2021-03Discussion Papers, Comments, Book Reviews
Is There Life Before Death? On Agata Bielik Robson’s Another Finitude

Preview: /Review: Agata Bielik-Robson, Another Finitude: Messianic Vitalism and Philosophy (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2019), 312 pages./ Since Nietzsche announced (or prophesied) the death of God, thinkers who took his words seriously have been dealing with one crucial question: how to live a life stripped of any references to…

2021-03Discussion Papers, Comments, Book Reviews
Toward New Adventures in Philosophy

Preview: /Review: Eli Kramer, Intercultural Modes of Philosophy, Volume One: Principles to Guide Philosophical Community (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2021), 382 pages./ Eli Kramer has provided us with the first volume of an ambitious trilogy entitled Intercultural Modes of Philosophy. His first volume, Principles to Guide Philosophical Community (hereafter PGPC), sets us…

2021-03Forum
A Few Theses on Art, Alienation, and Abolition

Abstract: Marcuse suggested the alienation of art from society intrinsic to the aesthetic form represents and recollects an unreal world capable of indicting existing social arrangements while simultaneously providing a sensuous experience of another possible, liberated reality denied by established institutions. Drawing on and recasting part of Marcuse’s theory of…

2021-03Thematic Section
Number(s) of Future(s), Number(s) of Faith(s): Call it a Day for Religion

Abstract: Encrypted in Derrida’s contribution to the Capri Seminar on Religion in 1994 are three retrievals: of his discussions of speech and of systems of inscription; of a concealment of splittings in the supposed continuities of traditions; and of a complicity between the operations of religion and those of a…

2021-03Thematic Section
Abstraction Made Flesh – Immediacy of the Body and Religious Experience. Derrida, Hegel and Georges de La Tour

Abstract: The text juxtaposes two different understandings of religion, the first: Hegelian, where it functions as an imaginary representation of the concept, and the second: Derridean, which confronts and radicalizes the idea of the death of God. At the center of their juxtaposition is the process of abstraction and the…

2021-03Thematic Section
The Religion (without Religion) of the Living (without Life): Re-reading Derrida’s “Faith and Knowledge”

Abstract: This article offers a reading of Jacques Derrida’s account of “religion” and “life” in his seminal essay “Faith and Knowledge.” Applying Derrida’s aporetic structure of “X without X” to his remarks on religion and life in “Faith and Knowledge,” this article suggests that underlying Derrida’s endeavor to “think religion…

2021-03Thematic Section
Against Autoimmune Self-Sacrifice: Religiosity, Messianicity, and Violence in Derrida’s “Faith and Knowledge” and in Classical Rabbinic Judaism

Abstract: In this essay, I argue that a comparison of Derrida’s “Faith and Knowledge” to the texts and thought of classical rabbinic Judaism can illuminate new conceptual connections among the different elements of Derrida’s thought.  Both Derrida and the rabbinic texts can be viewed as affirming a type of “holding…