This article seeks to re-evaluate the importance of the political in the thinking of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The article first shows that Sartre’s description of Merleau-Ponty’s intellectual trajectory as one of increasing political apathy from the 1950s onwards is inaccurate. The article then demonstrates that throughout the post-war period, including in his project for a new ontology, Merleau-Ponty believed that a revised version of Marxism would provide the methodological framework within which philosophical work could address the political challenges of the present. This revised Marxism was to be a direct alternative to the reifying uses of Marx’s thinking. It would rely upon the latter’s self-reflexive historicism, which meant its very failures showed how philosophy might transform itself in connection with its own time. Cet article tente souligner la place du politique dans la pensée de Maurice Merleau-Ponty. On contestera d’abord la description faite par Sartre de sa trajectoire intellectuelle, selon laquelle il aurait fait preuve d’une apathie croissante, à partir des années cinquante, vis-à-vis des questions politiques. On montrera ensuite que durant toute la période d’après-guerre, jusque dans les recherches ontologiques ultimes, Merleau-Ponty a pensé qu’un usage renouvelé du marxisme permettrait au travail philosophique de répondre aux défis politiques du présent. Une telle révision du marxisme représentait une alternative directe aux usages réifiant de la pensée de Marx. Cette révision serait rendue possible par la réflexivité historiciste de cette pensée, qui fait que, dans ses erreurs mêmes, celle-ci révèle la capacité de la philosophie à se transformer au contact de son temps.

This article explores how the later Heidegger and the early Derrida experience and say the “being” of language. Both stumble upon the impossibility of bringing language into language—either because, for Derrida, all terms are implicated in the differential process of semiosis; or because, for Heidegger, articulations are responses called forth from the being of language. This is how we experience the finitude of language. Instead of being plainly nameless, the word comes into presence in its being-absent, but does so in conflicting ways. Derrida’s différance brings into language the infinite self-signification of language, while Heidegger’s Ereignis brings into it the self-concealment of language in propositional statements. Cet article examine comment Heidegger, vers la fin de sa vie, et Derrida, à ses débuts, éprouvent et disent « l’être » du langage. Tous deux découvrent l’impossibilité de faire entrer le langage dans le langage – soit, dans le cas de Derrida, car tous les termes sont impliqués dans le processus différentiel de la semiosis; soit, dans le cas de Heidegger, car les articulations sont les réponses appelées par l’être du langage. C’est ainsi que nous faisons l’expérience de la finitude du langage. Au lieu d’être tout simplement sans nom, le mot trouve présence dans son être-absent, de manières néanmoins conflictuelles. La différance de Derrida fait entrer dans le langage l’auto-signification infinie du langage, alors que l’Ereignis de Heidegger y introduit l’auto-dissimulation du langage dans des formulations propositionnelles.

La romancière et essayiste Virginie Despentes s’est imposée par une plume qui fait écho aux travaux de Preciado ou Butler, où, par le biais d’une forme de recherche-création, elle aborde des thèmes tels que la prostitution, la pornographie ou la violence féminine. Partant du principe selon lequel le personnel est politique, sa réflexion expose le caractère construit de ce qu’on prend habituellement pour donner : le soi et l’identité genrée. Cet article entend montrer comment le corps est décrit par Despentes comme lieu d’une potentielle résistance politique dans la mesure où, tout comme le soi, il peut se soustraire du moins en partie aux déterminismes par un processus d’autoreconstruction. En transformant leurs corps de façon à redéfinir leur identité, les personnages décrits par Despentes présentent différentes façons de penser les rapports entre individus, mais surtout, de générer un discours critique qui permet de penser l’identité au-delà des dichotomies de genre. French novelist and essayist Virginie Despentes has become prominent through her literary work, which echoes the works of Preciado or Butler. Through a form of research-creation, Despentes tackles topics such as prostitution, pornography, and female violence. Starting from the principle that “the personal is political,” her reflection exposes the constructed character of what is usually taken as given: the self and gendered identity. This article intends to show how Despentes describes the body as the locus of a potential political resistance insofar as, like the self, it can at least partly escape determinisms by a process of self-reconstruction. By shaping their own bodies so as to redefine their identity, the characters created by Despentes present different ways to rethink the connections between individuals and, most importantly, different ways to generate a critical discourse that allows one to think about identity beyond gender dichotomies.

Engaging with Hans-Georg Gadamer and Edith Stein, this article argues that art offers us a glimpse of the interiority of both the artist and the community of connoisseurs who share in a love of art. By tarrying with the other in the artwork, the other becomes enmeshed in the meaning of that work and herself becomes a facet of how art is meaningful and world-making. This process does not claim to know the entirety of the other. Rather, the other, like the artwork, is seen only in part. A trace of the other’s interiority affirms our suspicion of connection to the other but always maintains her mystery and autonomy beyond our totalizing conceptualization. Né d’une collaboration entre Hans-Georg Gadamer et Edith Stein, cet article soutient que l’art nous offre un aperçu authentique de l’intériorité de l’artiste et de la communauté de connaisseurs qui partagent leur amour de l’art. En s’attardant avec l’autre dans l’art, l’autre commence à s’emmêler sur le sens de cet art et il devient eux-mêmes une facette de la richesse de l’art et de la trans-formation du monde. Ce processus ne prétend pas connaître l’autre dans son intégralité. Au contraire, l’autre, tout comme l’art, est vu seulement en partie. Des réminiscences de l’intériorité de l’autre confirment notre suspicion de connexion à l’autre mais préservent toujours son mystère et son autonomie au-delà de notre conceptualisation totalisante.

Bioethicists criticize Jürgen Habermas’s argument against “liberal eugenics” for many reasons. This essay examines one particular critique, according to which Habermas misunderstands the implications of human evolution. In adopting Hannah Arendt’s concept of “natality,” Habermas seems to fear that genetically modified children will lose the contingency of their births, which would impair their capacity for political action; but according to evolutionary theory, bioethicists argue, this fear is unfounded. I explore this objection by entertaining the hypothesis that Habermas’s argument assumes Arendt’s interpretation of Darwinian evolution in addition to her conception of natality, and then I answer it by contrasting the conceptions of evolution held by Habermas, by Arendt, and by Habermas’s critics. Les bioéthiciens critiquent l’argument de Jürgen Habermas contre « l’eugénisme libéral » pour de nombreuses raisons. Cet essai examine une critique en particulier, selon laquelle Habermas comprend mal les implications de l’évolution humaine : en adoptant le concept de la « natalité » de Hannah Arendt, Habermas semble craindre que les enfants soumis à une modification génétique ne perdent la contingence propre à leur naissance, une perte qui diminuerait leur capacité pour l’action politique, mais selon la théorie de l’évolution, les bioéthiciens soutiennent que cette peur est sans fondement. J’explore cette objection à Habermas en considérant l’hypothèse que, en plus du concept de la natalité, Habermas suppose aussi l’interprétation arendtienne de l’évolution biologique de Darwin, et j’y répond en confrontant cette conception de l’évolution avec la conception propre à Habermas et avec celle des bioéthiciens qui lui ont répondu.

In this article, I present an interpretation of Kierkegaard’s ethics in terms of Gilles Deleuze’s distinction between immanent ethics and transcendent morality. I argue that Kierkegaard’s skepticism towards moral prescription, his emphasis on the single individual as the basis of normative evaluation, and his view of Christianity as somehow “beyond” the scope of moral obligation are all functions of a Deleuzian conception of immanent ethics as a non-moralistic form of normativity. On this basis, I argue for two conclusions: first, that Kierkegaard’s work is better understood through this frame-work than through either aretaic or deontological frameworks; and second, that Deleuzian ethics is better served by Kierkegaardian illustrations like patience and stillness, than by the tropes of destruction that are often associated with it. Dans cet article, je présente une interprétation de l’éthique de Kierkegaard du point de vue de la distinction deleuzienne entre l’éthique immanente et la moralité transcendante. Dans cette perspective, je soutiens que le scepticisme de Kierkegaard quant à la prescription morale, sa conception d’un christianisme « en dehors » du champ de l’obligation morale, et l’accent qu’il fait porter sur le seul individu comme étant la base des évaluations normatives, sont tous fonction d’une conception deleuzienne de l’éthique immanente, en tant que forme amorale de la normativité. Sur cette base, j’affirme deux conséquences : la première, que l’oeuvre kierkegaardienne est mieux comprise selon ce cadre que selon, d’une part, le cadre de l’éthique de la vertu, et d’autre part, le cadre déontologique. La deuxième, que l’éthique deleuzienne s’illustre mieux par les exemples kierkegaardiens, comme ceux de la patience et de la tranquillité, que par les tropes de la destruction auxquels elle est souvent associée.

This interview, conducted over the span of several months, tracks the respective journeys of Constantin V. Boundas and Daniel W. Smith with the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. Rather than “becoming Deleuzian,” which is neither desirable nor possible, these exchanges reflect an array of encounters with Deleuze. These include the initial discoveries of Deleuze’s writings by Boundas and Smith, in-person meetings between Boundas and Deleuze, and the wide-ranging and influential philosophical work on Deleuze’s concepts produced by both Boundas and Smith. At stake in this discussion are key contributions by Deleuze to continental philosophy, including the distinction between the virtual and the actual and the very nature of a “concept.” Also at stake is the formative or pedagogical impact of a philosopher, like Deleuze, on those who find and fully engage with his texts, concepts, and project. Cette interview, menée sur plusieurs mois, suit les parcours respectifs de Constantin V. Boundas et Daniel W. Smith avec la philosophie de Gilles Deleuze. Au lieu de « devenir Deleuzien, » ce qui n’est ni souhaitable ni possible, ces échanges reflètent un éventail de rencontres avec Deleuze. Il s’agit notamment des premières découvertes des écrits de Deleuze par Boundas et Smith, des rencontres en personne entre Boundas et Deleuze, et du travail philosophique vaste et in􀏔luent sur les concepts de Deleuze produit par Boundas et Smith. L’enjeu ici étant les contributions clés de Deleuze à la philosophie continentale, y compris la distinction entre le virtuel et l’actuel, et la nature même d’un « concept. » Mais il y a aussi l’impact formateur ou pédagogique d’un philosophe, comme Deleuze, sur ceux qui trouvent et s’engagent pleinement dans ses textes, ses concepts et ses projets.

This paper proposes a heterodox reading of Levinas’s Otherwise Than Being by means of a hitherto unacknowledged lineage run-ning from Plotinus through Nietzsche to Levinas. Its claim is two-fold. (1) Throughout Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, and especially in its important speech on the “gift-giving virtue,” Nietzsche corporealiz-es and ethicizes Plotinian emanationist metaphysics, borrowing from it the notion of an auto-generosity that is extravagant and non-substantial. (2) Levinas’s late conception of embodied ethical giving in Otherwise Than Being borrows from this borrowing, al-beit in a way that draws more deeply on the logic of emanationism than Zarathustra does. Interpreting Levinas through Plotinus and Nietzsche in this way provides access to a version of his late ac-count of embodied ethical giving that is much stranger than the ul-tra-humanist version typically foregrounded both in the literature and in his self-presentation.

While the human body is not a point of focus in Heidegger’s later philosophy of technology, I argue that considering our contempo-rary relationship to our own bodies provides crucial support to Heidegger’s account. Heidegger suggests that, in our contemporary age of technology, humans are taken to be “human resources”: like natural resources and technological devices, humans should be available for efficient and flexible incorporation into any number of projects. I argue that the contemporary attitude toward the human body provides evidence confirming this suggestion. Moreover, I identify the body as a unique site of resistance to the age of tech-nology, an anomaly to the technological paradigm, as the body con-stantly resists our attempts to transform it into a resource.

This paper takes Porochista Khakpour’s personal narrative of chronic illness, disability, and addiction in Sick: A Memoir (2018) as a starting point to reflect on social and material features of sick bodily subjectivity. In ways heretofore largely unexplored by tradi-tional phenomenologies of illness, I ask what different modalities of the body come to light if we move beyond the privatization of dis-ease as a biological dysfunction and instead bring into focus its re-lation with conditions of existence that make and keep some of us sick.

“Nocebo,” a term coined in the mid-twentieth century, refers to the onset of negative side effects in individuals who anticipate harm from biomedical treatment. Sylvia Wynter invokes nocebo effects as racializing phenomena that demonstrate the injurious impact of colonial practices. By soliciting insights from Nocebo Studies, as well as Wynter and Achille Mbembe, this article explores decolonial philosophies of selfhood, especially in terms of the meaning-making expressivity of selves. This conversation between Nocebo Studies and Wynter proffers ways to engage with nocebo effects as mani-festations of the structures of colonial violence, while undercutting biomedical accounts of nocebos that presuppose an overly generic human body.

Precarious times have material consequences. Yet, feminist new materialist approaches demonstrate that the concepts of the “ma-terial” and of “matter” are radically different than what is com-monly held in the Western tradition. This article argues that femi-nist new materialism provides practical, essential, and ethical tools for political action in dynamic and entangled worlds. In such worlds (e.g., the Anthropocene), it is critically needed to establish an ethics of responsiveness, a culture of ethical living and dying with others. Yet, this ethic must respond to and acknowledge our relational, entangled, dynamic, and agentic ontology. In response to this, this article proposes the “pluri-person,” a political figure that mobilizes contributions of feminist new materialism to produce an ethical, ontology-making, everyday practice/response to “Precari-ous Times.”

Posthumanism’s abandonment of language and embrace of natural sciences can impede thinking about “selfhood, embodiment, mate-riality.” The role of language in a posthuman context involves a tri-ple consideration: ethics, history, and enunciation. The ethical di-mension works through the biopolitical risk of determinism. Any ethical “situatedness” must account for history. Finally, working through Agamben’s thought via Benvenistian linguistics (which in-fluence Agamben), I examine the interplay of ethics and history with respect to enunciation as an alternative to the legacy of de-construction. The claim here is that the gaps between embodiment and materiality, and the singularities of experience and ethics, in-volve history and language as “pure means.”

This article focuses on the constellation of texts in which Derrida engages with the autobiographical question raised by Heidegger in his lectures on Nietzsche. It argues that Derrida takes this question (“Who is Nietzsche?”) as the point of departure not only of two di-verging approaches to the problem of the signature of the philoso-pher, but also of the two texts that he devotes to the exploration of these approaches. In these texts, distancing himself from Heidegger, Derrida interprets Nietzsche’s treatment of his proper name as a new logic of the living and a new thought of self-reference.

This article imagines an alternative outcome to Hegel’s life-and-death struggle for recognition, one commensurate with Derrida’s critique of Hegel’s allegedly reserved negativity. Rather than pro-ducing lord and bondsman, the struggle is shown to be capable of producing a host and a guest, operating under the relation of hos-pitality. Pitt-Rivers’s reinterpretation of Boas’s classic ethnographic account of Inuit hospitality provides a model for the emergence of the alternative outcome. Derrida’s equation of deconstruction with hospitality illustrates its fundamental differences from Hegelian dialectics, expanding the significance of the struggle and its out-comes to the meaning of Hegel’s philosophy as a whole.

For Marx, capitalism’s division of labour between mental and mate-rial labour is the condition of possibility for the creation of its alien, out of control, and contradictory effects. This paper will analyze the proletarian class, the capitalist class, and the world market qua ef-fects of the division of labour. The division of labour conceptualized fundamentally as a dynamic division between activity and passivity informs the analysis of these contradictory effects. This conceptual-ization of the division of labour provides the framework for under-standing the striving toward activity and self-determination, de-scribed by Marx, of that which falls on the side of material labour.

Les études sept à neuf de Soi-même comme un autre, dans les-quelles Paul Ricoeur développe sa « petite éthique » souvent quali-fiée d’éthique de la sollicitude, s’achèvent sur une suggestion d’après laquelle la « catégorie de la reconnaissance » exprime adé-quatement la « dialectique du même et de l’autre » au coeur de cette éthique. Jean Greisch y a vu « la cellule germinale du Parcours de la reconnaissance » et a qualifié ce bloc d’études de « premier “travail de reconnaissance” ». Radicalisant ces remarques, nous soutenons que la petite éthique peut être qualifiée d’éthique de la reconnais-sance. Nous fournissons à cette thèse une première assise en clari-fiant le rapport qu’entretient la notion d’estime de soi – fondamen-tale dans la petite éthique, où elle est définie comme la capacité d’une personne à évaluer la cohérence de ses actions avec sa con-ception de la vie bonne, – avec celle de reconnaissance (de soi).