"Daimon Life is life-enchancing. To read it is to become richer in word." –John Llewelyn Disclosure of Martin Heidegger’s complicity with the National Socialist regime in 1933-34 has provoked virulent debate about the relationship between his politics and his philosophy. Did Heidegger’s philosophy exhibit a kind of organicism readily transformed into ideological "blood and soil"? Or, rather, did his support of the Nazis betray a fundamental lack of loyalty to living things? David Farrell Krell traces Heidegger’s political authoritarianism (...) to his failure to develop a constructive "life-philosophy"—his phobic reactions to other forms of being. Krell details Heidegger’s opposition to Lebensphilosophie as expressed in Being and Time, in an important but little-known lecture course on theoretical biology given in 1929–30 called "The Basic Concepts of Metaphysics," and in a recently published key text, Contributions to Philosophy, written in 1936–38. Although Heidegger’s attempt to think through the problems of life, sexual reproduction, behavior, environment, and the ecosystem ultimately failed, Krell contends that his methods of thinking nonetheless pose important tasks for our own thought. Drawing on and away from Heidegger, Krell expands on the topics of life, death, sexuality, and spirit as these are treated by Freud, Nietzsche, Derrida, and Irigaray. Daimon Life addresses issues central to contemporary philosophies of politics, gender, ecology, and theoretical biology. (shrink)

"Infectious Nietzsche is simply one of the most interesting and engaging works to appear on Nietzsche’s philosophy in years." —David Allison Krell explores health, illness, and creativity in the life and thought of Friedrich Nietzsche. Drawing on a varied literature of philosophical reflections on health, and analyzing Nietzsche’s confrontation with traditional values, Krell skillfully engages the legacy of Platonism and Western metaphysics that is at the core of Nietzsche’s thought. Nietzsche’s genealogical critique, his doctrine of eternal recurrence of the (...) same, and the Nietzschean physiology and psychology of decadence are principal foci. Anyone interested in a philosophical reflection on questions of genius and pathology, and all readers of Nietzsche, will find Krell’s new book compelling reading. (shrink)

First published in 1993. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The “deconstruction” that is commonly seen to be the method of Derrida’s philosophy has an inescapably negative connotation. To counter this view of Derrida’s thought as basically destructive, David Farrell Krell invites readers to understand how it may instead be seen as fundamentally affirmative—just as Nietzsche’s philosophy, so allegedly nihilistic, is at heart a call for tragic affirmation, in _amor fati_. But, while affirmative, Derrida is also engaged in a thinking of mourning, which he views as the promise (...) of memory—a fragile yet vital promise that binds past and future. The book explores what mourning means in Derrida’s writing and how the labors of mourning and affirmation are mediated by works of art. Thus the book engages many different areas of Derrida’s work, from the classic texts of deconstruction to the more recent meditations on art and mourning. "This chance [affirmation without issue] can come to us only from you, do you hear me? Do you understand me?... And me, the purest of bastards, leaving bastards of all kinds just about everywhere.” This passage from Derrida’s _La Carte postale _nicely encapsulates what David Farrell Krell wants to convey about Derrida’s thought_—_its astonishing mix of negativity and affirmation in his labors of mourning. (shrink)

Behind the third ventricle of the human brain a miniscule pedunculate bud, close to the optic thalamus, that is, to the two beds of optic nerves, a gland soft in substance yet containing gritty particles. Function: unknown. Because of its pine-cone shape it is called the conarium or pineal body, even though the recent photographs of it by Nilsson and Lindberg show it to be morphologically reminiscent of nothing so much as the plucked tail of a gamebird, which Simon Dedalus (...) refers to as ‘the pope's nose’. Today it is presumed to be an endocrine gland of some sort, even though there is no doubt that morphogenetically in all vertebrates it is a vestigial unpaired eye. As fossil evidence indicates—and we still find it almost fully developed in some extant amphibians—ancestral vertebrates possessed in addition to the paired bilateral eyes a solitary dorsal eye opening at the top of the skull to the sky. This singular evagination of the brain—something betwixt a visual organ and a gland—seems to hold a special fascination for philosophers. Here we shall consider two of them: René Descartes (1596–1650), the father, as we say, of modern philosophy; and Georges Bataille (1897–1962), the father, as many say, of post-modern philosophy. Three hundred years separate them. Devotion to the pineal body conjoins them. (shrink)

Through photographs and translations of Friedrich Nietzsche's evocative writings on his work sites, David Farrell Krell and Donald L. Bates explore the cities and landscapes in which Nietzsche lived and worked.

Hans-Georg Gadamer reads Georg Trakl’s “Ein Winterabend” (“A Winter Evening”) almost in the way Martin Heidegger does, but he alters Heidegger’s interpretation of a single image in the poem. Whereas Heidegger sees the image “Golden blooms the tree of grace” in terms of candlelight on a church altar, Gadamer sees it as the glow of a kerosene lantern, perhaps in a country inn. That one alteration, this essay argues, brings Gadamer closer to the Trakl-world than Heidegger ever manages to be.

A Black Forest Walden is a work of philosophical reflection, nature description, and sly humor. In brief chapters, or aphorisms, the American philosopher David Farrell Krell recounts his experiences in a cabin located in the mountains of southern Germany's Black Forest, where he has lived for several decades. Insofar as Krell compares his experiences with those of Henry David Thoreau, who serves as both inspiration and irritation, the book could be described as a critical commentary on Thoreau's (...) Walden. Yet it equally reads as a rigorous yet playful and profoundly literary manifestation of where and how the mind wanders. Hence, the "Marlonbrando" of the subtitle is not the late actor but a feral cat who frequents the cabin and comes to be an important interlocutor, as if playing the role of analyst to the author. The subjects Krell treats are wide-ranging: the changing seasons, environmental issues, romantic love, parent-child relations, European versus American "values," higher education, artistic creativity, solitude, and the contrast between lifestyles in a quiet Black Forest village and in a noisy contemporary United States. Forty-one black-and-white photographs taken by the author accompany and enliven the text. (shrink)

In a morally fragmented society there is no good reason for ethics committees to assume any particular point of view, yet failure to do so compromises their ability to function in either a case‐review or an educational capacity. A casuist methodology might enable committees to fulfill both roles.

_Features a reconstruction of an unfinished text by Jacques Derrida from his most penetrating series of readings of Heidegger’s philosophy._.

"Krell writes here with a brilliance of style that few other philosophers can match." —John Sallis Although the Romantic Age is usually thought of as idealizing nature as the source of birth, life, and creativity, David Farrell Krell focuses on the preoccupation of three key German Romantic thinkers—Novalis, Schelling, and Hegel—with nature’s destructive powers—contagion, disease, and death.

Offers philosophical and psychological reflections on cruelty and tenderness. The Cudgel and the Caress explores the enduring significance of tenderness and cruelty in a range of works across philosophy, psychoanalysis, and literature. Divided into two parts, the book initially focuses on tenderness, with David Farrell Krell delivering original readings of Homer’s Iliad, Sophocles’s Antigone, and writings by Hölderlin, Hegel, Freud, and Derrida that deal with the importance of tenderness and the tragic consequences of its absence. Part One concludes (...) with an extended reading of Robert Musil’s Man Without Qualities, in which Krell analyzes the tender relationship between Ulrich and Agathe. In Part Two, Krell begins by examining Otto Rank’s Birth Trauma, which reflects on the tenderness of gestation in the womb and the cruel necessity of birth. He then turns to an examination of cruelty in general, focusing on Derrida’s challenge to contemporary psychoanalysis, his opposition between Kant and Nietzsche, and his analysis (and indictment) of the death penalty. Groundbreaking and insightful, the book provides a rare philosophical treatment of subjects vital to the world we live in. David Farrell Krell is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at DePaul University and Brauer Distinguished Visiting Professor of German Studies at Brown University. (shrink)

War is invariably accompanied by debate, if not controversy, over the legitimacy of using force. Alongside the longstanding state practice of justifying use of force is the increasing codification of legal rules on the use of force. In this volume a leading group of international authorities consider the issues surrounding the legitimation of force from several distinct disciplinary perspectives, including political science, law, history and philosophy. In particular, they examine the underlying question of whether and how international society's traditional norms (...) of sovereignty and non-intervention can coexist both with the new norm of humanitarian intervention and with an increasingly hegemonial role played by the United States. What is the difference between 'legality' and 'legitimacy'? Is the latter a truly universal concept or mainly a Western one? Are earlier ideas about 'just war' still relevant? (shrink)

The article pursues the theme of “the unborn” in the poetry of Georg Trakl and in the commentaries on Trakl’s poetry by Heidegger and Derrida. It continues a decades-long conversation with Trakl, Heidegger, and Derrida developed most recently in Phantoms of the Other: Four Generations of Derrida’s Geschlecht and in “Derrida, Heidegger, and the Magnetism of the Trakl House,” Philosophy Today, 64:2, 1–24.

"This is vintage Krell—he is as always, a reader in the best sense of the word...." —Dennis J. Schmidt "Krell is a strong and often eloquent writer.

"Krell creates a remarkable interplay of meanings, allusions, and connotations—an interplay of multiple resonance which is finely tuned to Derrida's thought and which makes his essay as artful as it is conceptually disciplined. He is surely one of the most astute translators and readers in contemporary Continental thought." —Charles E. Scott.

The article discusses three research projects that I may never undertake: a genealogy of Nietzsche interpretations devolving from Bataille and Heidegger; a discussion of Derrida’s strange mix of biology and biography in his work on Nietzsche; and an account of meetings I had on various occasions with Heidegger, Arendt, and Derrida.

The essay reflects on Nietzsche's second Untimely Meditation, ‘On the Use and Disadvantage of the Study of History for Life’, especially as Heidegger reads it in section 76 of Being and Time and as Derrida reads Heidegger's reading of it. Derrida's concludes his first seminar on Heidegger, Heidegger: la question de l’Être et l'Histoire; Cours de l'ENS-Ulm 1964–1965, by reflecting on Heidegger as a Nietzschean antiquarian.

The emergence of global governance in several key areas calls into question conventional understandings of world politics in terms of conflicts of interests between sovereign states under conditions of anarchy. At the same time the new phenomena of anti-globalisation demonstrations, transnational social movements and an emergent global civil society point to developments in international relations that are both of profound importance and analytically complex. This volume's starting point is the hypothesis that one way of thinking about these processes is in (...) terms of a dichotomy between the politics of governance and the politics of resistance. Leading scholars from several perspectives reflect on the usefulness of this dichotomy and consider its application to several crucial areas of international relations. (shrink)

In 1974, thirty-year-old philosopher and translator David Krell began corresponding and then meeting with Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt. Years later, he would meet Jacques Derrida and, through many letters and meetings, came to know him well. Drawing on unpublished correspondence and Krell's warmly told personal recollections, Three Encounters presents an intimate and highly insightful look at the lives and ideas of three noted philosophers as they neared the culmination of their careers. Three Encounters offers a chance for readers (...) to encounter these three great philosophers and their ideas, not through the lens of their biographies, but as "people" known through their personal correspondence and Krell's recollections, demonstrating the entanglement of thought and the lived experience. (shrink)

In 1990-1991 Jacques Derrida taught a seminar in Paris involving the scientific-philosophical notebooks of the German Romantic writer and thinker Novalis. The present article offers an account of that seminar, which was entitled, "The Rhetoric of Cannibalism.".

This article reflects on the complex nature of Nietzsche's enduring appreciation of Emerson. Rather than rely on merely coincidental similarities between the two thinkers, the essay discerns a more difficult relationship—that of friendship—which somehow, perhaps through character, unites the two without making them the same.