s fictions is focused on a process of sobe... more This article argues that a common trope in Philip Roth’s fictions is focused on a process of sobering, which involves the challenges of overcoming delusions of authenticity. These delusions come in two forms, either self-identity or self-imitation. In both cases, this leads to existential aporias. The healthy response according to Roth is to overcome the common presupposition shared by these two failed approaches to the self. It is a matter of overcoming realism about the self and about the world. This overcoming takes the form of engagement with fiction, both as an author, as a character and as a person. As a result, the central delusion that motivates the trajectory of Roth’s characters could be understood as a form of self-deception, since it involves the literary self misconstruing itself as an object to be satisfied, attained and fulfilled.

Philosophical journal of Conflict and Violence, 2019

This article argues in favour of a formal definition of fanaticism as a certain relationship to o... more This article argues in favour of a formal definition of fanaticism as a certain relationship to one's beliefs that is informed by the assumption that there is a mutual incompatibility between consistency and moderation. It analyses this assumption as an expression of an implicit commitment to naïve realism. It then proposes a critique of such realism and finally it sketches an ontological alternative, able to philosophically and politically respond to and oppose fanaticism by showing the compossibility, on that ontological view, of moderation and consistency.

Les analyses Merleau-Pontiennes de l'art et du pouvoir se concentrent sur le paradoxe de la repré... more Les analyses Merleau-Pontiennes de l'art et du pouvoir se concentrent sur le paradoxe de la représentation : en art comme en politique, il faut représenter et excéder la représentation. Cela place l'artiste comme le prince dans un vide normatif qui fait appel à la « vertu » comme source d'action qui ne soit pas basée sur des principes transcendantaux. Ainsi, Merleau-Ponty rend compte des affinités entre art et politique au niveau essentiel tout en clarifiant le sens dans lequel le politique n'est ni soumis ni indépendant de l'appel normatif à la légitimité.

Summary : Merleau-Ponty analyses art and power via a focus on the paradox of representation: in art and in politics alike, one must both represent and exceed representation. This places the artist and the prince in a normative vacuum which appeals to virtue as a source of action independent form transcendent principles. This, Merleau-Ponty accounts for the affinities between art and politics at the essential level while offering clarifications about the sense in which the political is neither subjected to nor independent form the normative appeal to legitimacy.

The European Legacy-Towards New Paradigms, 2019

In the context of the well-established importance of Nietzsche's engagement with Stoic thought fo... more In the context of the well-established importance of Nietzsche's engagement with Stoic thought for his work as a whole, this paper seeks to make two claims: First, that the Mausoleum reference in Lecture 4 of " On the Future of Our Educational institutions " constitutes a substantial engagement with the Stoic doctrine of Recentes Opiniones as presented in Cicero's Tusculan Meditations and second, that this reference taken in its textual and intertextual context, constitutes a critique of the Stoic view of time and of the relations of nature and culture. In so doing, the paper hopes to make a contribution to the wider issues of Nietzsche's views on naturalism, fatalism, desirability and culture.

Chiasmi International, 2018

Studia Phaenomenologica, 2016

This essay attempts to provide a unified analysis of two working notes from The Visible and the I... more This essay attempts to provide a unified analysis of two working notes from The Visible and the Invisible. In these notes Merleau-Ponty questions not only the accuracy of the ontology he is elaborating, but also the incidence and place of this ontology within the Being it describes. He finds that his ontology transforms Being as it describes it, and therefore keeps chasing its tail endlessly. This view is suggested by Merleau-Ponty’s use of Nietzsche’s expression “Circulus Vitiosus Deus” as a formula that both he and Nietzsche use to describe the ontological place of their ontology. Merleau-Ponty, like Nietzsche, offers an ontology in which Being is highly sensitive to ontological accounts, construing Being as a principle of commensurability between action and description, language and reality, philosophy and world.

Research in Phenomenology, 2016

In this essay, I reconstruct Merleau-Ponty’s implicit critique of Husserl in his lectures on Huss... more In this essay, I reconstruct Merleau-Ponty’s implicit critique of Husserl in his lectures on Husserl’s concept of the earth as Boden or ground. Against Husserl, Merleau-Ponty regards the earth seen as pure Boden as an idealization. He emphasizes the ontological necessity for the earth as Boden to always hypostasize itself into the Copernican concept of earth as object. In turn, Merleau-Ponty builds this necessity into an essential feature of being, allowing himself to retrieve ontology itself from its status as external to being, and to make room for it within the structure of being: ontology is one of the ways in which experiences (such as that of the earth as Boden) become objectified, thereby allowing being to achieve its essential movement of hypostatization.

Journal of the History of Ideas , 2015

This paper seeks to address two lacunae of the literature about French political theory in the se... more This paper seeks to address two lacunae of the literature about French political theory in the second half of the 20th century. The first concerns the origins of the great Foucaldian thesis of the autonomy of power, and the second concerns the conceptual implications of the events of the 1950s surrounding the politics of communism on both sides of the Iron Curtain. There are many apparent responses to these questions in the existing literature. However, they are rendered insufficient by their refusal to address the need for a specifically intellectual history. With regard to Foucault’s thesis of the autonomy of power, philosophers seem happy to abstract Foucault’s insight from its context, resting on the implication that it may have come out of nowhere. Conversely, when it comes to the implications of historical developments on political philosophy, historians seem to satisfy themselves with wordplay: before so many histories of the intellectuals, who needs intellectual history? It is however rather obvious that both history and philosophy are set to benefit from a specifically intellectual history, that is to say, from an account neither of an idea nor of a context, but of how the historical context of the early fifties made the Foucaldian idea conceivable.

Chiasmi International, 2011

Nietzsche-Studien, 2015

Abstract: In this paper, I examine the possibility of constructing an ontological phenomenology o... more Abstract: In this paper, I examine the possibility of constructing an ontological phenomenology of love by tracing Nietzsche’s questioning about science. I examine how the evolution of Nietzsche’s thinking about science and his increasing suspicion towards it coincide with his interest for the question of love. Although the texts from the early and middle period praise science as an antidote to asceticism, the later texts associate the scientific spirit with asceticism. I argue that this shift is motivated by Nietzsche’s realization that asceticism and science share the same fetish of facts. It is now for Nietzsche no longer a matter of proving the so-called facts of the backworlds to be wrong (something science is very capable of doing), but a matter of rejecting the very structure of thought that reduces a shapeless reality into a series of facts, subjects and objects. It is this second attitude that Nietzsche regards as the common core of science and asceticism. From this critique of science and its correlative critique of facts, Nietzsche begins searching for a counter-attitude able to perform the reduction of the factual attitude. This is the attitude he calls love. Although Nietzsche’s concept of love has oft en been elucidated in terms of its object or its subject, I argue that such interpretations precisely defeat Nietzsche’s point, which is to recover a ground that precedes the division of the world into subjects and objects. Love becomes the name of this intra-relationship of being, opening up to new perspectives on Nietzsche’s ontology of the will to power.

Pli, The Warwick Journal of Philosophy, 2015

Les Temps Modernes 69: 677, 2014

Book Chapters by Frank Chouraqui

Merleau-Ponty, Çağdaş Fransız felsefesinin temelindeki akımları anlamamız için mükemmel bir örnek... more Merleau-Ponty, Çağdaş Fransız felsefesinin temelindeki akımları anlamamız için mükemmel bir örnektir. Filozofa göre bugünün felsefesi ne görkemli klasik rasyonalizm gibi hakiki bir fikri mutlak bir varlıkla çakıştırabilir ne de kendini hakikatin yıkıcısı olacak bir göreceliğe indirgemeyi onaylar. O daha çok, sonluluk ve olgusallık ufkunda, hakikatin öne çıkışını düşünmeyi önerir. Söz konusu girişim varoluşun hakikatinin ve sonluluğunun (ve hatta felsefenin imkânının) kökensel biçimde birbirine düğümlendiği yere yavaş bir çıkıştır. Hazırlanan bu seçkide Merleau-Ponty'nin düşünce dünyasının fenomenoloji ile ilişkisinin yanında, felsefe dışı alanların sorularını da içine alan eksenini betimlemek hedeflendi. Dolayısıyla, Fransız filozofun, psikanaliz, Gestalt psikolojisi, doğa bilimleri ve hiç şüphesiz resim ve sinema ile olan etkileşimi ortaya koyuldu (Emre Şan)

Herman Siemens and james Pearson (eds.) Conflict and Contest in Nietzsch'e's Philosophy, Bloomsbury, 2018

Among the many legitimate readings of GM, two are fully at odds with each other. The first conten... more Among the many legitimate readings of GM, two are fully at odds with each other. The first contends that GM makes no normative claim, that is, that although the story it tells might suffice to discourage us from committing to slave morality, it doesn't contain any argument against it. Such readings often leave Nietzsche's preference for an aristocratic morality to a matter of taste, and refer to the wide array of texts on taste. The other reading takes the opposite tack, and argues that GM constitutes an argument against slave morality. This is the path I shall take here. Yet, that path is fraught with difficulties. First, one should not fall into an account that would commit Nietzsche to some sort of genetic fallacy (Loeb, 1995): the argument against slave morality, if there is one, cannot be merely that the origins of slave morality are immoral. Secondly, any critique of slave morality cannot rely on any external criterion of value, as this would either commit us to the very kind of transcendent judgement that Nietzsche rejects in the slave morality, or take us back to the initial opposition of tastes: one is left free to choose one's scale of value according to one's taste. In short, the critique of slave morality needs to be immanent: it must show a contradiction in the slave morality or in the worldview that it relies on (if there is such a worldview and if slave morality truly relies on it). This leaves a narrow path open, which I wish to take. My suggestion is that Nietzsche intends GM to demonstrate the following contradiction in the slave morality:

Emmanuel Alloa, Frank Chouraqui, Rajiv Kaushik (eds.) Merleau-Ponty and Contemporary Thought, SUNY, 2019

Porosity Between Politics and the Economy, 2022

A lively, engaging and expansive analysis of embodiment and the philosophies that have helped us ... more A lively, engaging and expansive analysis of embodiment and the philosophies that have helped us to understand the complexities of lived bodies in their cultural, racial and gendered forms. Bodies and their powers and capacities constitute both cultural and power relations and are still not well understood. The Body and Embodiment serves as an excellent introduction to and overview of this most productive concept.
— Elizabeth Grosz, Jean Fox O'Barr Women's Studies Professor, Duke University

Chouraqui has a grand and powerful vision of his subject matter and his guidance is opinionated. I am not aware of any book quite like it. The combination of a detailed exposition of key ideas, together with a user-friendly guide to primary sources, makes this book invaluable. It is an important, beautifully conceived and exciting book, and the author is an entirely reliable guide.
— Alva Noë, Professor of Philosophy, University of California Berkeley

Chouraqui’s The Body and Embodiment: A Philosophical Guide is both historical and thematic. His presentation is extremely clear and well written. It deals with both the Continental and the Analytic traditions. Chouraqui addresses different trends in the current field of philosophy. It is sufficiently clear for an Introduction and adequately nuanced for a more sophisticated audience. Unlike most works of this level of seriousness, The Body and Embodiment was written with an eye to use in courses, readings from primary sources appear in each chapter.
— Bernard Flynn, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, Empire State College, State University of New York

Fordham University Press, Jan 2014

Human Studies, 2021

This essay argues that the deontological view of morality is connected to extreme and massive for... more This essay argues that the deontological view of morality is connected to extreme and massive forms of violence through a kind of phenomenological necessity. In the first main section, I examine one family of such violence, which usually comes under the label of “religious violence”. I argue that it is not the religious element but the disqualification of context from the realm of justification which characterizes such violence. In the second main section, I examine the phenomenology of duty to conclude that duty, by definition, denies any normative relevance to context. In the third main section, I use this sketch of a phenomenology of duty to propose a hypothesis about the underpinnings of the connection between mass violence and duty, namely, that the notion of duty carries with it the exclusion of moderation, and places the agent before an impossible situation that can only be resolved by violence.

Odradek: Studies in Philosophy of Literature, Aesthetics and New Media Studies, 2020

This article argues that a common trope in Philip Roth’s fictions is focused on a process of sobe... more This article argues that a common trope in Philip Roth’s fictions is focused on a process of sobering, which involves the challenges of overcoming delusions of authenticity. These delusions come in two forms, either self-identity or self-imitation. In both cases, this leads to existential aporias. The healthy response according to Roth is to overcome the common presupposition shared by these two failed approaches to the self. It is a matter of overcoming realism about the self and about the world. This overcoming takes the form of engagement with fiction, both as an author, as a character and as a person. As a result, the central delusion that motivates the trajectory of Roth’s characters could be understood as a form of self-deception, since it involves the literary self misconstruing itself as an object to be satisfied, attained and fulfilled.

Philosophical journal of Conflict and Violence, 2019

This article argues in favour of a formal definition of fanaticism as a certain relationship to o... more This article argues in favour of a formal definition of fanaticism as a certain relationship to one's beliefs that is informed by the assumption that there is a mutual incompatibility between consistency and moderation. It analyses this assumption as an expression of an implicit commitment to naïve realism. It then proposes a critique of such realism and finally it sketches an ontological alternative, able to philosophically and politically respond to and oppose fanaticism by showing the compossibility, on that ontological view, of moderation and consistency.

Les analyses Merleau-Pontiennes de l'art et du pouvoir se concentrent sur le paradoxe de la repré... more Les analyses Merleau-Pontiennes de l'art et du pouvoir se concentrent sur le paradoxe de la représentation : en art comme en politique, il faut représenter et excéder la représentation. Cela place l'artiste comme le prince dans un vide normatif qui fait appel à la « vertu » comme source d'action qui ne soit pas basée sur des principes transcendantaux. Ainsi, Merleau-Ponty rend compte des affinités entre art et politique au niveau essentiel tout en clarifiant le sens dans lequel le politique n'est ni soumis ni indépendant de l'appel normatif à la légitimité.

Summary : Merleau-Ponty analyses art and power via a focus on the paradox of representation: in art and in politics alike, one must both represent and exceed representation. This places the artist and the prince in a normative vacuum which appeals to virtue as a source of action independent form transcendent principles. This, Merleau-Ponty accounts for the affinities between art and politics at the essential level while offering clarifications about the sense in which the political is neither subjected to nor independent form the normative appeal to legitimacy.

The European Legacy-Towards New Paradigms, 2019

In the context of the well-established importance of Nietzsche's engagement with Stoic thought fo... more In the context of the well-established importance of Nietzsche's engagement with Stoic thought for his work as a whole, this paper seeks to make two claims: First, that the Mausoleum reference in Lecture 4 of " On the Future of Our Educational institutions " constitutes a substantial engagement with the Stoic doctrine of Recentes Opiniones as presented in Cicero's Tusculan Meditations and second, that this reference taken in its textual and intertextual context, constitutes a critique of the Stoic view of time and of the relations of nature and culture. In so doing, the paper hopes to make a contribution to the wider issues of Nietzsche's views on naturalism, fatalism, desirability and culture.

Chiasmi International, 2018

Studia Phaenomenologica, 2016

This essay attempts to provide a unified analysis of two working notes from The Visible and the I... more This essay attempts to provide a unified analysis of two working notes from The Visible and the Invisible. In these notes Merleau-Ponty questions not only the accuracy of the ontology he is elaborating, but also the incidence and place of this ontology within the Being it describes. He finds that his ontology transforms Being as it describes it, and therefore keeps chasing its tail endlessly. This view is suggested by Merleau-Ponty’s use of Nietzsche’s expression “Circulus Vitiosus Deus” as a formula that both he and Nietzsche use to describe the ontological place of their ontology. Merleau-Ponty, like Nietzsche, offers an ontology in which Being is highly sensitive to ontological accounts, construing Being as a principle of commensurability between action and description, language and reality, philosophy and world.

Research in Phenomenology, 2016

In this essay, I reconstruct Merleau-Ponty’s implicit critique of Husserl in his lectures on Huss... more In this essay, I reconstruct Merleau-Ponty’s implicit critique of Husserl in his lectures on Husserl’s concept of the earth as Boden or ground. Against Husserl, Merleau-Ponty regards the earth seen as pure Boden as an idealization. He emphasizes the ontological necessity for the earth as Boden to always hypostasize itself into the Copernican concept of earth as object. In turn, Merleau-Ponty builds this necessity into an essential feature of being, allowing himself to retrieve ontology itself from its status as external to being, and to make room for it within the structure of being: ontology is one of the ways in which experiences (such as that of the earth as Boden) become objectified, thereby allowing being to achieve its essential movement of hypostatization.

Journal of the History of Ideas , 2015

This paper seeks to address two lacunae of the literature about French political theory in the se... more This paper seeks to address two lacunae of the literature about French political theory in the second half of the 20th century. The first concerns the origins of the great Foucaldian thesis of the autonomy of power, and the second concerns the conceptual implications of the events of the 1950s surrounding the politics of communism on both sides of the Iron Curtain. There are many apparent responses to these questions in the existing literature. However, they are rendered insufficient by their refusal to address the need for a specifically intellectual history. With regard to Foucault’s thesis of the autonomy of power, philosophers seem happy to abstract Foucault’s insight from its context, resting on the implication that it may have come out of nowhere. Conversely, when it comes to the implications of historical developments on political philosophy, historians seem to satisfy themselves with wordplay: before so many histories of the intellectuals, who needs intellectual history? It is however rather obvious that both history and philosophy are set to benefit from a specifically intellectual history, that is to say, from an account neither of an idea nor of a context, but of how the historical context of the early fifties made the Foucaldian idea conceivable.

Chiasmi International, 2011

Nietzsche-Studien, 2015

Abstract: In this paper, I examine the possibility of constructing an ontological phenomenology o... more Abstract: In this paper, I examine the possibility of constructing an ontological phenomenology of love by tracing Nietzsche’s questioning about science. I examine how the evolution of Nietzsche’s thinking about science and his increasing suspicion towards it coincide with his interest for the question of love. Although the texts from the early and middle period praise science as an antidote to asceticism, the later texts associate the scientific spirit with asceticism. I argue that this shift is motivated by Nietzsche’s realization that asceticism and science share the same fetish of facts. It is now for Nietzsche no longer a matter of proving the so-called facts of the backworlds to be wrong (something science is very capable of doing), but a matter of rejecting the very structure of thought that reduces a shapeless reality into a series of facts, subjects and objects. It is this second attitude that Nietzsche regards as the common core of science and asceticism. From this critique of science and its correlative critique of facts, Nietzsche begins searching for a counter-attitude able to perform the reduction of the factual attitude. This is the attitude he calls love. Although Nietzsche’s concept of love has oft en been elucidated in terms of its object or its subject, I argue that such interpretations precisely defeat Nietzsche’s point, which is to recover a ground that precedes the division of the world into subjects and objects. Love becomes the name of this intra-relationship of being, opening up to new perspectives on Nietzsche’s ontology of the will to power.

Pli, The Warwick Journal of Philosophy, 2015

Les Temps Modernes 69: 677, 2014

Merleau-Ponty, Çağdaş Fransız felsefesinin temelindeki akımları anlamamız için mükemmel bir örnek... more Merleau-Ponty, Çağdaş Fransız felsefesinin temelindeki akımları anlamamız için mükemmel bir örnektir. Filozofa göre bugünün felsefesi ne görkemli klasik rasyonalizm gibi hakiki bir fikri mutlak bir varlıkla çakıştırabilir ne de kendini hakikatin yıkıcısı olacak bir göreceliğe indirgemeyi onaylar. O daha çok, sonluluk ve olgusallık ufkunda, hakikatin öne çıkışını düşünmeyi önerir. Söz konusu girişim varoluşun hakikatinin ve sonluluğunun (ve hatta felsefenin imkânının) kökensel biçimde birbirine düğümlendiği yere yavaş bir çıkıştır. Hazırlanan bu seçkide Merleau-Ponty'nin düşünce dünyasının fenomenoloji ile ilişkisinin yanında, felsefe dışı alanların sorularını da içine alan eksenini betimlemek hedeflendi. Dolayısıyla, Fransız filozofun, psikanaliz, Gestalt psikolojisi, doğa bilimleri ve hiç şüphesiz resim ve sinema ile olan etkileşimi ortaya koyuldu (Emre Şan)

Herman Siemens and james Pearson (eds.) Conflict and Contest in Nietzsch'e's Philosophy, Bloomsbury, 2018

Among the many legitimate readings of GM, two are fully at odds with each other. The first conten... more Among the many legitimate readings of GM, two are fully at odds with each other. The first contends that GM makes no normative claim, that is, that although the story it tells might suffice to discourage us from committing to slave morality, it doesn't contain any argument against it. Such readings often leave Nietzsche's preference for an aristocratic morality to a matter of taste, and refer to the wide array of texts on taste. The other reading takes the opposite tack, and argues that GM constitutes an argument against slave morality. This is the path I shall take here. Yet, that path is fraught with difficulties. First, one should not fall into an account that would commit Nietzsche to some sort of genetic fallacy (Loeb, 1995): the argument against slave morality, if there is one, cannot be merely that the origins of slave morality are immoral. Secondly, any critique of slave morality cannot rely on any external criterion of value, as this would either commit us to the very kind of transcendent judgement that Nietzsche rejects in the slave morality, or take us back to the initial opposition of tastes: one is left free to choose one's scale of value according to one's taste. In short, the critique of slave morality needs to be immanent: it must show a contradiction in the slave morality or in the worldview that it relies on (if there is such a worldview and if slave morality truly relies on it). This leaves a narrow path open, which I wish to take. My suggestion is that Nietzsche intends GM to demonstrate the following contradiction in the slave morality:

Emmanuel Alloa, Frank Chouraqui, Rajiv Kaushik (eds.) Merleau-Ponty and Contemporary Thought, SUNY, 2019

Chris Bremmers, Andrew Smith, Jean-Pierre Wils (eds.) Beyond Nihilism?, Verlag Traugott Bautz, 2018

This is a paper in response to Paul van Tongeren's question regarding the possibility to overcome... more This is a paper in response to Paul van Tongeren's question regarding the possibility to overcome nihilism on the occasion of his retirement.

Lisa Block de Behar (ed.) L'Eternité par les Astres d'Auguste Blanqui, Paris, Champion. , 2019

La fascination exercée par le petit texte de Blanqui ne saurait être dissociée de la question pol... more La fascination exercée par le petit texte de Blanqui ne saurait être dissociée de la question politique. Elle lui est liée par les circonstances de sa composition comme par la vie de son auteur et par sa place dans le dix-neuvième siècle tel qu'il peut être dit avoir eu lieu et plus encore, comme il nous apparaît aujourd'hui. Une telle spéculation astronomique, quand on les trouve chez plusieurs scientifiques plus ou moins sérieux au dix-neuvième siècle, n'attire pas notre fascination. A l'inverse, les textes politiques du révolutionnaire Blanqui qui ont certes leur place dans le canon de la gauche révolutionnaire, ne justifient pas un tel intérêt, même si la mystique révolutionnaire n'est jamais sans attrait romantique. La plupart des lecteurs de L'Eternité, au contraire, chacun à sa manière, semblent se focaliser sur le mystère du révolutionnaire astronome, du cosmologiste homme d'action.

Dariusz Skórczewski and Andrzej Wiercinski (eds), Melancholia: The Disease of the Soul (Lublin: KUL, 2015)

Christine Daigle and Elodie Boulil (eds.), Nietzsche and Phenomenology, indiana University Press, 2013

Auguste Blanqui: Eternity by the Stars

Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo, D. Large and C. Martin (eds.), Berlin, De Gruyter. (forthcoming 2015)

in Andrzej Wiercinski, ed., Hermeneutics-Ethics-Education, Zürich: LIT Verlag, 2015

Manuel Dries (ed.) Nietzsche on Consciousness and the Embodied Mind, Berlin, de Gruyter., 2018

This paper attempts to show the importance of taking into

British Journal of the History fo Philosophy, 2017

Continental Philosophy Review

Notre-Dame Philosophical Reviews

International Journal of Philosophical Studies

Philosophie (ed. du Seuil) no. 122

International Journal of Phıilosophical Studies

The Agonist-Journal of the Nietzsche Circle

The Agonist-Journal of the Nietzsche Circle

Since its origins in the European spirit of the Renaissance, modern philosophy has oscillated bet... more Since its origins in the European spirit of the Renaissance, modern philosophy has oscillated between its metaphysical desire for pure knowledge and its acknowledgment of what Connolly calls the 'urgency of today' (p. 41), the everyday demands for action which cannot afford to wait for pure knowledge. For many, this division is heuristic more than it is real, and therefore, it is a chronological problem of foundations and consequences before it is a conflict of priorities.

Contra Mundum Press, 2014

Blanqui was the great conspiratorial revolutionary of the nineteenth century. At the end of his l... more Blanqui was the great conspiratorial revolutionary of the nineteenth
century. At the end of his life, he produced this strange, poetic, wondrous
little book, which employs the science of the age to argue for the
eternal repetition of the world. From this hypothesis, Blanqui draws
reflections resigned, but somehow affirmative. Students of nineteenth century thought will be grateful for this eloquent new translation. Frank
Chouraqui’s superb introduction locates Eternity by the Stars in the trajectory of Blanqui’s thought and life and builds toward a crescendo that
links the book to ruminations on the condition of modernity by the
likes of Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Benjamin and Borges.
—Warren Breckman, Sheldon and Lucy Hackney professor of History, University of Pennsylvania

Blanqui’s Eternity by the Stars is a must read for anyone who has been
enthralled by Nietzsche, Walter Benjamin, or Borges. Chouraqui’s perceptive
and erudite introduction and notes clarify the logic of the argument,
Blanqui’s reception by major thinkers, and the context of the essay’s
composition in solitary confinement following the Paris Commune. This
book should certainly be in the canon of philosophical prison literature,
alongside writers like Boethius & Gramsci.
—Gary Shapiro, Prof. of Philosophy, Tucker-Boatwright Professor of the Humanities, Emeritus, University of Richmond

Blanqui’s Eternity by the Stars is the late, phantasmagoric manifesto of a
man who had been condemned to prison for the better part of his life
on account of his radical politics. Encountering this text toward the end
of his career, Walter Benjamin pronounced it an incomparably bleak (yet
potentially messianic) articulation of the Ever-Sameness of the New on
the order of Nietzsche’s doctrine of the Eternal Return. Here rendered
and admirably introduced into English for the first time by Frank Chouraqui,
Blanqui’s cosmological prose stands alongside Blake’s later prophecies,
Poe’s Eureka, & Borges’ Ficciones as an homage to the human mind’s capacity “to see the world in a grain of sand” (and “hold infinity in the palm
of your hand”) — that is, to imagine the boundless self-sameness of the
universe across space and time as a revolutionary opportunity to dissolve
the antinomies between the actual and the possible, liberty & fate.
—Richard Sieburth, Prof. of French, Comparative Literature, nyu

Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2019

Maurice Merleau-Ponty is widely recognized as one of the major figures of twentieth-century phi... more Maurice Merleau-Ponty is widely recognized as one of the major figures of twentieth-century philosophy. The recent publication of his lecture courses and posthumous working notes has opened new avenues for both the interpretation of his thought and philosophy in general. These works confirm that, with a surprising premonition, Merleau-Ponty addressed many of the issues that concern philosophy today. With the benefit of this fuller picture of his thought, Merleau-Ponty and Contemporary Philosophy undertakes an assessment of the philosopher’s relevance for contemporary thinking. Covering a diverse range of topics, including ontology, epistemology, anthropology, embodiment, animality, politics, language, aesthetics, and art, the editors gather representative voices from North America and Europe, including both Merleau-Ponty specialists and thinkers who have come to the philosopher’s work through their own thematic interest.