From the Understanding of Being to the Happening of Being (original) (raw)

An introduction to Derrida's philosophy and deconstructive method -- with a focus as well on Derrida's precursors: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Saussure and Freud.

“Laughing at Finitude” interprets Slavoj Žižek’s intellectual project as responding to a challenge left by Being and Time. Setting out from discussions of Heidegger’s book in The Parallax View and The Ticklish Subject, the essay exfoliates Žižek’s response to the Heideggerian version of a “philosophy of finitude”—both finding the central insight of Žižek’s work in Heidegger’s radical proposal for “anticipatory resoluteness” and developing Žižek’s critique of Being and Time as indicating Heidegger’s retreat from that proposal within the very book where it appears. Žižek reads Being and Time’s existential thematic as proposing a radical subjectivism and, unlike other Heidegger-critics, praises this aspect of the project. Indeed, Žižek claims that the weakness of Being and Time as a whole is that it is insufficiently radical in its subjectivism. For him, Heidegger is a thinker of ambiguous value, one who develops a program from whose own demands he hides. “Laughing at Finitude” both articulates this accusation of self-deception in Heidegger and examines the imperatives necessary to avoid it, for a dialectical shift from the “tragic” voice in existential treatments of finitude and for a revolutionary collectivist re-conception of social “Mitsein.” It suggests, in the process, Žižek’s own intellectual itinerary.

This article is a philosophical re-examination of Ecclesiastes using the work of Martin Heidegger, particularly his early work in Being and Time. Heidegger's focus on death, temporality, and history provides a powerful and compelling framework for understanding these same themes in Ecclesiastes. In elaborating these philosophical motifs and correspondences, this article proposes that ‭לכה‬ should be understood as an analog to Heidegger's concept of Geschichtlichkeit (historicity). If ‭לכה‬ is understood as such, then most of the traditionally puzzling terms in Ecclesiastes (e.g. ‭םלעה‬, ‭למע‬, ‭החמש‬) can be made sense of using the aforementioned philosophical framework. This framework additionally shows that Ecclesiastes (like Being and Time) cannot be understood as a proto-existentialist text.

""The Domestication of Derrida" offers a detailed account of Richard Rorty’s attempt to reconcile deconstruction with the American pragmatist and liberal traditions. Fabbri argues that Rorty’s powerful reading protocol is motivated by the necessity to contain the risks of Derrida’s critique of Western philosophy and politics. Rorty claims that Derrida reduces philosophy to a production of private fantasies that do not have any political or theoretical relevance. Fabbri challenges such an aberrant appropriation by investigating the two key features of Rorty’s privatization of deconstruction: the reduction of deconstructive writing to an example of merely autobiographical literature; and the thesis that Derrida not only dismisses, but also mocks the endeavor to engage philosophy with political struggle. What is ultimately questioned in "The Domestication of Derrida" is the legitimacy of labelling deconstruction as a postmodern withdrawal from politics and theory. By discussing Derrida’s resistance against the very possibility of theoretical and political ascetism, Fabbri shows that there is much more politics and philosophy in deconstruction than Rorty is willing to admit. "

The question of freedom has been a present and constant concern since the inception of the occidental philosophical tradition. Yet after a certain point the manner in which this question is to be asked has been canonized and sedimented: do humans (subject) have the capacity (predicate) for free and spontaneous action? The third antinomy of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, I argue, demonstrates the necessary failure, the perpetual aporia, of continuing to discuss whether humans conceived of as subjects possess the predicate freedom. I argue that if we do not want to fall either into the Third Antinomy, we must steer away from thinking of freedom as a predicate of a subject and reconfigure it as an experience or a comportment. Following suggestions from Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Inoperative Community, Being Singular Plural, and The Experience of Freedom, my dissertation argues that re-thinking of freedom as an experience simultaneously requires a re-thinking of identity, in terms of ecstasy, ek-stases, or ex-position, and accordingly a re-thinking of the activity of thinking itself. Nancy cites Schelling and Heidegger as the thinkers who have made an attempt to think about ecstasy seriously as a fundamental ontological fact about the constitution of things. This reconfiguration of the constitution of things as either parts of organic structures (Schelling) or beings in a world (Heidegger), demands that we recognize how our identities are perpetually being constituted in all of our acts of relating with the world. We are constituted and constituting by our engagement with the things that environ us, and this environing is active and alive. If this is accepted as an ontological fact, this requires that we reconsider what it would mean to think, as all of our engagements with the world would be creative—both of ourselves and of what it is that we encounter. This would also mean that the meaningfulness of all things is wildly contingent, in fact necessarily, so. Accordingly, I defend that freedom, as the experience of possibility through our awareness of this contingency due to the lack of an origin, emerges for us in the experience of thinking.

Hannah Arendt’s critique of “classic phenomenology,” shaped by Husserl and Heidegger, is a significant contribution to the development of what I would like to call “second generation phenomenology,” which contains figures such as Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Levinas, Fink, and Patočka, all of whom developed their own approaches by critically working through Husserl and Heidegger. It addresses three main topics, two of which run through the phenomenological tradition as fundamental issues and fields of controversy: (1) the question of (the constitution of) reality (Wirklichkeit) and (2) the question of the constitution of meaning (Sinn). The third is a crucial Arendtian concern that deeply challenges the phenomenological method(s) and therefore has a special transformative potential: (3) the question of how to properly understand and describe not only action (Handeln), but also basic phenomenological terms like appearance, experience, and world/liness with respect to her “core-phenomenon” of actualized plurality. As much as these initial points of discussion situate Arendt at a critical distance from the tradition of phenomenology, equally—I would like to claim—does she elaborate on them in a genuinely phenomenological way. Thereby, she develops a distinct form of a “phenomenology of plurality.”