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john russon's phenomenological encounters
1. Symposium: Volume > 27 > Issue: 2
Peter Gratton Introduction
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2. Symposium: Volume > 27 > Issue: 2
Peter Gratton John Russon's Achievement: The Impossible Experience of Adulthood
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My hypothesis is that achieving adulthood has been Russon’s aim from the beginning—in life, yes, as perhaps with the rest of us—but also in and as his philosophical development. To set up this claim, I show how philosophy has traditionally conjoined its own development with narratives of adulthood. I turn to important moments in Plato, Descartes, and Kant to set out the outlines of a given structure of maturation as found in the Western tradition, all to bring home how Russon’s writing tries to achieve something of an event beyond maturity as it’s been envisaged previously in these works.
3. Symposium: Volume > 27 > Issue: 2
Whitney Howell Eros as Initiation: Russon on Desire, Culture, and Responsibility
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This article considers how John Russon’s original analyses of sexuality in Bearing Witness to Epiphany: Persons, Things, and the Nature of Erotic Life and in relevant articles address the relation between erotic desire and the familiar cultural narratives that describe and set the terms for engaging in erotic experience. I show how, according to Russon, erotic experience is an initiation into our responsibilities within and for an interpersonal reality that challenges speci􀏔ic cultural narratives about sexuality and the pre-sumption that any cultural narrative could adequately prepare us to fulfill those responsibilities. I situate his work in relation to the classic account of the relation between erotic desire and culture in Socrates’s speech about eros in Plato’s Symposium. I also consider how it addresses concerns in contemporary feminist analyses about how intimate relationships may reproduce broader cultural patterns of oppression.
4. Symposium: Volume > 27 > Issue: 2
Shannon Hoff A Phenomenological Account of the Conditions of Transnational Feminism
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In Sites of Exposure, John Russon draws on the resources of phenomenology to describe how human life, while not having a “given” form specified in advance, nonetheless takes speci􀏔ic shape through practices by which we become committed to certain ways of living. This means that our lives are simultaneously a matter of living with a speci􀏔ic reality—what Russon calls “home”—and having to respond to an outside to which we are “exposed.” I argue here that Russon’s analysis is especially useful for feminist philosophy and its attempt to grapple with the possibility of universal principles of justice across cultural contexts, developing this philosophical framework in conversation with Serene Khader’s efforts to furnish a set of core values for transnational feminist praxis that, while universal in their opposition to sexist oppression, are not imperialist, and with Saba Mahmood’s critique of the parochial character of Western conceptions of freedom.
5. Symposium: Volume > 27 > Issue: 2
Ömer Aygün The Therapy of Theōria: Counterpointing Russon’s Reading of Plato's Republic
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This article applies Russon's principles of reading Plato's dialogues to solve a problem arising from both the dramatic and philosophical aspects of Plato's Republic: persuasive speech seems effective only when its audience is already willing to listen and be convinced. Yet if so, then either persuasive speech is powerless to persuade anybody truly, or it is unclear how it differs from simple manipulation or brainwashing. This article resolves this dilemma by using Russon’s insights about the kind of rationality Plato invites us to assume, namely a “concrete rationality,” and by analyzing the 􀏔irst three interlocutors of Socrates in the Republic: Polemarchus, Cephalus, and, of course, Thrasymachus. This approach enables us to differentiate these three interlocutors, explain Thrasymachus’s persistence in listening to the conversation until the end despite his unwillingness to listen, as well as the therapeutic function of theōria for providing him some momentary relief from his “hatred of speech” (misologia).
6. Symposium: Volume > 27 > Issue: 2
Sean D. Kirkland Russon's Plato
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This essay offers an assessment of some of the fundamental features and contributions of John Russon’s scholarship on the dialogues of Plato. It focusses on the interpretive method he refers to as “reading as agents of nemesis” and on Russon’s unique emphasis on experience as the ground of philosophical activity in the Platonic corpus. I close by raising two issues that I see as fundamental questions that Russon’s work on Plato leaves unanswered—the difference in ontology, and thus method, between ancient and modern philosophers and the frequently relied upon chronological ordering of Plato’s dialogues.
7. Symposium: Volume > 27 > Issue: 2
Gregory Kirk Russon's Method of Authorless Description
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In this article, I present John Russon’s phenomenological method of authorless description. I trace this method to Russon’s engagement with Aristotle, Hegel, and Heidegger. Speci􀏔ically, I claim that he is informed by Aristotle’s practice of accounting for appearances, Hegel’s method of presuppositionless science, and Heidegger’s project of preparation to “let being be.” I apply this to Russon’s book, Sites of Exposure, and his account of both the human need to transcend the home towards an open-ended realm of indifference and the concrete development of the conditions in which that is made possible in what we call the modern world. I present his account of the emergence of representative democracy, modern science, and glob-al capitalism. I argue that Russon’s method provides essential tools for understanding the promises and failures of what we call the modern world and the imperative of openness that ought to guide us in striving to address those failures.
8. Symposium: Volume > 27 > Issue: 2
John Russon Phenomenology as the Critical Disclosure of the Realities within Our Experience
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I use phenomenology to interpret the distinctive character of our human reality with a goal of determining how we can live in order to answer to our inherent needs. I distinguish three basic ways we can comport ourselves in living our lives: “security,” “preparation,” and “readiness.” I argue that readiness is the healthy ful􀏔illment of our needs as free beings. I argue that such readiness is a continuation of the natural enthusiasm for engaging with the world manifested by children, and I associate this with the Greek notion of erōs. I then consider the process of growth from childhood to adulthood to show how we develop and become habituated to practices of self-interpretation that undermine our healthy development, and I consider how this relates to the distinctive problems of capitalist culture, in particular. I conclude by considering again the phenomenological interpretation of our human reality in order to determine what the ultimate view of reality is that is implied by this position.
regular articles/articles variés
9. Symposium: Volume > 27 > Issue: 2
Tina Röck, Daniel Neumann Phenomenology of the Future: The Temporality of Objects Beyond the Temporality of Inner-Time Consciousness
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Based on a creative use of the phenomenological method, we argue that a close examination of the temporality of objects reveals the future as genuinely open. Without aiming to decide the matter of phenomenological realism, we suggest that this method can be used to investigate the mode of being of objects in their own temporality. By bracketing the anticipatory structure of experience, one can get a sense of objects’ temporality as independent of consciousness. This contributes to the current Realism versus Idealism debates, but it does so without taking sides. The starting point is neither an analysis of pure consciousness, nor attempts to describe objects in-themselves, but the idea that things can be phenomenologically grasped through the difference between their temporality and our own. By being methodically “open to the future,” one can become aware of the sui generis temporality of objects as different from the temporality shaped by our anticipation.
10. Symposium: Volume > 27 > Issue: 2
Surti Singh Invention of the Visual Form: Reciprocal Alienation in Debord’s Society of the Spectacle
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In The Society of the Spectacle, Debord describes the spectacle as a capitalist social formation that is at the same time reflective of the privileging of vision in the history of Western philosophy. This article highlights Debord’s appeal to the Hegelian-Marxist notion of reciprocal alienation in his discussion of how the spectacle invents the visual form. Reciprocal alienation produces a dialectical relation between concrete social activity and the spectacle, which I argue is key for understanding how the political subject is represented in the hyper-spectacularized societies of the 21st century.
11. Symposium: Volume > 27 > Issue: 2
David Ventura Experiment Prudently: Ethical Prudence in Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus
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In their shared works, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari repeatedly advise that ethical practices of experimentation must be imbued with a large dose of prudence. Among commentators, this concept of prudence has primarily been read in cautionary terms, as that which merely enables ethical subjects to avoid the “many dangers” of experimentation. By contrast, this article develops a wider, more positive reading of Deleuzo-Guattarian prudence. Focussing specifically on A Thousand Plateaus, I show that, for Deleuze and Guattari, we must always exercise prudence in ethics because prudence constitutes one positive means of maximizing the success of experimental ethical praxes.
12. Symposium: Volume > 27 > Issue: 2
Benjamin Décarie-Daigneault Merleau-Ponty and the Transcendental Past: From the Nascent State of Perception to the Ontogenesis of Nature
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Phenomenology’s reversal of naturalism hinges on the central claim that the worldly objects that we experience acquire their ontological solidity throughout series of intentional acts that are accomplished over the course of our subjective and intersubjective lives. This posture has historically given rise to realist critiques stating that such a “correlational” ontology undermines our capacity to formulate a coherent discourse on generative natural events that predate humans, such as the Big Bang, the Earth’s accretion, the formation of the oceans, etc. In this paper, I articulate a Merleau-Pontian response to this problem. I establish a continuity between the temporality that is at play in the genesis of empirical bodies and the pre-objective tension that precedes perceptual givenness. I therefore suggest treating the past of nature as a transcendental past, always at work within our present experience, instead of an objective moment that would have determined in advance a causal chain of events.
13. Symposium: Volume > 27 > Issue: 2
List of Book Reviews/Liste des comptes rendus
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14. Symposium: Volume > 27 > Issue: 2
Call for Submissions/Appel à soumission
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“it must be done”: critical reflections on derrida’s theory and practice
15. Symposium: Volume > 27 > Issue: 1
Rick Elmore Introduction: "It Must Be Done": Critical Reflections on Derrida's Theory and Practice
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16. Symposium: Volume > 27 > Issue: 1
Jeffrey Gower What Are Thinking and Acting Beyond the Theory/Practice Pair?
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This article rehearses Derrida’s articulation in Theory and Practice of an analogy between Althusser’s and Heidegger’s treatments of the theory/practice pair. The analogy motivates a question about what remains for thinking and acting in the wake of Marx’s 11th Thesis on Feuerbach, when the traditional sovereignty of theory over practice becomes untenable. In the seminar, Derrida develops a line of inquiry about the edge distinguishing theory from practice, which philosophy would presumably over􀏔low as it ceases to merely interpret the world and begins to change it. The article shows how Derrida’s analogy between Marxist philosophy and Heideggerian thinking exposes some pitfalls of any attempt to definitively escape prescientific philosophy or metaphysics while also opening up the possibility of allying Heidegger’s destruction of technological humanism and retrieval of an originary ethics with the Marxian imperative to change the world.
17. Symposium: Volume > 27 > Issue: 1
Vernon W. Cisney, Ryder Hobbs To Have Done With the Death of Philosophy: Derrida’s Theory and Practice Seminar
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In this essay, we read Derrida’s Theory and Practice seminar against the backdrop of the theme of the “death of philosophy,” prominent in 1960s French philosophy. This theme takes two forms—one Nietzschean-Heideggerian and the other Hegelian-Marxian. We summarize both before turning to Derrida’s treatment of Althusser’s views on the Hegelian-Marxian form of this death. Althusser posits a distinction between theory in the general sense and Theory as a designation for Marxist dialectical materialism. Derrida gives two specific criticisms of Althusser that we discuss: (1) Althusser commits himself to a tautology, by arguing that Theory only makes explicit what is implicit already in Marxist practice; (2) Althusser ultimately establishes the priority of practice over theory. We refute both of these charges before concluding that, prior to the distinction between theory and practice, is the world itself; and presenting itself to us as unthinkable, the world places the demands upon us that it be engaged with, in theory and in practice.
18. Symposium: Volume > 27 > Issue: 1
David Maruzzella Derrida’s Speculative Materialism/Marxism’s Promethean Scientism
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This paper examines the relationship between deconstruction and Marxism by turning to recent attempts to read Derrida as a materialist philosopher. Following Martin Hägglund, I propose that Derrida’s critique of logocentrism implies a commitment to certain seemingly materialistic philosophical positions, most importantly, the radical foreclosure of an entity exempt from a transcendental field of differences. However, Derrida’s materialism remains speculative to the extent that it results in a philosophy of infinite finitude itself premised upon a transcendental style of argumentation excluded from scientific verification or falsification. By contrast, I suggest that Marxism with its commitment to Promethean scientism—the claim that all limits on human theory and practice are relative and subject to possible transformation—offers a more radical form of philosophical materialism.
19. Symposium: Volume > 27 > Issue: 1
Thomas Telios Shrapnels: Jacques Derrida’s Theory and Practice: Towards an Enigmatic Materialism of Hope
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Jacques Derrida’s lectures on Theory and Practice leave a lot to be desired from the perspective of historical materialism. Yet, one can nonetheless find in them the germ of a genuine understanding of materialism. More specifically, following the systematic use of the word “enigma” in the text, I show that this term serves as the heu-ristic device for articulating an originally Derridean materialism, one which I name “enigmatic materialism,” and which, I argue, is genuinely collective, insofar as it opposes any form of monism. Moreover, this materialism has profound repercussions for the concept of hope developed in these lectures. Hope, from the perspective of an “enigmatic materialist,” becomes a collective endeavour that avoids the pitfalls of solipsistic individualism through the joint effort of the subject and its/the Other.
20. Symposium: Volume > 27 > Issue: 1
Ammon Allred Pedagogy and Politics in Derrida’s Theory and Practice Seminar
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In what follows, I outline the role that pedagogical concerns play in how Derrida structures his Theory and Practice seminars. Framing my discussion with Foucault’s criticism of Derrida’s pedagogy as overly textual and quasi-despotic, I show how Derrida accepts elements of that criticism in his description of his pedagogy. Moreover, by treating these seminars as model exercises for students rather than as a philosophical text advancing a thesis, we can identify connections with Derrida’s commitment to a more radically democratic institutional politics, insofar as the supposed “limitless sovereignty” of the quasi-despotic pedagogue is a self-conscious fiction, deployed strategically to challenge other forms of sovereignty. In this way, Derrida draws a parallel between his own textual and pedagogical practices and those of Heidegger, an attempt both to open his practice up to genuine interruptions and gaps and to contest the neoliberal “disruptions” of the academy.