The central problem posed in these essays, collected from over a decade, is how in the wake of Western ontologies to conceive the coming, the birth that characterises being. The first part of this book, 'Existence' asks how, today, one can give sense or meaning to existence as such, arguing that existence itself, as it comes nude into the world, must now be our 'sense'. In examining what this birth to presence might be, we should not ask what presence 'is'; (...) rather, we should conceive presence as presence to someone, including to presence itself. The second section, 'Poetry', asks: What if art exposes this? In writing, in the voice, in painting? And what if art is exposed to it? How does it inscribe the coming of existence as such? The author's trajectory in this book crosses those of Hegel, Schlegel, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Freud and Heidegger, in their comments on art and politics, existence and corporeality, everyday life and its modes of existence, and ecstasy. An analysis that dares this crossing involves all the varied accounts of existence, political and philosophical, as well as all the realms of poetry. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Listening Eye: Postmodernism, Paranoia, and the HypervisibleJerry Aline Flieger (bio)Jean Baudrillard. The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena. Trans. James Benedict. London: Verso, 1993. Trans. of La transparence du mal: Essai sur les phénomènes extrêmes. Paris: Galilée, 1990.Jean-François Lyotard. The Inhuman: Reflections on Time. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Rachel Bowlby. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1991. Trans. of L’inhumain. Paris: Galilée, 1988.Slavoj Zizek. Looking Awry: An Introduction (...) to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture. Cambridge: MIT P, 1992.“To the insides of the ear belong those who have a sight of internal hearing.” That’s the nocturnal look, the listening eye.—Emmanuel Swedenborg, cited in Lyotard, The InhumanPostmodernism, Yet AgainIn this essay, I shall take a cue from Slavoj Zizek’s discussion of Lacanian anamorphosis, or skewed perspective (Looking Awry), in order to read three dissimilar works alongside one another, and from a “paranoid” slant. For in spite of sometimes radically incommensurate subject matter, the three works I discuss here—The Transparency of Evil (Jean Baudrillard), Looking Awry (Slavoj Zizek) and The Inhuman (Jean-François Lyotard)—all share a focus on the dehumanizing effects of technology as determinants of what Lyotard has called the postmodern condition. 1 Moreover, all three works themselves adopt something like a paranoid perspective, suggesting that under the sway of an ethic of sheer performativity, human contact—face to face—has been rendered obsolete by interface.In the bleak vision of The Transparency of Evil (1993), for instance, Baudrillard describes an isolated disembodied satellite man, cut loose from his moorings: “The centrifugal force of our proliferating technologies has stripped us of all weight.... Freed of all density, all gravity, we are being dragged into an orbital motion which threatens to become perpetual” [30–31]. Similarly, in “The Ecstasy of Communication” (1983), Baudrillard describes a robotic subject mesmerized by pornographic hypervisibility, [End Page 90] “more visible than the visible... the obscenity of what no longer has any secret, or what dissolves completely in information and communication” [130–31]. 2Like Baudrillard, Lyotard (The Inhuman) describes the loss of dimensional intersubjectivity, suggesting that space is no longer an enabling interval between subjects, the scene of the exchanged gaze: contemporary cyberspace is the scene of communication without community, saturated with hypervisible information. But while for Baudrillard, we are already in weightless orbit, in a postcatastrophic, fractal aftermath, for Lyotard our fate is not yet cast, although adumbrated disaster—the end of the species or of the universe—provides a telos for our existence.Slavoj Zizek is not nearly so metaphysical, nor so glum, as his fellow post-philosophers, but he is every bit as concerned with the optical, Looking Awry. Zizek is a patient and even cheery exegete of Lacan, attempting to “introduce” Lacanian thought by looking at film, detective fiction, and other user-friendly instances of modern culture as templates of theory. Indeed, compared to his fellow travelers, Zizek is resolutely quotidian, even earthbound, focusing on the contemporary human subject as consumer/spectator, seated not in a satellite capsule or at a computer terminal but at the movies, popcorn in hand.Yet in spite of his goodwill, Zizek’s take on postmodernism is anything but sanguine: he too depicts a subject who is prey to the fascination of overexposed “obscene” virtual reality (X-rated Hitchcock, if you will), and always threatened as well by the eruption of the menacing Lacanian real into the web of symbolic reality—an intrusion that awakens the paranoid “post-man” from an absorption in the image on the screen, with a reminder of the precariousness of all that appears evident or meaningful. Thus in “The Obscene Object of Postmodernity” [Looking Awry, chap. 8], Zizek describes a blot or stain that sticks out or refuses assimilation to the totalizing gaze, eclipsing the heretofore meaningful and legible symbolic universe with an ineffable real that “produces a radical opacity and blocks every essay of interpretation” [151]. I suggest that Zizek’s notion of the obscene object as blot—like the hair on the camera lens that “disturbs” our absorption in the screen—as well as Lyotard’s notion of obdurate matter, may... (shrink)

"For at kunne leve og virke og for at kunne planlægge vort eget liv på længere sigt, må vi tage stilling til livets tre hovedproblemer: Hvad kan vi vide? Hvad tør vi håbe? Og hvad skal vi gøre? Det er netop disse problemer, de store filosoffer har tænkt igennem langt mere dybtgående og grundigt, end man sædvanligvis har mulighed for at gøre det." I en vis forstand er vi alle sammen filosoffer, for vi har alle et bestemt livssyn, om vi (...) er klar over det eller ej. Professor i filosofi Svend Erik Stybes bog beskriver ikke blot forskellige livssyn, som er opstået gennem filosofihistorien i løbet af de sidste mange århundreder. Han giver også en definition af begrebet livssyn, som de fleste vil kunne relatere til og få til at give mening i forhold til deres eget liv. Bogen "De store tænkere og vort livssyn" fra 1963 henvender sig til enhver, der har interesse for livets store og små spørgsmål og forskellige filosoffer og idéhistorikeres tilgang dertil. Svend Erik Stybe (1919-1995) var en dansk idéhistoriker og forfatter, der udgav et væld af bøger om både dansk og europæisk filosofi- og idéhistorie gennem de sidste mange hundrede år. Han skrev blandt andet bøger til brug i undervisning i idéhistorie på gymnasiet og universitetet, opslagsværker om filosofi og idéhistorie samt bøger om specifikke filosoffer som Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Locke og Baruch de Spinoza. Svend Erik Stybe blev udnævnt til professor i filosofi ved Københavns Universitet i 1970, hvor han forblev frem til sin pension i 1989. (shrink)

Using methods of abstract logic and the theory of valuation, we prove that there is no paraconsistent negation obeying the law of double negation and such that $\neg(a\wedge\neg a)$ is a theorem which can be algebraized by a technique similar to the Tarski-Lindenbaum technique.

The Tindemans report on the European union and the decision to organize direct elections for the European Parliament have been two important events in European afjairs in 1976. This article analyses the origins, developments and bearing of these two events.Although his mandate was initiated and encouraged at the highest level - that of the European heads of state -, Mr. Tindemans' attempt to propose concrete steps in order to achieve a real political union in Europe did not get through. It (...) received a rather cold reception from several states who opposed some of his proposals on different grounds.At the Conference of The Hague, Mr. Tindemans was able to get a formal support to his ideas, but no decision was taken to implement any of them.The decision to organize direct elections for the European Parliament, which can be seen as a concrete step toward the implementation of the long awaited European union, is facing the same kind of resistance at the national level. Although the Nine have all agreed to do everything possible to organize these elections in the spring of 1978, there are still unsolved problems which are both technical and political. Moreover, even if they are taking place, it is not at all sure that they will bring about substantive changes in the role and functions of the European Parliament. (shrink)

Presentation of the Excellence Award at the Fonds Ricœur’s Summer Workshop 2019.

The Reveries sur la nature primitive de l'homme are one of the important books of the dawn of the nineteenth century. In this text, Senancour limns an image of the world in accordance with the scientific thought of his time. It is a disenchanted image, dominated by mechanical necessity, and in it the distinction between good and evil no longer holds. God is absent; the world is not his creation. And Senancour expresses no regret:Everything in nature is indifferent, for everything (...) is necessary: all is beautiful, for all is determined. The individual is nothing, as a being apart: his cause and his end lie beyond him. Only the whole exists absolutely, invincibly, with no other cause, with no other end beyond itself, with no laws but those of its nature, with no other product than its permanence…. The beautiful, the true, the just, evil, and disorder exist only for the weakness of mortals…. The same earth contains happy orchards and ruinous volcanoes. The villain triumphs, the hero dies; the orchard withers, the volcano is snuffed out; one and the same destruction devours both the animate and the inanimate, shrouded in the same oblivion; and in a world reborn, there remains not a trace of what was abhorred or deified in a bygone world. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Live or TellDaniel BertholdTwo of the more notoriously elusive authors writing in the first half of the nineteenth century—a century noteworthy on the European continent for producing more than its fair share of elusive authors—are the German idealist Georg Hegel and his posthumous tormentor, the Christian existentialist Søren Kierkegaard. Their elusiveness is such that to read either of them is much like taking a Rorschach test: what we find (...) tells us as much about ourselves as it does about Kierkegaard or Hegel themselves. But to think through the relationship between the two is a yet more challenging task, perhaps like seeking to align the ink-blotted lenses of a Rorshachian kaleidoscope. Some commentators have found no alignment of the lenses to produce anything resembling a meaningful picture, and have concluded, as Niels Thulstrup puts it in his study of Kierkegaard's Relation to Hegel, that, "Hegel and Kierkegaard have in the main nothing in common." 1 With equal forthrightness, Richard Kroner suggests in his essay on "Kierkegaard's Understanding of Hegel" that "Hegel and Kierkegaard are separated from each other by an abyss which no agreement can ever succeed in bridging." 2Such a reading of the Kierkegaard-Hegel relation is in fact made tempting by Kierkegaard's own construction of the relation as one of radical difference. Hegel is the archetypal Other, the perpetual foil whose philosophic values and whole way of thinking and writing Kierkegaard devotes his own authorship to perfectly inverting. If Kierkegaard's Hegel is the philosopher of the "objective spirit" and the champion of reason, more interested in the logical relations between concepts than in the actual reality of existing individuals, Kierkegaard presents himself as the adherent of subjectivity, of faith, of existence.In what follows, I wish to explore one of the most recurring of [End Page 361] Kierkegaard's representations of his difference from Hegel, the contrast between action and thinking about action, existing and contemplating existence, living and philosophizing about living. "In the objective [Hegelian] sense," Kierkegaard's pseudonym Johannes Climacus writes, "thought is understood as being pure thought,... [and] this objective thought has no relation to the existing subject; and while [it is difficult to know] how the existing subject slips into this... pure abstraction,... it is certain that the existing subjectivity tends more and more to evaporate." 3As the contrast gets developed, we will come to focus on Kierkegaard's phrasing of the difference in terms of the role of language. Kierkegaard portrays himself as speaking (writing) in order to act: "to be an author is to act." 4 Hegel, on the other hand, is presented as writing so as to merely speak about acting; hence Hegel is a "mere scribbler" and his philosophy occurs "only on paper" (CUP, p. 176, 375f). In many ways, Kierkegaard understands his contest with Hegel in terms of the ultimatum of the tormented diarist of Jean-Paul Sartre's novella Nausea, Roquentin: "you have to choose: live or tell." 5 Roquentin is doubly cursed, first by a need to write so as to escape his sense of the nausea of existence by distancing himself from the cloying taste of reality, but second, by a recognition that his writing removes him from the possibility of truly existing. His ultimatum, "live or tell," is the constant reminder he carries with him of his inability to reconcile his fear of existence and his self-disgust at his escapism.The contrast between action and thinking leads to a question about the ethics of authorship: how is one to use words, to write, in such a way as to act—and to elicit action from one's reader? I will suggest that a readjustment of Kierkegaard's alignment of the kaleidoscope lenses which display the image of his relation to Hegel allows for a more rewarding dialogue between the two. In this altered image, there is as much telling as living in Kierkegaard as in Hegel (indeed, as we will see, in some respects more so), and as much a choice for living in Hegel as in Kierkegaard. Perhaps most importantly, this reorientation invites us to see the either/or construction of "living... (shrink)

La collection « Les grands classiques de l’érotologie moderne » des éditions EPEL a l’ambition d’offrir une visibilité française à des ouvrages pionniers dans le domaine des gay and lesbian studies et de la queer theory. Dans cette optique est éditée la traduction de l’ouvrage de Maud Gleason paru en 1995 sous le titre Making Men. Sophists and Self-presentation in Ancient Rome. Afin de prendre en compte les avancées récentes de la recherche, l’éditeur a pris soin d’insérer une postface de (...) Flo... (shrink)

Le problème de la vérité a toujours préoccupé l'esprit humain; il hante pour ainsi dire l'homme d'aujourd'hui. Dans les brèves réflexions qui vont suivre, nous nous proposons de présenter une approximation tres limitée de ce problème tel qu'il se pose à la philosophic traditionnelle, à savoir: Le caractère historique et relatifde la connaissance humaine est-il conciliable avec I'affirmation de vérites immuables?

Depuis le XIXe siècle, on lit Montesquieu comme le théoricien du libéralisme politique, l'héritier de Locke et des penseurs du droit naturel, le chantre de la modernité post-révolutionnaire. Jean Goldzink montre ici avec brio combien cette lecture est discutable: l'essentiel de la gloire de notre plus fameux théoricien politique serait dû à un « blanchiment d'idées » involontaire, opéré dans les camps idéologiques les plus opposés. En proposant une relecture de De l'esprit des lois et des oeuvres des lecteurs (...) français les plus marquants de cet ouvrage fondateur - de Voltaire à Rousseau, en passant par de Maistre, Constant, Comte et d'autres -, Jean Goldzink rappelle que Montesquieu refuse avec la dernière énergie de penser avec Locke, et que tout son projet consiste au contraire à fonder une science politique sans droits naturels attachés à la personne humaine, autrement dit sans la visée universelle qu'implique le jusnaturalisme moderne. Sa méthode et ses objectifs lui interdisent de concevoir une déclaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen ou une quelconque républicanisation de la liberté par l'élection d'un parlement. De cette remise en cause d'un dogme quasi unanime depuis deux siècles, il ressort aussi qu'il faut questionner la pertinence de l'emploi inconsidéré du terme « libéralisme » en histoire des idées, compte tenu de sa propension vorace à tout avaler, au mépris des moments, des projets et des rudes saveurs d'origine. Jean Goldzink a enseigné la littérature française à l'ENS de Saint-Cloud/Fontenay/Lyon de 1967 à 2002, et l'histoire des idées politiques à Sciences Po Paris de 2003 à 2009. Il a publié une douzaine d'ouvrages sur les Lumières, dont deux sur Montesquieu. (shrink)

Those who know the work of Karl Popper will have recognized in my title the transformation into interrogation of a formula repeated several times by this eminent philosopher of science, whom some consider as the greatest of the 20th century in his specific field - even if they do not share his theses. This Popperian formula, to which I wish to devote my analyzes here, has at least the merit of being clear and impactful. But as often, what is clear (...) and impactful can become too simple for what is to be thought, and perhaps even too simple to express faithfully the philosophy which one seeks to summarize there. Writing this, I am not claiming that Popper was not really a falsificationist. Far be it from me to dispute that the great thesis of his epistemology consists in making any scientific theory worthy of the name falsifiable or refutable. This is indisputable: for Popper, the dividing line between scientific theory and non-scientific theory lies precisely in this falsifiable character. (shrink)

Lelarge de Lignac occupe une place singulière dans l’abondante littérature anti-matérialiste du xviii e siècle. Combattre efficacement le matérialisme impose de réconcilier métaphysique et expérience. L’analyse du « sens intime de notre existence » offre une base phénoménale pour une nouvelle élaboration des principaux concepts de la métaphysique (substance, cause, contingence et nécessité, etc.). Un tel sens intime reste cependant aveugle au phénomène du corps. Lignac lui adjoint donc un sentiment de coexistence, susceptible de faire droit au phénomène particulier du (...) corps vécu. La stratégie anti-matérialiste met au cœur de son dispositif cette singularité phénoménologique d’un corps propre et en quelque sorte immatériel, objet d’une expérience irréductible à celle des corps physiques. (shrink)