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 transcendent divinity? Are we to mourn…
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 on a rich, detailed,…
Preview: /Review: Michał Herer, In Praise of Friendship (Alresford, UK: Zero Books, 2021), 112 pages./ In this article I will try to discuss some thoughts presented by Michał Herer in his book In Praise of Friendship. I read it a couple of times and it certainly deserves both the Barbara Skarga prize and interest among young scholars and students…
Abstract: This paper is an adventure of ideas. More specifically, it is a continuation of the adventure of ideas concerning the relations between creativity and logic at the level of being one finds in the work of Whitehead and his interpreters/inheritors. The “argument” of the paper, such as it is, is that ontological creativity…
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 art and the aesthetic…
Abstract: The author begins by analyzing Walter Benjamin’s quarrel with George Kreis and the respective visions of culture advocated by both sides of the debate. Then, he offers a reading of a poem by Paul Celan in which the poet sides with Benjamin, but also makes his position more complex, ultimately offering a paradoxical figure of “the secret…
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 dissipation of the unities of science, Enlightenment, and…
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 religious figure…
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 abstractly” is a radical re-conception not only…
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 back” and “allowing the other to be,” stances…