Search Results (79)

Human beings have had beautiful dreams for a harmonious world since centuries ago; this can be termed cosmopolitanism, shijie datong, or global community. Based on theories expounded by Confucius, Tönnies, Anderson, Bauman, Derrida, and Appiah, we closely examine the concept of “global cultural community” or “international community”, that is, the community involving individuals or groups of two or more countries by way of textual analysis, with James Welch’s The Heartsong of Charging Elk as an example. Through an analysis of the plot in the novel, we find that the American Indian protagonist Charging Elk integrates into the local French culture, while retaining his indigenous cultural identity, and thus negotiates a global community. This finding is also evaluated in the context of all five novels by Welch and in a broader scope of American Indian literature with inter-continental themes. The studies on cosmopolitanism or global community in American Indian literature can play an important role in exploring the construction of a global community for humanity for a shared future. Full article

This article aims to add a further perspective to the discussion of the relationship between film and ethics. This perspective is important in today’s context, as the omnipresence of digital and mobile audiovisual images in everyday life increasingly determines our thinking and behaviour. However, there is a lack of appropriate critical reflection and ethical understanding of these images and their ontology. This article proposes a machine ethics of film from a film-philosophical perspective. Such an ethics draws on critical posthumanism, namely on Karen Barad’s “ethics of mattering”, which explicitly relates to Emmanuel Levinas’ philosophy of the Other and their death. Thereby, special attention is given to the ontological nexus of film and death, as well as to the idea of film’s spectrality (drawing on, e.g., Derrida, Barthes, and Leutrat), a context that is discussed along with Barad’s diffractive view on quantum entanglement. Following from the author’s earlier approaches to Barad’s agential realism in the context of film-philosophy and certain Heidegger-based arguments set out in earlier writings about film and death, this article introduces the figure of what is called the “machinic spectre of film”. From here, the outline of a possible spectral ethics of film is considered by giving reasons for the exploration of further questions. Full article

This essay explores the notion of Mitsprechen or “with-speaking” in Paul Celan’s poetry. “With-speaking” supposes that voices in the poems actively participate and engage in a dialogue that goes beyond traditional hermeneutic frameworks. Celan’s notion of col-loquy, distinct from the conventional sense of dialogue, challenges the separation between author and interpreter, rendering the traditional concept of intertextuality inadequate. The poems, according to Celan, give voice to human destinies, making texts audible as the voices of others. This vocal dimension of Celan’s poetry has prompted extensive discussion among philosophers, particularly in France. Levinas, Blanchot, and Derrida, influenced by German phenomenology and hermeneutics, critically examine the ethical implications of speaking “about” the other. They challenge traditional hermeneutical practices, emphasizing the responsibility of interpreters to respect the unique and untranslatable character of individual voices. This critique extends to Protestant categories of interpretation, drawing on alternative Jewish perspectives on being-in-the-world and alterity. The text explores the tensions inherent in speaking “for” or “in the name of” others, especially in the context of interpreting Celan’s work, raising questions about maintaining the fundamental difference and distance that otherness implies. The discussion concludes by highlighting Werner Hamacher’s formulation of a new philology that disrupts hermeneutical violence, influenced by the critiques of Blanchot, Levinas, and Derrida, and offering an alternative way of addressing the particular challenges posed by Celan’s poetry. Full article

This article explores the importance of faith in the Victorian historical novel, with a particular focus on George Eliot’s Romola (1862–1863), and rethinks past secularist approaches to the genre. Romola was arguably the most meticulously researched historical novel of the nineteenth century. Set in Florence from 1492 to 1498, the novel traces the rise and fall of the Dominican friar, Girolamo Savonarola, as he pursued the spiritual and political reform of the city, leading to his excommunication and martyrdom. Despite the religious setting of the novel, Eliot’s painstaking effort to imagine a realistic historical representation of Florentine society has often been approached in secular terms as a tour de force of the author’s humanist vision of a progressive march towards modernity. Building on recent work in postsecular studies, this essay rethinks the novel’s historical realism in terms of Christian faith. Centering on the spiritual journey of the protagonist, Romola de’ Bardi, the novel presents a faithful depiction of Renaissance Florence by imagining historical representation as an act of faith. Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s essay, “Faith and Knowledge”, the article analyzes how Eliot frames the significance of the novel’s historical representation as an act of faith that one’s life is bound meaningfully to those of others. Full article

This article examines the nuanced discourse of hospitality in Dina Nayeri’s works Refuge (2017) and The Ungrateful Refugee (2019), attending to the ethics of interdependency that transcend beyond borders of different natures. By making the limits of hospitality evident, both texts bring forth the ethical implications beyond borders that are present in opposing, yet equally significant paradigms: security and danger—depending on whose interests prevail; recognition and non-recognition—attending to the precarious conditions that potential guests are requested to endure or fulfil to be acknowledged and hosted; and rights and duties—considering borders as exclusive and independent rather than as contact zones. Following Jacques Derrida (2000) Jeffrey Clapp and Emily Ridge (2016), and Judith Butler (2009, 2015, 2016), among others, I will consider the complexities of locating home after forced displacement and the (dis)connection between belonging and identity. In both of Nayeri’s works, the direct experience of displacement becomes key to understanding the need for refuge in the recreation of a home-like experience beyond home and borders. This is particularly evident in the negotiated spaces of vulnerability and resistance that refugees inhabit. Full article

Homiletics manifests as a technē that commends certain kinds of preaching over others. As such, homiletics structures debate unaware of the philosophical assumptions operative within it. This paper challenges the logocentrism of contemporary homiletical theories in light of Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive analytic. I take as my privileged conversation partner Fred Craddock, the much-lauded king of the New Homiletic. I argue that in commending inductive over deductive logic, Craddock merely inverts the logical movement of preaching, thereby reinscribing logocentrism. Utilizing Derrida’s neologism différance, I press homiletics toward what I am labeling conductive preaching, which reframes homiletical theory beyond the epistemological biases that condition it. Full article

In his Circumfession, Jacques Derrida journeys at length with Saint Augustine. The angle adopted is somewhat autobiographical, its philosophy staying as close as possible to the body, to the intimate, to the family. In Politics of Friendship, the Bishop of Hippo is one interlocutor among others. Once again, the autobiographical vein is kept alive, this time by book IV of Augustine’s Confessions. The episode of private life, the dear friend’s death, opens now onto political dimensions. Saint Augustine plays a pivotal role in what Derrida calls the infinitization of friendship. Over time, links were put in place, and the contemporary society cannot ignore or get rid of them. Our work here goes back to the traces left in the writings of Saint Augustine by the most classic canons of friendship incorporated into Christian theology. In our conclusion, we will see that Derrida puts this tradition in tension with fraternity, family, and community—all elements that the philosopher considers the most problematic in our current situation, and even more so for a democracy to come. Full article

The distinction between philosophical Daoism and religious Daoism is widely influential yet highly controversial. The current popular empirical methods often overlook the vicissitude of the concepts underlying the reception history of this distinction. Therefore, this article adopts the method of intellectual history, based on the transmission and transformation of the concept of philosophy, to examine the rationales of the establishment and reception of this Daoist distinction. Here, we present that, though the Confucian tradition of ranking Daoist figures provided soil for this Daoist distinction, the establishment of the dichotomy with terminological awareness should be attributed to the cooperation between Victorian Protestant intellectuals and their late Qing Confucian collaborators. The concept of philosophy that pursues eternal wisdom and truth and traces the origin of all things has played an essential role in the establishment of this distinction. The thought of Laozi and Zhuangzi was valued and preferred in mainland China because of its deemed congruence with this Western concept of philosophy, while other more religious branches of Daoism were belittled. However, the philosophies of anti-metaphysics engender a new paradigm of thinking. On the one hand, under the influence of logical positivism and its successors, natural science has become an excellent model for other studies. In light of empirical methods, the distinction between philosophical Daoism and religious Daoism becomes an erroneous and inefficient metaphysical distinction. On the other hand, inspired by continental philosophers such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida, scholars gained a new perspective on understanding the thought of Laozi and Zhuangzi. Thus, a new consensus emerges: eternal truth based on concepts and logic distorts the real world of life. According to this, the distinction between philosophical Daoism and religious Daoism is only an imaginary and conceptual distinction, which does not apply to the understanding of living Daoism. Full article

The article argues that where secrecy and secrets are key aspects of conspiracy theory narratives and practice, the genealogies of the/a secret have not been well understood. We argue that two forms of the secret, one a premodern notion of the secret as truth and revelation, the other a post-Derridean non-secret, inform two distinct forms and functions of contemporary conspiracy practice. Full article

Jacques Derrida’s theory of deconstruction provides an ideal means of appreciating and interrogating the duality central to both Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and its adaptations. Moreover, because deconstruction exposes binary oppositions as artificial and constrictive, it enables us to advance beyond them toward multiplicity, a term used by Gilles Deleuze for a complex, ever-changing, multipart structure that transcends unity. Roy Ward Baker’s Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde (1971) and episodes of Showtime’s Penny Dreadful (2014–2016) offer fresh ways to think about—and beyond—the duality of culture’s most famously divided pair. The binary oppositions that organize each text are innovative, as are the ways in which these oppositions are reversed and conflated. Ultimately, these adaptations employ triangulation to deconstruct themselves, thereby demonstrating the limitations and instability of duality, as well as the possibilities of multiplicity. Full article

Starting from a recent book on Derrida and psychoanalysis, I return to the controversy between Lacan and Derrida in the 1970s. Its focus was the letter as interpreted by Lacan in a commentary of Poe’s “Purloined Letter”. While agreeing with some of Derrida’s objections, I conclude that Lacan makes stronger points about the destination of the letter. I give my own example, Kafka’s “Letter to the Father” in order to argue that one can state that “a letter always reaches its destination” even if it has not been delivered. Full article

This essay sets out to explore the unexpected but amusing entanglement of three Jewish writers—Harry (“Heinrich”) Heine, Sigismund (“Sigmund”) Freud, and Jackie (“Jacques”) Derrida. You will not often find a reference to Heine in the work of Jacques Derrida, but you will find a Heine joke in Derrida’s discussion of forgiveness in Le parjure et le pardon (1998–1999), where the name Heine is invoked precisely in order to recall the scandalous automaticity, the machine-like quality of forgiveness. Beginning with Derrida’s surprising reference to the man George Eliot called a “unique German wit”, this essay will begin by arguing that there is something about Heine’s jokes, his Witze, his mots d’esprit, that not only plays up, but also paradoxically takes seriously, what Derrida, echoing Nietzsche in Of Grammatology, describes as the “play of the world.” The second part of this essay will engage Freud’s particular and quite special relation to Heine: Heine is the third most cited German writer in all of Freud’s work (after Goethe and Schiller). Neither Homer nor Sophocles is cited more often than Heine. Indeed, a bon mot from Heine is always ready-to-hand in the face of theoretical obstacles (e.g., “Observations on Transference Love”, “On Narcissism”, etc.). But perhaps nowhere is Freud’s affinity with Heine more apparent and more striking than in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905), where Heine’s witticisms offer the best and most canonical examples of jokes. In conclusion, this essay will argue that Heine’s wit can be read as a playbook—not only for psychoanalysis’s economic understanding of jokes, but also, more radically, for deconstruction’s thinking of play. Full article

In keeping with the focus of this special edition of Humanities on the political child, this article builds on investigations into constructions of the child body in literature and society to examine how portrayals of the child body in Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book repeatedly slip under the varying perspectives of the adults; that is, how adult politics are always at play in understandings of children and childhood both within and outside of the text. In taking this approach, this article focuses on two key texts in literary discussions of spectrality, bodies, and signification—Hamlet and ‘Fors’—to consider how the paradoxical child body in Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book is both constructed within the adult perspective and constantly slips from it, and how Gaiman approaches the issue at the heart of this analysis: that of who gets to decide who or what a child is, should be, or can be. Full article

Heidegger’s ontological differentiation and Derrida’s deconstruction of metaphysics rearranged the key players of the onto-stage, essence, being, existence, and entity (the being), which had an impact on the contemporary understanding of ontology. This paper focuses on the study of the origins of art, but also on the ontological matter to the extent to which it might be related to the matter of art. It appears that the origins of both ontology and art are at the core of this interaction. The ontological matter is connected to the issue of art in the way that questions: what if freedom, in a co-creative way, is that which is immutable and fundamental to being? What if the essence of being is the freedom of co-creating? Such an essence would always be capable of alteration (via co-creation) and transformation. It is important to note that the perception of form in art, as an experiment of the form, i.e., continuous movement and growth from the conventional to the unconventional, will also be examined. This artistic observation emphasizes the relational dynamics within a work of art, shifting the focus from its “objectivity” (an ontological perspective) to its inherent relational nature (an ontic perspective). Full article

Photography evidences presence, but what does it present? This article explores the notion of magic in photography through Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of ‘haecceity’, Jacques Derrida’s logic of the ‘supplement’ and Jean-François Lyotard’s ‘inhuman’. The sections ‘The Zone of Photography’, ‘Ghosts in/of the Machine’, ‘The Crypt and Encryption’, ‘Affect-Event-Haecceity’ and ‘Magic, Consumerism, Desire’ consider how photography provides a ‘zone’ that encrypts the desires of its photographer and viewer. A photograph, in its various forms and appearances, from scientific instrument to personal documentation, bears our need and desire to be affected. The photographic zone can connect with the anxiety, fear, grief, and ha ppiness that are latent within the irrationality of its viewer. The photography is never past as it continually unfolds into, and is entangled with, the fabric of the present. Through consideration of photography we will consider how magic does not happen to people but people happen to magic. We desire magic to appear. Full article