In this article I examine Michel Serres’s seminal study of Leibniz: Le Système de Leibniz et ses modèles mathématiques, a book which, in spite of its significance, has never been dis...

I focus in this response on what I take to be Bernasconi's proposal to dissolve and reframe moral and political philosophies around the problematic of slavery. Insofar as, in the wake of Afro-diasporic and Black radical thought, it offers us one version of an argument that has now touched virtually all aspects of modern European philosophy, how are we to understand the specific orientations of Bernasconi's approach? Reading Bernasconi's article, I comment on the following points: (1) the notion of “absence” (...) or “silence” about slavery, (2) Bernasconi's focus on methodology rather than individual moral or political responsibility, and (3) his shift away from canonical philosophical figures. To conclude, I open further questions regarding the relationships between the “material” approach to the history of philosophy he advocates in this article and the project of a “critical philosophy of race” he has defended elsewhere. (shrink)

This article contends that an adequate investigation of the role and effects of race in the history of philosophy requires an elucidation of the ways in which the history of philosophy functions as a “territorial” structure. This argument is developed through an extensive cross-examination of Peter Park's Africa, Asia and the History of Philosophy: Racism in the Formation of the Philosophical Canon 1780–1830 and Catherine König-Pralong's La colonie philosophique. Écrire l'histoire de la philosophie aux XVIIIe et XIXe siècles. I show (...) that although the two studies inquire into the fixation of the history of philosophy on Europe that took place in German and French philosophy at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, they do so via different explanatory frameworks, highlighting diverging critical strategies in the dismantling of Eurocentrism in the discipline. In the final part I contrast three broad critical strategies against the Eurocentric orientation of the historiography of philosophy based on opposite problematizations of the territoriality of the history of philosophy: the territory as jurisdiction, relational field, and space of address. (shrink)

The central premise of this thesis is that translation has acquired a new meaning in so-­called postcolonial times and that this transformation calls forth a renewal of the philosophical conceptualisation of translation. I begin by distinguising between two different philosophical genealogies of translation in modern European philosophy. The first is a Romantic and hermeneutic lineage, in which translation is closely bound to the movement of culture, and conceived of as an ‘experience of the foreign’. The second is a relational genealogy (...) of translation, in which translation is a transformation without teleology, yet systematically-­oriented. The thesis reconstructs this alternative concept through a parallel reading of Walter Benjamin’s and Michel Serres’ works on translation, contending that Leibniz’s relational metaphysics proved a crucial resource for both of them. Albeit reflecting on different objects, these two authors converge in thinking translation as a relation and a method, associating translation with their critique of epistemology. By drawing on a generalised metaphysics of language, they both reflect on translation as a transformation in the objective domain, hence as a form of historicity. The thesis is composed of three autonomous yet convergent parts. The first part operates as a backdrop to the whole by expounding the need for locating the philosophy of translation outside of the ethics of alterity. It contends that the link made between linguistic difference and difference ‘as such’ is often insufficiently mediated. The second part examines Serres’ early works, explicating his philosophy of translation in close connexion with the evolution of his structuralism, from his doctoral work on Leibniz to the last of the Hermès series: Le passage du Nord-­Ouest. The third part investigates Benjamin’s philosophy of translation in light of his metaphysics of language, following his concepts of the ‘afterlife’ as a thread through his early and later works. Finally, the conclusion propounds the intrinsic connexion that holds between the translation problem, Leibnizianism and ‘decentered epistemologies’. (shrink)