One striking feature of Finite and Eternal Being is Edith Stein’s exceedingly rare use of the term “metaphysics.” She uses the term “formal ontology” numerous times, but the term “metaphysics” only appears a handful of times in the body of the text, and even those references are themselves a bit surprising. This could be explained in several ways, some of which may be quite innocent and have nothing to do with whether she understands her project as metaphysical. In the following, however, I would like to explore a differing explanation and argue that (at least, in part) her reason for avoiding describing her work as metaphysical is connected with the type of philosophical critique she wants to make of traditional metaphysics. I will not argue that Finite and Eternal Being should ultimately be read as a phenomenological analysis of being rather than any sort of metaphysical treatise, but I will argue that Stein has explicitly phenomenological reasons for being cautious about using the term “metaphysics.”

Throughout much of his career, Deleuze repeats a problem he attributes to Spinoza: “we do not even know what a body can do.” The problem is closely associated with Deleuze’s parallelist reading of Spinoza and what he calls ethology. In this article, I argue that Deleuze takes ethology to be a new model for philosophy which he intends to replace ontology. I ground my claim in Deleuze’s sugges-tion that Spinoza offers philosophers the means of “thinking with AND” rather than “thinking for IS.” The argument is developed through Deleuze’s monographs and collaborations on Spinoza and alongside his meta-philosophical critique of the Image of Thought.

The article reflects on Heidegger’s “metaphysical” interpretation of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. This interpretation is driven by two theses Heidegger holds: (1) that the Phenomenology is a necessary part of Hegel’s “system of science” and (2) that the Phenomenology is metaphysics. These two theses contrast with Houlgate’s “epistemological” interpretation, which claims that the Phenomenology is not a necessary part of Hegel’s system of science and that it is not metaphysics. The article shows that while Heidegger has an argument that establishes, contra Houlgate, his second thesis, this very argument has consequences that undermine his first.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This article seeks to characterize deconstruction (and “theory” generally) as a practical activity in order to assess its potential effects in view of Marx’s 11th Thesis on Feuerbach. Taking its cue from Derrida’s reference to the “inner edge of philosophy” in Theory and Practice, the article juxtaposes Derrida’s ostensibly philosophical approach with the contentious, historiographic approach taken by Ian Hunter. Reflecting on the activity of deconstruction from the outer edge of philosophy, as it were, the discussion first reviews Derrida’s diagnosis of the philosophical impulse to monopolize authority over all theory and practice, then interprets this move via Hunter’s “empirical” attempt to situate and analyze different modes of philosophizing as concrete exercises in self-problematization. The discussion highlights the surprising convergences in Derrida’s and Hunter’s arguments before adopting this view from the outer edge of philosophy in order to reassess where and how deconstruction’s practical effects may be registered.

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.

Shestov and Levinas share a preference for Jerusalem over Athens—specifically, for a movement of spirit other than knowledge that is not oriented toward the past, as knowledge is, but toward the new. They characterize that movement differently: Shestov opts for faith and the exercise of creative powers based on his interpretation of Adam and Eve eating of the tree of knowledge, while Levinas prefers a suspension in which we marvel at the created other, an idea, influenced by Husserl on suspension, which presages Levinas’s later notion of welcoming or being cored out by the absolute other.

The question of communism as a real political possibility, if not the most necessary political possibility, seems entirely foreign or strange in our world today. Just as striking is the claim that communism is inextricably linked with literature. But both of these claims are made by the often-overlooked and as-yet untranslated French thinker and political activist Dionys Mascolo. By examining and explicating Mascolo’s strange (re)conception of communism, with the aid of the thought of his friend Maurice Blanchot concerning communication and friendship, this article will explore another communism, between politics and literature—a communism of the future, a communism of thought, which approaches human need in a manner radically different from the common conception of communism.

This interview, conducted over email, is an exchange between Annemarie Mol, a philosopher and Professor of Anthropology of the Body at the University of Amsterdam, and Ada Jaarsma, associate editor of Symposium. While the questions reflect Jaarsma’s interests in Mol’s account of “empirical philosophy” and its import for contemporary Continental philosophy, Mol’s responses raise questions, in turn, about how phrases like “Continental philosophy” betray geographical and canonical presumptions. Reflecting on the import of wonder, of reading, of intervening in philosophy’s set tropes, and of decentring the subject, Mol draws readers into an array of ways to reconsider the cultural repertoires and social realities by which philosophical activities take place.

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.

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.

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.

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.