Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy proved more palpable to artists of the nineteenth century than to philosophers as such (with the exception of Nietzsche, Freud and Wittgenstein). Ironically, Schopenhauer’s aesthetical theory is particularly paradoxical on a variety of fronts. One troubling paradox is how Schopenhauer subscribes both to the elitist nature of the genius artist and a naturalist metaphysics. How can a singular being have radically distinct abilities if s/he cannot principally differ from the rest of existence? I address this paradox in this essay and provide a solution by focusing on a certain evolution in Schopenhauer’s philosophical development.

This paper is an elaboration of Paul de Man’s critique, in “Heidegger’s Exegeses of Hölderlin,” of Martin Heidegger’s commentary on Friedrich Hölderlin’s poem, “As when on a holiday…” I show that de Man’s critique can be expanded into a critique of a type of testimony that Heidegger ascribes to Hölderlin’s poem. Heidegger ascribes to Hölderlin’s poem what I call “infinite testimony,” but, thereby, suppresses in the poem another type of testimony—what I call “finite testimony. This suppression is most in evidence in Heidegger’s interpretation of Hölderlin’s reference to the myth of Semele, as well as in Heidegger’s excision, in the version of the poem that he printed in the commentary, of the concluding lines of the poem. Additionally, I discuss the political implications of Heidegger’s suppression of the finite testimony depicted in “As when on a holiday . . .”

I argue in this paper that some of the most basic commitments of Kantian ethics can be understood as grounded in the dynamic of sense that Maurice Merleau-Ponty describes in his Phenomenology of Perception. Specifically, I argue that Merleau-Ponty’s account supports the importance of universalizability as a test for the moral permissibility of particular acts as well as the idea that the binding character of the moral law is given as something like a fact of reason. But I also argue that Merleau-Ponty’s account of reversibility suggests an important dimension of moral experience that is given in the experience of contact and that is underthematized in moral philosophies like Kant’s that emphasize the role of universalizability.

Is Heidegger’s theory of the era of technology a sufficent hermeneutics of contemporary globalization? It remains invaluable because it understands technology in terms of transcendence, and transcencence in terms of being-in-the-world. But should it nevertheless be revised in the context of contemporary social and technological environment? This article shows firstly how Heidegger’s general idea of being-in-the-world is specified in his theory of technology, and how technology reduces man and nature into “natural resources” and being into elemental techno-nature. Secondly, the article presents two types of critique to Heidegger’s idea: on the one hand, Ihde, Latour and Stiegler question Heidegger’s understanding of technology as a total system; on the other hand, Foucault and Eldred question Heidegger’s understanding of technology independently of social and economical structures. The article suggests that re-interpreted through these critiques, the theory of technology gives a good basis for an ontology of contemporary “uprooted” existence.

This essay examines the concept of criticism in the early works of Walter Benjamin. Critique is for Benjamin an attitude toward objectivity that treats it as a medium of reflection, and embodies a politics of ‘sobriety.’ This critical posture provides the early Benjamin with an original method of critiquing capitalism as a form of religion. Capitalist religion is characterized by the proliferation of ‘debt’ that robs the subject of the capacity for critical experience. Art critique and the critique of capitalism are two valences of the concept of critique: positive (or immanent) critique, and negative (or redemptive) critique.

The article examines the role of the Last Judgment in Giorgio Agamben’s philosophy. It argues that the central ontological structure of Agamben’s early thought is that of the perpetually occurring origin. The figure of the perpetual final judgment captures precisely this ontological structure. In order to explicate this figure, the article examines Agamben’s relation to the Heideggerian project of the “destruction of judgment” in two steps. First, it examines the way Agamben turns the methodology of “destruction” into the project of “decreation.” Second, it examines the Agambenian critique of judgment in terms of the perpetually occurring Last Judgment. The essay concludes with a brief examination of the Homo Sacer project and argues that “bare life” should be understood as life lived under this perpetual final judgment.