Cet article propose de confronter le thème kojévien de « la disparition de l’homme à la fin de l’histoire » et le thème foucaldien de la « mort de l’homme ». Cette confrontation permet non seulement de faire apparaître le déplacement qui s’opère de Kojève à Foucault en ce qui concerne le cadre théorique de leur réflexion sur l’homme, mais aussi de souligner les effets contrastés de la lecture kojévienne de Hegel sur Sartre et sur Bataille.This paper aims at confronting (...) the Kojevian theme of « the Disappearance of Man at the end of History » and the Foucaldian theme of the « Death of Man ». This comparison allows one the displacement from Kojève to Foucault as regards the theoretical frame of their thoughts about Man, and also to emphasize the contrasted effects of the Hegelian reading of Kojève on Sartre and on Bataille. (shrink)

Prezentowana tu książka jest poświęcona relacjom między filozofią a polityką, politycznemu zaangażowaniu filozofii bądź jej ucieczce przed owym zaangażowaniem. W moim ujęciu pytania o autowizerunek filozofa w XX wieku są pytaniami o jego uwikłania, i uwikłania jego filozofii, w politykę. Nigdy wcześniej filozofowie nie żywili takich nadziei na przemodelowanie społeczeństwa z pomocą polityki (i tym się różnili od licznych wcześniejszych utopistów) zgodnie ze swoją filozoficzną wizją jak właśnie w XX wieku. Jest to zarazem książka o tradycyjnych antynomiach i opozycjach filozoficznych: (...) bios teoretikos i bios praktikos, teoria i praktyka, myśl i działanie, interpretowanie świata i jego zmienianie, człowiek kontemplacji i człowiek czynu, wieża z kości słoniowej i zaangażowanie etc. etc. I dlatego, pisząc tu o autowizerunku filozofa, mam na myśli jego autowizerunek ujmowany z punktu widzenia polityki. Interesują mnie tu odpowiedzi na pytanie o stosunek między filozofią a polityką, bowiem to pytanie uważam dzisiaj z racji historycznych za fundamentalne. Dlaczego pytam tu o autowizerunek filozofa? Uważam, że w filozofii (pytającej o swoje uwikłania w politykę) sposób ujmowania siebie determinuje sposób ujmowania świata. Im bardziej filozofia zostaje odniesiona do „teraz”, tym wymaga większej precyzji, dokładniejszego usytuowania siebie w ramach dostępnych bądź wyobrażonych w kulturze możliwości. Autowizerunek to platforma, z której korzysta filozof, to pewien horyzont konstytuujący jego tożsamość, podający zakres możliwych do przyjęcia ról w kulturze. Zupełnie inny jest autowizerunek filozofa w filozofii odniesionej do „teraz”, a zupełnie inny w filozofii nastawionej na uniwersalność, wieczne i niezmienne prawa, na spoglądanie na świat sub specie aeternitatis. Kluczowe słowa w takiej perspektywie to choćby rewolucja intelektualna, przemoc, nowy świat, nowy człowiek, nowa era, zmiana, postęp, konstruktywny wkład, przyłączenie się i zaangażowanie czy wymogi chwili. Pytam tutaj o chęć wywoływania zmian politycznych mocą filozofii i poprzez filozofię jako narzędzie, pytam o filozofa jako politycznego „zbawcę” (Habermas o Martinie Heideggerze), o filozofa jako egzekutora wyroków historii dysponującego pełną świadomością doniosłości chwili, która nikomu poza filozofami nie może się w pełni odsłonić i ujawnić. Dlaczego jednak filozofia potrzebuje siły? Skąd bierze się jej odwieczne marzenie o wykroczeniu poza uniwersum teorii, myśli, kontemplacji - ku realnemu światu, w którym filozof działa? Książka ta w pewnej mierze stanowi analizę marzeń o filozofii działającej, o filozofii czynu - o filozofie przekonanym o swoim posłannictwie jako posłannictwie człowieka działania. Filozof działający to człowiek oddany wspólnocie - przekonany o politycznie sprawczej roli wypowiadanego, filozoficznego słowa; zwierciadlanym odbiciem tego ideału jest filozof oddany tekstowi, czyli (bezpośrednio) lekceważący społeczne powinności i zobowiązania — przekonany o politycznej i społecznej bezsilności tegoż słowa, skoncentrowany na dostarczaniu interpretacji kolejnych interpretacji tekstów filozoficznych. Jednak oprócz nich w perspektywie autowizerunku politycznego pojawiają się i inni: tekstualiści marzący o drobnych, choć społecznie wpływowych wspólnotach czytelników; wspólnotowcy pragnący działać poprzez filozoficzne słowo, a jednak zarazem pozbawieni złudzeń co do swojej historycznej skuteczności, poniekąd z góry świadomi, że tą drogą świata (przynajmniej w przewidywalnym horyzoncie czasowym) zmienić się nie da; miłośnicy tekstu budujący programy społecznej naprawy świata, a poszukujący wśród tekstualistów (na przykład genealogicznej czy dekonstrukcjonistycznej) „metody”, którą można by wprost zastosować w praktyce, na sposób działających w historii wspólnotowców. Tekst, wspólnota - to jedynie ogólne hasła wywoławcze mające ewokować pewne marzenia o miejscu filozofii i filozofa w kulturze. Z jednej strony stoi autowizerunek, w ramach którego naczelnym hasłem jest „robienie historii” (Emil Cioran) czy „robienie rewolucji”, z drugiej autowizerunek z naczelnym hasłem „robienia tekstów”, czyli bycia uważnym czytelnikiem tekstów filozoficznych i uważnym ich autorem. A oprócz tego, pomiędzy nimi, jest miejsce na autowizerunki pośrednie, mieszane i mniej czy bardziej skłaniające się ku któremuś ze skrajnych wyborów oraz na autowizerunki, których powyższe przeciwstawienie nie uchwytuje. Oba motywy mają do pewnego stopnia organizować prezentowaną książkę, ale nie mają stać się jakimś nowym kluczem pozwalającym na zupełnie nową odsłonę filozoficznego pejzażu. Stoi przecież za nimi długa, filozoficzna tradycja, korzystająca na przestrzeni dziejów z określeń pochodzących z różnych słowników. Kto powiedział, że filozofia ma „robić rewolucję”, tzn. gruntować ją i przygotowywać, promować i usprawiedliwiać, znajdować dla niej wielki intelektualny kontekst, stanowić jej awangardę i magazyn niezbędnych pojęć, legitymizować jej przemoc i uzasadniać jej terror, dawać jej broń w walce i podtrzymywać marzenia o jej nieuchronności, wyjątkowości, celowości i wartości? Kojeve, Heidegger, de Man, Sartre, Bataille (w analizowanych tu przeze mnie tekstach i w ściśle określonych okresach) - byli o tym przekonani. Dlaczego odpowiadał im właśnie taki autowizerunek? Co więcej - albo co innego - daje filozofowi „filozofia wspólnoty” niż „filozofia tekstu”, by sięgnąć do dwóch skrajności w ramach długiego continuum? Czym jest owa nadwyżka? Uczuciem spełnienia, świadomością realizacji marzeń, wcielenia w życie filozoficznych ideałów? Przejściem do świata rzeczywistego - a może wreszcie „pracą”, w mocnym sensie tego terminu? Jednak im filozofia była bliżej świata, tym większe rodziła napięcia. Tym większe miała wyrzuty sumienia. Kluczowy problem analizowanych tu propozycji filozoficznych można by podsumować tak: czy szukać przejść — a jeśli tak, to jakie powinny one przyjmować formy - między uniwersum. zagadnień filozoficznych a światem rzeczywistym? Jaka relacja wiąże filozofa ze światem realnym: z historią, postępem, zmianą? Kim jest filozof zanurzony w historii, kim jest filozof „robiący historię”? W jakiej mierze filozofia jest niezbędnym fundamentem społecznych transformacji i społecznych rewolucji? Jak związać filozofię z czynem i z działaniem? Jak związać spekulację i kontemplację z aktywizmem? Jaki stosunek wobec gwałtownych i radykalnych zmian w świecie społecznym ma zajmować filozof - i w jakim charakterze? Filozofa? Obywatela? Obywatela-filozofa? Czy umieszczać filozofię w głównym nurcie zmian społecznych - w ramach toczących się rewolucji — czy przyjmować w niej postawę wyczekującą, obserwującą, niezaangażowaną, która pozwala spoglądać na akcydentalne zawirowania świata rzeczywistego z perspektywy jego istoty? Czy filozofia ma brać na siebie odpowiedzialność za zmienianie świata? Czy ma się do niego dostosowywać, czy może wręcz je ugruntowywać, znajdując dla niego szeroki, metafizyczny kontekst? Spis treści Wprowadzenie. „TYRANIA HEGLA” I MYŚLENIE PONOWOCZESNE W KONTEKŚCIE PYTAŃ 0 AUTO WIZERUNEK FILOZOFA (9) „Uwolnić się od Hegla”? (10) Panorama (15) „Przyszłość świata” a „interpretacja pism Hegla” (24) Podsumowanie: filozof czynu, filozofia działania (27) Rozdział 1. Przykład wspólnotowy: Alexandre’a KOJEVE’A filozof zmieniający świat (FRANCUSKI HEGEL) (37) Antropologia, panowanie, niewola (41) Kojeve-Strauss: debata stulecia? (44) Filozof wedle Straussa (47) Filozof wedle Kojeve’a (50) Historia, filozofia, przemoc. „Humanizm” i „terror” (57) Rządzenie: zdolności i powinności (61) Kres historii (63) Podsumowanie (68) Rozdział 2. PRZYKŁAD TEKSTUALNY: DELEUZE’A 1 KLOSSOWSKIEGO FILOZOF TWORZĄCY TEKST (francuski Nietzsche) (70) „Jakiegoż to adwersarza, jakiegoś wroga należy pokonać?” (73) „Między Heglem a Nietzschem nie może być kompromisu” 77 Nietzsche, Freud, Marks 90 Historia i genealogia 96 Kwestia stylu 99 Rozdział 3. PRZYPADEK GEORGESA BATAILLE’A: MIĘDZY HEGLEM A NlETZSCHEM? 106 „Człowiek integralny” a działanie 110 Rewolucja, ekstaza, krew 115 W towarzystwie Nietzschego 124 Ekonomia nadmiaru 128 Rozdział 4. WOKÓŁ ZAANGAŻOWANIA. OD WSPÓLNOTY DO TEKSTU I DALEJ: SARTRE, BARTHES, BLANCHOT, FOUCAULT 133 „Umiłowanie mądrości” a polityka 133 Filozofia, polityka - tekst, wspólnota 136 Pisarze i piszący 138 „Co to znaczy pisać?”142 Pisanie - czysta bierność na marginesie historii? 151 Poza opozycję esteta/pisarz zaangażowany 157 Intelektualiści - władza 161 Książki-doświadczenia i książki-prawdy 166 „Tyrania prawdy”168 Rozdział 5. FILOZOF A CZASY PRZEŁOMU. FRANCUSKIE BURZE WOKÓŁ MARTINA HEIDEGGERA W PERSPEKTYWIE SPORU O MIEJSCE FILOZOFII W SFERZE OBYWATELSKOŚCI. 172 Początki 172 Heidegger - francuski „mistrz myślenia”180 „Czy można jeszcze wierzyć filozofom?” 184 Heideggera sen o przywództwie 188 Dyskusje, dyskusje 205 Specyficzna aura filozofa? 210 „Przyjdźcie do nas, a będziecie mogli przekuć waszą myśl w czyn” 230 Rozdział 6. WOKÓŁ PAULA DE MANA - EUROPEJSKIE PYTANIA O SŁOWA JAKO CZYNY 233 Kontekst europejski - rewolucja intelektualna 238 Nowy porządek, nowy początek 248 „Konstruktywne” podejście do rewolucji a „humanizm” 255 Europejski cień człowieka czynu 257 Ideologia estetyczna 262 Rozdział 7. W STRONĘ ESTETYKI EGZYSTENCJI: MICHEL FOUCAULT 266 „Dać żyjącym exempla...” 271 Kanta i Nietzschego „troska o siebie” 272 Etyka jako estetyka 283 Foucault, Kant i „ontologia teraźniejszości” 291 „Troska o siebie” jako praktyka wolności 302 Myślenie - niebezpiecznym aktem? 310 Bibliografia 313 SUMMARY 331 CONTENTS. (shrink)

Sartre and Foucault were two of the most prominent and at times mutually antagonistic philosophical figures of the twentieth century. And nowhere are the antithetical natures of their existentialist and poststructuralist philosophies more apparent than in their disparate approaches to historical understanding. In Volume One of this authoritative two-volume study, Thomas R. Flynn conducted a pivotal and comprehensive reconstruction of Sartrean historical theory. This long-awaited second volume offers a comprehensive and critical reading of the Foucauldian counterpoint. A history, theorized (...) Foucault, should be a kind of map, a comprehensive charting of structural transformations and displacements over time. Contrary to other Foucault scholars, Flynn proposes an "axial" rather than a developmental reading of Foucault's work. This allows aspects of Foucault's famous triad of knowledge, power, and the subject to emerge in each of his major works. Flynn maps existentialist categories across Foucault's "quadrilateral," the model that Foucault proposes as defining modernist conceptions of knowledge. At stake is the degree to which Sartre's thought is fully captured by this mapping, whether he was, as Foucault claimed, "a man of the nineteenth century trying to think in the twentieth.". (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Bataille and Sartre: The Modernity of MysticismJean-Michel Heimonet (bio)Translated by Emoretta Yang (bio)1It is always relatively surprising to see how the great minds of an era manifest a kind of blindness when it comes to judging their peers, whether one is thinking of Balzac as the reader of Stendhal or Gide as the reader of Proust. This is undoubtedly because any truly forceful mind is also a mind so (...) obsessed and fascinated by its own way of apprehending the world that it can admit no other system of reference, no other range of values than its own. From this point of view, “A New Mysticism,” the article that Sartre devoted in some bad faith to Bataille’s Inner Experience when the book was published in 1943, should be accorded a prime place in the annals of great literary misunderstandings. There is no doubt that the brilliant philosopher of Being and Nothingness commits a strange blunder—strange, at least, for an intellectual of his stature—with respect to the conceptual sacrifice by which Bataille seeks to reveal and, at the same time, cast out modern man’s nostalgia for the sacred. But is “blunder” the right word? Because everything in the book proceeds not as though Sartre had not understood, or badly understood, but rather as though he had pretended not to understand the true stakes that in turn are revealed and consumed by this impossible book. The harshness of his critiques, the vehemence of tone—poorly tempered by a forced irony—instead prove that Inner Experience had hit home, at a level unusual for intellectual polemics. Struck to the core, Sartre reacted. This explains why “A New Mysticism” is a “boomerang” text, or a revealing one, in the photographic sense, being more valuable for what it tells us about its author than for what it teaches about the object being criticized. It is a text in which the reader has to read what is not said, “between the lines,” seeking the cause for the text’s often flagrantly unjust and indeed petty and truistic assertions, in its defense system, or, to borrow a term from the field of psychoanalysis which Sartre so abhorred, in the author’s “denials.” To put it clearly, is not the presence of the sacred, this unknowable and virulent sacred, which seeps out of every part of Bataille’s book, through the cracks and tears in its “form” and the paradoxical gaps in its “content,” also the presence that ceaselessly haunts, with its shadow and disturbing light, the thinking of the last great philosopher-monster?In his didactic concern to be convincing, Sartre divided his article into three parts, the first two dealing respectively with “form” and “content,” the third functioning as a verdict. Viewed fifty years later, such a division applied to a text as anti-academic as Inner Experience might seem comical. It points, however, to the seriousness being accorded in Sartre’s text to knowledge as organized within the academy and to the institutional function of the academy. From one end of the text to the other, Sartre acts as censor and judge, pitilessly pointing out, with the derisive scorn of the specialist, the philosophical naiveté of “Mr. Bataille,” particularly his rapid and unprofessional reading of Jaspers and Heidegger, which Bataille knew only in translation [see “NM” 194]. Sartre’s superior mandarin attitude explains why his first task had been to divide literary and philosophical history into two “frames of mind.” Although original, Bataille’s style and writing already had their place in a “tradition,” which is that line from Pascal to the surrealists, by way of Nietzsche, made up of writers anxious to express (themselves), writing down their [End Page 59] thoughts as they come, helter-skelter, in the exalted illumination of the moment, even before being located and fixed within the design of an argument. In modern writers, this tradition had become even more intensified. Disregarding the classical writerly values of restraint and modesty, the writer seeks to express not only his mind but also his body and its living reality, to establish with the reader a sort of “carnal promiscuity.” Thus we get Breton, who... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THE PLACE OF RENE GIRARD IN CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY Guy Vanheeswijck University ofAntwerp and ofLeuven Iwould like to start by quoting a text which is likely to be recognized by everyone, who is even on a superficial level familiar with the work of René Girard: Desire that bears on a natural object is only human to the extent that it is mediated by the desire of another bearing on the (...) same object: it is human to desire what others desire, because they desire it. Thus an object that is perfectly useless from a biological point of view (such as a medal, or the enemy's flag) can be desired because it is the object of other desires. Such a human desire, and human reality as it differs from animal reality, is only created by the action that satisfies such desires. Human history is the history of desires that are desired [Désirs désirés]. Undoubtedly, these could be words written by Girard. However, they are not. These words are quoted from the famous lectures given by Alexandre Kojève on Hegel's Phänomenologie des Geistes at the Ecole pratique des hautes études between 1933 and 1939. They were followed by what would become the crème ofpost-war French philosophy: Raymond Aron, Georges Bataille, Alexandre Koyré, Pierre Klossowski, Jacques Lacan, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre.' Kojève's interpretation ofHegel has, as generally known, become the point ofreference to the post-war twentieth ' Although Sartre himselfcould not attend the lectures (at that time he taught philosophy in Le Havre en Laon), he must have heard from it by way of Aron or Merleau-Ponty. 96Guy Vanheeswijck century philosophy in France. Before 1930 the word "dialectic" was burdened with an odium of sin, after 1930 it became a word—thanks to Kojève —radiant with prestige. Before 1930 there had been no talk of an Hegelian school whatsoever in France, after 1930 the situation changed so drastically that Merleau-Ponty was able to write these often quoted lines in 1946: Hegel is at the origin of everything that has been great in philosophy for over a century; for example Marxism, Nietzsche, phenomenology and German existentialism, psychoanalysis. He inaugurates the attempt to explore the irrational and to integrate it within a wider rationality that remains the philosophical task of our century. (Sens et non-sens 109-110) Half a century later, these words have lost their self-evident character. While the generation of French thinkers between 1930 and 1960 stresses its dependence on Hegel, the generation after 1960 heavily reacts against him. In 1970 Michel Foucault gave his inaugural speech at the Collège de France. On behalf of his generation he testified to a generalized antiHegelianism at that moment: "Our entire epoch, whether through logic or epistemology, whether through Marx or Nietzsche, seeks to evade Hegel's Imperium [échapper à Hegel] (L'Ordre du discours 74). Obviously, René Girard belongs to the second generation, which, on the one hand, embroiders on the theme ofdesire, borrowed from Kojève's interpretation ofHegel, but, on the other, in its search for answers precisely wishes to get rid of Hegel. But, is it correct to call René Girard a philosopher? His schooling was that of an historian. In 1947 he graduated in Paris as an archivistepal éographe at the Ecole de Chartres: his thesis was "La vie privée à Avignon dans la seconde moitié du XVe siècle." Three years later—in the meantime he had emigrated to the United States—he received his Ph.D. at the faculty of history of the University of Indiana. The topic of his dissertation was "American opinion ofFrance, 1940-1943." However, he has never worked as a professional historian. He owes his reputation first and foremost to his literary analyses, subsequently to his research in anthropology, finally to his exegesis ofthe Bible. Time and again, Girard has expressed his preference for literature to both humanities and philosophy. Human behavior is, in his view, much less elucidated by the conceptual structures of discursive philosophy than by the evocative force of a Greek tragedy, the Biblical passion story or a modern novel. One might retort that René Girard... (shrink)

One fundamental point of agreement that emerged between Foucault and Habermas is that both rejected the Kantian paradigm of critique grounded in the notion of a transcendental subject. For Foucault, genealogy is a form of history that can account for the constitution of knowledge, discourses, etc. without reference to a constitutive subject; while central to Habermas's approach is his rejection of the "philosophy of the subject" in favor of the "intersubjectivist paradigm of communicative action". For Foucault, the end of (...) "man;' a foundational subject providing ultimate normative yardsticks, is not the creation of a deficiency but "the unfolding of a space in which it is once again possible to think". His critical work seeks "to know to what extent it is possible to think differently, rather than legitimating what is already known" ; to promote new forms of self, thought, and action, and to give impetus to the "undefined work of freedom". Yet without direction, doesn't this amount to an unrestricted notion of autonomy? Influenced perhaps by Nietzsche, Foucault calls on us to "create ourselves as a work of art", but without guidance for self-creation, aren't we left only with arbitrary choices, an "aesthetic decisionism," in which one has to take "irrationalist leaps" to affirm anything? (shrink)

Writer, thinker, essayist, Georges Bataille (1897–1962) was not a “professional” philosopher. But he “always, above all else, turned towards philosophy,” as he himself stressed (Chapsal 1961, p. 34); and “philosophers” can hardly remain indifferent to the radical calling into question of their discipline that his heterological body of work occasions, in its devotion to the other and to the subversion of the Logos. It is no longer possible to trivialize, or even to reject Bataille's contribution, as Sartre once did under (...) the label of “new mysticism” (Sartre 1943). In 1970, while presenting the Oeuvres Complètes (Complete Works) [henceforth OC], Michel Foucault stated: “We owe to Bataille a large part of that which is our present moment; but without doubt we also owe to him that which remains to be done, to be thought and to be said, and this will be the case for a long time to come” (OC, vol. I, p. 5). If such a prophecy is by its nature difficult to verify, Bataille's contribution to philosophical “modernity” is nonetheless largely recognized, in as much as it deals with the destruction of the Hegelian “closure” of Discourse (Derrida 1967) and, more generally, with the emancipation of thought from the limits of Reason (Habermas 1984). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:IntroductionCarolyn J. Dean (bio)... even since he [Nietzsche] became famous has he ever been anything but an occasion for misunderstanding?—Georges Bataille, The Accursed ShareAt the current juncture in the history of studies “on Bataille,” admiration and indebtedness have given way to admiration constrained by ambivalence and indebtedness complicated by a desire for accountability. This special issue provides an opportunity to work through these inevitable critical shifts, symptoms of (...) an immeasurable debt to a writer from whom we have necessarily taken distance. It is also an occasion to ask about our own investments in the renewed production of Bataille.During his lifetime (1897–1962), Georges Bataille was called many names, including a “pornographer” and a fascist, and when he died he became a cult figure among some intellectuals, for whom he represented an eclectic and unappreciated thinker. Since his untimely death, Bataille has become very famous. Now, according to Jürgen Habermas, this former librarian at the Bibliothèque Nationale, editor of Critique, author of covertly circulated erotic books and other works that did not sell well, stands first in a line of French intellectuals leading from “Bataille via Michel Foucault to Jacques Derrida” [Habermas 14]. 1 Bataille’s remains are located in the posthumanist pantheon: his work is joined to the giants of the French philosophical, psychoanalytic, and literary heritage, including Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Lacan, and Maurice Blanchot; he has been the subject of countless literary exegeses and even of a prizewinning biography [see Surya]. Bataille no longer has the merit of being unknown.But who is the Bataille we pretend to know? He is the one with whom many critics identify, yet his work is necessarily misunderstood, sometimes (but not always) in the interests of preserving its insights. Critical work on Bataille naturally emphasizes his theory of dépense (expenditure), his mysticism, his attraction to the sacrificial, sadomasochistic erotics of fascist politics, and tends, viscerally if implicitly, to identify with Bataille’s refusal to be hard in the conventional sense—his repudiation of impermeable, phallic masculinity and its association with moral resolve. In 1945, Bataille wrote that he was the “contrary of him who tranquilly watches the dismasted vessels from the shore, because in fact... I cannot imagine anyone so cruel that he could notice the one who is dismasted with such carefree laughter. Sinking is something altogether different, one can have it to one’s heart’s content...” [OC 6:358]. In 1966, a sensitive critic wrote: “Bataille’s cogito, thus, reads: ‘I sink therefore I am’” [Hollier 138]. In other words, Bataille was no proponent of a sink-or-swim philosophy, but of “the hard desire to endure”—words he wrote to describe Vincent Van Gogh, whose self-mutilation was, from Bataille’s perspective, the necessary precondition of his art. This hard desire is paradoxically the hard labor of unbinding the self, a project that entails yet moves beyond empathizing with those caught in the storm: Bataille insisted that creation required symbolic castration rather than the phallic virtue of the moral man or the swollen pride of those who volunteer heroically for the rescue mission (“Heroism,” he said, “is an [End Page 3] attitude of flight” [OC 5: 347]). As countless critics have demonstrated, even Bataille’s most relentlessly hard-core texts use sexuality as an allegory for the self-shattering of the phallic body.The sacrificial constitution of the man who would sink—for this Bataille was giddily embraced after his death. By 1990, when Yale French Studies devoted a special issue to him, the embrace was equally enthusiastic, but giddiness had given way to some defensiveness. Those theorists who did not admire Bataille equated his repudiation of phallic virtue with the ego-dissolving sublimity of fascism. After all, some of his friends and intellectual heirs had been subjected to public scrutiny for their anti-Semitic, often fascist sympathies. Implicitly defending Bataille, the editor of that special issue insisted on Bataille’s “ethics” of sacrifice. He claimed that Bataille held “onto the possibility of an ethics” through a paradoxically “incessant repositing of the ethical” [Stoekl 2, 5]. This account of Bataille’s ethics avoids the problem that the ethics of sacrifice in... (shrink)

This book disentangles two terms that were conflated in the initial Anglo-American appropriation of French theory: deconstruction and poststructuralism. Focusing on Sartre, Derrida, Foucault, and Baudrillard (but also considering Levinas, Blanchot, de Man, and others), it traces the turn from a deconstruction inflected by phenomenology to a poststructuralism formed by the rejection of models based on consciousness in favor of ones based on language and structure. The book provides a wide-ranging and complex genealogy of French theory from the 1940s onward, (...) placing particular emphasis on the largely neglected early work of the theorists involved and on deconstruction’s continuing relevance. The author argues that deconstruction is a form of radical, antiscientific modernity: an interdisciplinary reconfiguration of philosophy as it confronted the positivism of the human sciences in the 1960s. By contrast, poststructuralism is a type of postmodern theory inflected by changes in technology and the mode of information. Inasmuch as poststructuralism is founded upon its “constitutive loss” of phenomenology (in Judith Butler’s phrase), the author is also concerned with the ways phenomenology (particularly Sartre’s forgotten but seminal Being and Nothingness) is remembered, repeated in different ways, and never quite worked through in its theoretical successors. Thus the book also exemplifies a way of reading intellectual history that is not only concerned with the transmission of concepts, but also with the processes of transference, mourning, and disavowal that inform the relationships between bodies of thought. (shrink)

Este artículo se refiere a una línea de interpretación de la Fenomenología del Espíritu de Hegel que tiene en Alexandre Kojève a su exponente más conocido e influyente. En ella se privilegian los aspectos antropológico-existenciales e histórico-políticos por sobre los aspectos lógico-sistemáticos de la obra. La exposición se divide en dos partes. La primera está dedicada a la lectura de Hegel realizada por Kojève en su célebre curso dictado entre 1933-1939 en la École Practique des Hautes Études de París, y (...) la segunda se ocupa de su aporte a cinco filósofos directamente influidos por su interpretación. Finalmente concluye con una breve evaluación de estas lecturas. (shrink)

Whereas Phenomenology of Perception concludes with a puzzling turn to “heroism,” this article examines the short essay “Man, the Hero” as a source of insight into Merleau-Ponty’s thought in the early postwar period. In this essay, Merleau-Ponty presented a conception of heroism through which he expressed the attitude toward post-Hegelian philosophy of history that underwrote his efforts to reform Marxism along existential lines. Analyzing this conception of heroism by unpacking the implicit contrasts with Kojève, Aron, Caillois, and Bataille, I (...) show that its philosophical rationale was to supply experiential evidence attesting to the latent presence of human universality. It is a mythic device intended to animate the faith necessary for Marxist politics by showing that universal sociality is possible, and that the historically transformative praxis needed to realize it does not imply sacrifice. This sheds considerable light on Merleau-Ponty’s early postwar political thought. But inasmuch as the latter cannot be severed from his broader philosophical concerns, the prospect is raised that his entire phenomenological project in the early postwar period rested on a myth. Not necessarily a bad myth, but a myth nonetheless. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Antihumanism of the Young Deleuze:Sartre, Catholicism, and the Perspective of the Inhuman, 1945–48Giuseppe BiancoGilles Deleuze, along with Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and to a lesser extent Jean-François Lyotard, is considered an avatar of post-structuralism, and often associated with the critique of the concepts of identity and subjectivity. In this essay, I seek to identify the early sources of Deleuze's rejection of the notions of ego and person. In (...) the decade following 1944, one buzzword linked these two notions: humanism. Inspired by the evidential paradigm,1 and by using archival documents and little-known writings, I suggest why Deleuze's position, and the context in which it developed, can illuminate his mature work, especially his use of the concepts of immanence and univocity.Deleuze's engagement with anti-humanism—or, to be precise, with "inhumanism" and "impersonalism," the expressions Deleuze and his friends [End Page 795] used during the 1940s—is rooted in his radicalization of Jean-Paul Sartre's atheistic philosophy, which he read and discussed between 1943 and 1948. During this period, Deleuze was involved in gatherings organized by Catholic historians of medieval philosophy, including his mentor Maurice de Gandillac and Marie-Madeleine Davy. Gandillac, Davy, and their circles were interested in the existentialist and phenomenological movements, which they occasionally read within a theological framework. By radicalizing the positions detailed in works such as Being and Nothingness (1943) and "Transcendence of the Ego" (1936), Deleuze and his friend Michel Tournier confronted the mutation of Sartre's philosophy that began with his lecture "Existentialism Is a Humanism" (given in 1945 and published as a book the following year). They considered this turn to be incoherent with the core of his philosophy and to have conservative political consequences. This radical stance distinguished them from an older generation of scholars.Stefanos Geroulanos has shown that opposition to humanism, broadly conceived, emerged in French thought during the 1930s.2 To him, the idea that humanism had to be rejected and especially that anthropological questions had to be overcome began in the middle of that decade and reemerged in the later 1940s, with atheist and secular rejections of liberal humanism shadowing Catholic and, to a lesser degree, communist ones. However, I would argue that this ideological transformation in fact slowed somewhat in the decade following 1944. During this period, as Edward Baring has also claimed, most French intellectuals utilized "humanism" to oppose totalitarian and "anti-human" ideologies and to promote doctrines underlining the uniqueness of man as compared to other beings, the centrality of freedom, and the importance of defending human rights.3 Critiques of humanism took a final turn during the 1950s, after the publication of Martin Heidegger's "Letter on Humanism" (1947).4 From the late 1950s, and even [End Page 796] more so during the 1960s, the question of Being and the analysis of unconscious structures became common among scholars born during the interwar years as ways to overcome humanism and its limitations. During the 1960s, far more than during the 1930s, opposition to humanism and to the centrality of the notion of human subjectivity became radical and explicit; in this period, the term "anti-humanism" took hold, whereas, prior to the 1960s, it was rare and used as a pejorative. Deleuze used "inhumanism" far earlier than other authors of his cohort, already in 1945–48: by comparison, in the early 1950s, both Foucault and Derrida were still relying on different forms of humanism—in the case of the former, Marxist/existentialist; in the case of the latter, existential/spiritualist.5 Their turn toward anti-humanism during the mid-1950s was the result of the influence of Heidegger, Jean Hyppolite, Jules Vuillemin, and linguistic structuralism, through Lévi-Strauss.6 Not only did Deleuze reach antihumanist positions earlier, before even some of his professors, but he got there along a different way. Sartre's works were a defining theoretical influence at the beginning of Deleuze's intellectual trajectory, and they gave it a peculiar theoretical direction. During the 1940s, authors such as Bergson, Spinoza, and Nietzsche were not yet dear to Deleuze, and they did not occupy the important role that they... (shrink)

In this manuscript of the early 1950s, Foucault outlines the path of Freud’s psychoanalysis from a biological approach based on the evolutionary perspective to disease, towards the understanding of its psychological significance. However, since the evolutionary point of view is never abandoned by Freud, the question that arises is how, in the psychoanalytic definition of the disease and its relation to personality, the evolutionary analysis is combined with the perspective of a meaningful understanding: what equilibrium can be established between them, (...) and what image of the sick man does result? Moreover, if the disease has a sense, and if it is defined by a set of significant and consistent reactions, how can it still be defined as a disease? (shrink)

"Next to Sartre's Search for a Method and in direct opposition to it, Foucault's work is the most noteworthy effort at a theory of history in the last 50 years." -- Library Journal.

Foucault's previously unpublished doctoral dissertation on Kant offers the definitive statement of his relationship to Kant and to the critical tradition of philosophy. This introduction and commentary to Kant's least discussed work, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, is the dissertation that Michel Foucault presented in 1961 as his doctoral thesis. It has remained unpublished, in any language, until now. In his exegesis and critical interpretation of Kant's Anthropology, Foucault raises the question of the relation between psychology and anthropology, (...) and how they are affected by time. Though a Kantian “critique of the anthropological slumber,” Foucault warns against the dangers of treating psychology as a new metaphysics, explores the possibilities of studying man empirically, and reflects on the nature of time, art and technique, self-perception, and language. Extending Kant's suggestion that any empirical knowledge of man is inextricably tied up with language, Foucault asserts that man is a world citizen insofar as he speaks. For both Kant and Foucault, anthropology concerns not the human animal or self-consciousness but, rather, involves the questioning of the limits of human knowledge and concrete existence. This long-unknown text is a valuable contribution not only to a scholarly appreciation of Kant's work but as the first outline of what would later become Foucault's own frame of reference within the history of philosophy. It is thus a definitive statement of Foucault's relation to Kant as well as Foucault's relation to the critical tradition of philosophy. By going to the heart of the debate on structuralist anthropology and the status of the human sciences in relation to finitude, Foucault also creates something of a prologue to his foundational The Order of Things. Michel Foucault is widely considered to be one of the most important academic voices of the twentieth century and has proven influential across disciplines. (shrink)

Philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre counted among his friends and associates some of the most esteemed intellectuals, writers, and artists of the twentieth century. In Portraits, Sartre collected his impressions and accounts of many of his notable acquaintances, in addition to some of his most important writings on art and literature during the early 1950s. Portraits includes Sartre's preface to Nathalie Sarraute's Portrait of a Man Unknown and his homages to André Gide, Albert Camus, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The essay on Merleau-Ponty casts (...) considerable light on the recent history of French philosophy, particularly with regard to dominant post-war political conceptions. Featured as well are lengthy studies of Sartre's close friend Paul Nizan and of the young André Gorz that are no less revealing, as well as Sartre's "Reply to Albert Camus," which sealed the ideological and personal break between the two writers on its publication in 1952. Alongside these major writings are fascinating articles on Tintoretto and a number of contemporary artists, including Giacometti and Masson. Finally, Portraits concludes with two travelogue-style accounts of Sartre's time in Italy. This new translation by Chris Turner presents these essays in their complete form as originally intended by Sartre when he first published Situations IV in France and is thus essential reading for anyone interested in the artistic and intellectual history of the time. (shrink)

Most Anglo-American readers know Bataille as a novelist. The "Accursed Share "provides an excellent introduction to Bataille the philosopher. Here he uses his unique economic theory as the basis for an incisive inquiry into the very nature of civilization. Unlike conventional economic models based on notions of scarcity, Bataille's theory develops the concept of excess: a civilization, he argues, reveals its order most clearly in the treatment of its surplus energy. The result is a brilliant blend of ethics, aesthetics, and (...) cultural anthropology that challenges both mainstream economics and ethnology. The three volumes of "The Accursed Share" address what Georges Bataille sees as the paradox of utility: namely, if being useful means serving a further end, then the ultimate end of utility can only be uselessness. The first volume, the only one published before Bataille's death, treated this paradox in economic terms, showing that "it is not necessity but its contrary, luxury, that presents living matter and mankind with their fundamental problems." In the second and third volumes, "The History of Eroticism" and "Sovereignty", Bataille explores the same paradox of utility from an anthropological and an ethical perspective, respectively. "The History of Eroticism" analyzes the fears and fascination, the prohibitions and transgressions attached to the realm of eroticism as so many expressions of the "uselessness" of erotic life. In the third volume, Bataille raises the ethical problems of sovereignty, of "the independence of man relative to useful ends.". (shrink)

Sartre and Foucault were two of the most prominent and at times mutually antagonistic philosophical figures of the twentieth century. And nowhere are the antithetical natures of their existentialist and poststructuralist philosophies more apparent than in their disparate approaches to historical understanding. A history, thought Foucault, should be a kind of map, a comparative charting of structural transformations and displacements. But for Sartre, authentic historical understanding demanded a much more personal and committed narrative, a kind of interpretive diary of (...) moral choices and risks compelled by critical necessity and an exacting reality. Sartre's history, a rational history of individual lives and their intrinsic social worlds, was in essence immersed in biography. In Volume One of this authoritative two-volume work, Thomas R. Flynn conducts a pivotal and comprehensive reconstruction of Sartrean historical theory, and provocatively anticipates the Foucauldian counterpoint to come in Volume Two. (shrink)

In the unpublished manuscript of a lecture course probably given by Foucault at the École normale supérieure of Paris in 1954–5 (‘On Anthropology’; the dating is still uncertain), Foucault undertakes an erudite and detailed reconstruction of the history of anthropological knowledge, from modernity (Descartes and Malebranche) to 20th-century Nietzschean commentaries (Jaspers and Heidegger), including analyses by Kant, Feuerbach, and Dilthey, among others. My article explores this lecture course to emphasize the importance of anthropological criticism for the young Foucault, addressing (...) in particular the anti-anthropological significance of the encounter with Nietzsche’s philosophy, which becomes an output power ( puissance de sortie) both of the figure of man and the notion of truth in which he was involved. These unpublished manuscripts will therefore allow me to find a common thread in Foucault’s work in the 1950s and 1960s (and even beyond): the exploration of new potentialities for thought opened by ‘the death of man’. (shrink)

_Critical Essays _ contains essays on literature and philosophy from a highly formative period of French philosopher and leading existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre’s life, the years between 1938 and 1946. This period is particularly interesting because it is before Sartre published the magnum opus that would solidify his name as a philosopher, _Being and Nothingness_. Instead, during this time Sartre was emerging as one of France’s most promising young novelists and playwrights—he had already published _Nausea, The Age of Reason, The Flies, (...) _and_ No Exit_. Not content, however, he was meanwhile consciously attempting to revive the form of the essay via detailed examinations of writers who were to become central to European cultural life in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Collected here are Sartre’s experiments in reimagining the idea and structure of the essay. Among the distinguished writers he analyzes are Francis Ponge, Georges Bataille, Vladimir Nabokov, Maurice Blanchot, and, of course, Albert Camus, whose novel _The Stranger _Sartre endeavours to explain in these pages. _Critical Essays _ also contains a famous attack on the Catholic novelist François Mauriac, studies of the great American literary iconoclasts Faulkner and Dos Passos, and brief but insightful essays on aspects of the philosophical writings of Husserl and Descartes. This new translation by Chris Turner reinvigorates the original skill and voice of Sartre’s work and will be essential reading for fans of Sartre and the many writers and works he explores. “For my generation he has always been one of the great intellectual heroes of the twentieth century, a man whose insight and intellectual gifts were at the service of nearly every progressive cause of our time.”—Edward Said. (shrink)

Rella came of age as a philosopher in Italy during the period of the "crisis of reason" or more generally the exhaustion of classical rationality in its authority to structure experience. For Rella, unlike many others, the tensions of the crisis are productive. In The Myth of the Other, he presents a unique perspective on four seminal French thinkers: Lacan, Foucault, Deleuze, and Bataille. Moe's masterful translation brings this remarkable Italian thinker to American readers for the first time. This slim (...) book mayvery well change the way American scholars think about the crisis of the other and the self coming our of French poststructuralism. (shrink)

The impetus for exploring the relationship between Sartre and Foucault may be informed more by Foucault than by Sartre, as it would seem to be geared toward a Foucauldian determination of the discursive parameters of a particular dimension of modern philosophy; that is, of the history of philosophy, including, by extension, the history of existentialism. But insofar as this determination opens up a significant dimension of the situation of philosophy today - of our situation and of the situation (...) of existentialism - it is also Sartrean in nature, as are the effects of this determination, a determination situated somewhere between Sartre's philosophy of freedom and the freedom afforded to Foucault and to us all by the practice of philosophy, and by its future possibilities, which include the possibility "… that I do not believe a word, not one little word, of all I've just scribbled.". (shrink)

This article explores the concept of ethical invention in both Jean-Paul Sartre’s and Michel Foucault’s later lectures and interviews, showing that a courageous disposition to invent or transform plays a key role in both thinkers’ visions of ethics. Three of Sartre’s post-Critique of Dialectical Reason lectures on ethics are examined: Morality and History, The Rome Lecture, and A Plea for Intellectuals. It is shown that ethical invention for Sartre requires the use of our freedom to transcend our current circumstances, (...) a willingness to break away from harmful ideologies, and directing our free praxis towards the goal of universal humanism. Examining several of Foucault’s interviews alongside his lecture series The Government of Self and Others and The Courage of Truth, it is shown that ethical invention for Foucault requires a rejection of necessities or inevitabilities in our current landscape, a willingness to reshape our current beliefs, and a philosophical way of life that results in an alteration of the relationship to self and others. For both thinkers, ethical invention should be preceded by a critical reflection on ourselves in our historical moment. Both argue that ethical invention requires a rejection of the inherent value of our world and realization that the conditions of possibility for being subjects are malleable. Last, it is shown that both philosophers specifically call philosophers or intellectuals to invent. (shrink)

There has been and still is much debate in the literature as to whether Foucault is (or not) a historian (as opposed to being a philosopher). When he became famous through the publication of The Order of Things, in 1966, many historians of ideas immediately attacked him for the alleged inaccuracy or mistaken character of his analyses1. At the same time, the French philosophical establishment rejected him for being too historical in his approach, to the extent that when the first (...) large Foucault Colloquium was held in Paris in 1988, its (pro-Foucaldian) organisers felt that the title best suited to characterise and defend his work was “Michel Foucault Philosophe”2. Perhaps the latest example of this debate is the recent set of exchanges between G. (shrink)

Part intellectual history, part critical theory, The Last Man Takes LSD challenges the way we think about both Michel Foucault and modern progressive politics. One fateful day in May 1975, Foucault dropped acid in the southern California desert. In letters reproduced here, he described it as among the most important events of his life, one which would lead him to completely rework his History of Sexuality. That trip helped redirect Foucault's thought and contributed to a tectonic shift in (...) the intellectual life of the era. He came to reinterpret the social movements of May '68 and reposition himself politically in France, embracing anti-totalitarian currents and becoming a critic of the welfare state. Mitchell Dean and Daniel Zamora examine the full historical context of the turn in Foucault's thought, which included studies of the Iranian revolution and French socialist politics, through which he would come to appreciate the possibilities of autonomy offered by a new force on the French political scene that was neither of the left nor the right: neoliberalism. (shrink)

Poststructuralism--as a name for a mode of thinking, a style of philosophizing, a kind of writing--has exercised a profound influence upon contemporary Western thought and the institution of the university. As a French and predominantly Parisian affair, poststructuralism is inseparable from the intellectual milieu of postwar France, a world dominated by Alexandre Kojève's and Jean Hyppolite's interpretations of Hegel, Jacques Lacan's reading of Freud, Gaston Bachelard's epistemology, George Canguilhem's studies of science, and Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialism. It is also inseparable from (...) the structuralist tradition of linguistics based upon the work of Ferdinand de Saussure and Roman Jacobson, and the structuralist interpretations of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Louis Althusser, and the early Michel Foucault. Poststructuralism, considered in terms of contemporary cultural history, can be understood as belonging to the broad movement of European formalism, with explicit historical links to both Formalist and Futurist linguistics and poetics, and with aspects of the European avant-garde, especially André Breton's surrealism. Each essay in this unique collection by and for educators is devoted to the work and educational significance of one of ten major poststructuralist philosophers. (shrink)

This thesis examines the relationship between ethics and politics in relation to the problem of history. More precisely, this work is concerned with the particularly phenomenological approach to this problem demonstrated in the work of Merleau-Ponty and Sartre, and to the important critique of phenomenological historicity that emerges in the work of Michel Foucault. Foucault claims that there is something in the phenomenological account of history---and the attendant structure of transcendental subjectivity---that is totalizing. This thesis attempts to diagnose (...) the validity of this accusation with an eye towards its ethical implications, and point to the moments where Merleau-Ponty and Sartre may evade this criticism. (shrink)

El autor se propone, en Sartre-Foucault (una oposición tergiversada) , resolver el enigma planteado por el rechazo foucaultiano de la filosofía contemporánea . Rechazo casi endógeno y no exógeno, rechazo por conocimiento interiorizado y no desconocimiento exterior. Se analizan las dos fuentes de hostilidades flagrantes. 1) El rechazo foucaultiano de los privilegios del Cogito en beneficio de una consideración de la especialización del pensamiento. 2) La evidencia que posee de la normatividad, sin moral teorizada , de esta filosofía contemporánea y (...) particularmente en el caso de Sartre, el más existencialistamente moralista de entre todos los contemporáneos citados por Foucault: Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Sade, Nietzsche, Artaud, Bataille. «El pensamiento desde su forma más temprana es una acción – un acto peligroso» (Les Mots et les Choses , p. 339). También lo sabían Hegel, Marx, Freud, nos dice. El enigma surge precisamente del poder totalizante de comprensión que manifiesta con relación a este gran cuadro de la filosofía contemporánea. En general una oposición procede, en efecto, de una incomprensión del autor criticado o de una comprensión tergiversada. (shrink)

1. The most original discovery in Beauvoir’s book is one more Columbus’s egg, namely that it is far from evident that a woman is a woman. That is, she discovers that a woman is the result of a process that made so that she is like she is. The paper discusses two aspects of the so-to-say ‘ideology’ inspiring the work. The first is its ideology in the proper, Marxian sense. My claim is that the work still pays a heavy price (...) to the dominating ideology. It leaves still too much unquestionedof what was assumed at the time to be obvious, necessary, and unchanging. This ballast depends firstly on the inherited prevailing climate of opinion, corresponding to a situation of alienation, producing two distorted views of the male and female gender. On the other hand, it depends on an unquestioned legacy from the modern episteme (in Foucault’s sense of the word) carrying presupposed Cartesian dualism. The other side of the work’s ideology, that is, the positive program presented or better the utopia it formulates is less innovative than it could be, In a few passages, where she seems to make use of suggestions from Merleau-Ponty, she points at a view where the bodily and emotional dimension is rescued from its negation in the male-dominated Capitalist society. Still, these suggestions are forgotten in the bulk of the work. -/- 2. The making of a philosophical work does not depend just on the kind of philosophical influences behind it. A book is also the product of an author with a story living in one society at a given time of social history. In this case, the book was written in the afterwar time when women were pushed back home again from the wartime labor market and when several of the goals reached by the first phase of feminist movements had gone lost in several European countries under Fascist or semi-fascist regimes and were being eroded in America by the reactionary climate of McCarthyism. It was a book written by an intellectual young woman in almost total isolation. These circumstances account for some more naïve suggestions from work: for ex., the idea that the alternative to the strategy once adopted by nineteenth-century emancipationist movements should be an individual inner process of transformation confined within the boundaries of one woman’s consciousness, or also, the idea that the goal of women’s liberation should be to bring all women to a condition similar of Simone de Beauvoir herself who, as an educated woman, earning her life by her work, and living in an allegedly equal state with an enlightened man (Jean-Paul Sartre!) in a relationship free from constraints (an unmarried couple!), was already exemplifying what a liberated woman’s life would be. -/- 3. The reconstruction of the idea of femininity is still the most fruitful part of the work. It rejects the notion of femininity as an essence depending on biology or other factors and explores the making of this image as a result of a condition made of the social and economic state of affairs but as revived and actively mirrored through and by the consciousness of the very subjects suffering an oppressive situation. And the main novelty is the ‘discovery’ of asymmetry between the self-image of the male and the (self)-image of the woman, an asymmetry depending on the fact that the woman sees herself through the other’s eyes. -/- 4. Later feminist writers such as Shulamit Firestone remarked that 'The Second Sex' heavily depended on several key-ideas from Sartre existential ontology. One crucial aspect is accepting the mind-body dualistic framework without any suspicion that such dualism could have been itself a projection of the basic experience of the male-female duality. I suggest that the philosophical legacy inherited from Sartre is on occasion an asset for Beauvoir’s innovative existential analysis of the feminine ‘condition,’ but on several occasions, it creates unnecessary obstacles for her project of a new comprehension of the feminine ‘situation,’ aimed at rescuing women from an 'inauthentic' self-definition. -/- 5. The first among these poisoned gifts is Sartre’s idea of the individual as pure freedom and project. Merleau-Ponty’s criticism is well-known: Sartre draws a picture of the world as containing no more than ‘human beings and things,’ thus denying any substance to social relations, institutions, and culture. -/- 6. The second is Sartre’s reconstruction of dialectics, understood as dialectics without synthesis. This is an enlightening tool when used to describe conflicts, in so far as it accounts for the emergence of the ‘other’ as what is excluded. But it becomes a boomerang when used to interpret any kind of relationship, leading to equate inter-subjectivity with conflict. -/- 7. Suggestions coming from Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological approach of positive value of the bodily dimension as such, and hence of the feminine body, are evoked here and there but never fully spelled out. The most shocking consequence of acceptance of the Cartesian or Sartrean dualist view is an almost total de-evaluation of sexuality, understood as an activity involving just one tiny part of the human body, going with the idea that overcoming the oppression of women implies de-empathizing biological differences that are after all tiny and devoid of value. Besides, Beauvoir falls back into the trap of grounding claims of equality between men and women on the assumption that biological differences are of limited relevance. The eventual reason for such a step back is the distorting Cartesian mirror into which Beauvoir still looks in the vain hope of discovering a disembodied self as the (Cartesian) subject of an impossible kind of liberation.The first among these poisoned gifts is Sartre’s idea of the individual as pure freedom and project. Merleau-Ponty’s criticism is well-known: Sartre draws a picture of the world as containing no more than ‘human beings and things’, thus denying any substance to social relations, institutions and culture. The second is Sartre’s reconstruction of dialectics, understood as a dialectic without a synthesis. This view of dialectics is an enlightening tool when used to describe conflicts. It may account for the emergence of the ‘other’ as what is excluded. However, it becomes a boomerang when used to interpret any relationship, leading to equate inter-subjectivity with conflict. Suggestions coming from Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological approach would tend to admit that the bodily dimension as such has a positive value, and hence the feminine bodily dimension is not just indifferent, but instead gives women a point of view on the world different from the male point of view. These suggestions, yet, are evoked here and there but never fully spelt out. The most shocking consequence of acceptance of the Cartesian or Sartrean dualist view is an almost total de-evaluation of sexuality, understood as an activity involving just one tiny part of the human body, going with the idea that overcoming the oppression of women implies understressing biological differences that are after all tiny and devoid of value. Furthermore, Beauvoir falls back into the trap of grounding claims of equality between men and women on the assumption that physical differences are of limited relevance. The eventual reason for such step back is the distorting Cartesian mirror into which Beauvoir still looks in the vain hope of discovering a disembodied self as the (Cartesian) subject of an impossible kind of liberation. -/- . (shrink)

In this paper we present an approach between the conceptions of choice in Thomas Aquinas (1224-1274) and Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980). The purpose is to offer elements for a refl ection on the permanency of essentially human characteristics under quite different historical – and theoretical – conditions. The analysis follows the assumptions of Social History, from Braudel’s perspective of Long Duration. In fact, it is possible to identify analogies between Thomas’ and Sartre’s concepts of choice, which allows us, in education, (...) to make inferences about man’s responsibility for their actions. (shrink)

In an original approach to Foucault's philosophy, Christopher Falzon argues for a reading of Foucault as a philosopher of finite transcendence, and explores its implications for ethics. In order to distinguish Foucault's position, Falzon charts the historical trajectory of transcendence as a philosophical concept, starting with the radical notion of transcendence that was introduced by Plato, and which reappears in various forms in subsequent thinkers from the Stoics to Descartes, and from Kant to Sartre. He argues that Foucault's critique of (...) the transcendent subject of humanism is a rejection not of transcendence per se but of radical transcendence in its distinctively modern form. As such, he shows how Foucault's conceptualisation of transcendence as finite enables a picture of the human being as neither fully determined nor a creature of infinite possibilities, but as both subject and object, affected by but also able to affect the world. With the notion of finite transcendence Falzon captures the essence of Foucault's unique philosophy and provides a new insight into his contribution to ethics. Demonstrating its contemporary relevance, Foucault and the History of Philosophical Transcendencefurther explores the potential application of Foucault's approach to the current ecological crisis. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Somaesthetics and Racism:Toward an Embodied Pedagogy of DifferenceDavid A. Granger (bio)IntroductionThe philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once remarked that "The human body is the best picture of the human soul."1 There is a basic truth in this assertion that we recognize (I want to say) intuitively: the notion that human beings are parts both mental and physical, that these facets are ultimately interdependent, and that they are in some measure correlated (...) was a commonplace in the intellectual culture of ancient Athens, especially among Socratic thinkers. It can also be found as a central part of the basic ontology and ideals of self-cultivation espoused in much East Asian philosophy. In the West, however, this deep appreciation for the relationship between mind and body appears somewhat sporadically after the Socratics, only to be fervently reasserted as a main plank in the lived philosophy of the early American pragmatists, as when Henry David Thoreau proclaimed that "We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones. Any nobleness begins to refine a mean's features, any meanness or sensuality to imbrute them."2I use the word "sporadically" above because it is likewise a basic truism that canonical Western philosophy has a long and storied history of rejecting, ignoring, or degrading the human body—that most formative part of our being and connection to the world and to others. The position of the later, more metaphysical Plato is iconic in this regard, and it effectively set the tone for much Christian theology and the Cartesian philosophy of consciousness. For Plato and his adherents, the longing to escape our embodiedness, conceived as a necessary means to human (or perhaps superhuman) perfection [End Page 69] by achieving a godlike existence, requires effectively divorcing ourselves from the irrational brutes of terra firma. The body is conceived as a static constraint to human flourishing rather than a dynamic enabler. It is more or less an adversary, something that we must endeavor to be freed from or subdue.3 Its base senses and unruly passions deceive us epistemologically, while its inexorable power to situate us in space and time limits our objectivity. In its inevitable pains and infirmities, the body is also a constant reminder of the aging process and of our ultimate mortality. Deeming the body as at best a mere servant of the mind, philosophers typically have portrayed it as a veritable prison of deception, temptation, and suffering. Moreover, it is well-established that such thinking has been particularly pernicious in light of the historical identification of women and other marginalized groups with their variously enfeebled, depraved, or uncivilized bodies.4Against this disquieting backdrop, it is only relatively recently that the human body, and the significance of our existence as embodied beings, has received sustained positive attention by leading lights in Western philosophy and criticism. These luminaries include, among others, "feminist" thinkers like Simone de Beauvoir, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray and, of late, Susan Bordo and Judith Butler (with a nod to Michel Foucault, Pierre Bordeau, and others); pragmatists William James and John Dewey (with a nod to Emerson and Thoreau); phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty (with a nod to Jean-Paul Sartre); analytic philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (with a nod to James); and postmodernist Michel Foucault (with a nod to Friedrich Nietzsche, George Bataille, and the ancient Asian ars erotica tradition5). While these thinkers do not universally praise the body and its active, conscious cultivation for human flourishing (about which more later), they nonetheless acknowledge its necessity for all perception, action, and even thought.6 In short, they all seek to recognize and elucidate the significance—cognitive and affective, discursive and nondiscursive—of our full embodied intelligence.Looking specifically at the architectonics of the body espoused by the trio of Dewey, Foucault, and Wittgenstein, this article uses what philosopher Richard Shusterman terms "analytic somaesthetics" to examine some of the primary embodied dimensions of feeling, perception, action, and thought, particularly through the functioning of habit.7 In doing so, it seeks to expose the way various ideologies of domination (for example, racism, sexism, classism, ableism, heterosexism, ageism, etc.) are covertly (and at times overtly) materialized... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:diacritics 35.1 (2005) 136-146MuseSearchJournalsThis JournalContents[Access article in PDF]The Christian Bain de Diane, or the Stakes of an Ambiguous ParatextPatrick AmstutzTranslated by Gerald MooreUpon its publication, Le bain de Diane elicited few reactions on the part of criticism. Klossowski's name was still a secret and, despite its note among writers such as Bataille, Beauvoir, Camus, Parain, and Sartre and their public following, the number of readers to have read this (...) fifth work remained confined to those already familiar with Klossow-ski the essayist (Sade mon prochain, Méditations bibliques de Hamann), or the novelist (La vocation suspendue, Roberte, ce soir). The discreet silence that characterized the first reception of Le bain de Diane would last until the end of the seventies, despite a reedition in 1972 by the same publisher. During this time three important moments made Le bain de Diane resurface at the heart of the literary world: first, in fictional form, thanks to a subtle but explicit homage paid by Henri Thomas [Le promontoire]; second, in the form of a penetrating commentary article by Michel Foucault ["La prose d'Actéon"], and finally, at the hands of René Micha and Catherine Backès-Clément, key contributors to the issue that the review L'Arc dedicated to the writer. The reedition of Le bain de Diane by Gallimard1 would significantly relaunch interest in this work which, one comes increasingly to realize, is a major text in the Klossowskian oeuvre: offering a reflection on the image and writing, it was Gilles Quinsat who would open this new period of critical reception.An Uncertain IdentityQuinsat emphasizes the "series of 'tableaux' that glazes Le Bain de Diane" in accordance with a "circular" descriptive movement, he says, "from vision to commentary, attributed to the deferral without end of signs, and which feeds the entire work of Pierre Klossowski" [95]. And if he borrows the term "exegesis" from Foucault to describe the genre of the work, he immediately associates it with that of "narrative." A quarter of a century earlier, a commentary in the new Nouvelle revue française had already underlined the "disconcerting" character of Klossowski's book, by accentuating not only the strangeness of its thematic, but also the difficulties posed by the uncertainty of its generic belonging (which is echoed by the absent mention of a paratext): the critic, hesitating, suggested somewhat confusedly a typological kinship with philosophical commentary, theological scholasticism, prose poetry, series of paintings, historical narrative and even the analysis of myths [Amer 144]. In fact, this mythological "reverie," neither an essay nor a narrative, is, from this point of view, a typically Klossowskian [End Page 136] book, as Ian James has more recently reminded us [143]. Le bain de Diane mixes erudite commentary and narrative discourse so well that it entices its commentators into the traps of scholarly, historical, and philological annotation. Yet this would be to forget, as Maurice Blanchot has observed [92–94], that the written oeuvre of Klossowski belongs fully to the field of literature, even more so than to those of philosophy, theology, or psychoanalysis.When it comes to discerning the literariness of this literary object, which the different paratextual and intertextual stakes and levels underline, the principal difficulty consists in not losing oneself in a mythological labyrinth and innumerable variants of the cult of Artemis, which was one of the most significant, oldest, and popular cults of the Greco-Roman era and which plunges into a world on whose complexity historians and philologists have insisted on many occasions. The study of Klossowski's sources could lead one through multiple disciplines (philology, mythography, psychoanalysis, the history of religions, history of art, French literature—all centuries cobbled together, and so on) to overly vast inquiries: the goddess "of a thousand names" assumes a properly vertiginous semiotic richness, and the cult of Artemis, before being linked to that of Apollo, stretches back to time immemorial where, behind Artemis, can be glimpsed the Asiatic figure of a Great Mother Goddess, whose... (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: References.

We are celebrating the centennial year of the birth of Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980). His death and the huge funeral cortege that spontaneously gathered on that occasion marked the passing of the last of the philosophical "personalities" of our era. Contrast, for example, his departure, which I did not witness, with that of Michel Foucault, which I did. The latter was acknowledged in a modest ceremony at the door of the Salpêtrière Hospital; his private funeral in the province was even more (...) stark. The two passings exhibit the distinction graphically. Foucault, the most likely candidate to become Sartre's successor as reigning intellectual on the Left Bank, exited the institution that had figured in several of his books attended by a small crowd of a couple hundred, admittedly assembled without public notification, on a damp morning to hear Gilles Deleuze read a brief passage from the preface to The Uses of Pleasure. Describing philosophy as "the critical work that thought brings to bear on itself," the message had an ironically haunting Sartrean ring. (shrink)

Georges Bataille's powerful writings have fascinated many readers, enmeshed as they are with the themes of sex and death. His emotive discourse of excess, transgression, sacrifice, and the sacred has had a profound and notable influence on thinkers such as Foucault, Derrida and Kristeva. Bataille: Writing the Sacred examines the continuing power and influence of his work. The full extent of Bataille's subversive and influential writings has only been made available to an English-speaking audience in recent years. By bringing together (...) international specialists on Bataille from philosophy and literature to art history, this collection is able to explore the many facets of his writings. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Bataille in Theory: Afterimages (Lascaux)Suzanne Guerlac (bio)If there is a single term poststructuralism could not live without—at least within the intellectual circles associated with the review Tel quel—it is “transgression,” inherited from Bataille. “God-meaning,” Philippe Sollers writes in an early essay, “... is a figure of linguistic interdiction whereas writing—which is metaphoricity itself (Derrida)—transgresses... the hierarchic order of discourse and of the world associated with it” [“La science de (...) Lautréamont” 808, my emphasis]. In their Dictionnaire des sciences du langage Ducrot and Todorov declare grandly that text “has always functioned as a transgressive field with respect to the system according to which we organize our perception, our grammar, our metaphysics and even our science” [443–44, my emphasis]. They describe the advent of poststructuralism as a “Copernican revolution,” and it became customary to characterize the before and after of this break by referring to Bataille’s distinction between “restrained” and “general” economies.An influential essay by Foucault, “Préface à la transgression” (1963), might be considered the opening move in what would become Tel quel’s appropriation of Bataille. Foucault’s essay examines Bataille’s L’érotisme (1955), a study that theorized transgression in a complex elaboration which articulated philosophical discourse (Hegel/Kojève) with a “sociological” discourse of the sacred (Caillois). Foucault’s reading of the text removes the transgression of eroticism from both these discursive horizons and moves it toward late Heidegger (an ontology of the limit) and Nietzsche. If one of Bataille’s most radical gestures was to insert the ethnographic distinction sacred/profane into philosophical discussion, Foucault’s analysis reinscribes transgression within the intertextual field of philosophy, radicalized, of course, through the inclusion of the “marginal” figure, Nietzsche, and the philosopher who announced the end of philosophy, Heidegger. Foucault’s rewriting of Bataille may read philosophy against itself, may even propose the transgression of philosophy; nevertheless, it is structured by the vicissitudes of philosophical discourse. Bataille on the other hand had confronted philosophy with something radically other—tout autre.In “Préface à la transgression,” Foucault defined transgression as “a gesture concerning the limit.” He presented it as a flash of lightning, an image that not only figures transgression but also emblematizes the move into what will become the philosophical register of poststructuralism. It traces a line, a line that figures the Heideggerian ontology of limitation, the coming into being (or appearance) of beings on the horizon of Being; it suggests the limit of the ontological difference between Being and beings.Anticipating Derrida through Heidegger, Foucault analyzed transgression as an event of difference, alluding to Blanchot’s “principe de contestation” and to a Nietzschean notion of affirmation. “Might not the instantaneous play of the limit and transgression be today the essential test of a thinking of ‘origin’ which Nietzsche bequeathed to us... a thinking that would be absolutely, and in the same movement, a Critique and an Ontology, a thinking that would think finitude and being?” [Foucault 759]. Transgression becomes identified with a “philosophy of eroticism” (which plays on Sade’s “philosophie dans le boudoir”), a gesture that transvalues philosophy from the realm of cognitive or rational activity to “an experience of finitude and of being, of the limit and of transgression.” The [End Page 6] “philosophy” of eroticism is thus a “test/ordeal [épreuve} of the limit,” one that “no dialectical movement, no analysis of fundamental laws [constitutions] and of their transcendental foundation [leur sol]” can help us think. Foucault then asks a rhetorical question that could be said to structure much of the discourse of theory in the next decade: “Would it be an exaggeration, to say,” he asks, “... that it would be necessary to find a language for the transgressive that would be what dialectic has been for contradiction?” [759].In this way Foucault established transgression as an alternative to the machine of dialectical contradiction. Attuned to the recent discoveries of structuralism, which had begun to reverse the conventional understanding of relations between the subject and language (the subject is no longer considered master of his or her language but structured by it), Foucault announced that “the gesture of transgression replaces the movement of contradiction by plunging the... (shrink)

Georges Bataille was a philosopher, writer, and literary critic whose work has had a significant impact across disciplines as diverse as philosophy, sociology, economics, art history and literary criticism, as well as influencing key figures in post-modernist and post-structuralist philosophy such as Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. In recent years, the number of works published on Georges Bataille, as well as the variety of contexts in which his work is invoked, has markedly increased. In _Georges Bataille: Key Concepts_ an (...) international team of contributors provide an accessible introduction to and survey of Bataille's thought. The editors’ introduction provides an overview of Bataille’s work, while the chapters in the first section cover the social, political, artistic and philosophical contexts that shaped his thought. In the second part, each chapter engages with a key theme in Bataille’s philosophy, including: art, eroticism, evil, inner experience, heterology, religion, sacrifice, and sovereignty. The final chapter addresses Bataille’s literary writings. Georges Bataille: Key Concepts is an invaluable guide for students from across the Humanities and Social Sciences, coming to Bataille’s work for the first time. Contributors: Giulia Agostini, Elisabeth Arnould-Bloomfield, Tiina Arppe, Marcus Coelen, Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Patrick ffrench, Marina Galletti, Nadine Hartmann, Mark Hewson, Andrew Hussey, Stuart Kendall, Claire Nioche, Gerhard Poppenberg, and Michèle Richman. (shrink)

En este artículo se estudian las razones que permiten establecer dos momentos en la filosofía kantiana de la historia, momentos que configuran una sutil evolución que, sin embargo, no contradice la intención esencial de la misma: El primero de ellos, anterior a 1790, se basa en un necesitarismo naturalista conjugado con la idea de la libertad como subsunción a la ley moral, lo cual dificulta la relación teoríapraxis, generando pesimismo histórico y, a la vez, no muy fundadas esperanzas en la (...) intervención del buen príncipe para producir el cambio político y social. El segundo momento, encara la historia desde el juicio teleológico, la admisión de los sentimientos como parte cooperante en la moral y la admiración a la revolución francesa, generando optimismo histórico, otorgando al derecho un papel decisivo en la construcción de la república noumenon y abriéndose a una concepción de la libertad más cercana al libre albedrío. (shrink)