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.

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.