Jean-Paul Sartre, in Being and Nothingness, develops the concept of “bad faith” in order to account for the paradoxical fact that knowledge can be ignorant of itself, and thus that a self-conscious subject can deceive itself while being aware of its own deception. Sartre claims that Freudian psychoanalysis would account for self-deception by positing an unconsciousness that guides consciousness without consciousness being aware of it. Therefore, Freudian psychoanalysis is an insufficient model with which to address bad faith. I disagree. There is a specific psychic mechanism in Freud that answers Sartre’s criteria for bad faith, and it is called “disavowal” (Verleugnung). Disavowal is the mechanism responsible for fetishism. And thus, fetishism is the Freudian account of bad faith.

To what extent can meaning be attributed to nature, and what is the relationship between such “natural sense” and the meaning of linguistic and artistic expressions? To shed light on such questions, this essay lays the groundwork for an “ontology of sense” drawing on the insights of phenomenology and Merleau-Ponty’s theory of expression. We argue that the ontological continuity of organic life with the perceived world of nature requires situating sense at a level that is more fundamental than has traditionally been recognized. Accounting for the genesis of this primordial sense and the teleology of expressive forms requires the development of an ontology of being as interrogation, as suggested by Merleau-Ponty’s later investigations.

Through a critical reading of Hölderlin’s poetry and Heidegger’s thinking, this essay explores how thunder awakens us to the elemental, opens us to the elements through their boundaries or cracks, and brings the hum and clamor of things, their elemental voices, to our presence.

This study examines the ritualized character of crimes against humanity in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Encompassing a victim, a victimizer, and a witness, degradation ceremonies structured the activity of what is euphemistically called ethnic cleansing. The observing world played the role of witness, which became a perpetuating component of the ritual.The discussion leads to the formulation of evil as the degradation of not only an individual human being but also humanity itself.

This essay is a philosophical reading of Don DeLillo’s novel, The Body Artist, and his essay, “In the Ruins of the Future.” Focusing on the issues of loss, mourning, and terror after the attacks of September the 11th, I argue that DeLillo gives a picture of mourning as something that occurs through a loss of language. This loss does not end language; instead, it occurs through language.

It may be considered a rather oblique move to convene a discussion of the Hydra and Heracles in relation to our larger initiative to ground a conceptual typology of polemics, but it serves as perhaps the most effective analogy in the spirit of poststructuralist and deconstructive critique. That is, we invoke these two “styles” of critique with their preoccupation with language and the Other: two key components to elucidate upon the notion of polemics, and more specifically, take our cues from Derrida’s idea of hydratext and Deleuze’s clarion call for concept creation. If the polemicist is considered monstrous, then it behooves us to commit considerable study to the polemicist’s monstrosity.

This article begins with a response to Habermas’ critique of Bataille. Habermas argues that the realm of heterogeneity/transgression is only opened up in moments of shock which overwhelm the subject. The rational categories of thought which maintain a useful relationship with the outside (i.e., with anything construed as unfamiliar) are fragmented in the excess and horror of Bataille’s communication. Hence it is impossible to bring together under one theoretical umbrella the antitheses of subjectivity and its excluded other: by definition the other ought to be marginalized in its very objectification by the subject, normativity, rationality, etc. My response is that the two opposed terms/antitheses are indeed opposed, but they are not therefore abstract opposites. That is to say, the subject is always already an equivocation of terms, a kind of sacrilege which cannot be assimilated to an ideal completion. The law is itself a transgression.

With the 1999 film The Martix as its point of departure, this work explores the meaning of ‘reality’ outside the scope of empirical positivism. Drawing on the phenomenological epistemology of the interplay of noetic and noematic dimensions of experience postulated by Husserl, and on the works of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, this work considers how the reality of our experience derives not from some correspondence to a universal ‘objective’ point of view, but from our concernful involvement with our lived world as the horizon of our lived and known projects. Finally, in light of Ricoeur’s work on imagination and productive reference, this work considers whether and on what grounds the distinction between so called ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ experiences is meaningful.

The starting point of my essay is a paradoxical claim that the Spanish philosopher, poet and novelist Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936) makes—in his essay “Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho” (1905)—that Don Quixote, Cervantes’ character, is more real and authentic than Miguel de Cervantes himself. Then, after discussing this claim and analyzing the implications of an ingenious literary device that Unamuno employed in his fiction “Niebla” (1914), I will sketch some of the possible philosophical consequences that Unamuno’s literary concepts might have on understanding the ultimate identity of the self, and of the nature of human condition in general. The paper is in three parts: 1) the first part is dedicated to discussing the above mentioned paradoxical claim in “Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho”; 2) the second part deals mainly with Chapter XXXI of Unamuno’s “Niebla”; and 3) in the final part I will deal with Unamuno’s insight that the relationship between the self and God is, properly speaking, of the same nature as the relationship between a literary author and the fictional beings he creates. In addition, I will be trying to place Unamuno’s insight within a broader context of history of ideas, and to point to some of its far-reaching philosophical implications.