This is the first book published that specifically examines questions of ethics and advocacy that arise in conducting research on homelessness, exploring the issues through the deeply personal experiences of some of the field’s leading scholars. By examining the central queries from a broad range of perspectives, the authors presented here draw upon years of rich investigations to generate a framework that will be instructive for researchers across a wide spectrum of areas of inquiry.

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 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 Drawing on unpublished correspondence and Krell's warmly told personal recollections, Three Encounters presents an intimate and highly insightful look at the lives and ideas of three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)

"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)

"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.

David Farrell Krell reflects on nine writers and philosophers, including Heidegger, Derrida, Blanchot, and Holderlin, in a personal exploration of the meaning of sensual love, language, tragedy, and death. The moon provides a unifying image that guides Krell's development of a new poetics in which literature and philosophy become one. Krell pursues important philosophical motifs such as time, rhythm, and desire, through texts by Nietzsche, Trakl, Empedocles, Kafka, and Garcia Marquez. He surveys instances in which poets (...) or novelists explicitly address philosophical questions, and philosophers confront literary texts--Heidegger's and Derrida's appropriations of Georg Trakl's poetry, Blanchot's obsession with Kafka's tortuous love affairs, and Garcia Marquez's use of Nietzsche's idea of the Eternal Return--all linked by the tragic hero Empedocles. In his search to understand the insatiable desire for completeness that patterns so much art and philosophy, Krell investigates the identification of the lunar voice with woman in various roles--lover, friend, sister, shadow, and narrative voice. (shrink)

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.

"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)

The third chapter of Brentano's dissertation "On the Manifold Meaning of Being According to Aristotle" (1862) analyzes "Being in the sense of the True." Because Heidegger has always related the Question of Being to the Question of Truth, and because he calls Brentano's work the "chief help and guide" of his first venture into philosophy, the question arises: does Brentano's account of "Being in the sense of the True" have significant bearing on Heidegger's response to the principal matter of his (...) thought, i.e., Aletheia as the Unconcealment of Beings in Presence? This article traces the parallels and divergencies in Brentano's and Heidegger's accounts of the relation between Being and Truth. (shrink)

A historical novel, this is the beautifully-told story of Louis Hegel, illegitimate son of the philosopher G.W.F. Hegel. Ultimately disowned by his father and forced to use his mother's name, Louis died in Indonesia, as Ludwig Fischer, at the age of 24--the bastard son of SPIRIT.

Jacques Derrida’s final seminars were devoted to animal life and political sovereignty—the connection being that animals slavishly adhere to the law while kings and gods tower above it and that this relationship reveals much about humanity in the West. David Farrell Krell offers a detailed account of these seminars, placing them in the context of Derrida’s late work and his critique of Heidegger. Krell focuses his discussion on questions such as death, language, and animality. He concludes that (...) Heidegger and Derrida share a commitment to finding new ways of speaking and thinking about human and animal life. (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)

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

_ Source: _Volume 46, Issue 1, pp 3 - 34 The article, based on a course taught at the Collegium Phaenomenologicum in 2015, has three sections: 1) Derrida’s first major seminar on Heidegger, taught in 1964–65, asks whether the language of _Sein_ is ontological or mere “ontic metaphor”; 2) Derrida notes that the first paragraphs on historicity in _Being and Time_ offer an intriguing interpretation of birth as “the other end of Dasein”; 3) Derrida focuses on the theme of the (...) past as an _ekstasis_, which is literally “_une sortie hors de soi_.”. (shrink)

_Lectures on ecstatic temporality and on Heidegger’s political legacy._.

The following paper, delivered as a lecture to the philosophy departments of a number of American universities in 1979, traces a parallel between Hegelian phenomenology and Freudian psychoanalysis. It stems from a project I have been working on for several years now entitled Erinnerungsversuch or "Essay in Remembrance. " In my studies of Freud and Hegel for that project I was struck by the importance of memory for their work, not only as a field of investigation but also as a (...) method of the investigation itself. Remembering and forgetting are the crucial events for both psychoanalysis and phenomenology, crucial yet maddeningly intertwined, so that while memory seems eminently subject to malfunction and even illness it remains the sole source of insight and cure. I therefore determined to extend the parallel as far as it would go-perhaps even farther-and the present paper is the result. I am of course aware that Hegel was not a psychotherapist, Freud not a systematic philosopher, and realize that if essays like this one may be excused at all it is only because they eventually grow silent and allow irreconcilable differences to reassert themselves. Yet there is a sense in which Hegel's creative recapitulation of the history of philosophy, seeking as it does to liberate philosophical thought from a crippling self-ignorance, amounts to therapy of spirit; and there is a sense in which Freudian therapy must shatter traditional prejudices in our thoughts about what the psyche or spirit is, by letting psychological phenomena show themselves as they are. I have tried to make the parallel as concrete as possible, shunning Freud's metapsychology and turning instead to one of his earliest accounts of psychoanalytic praxis, eschewing sweeping remarks about Hegel's "system" and concentrating on just a few pages from the Phenomenology. Readers trained in philosophy will know that a few pages of Hegel are bound to contain labyrinths. I hope that my psychologist-readers will overlook the oversimplified presentation of Freud-which results partly from the lecture form-and will forgive my unwillingness to make Hegel's thought seem less demanding than it is. Finally, if I am right, the Freud-Hegel parallel with respect to memory tells us a good deal not only about this fascinating faculty but also about that singular creature who is so ardent to remember and so prone to forget. (shrink)

"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.

A new generation, earmarked the Thirteeners, is an emerging force in the marketplace. The Thirteener cohort group, so designated since they are the thirteenth generation to know the American flag and constitution, encompass over 62 million adult consumers. All the former "Mall Rats" have grown up. The normative structures that these Thirteeners employ in both acquisition and disposition retail settings is empirically assessed in this study through the use of a national sample. The findings suggest that Thirteeners are more likely (...) to attempt to rationalize away unethical retailing consumption behaviors than their parent's generation. The managerial and theoretical implications for the practice of retailing in the 1990s associated with these observations are discussed. (shrink)

John Sallis, Force of Imagination: The Sense of the Elemental. Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 2000, pp. 237 + xiv.John Sallis, Logic of Imagination: The Expanse of the Elemental. Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 2012, pp. 287.The most common German word for imagination, especially after Kant, is Einbildungskraft. If one were to translate John Sallis’s title, Force of Imagination, back into German, it would be something like Die Kraft der Einbildungskraft. “Force” would constitute the beginning and the end, (...) performing a redoubling that overpowers the “in-forming” itself. By contrast, the word Einbildungskraft does not appear at all—not even once, much less redoubled—in the first part of Hegel’s “System of Science,” the science of the experience of consciousness, namely, Die Phänomenologie des Geistes. It is not as though Hegel shies from discussions of productive and associative imagination in Kant, Fichte, and Schelling both prior to and after his ow .. (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.

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)

The essay reads Hans Ruin’s Being with the Dead (2019), focusing on four issues: 1. Heidegger’s remarkable indecision (at Sein und Zeit 238) concerning the being of the dead person, which or who is no longer Dasein but not yet a thing; 2. Derrida’s startling reflections—or phantasms—concerning his eventual “remains,” his corpse, and its inhumation or cremation; 3. Heidegger’s interpretation of mana (in what others deride as “primitive” cultures) as an ontological phenomenon, a mode of being; and 4. two variant (...) readings of Antigone, which see her as growing ever younger in the course of the tragedy, which is the story of her uninhibited death drive. (shrink)

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)