Nostalgic, socially privileged ideals of childhood have actively contributed to the formation of Australian national identity, as well as modern subject-formations more broadly. This paper argues that, while such nostalgia has been drawn on for normative ends—in the service of the management of the modern individual—nostalgia also has the power to disrupt our conceptions of the normal. In the context of the contemporary “crisis” of childhood particularly, opportunities to reconstitute ideals of “childhood” and “family” differently have become available to communities such as Aboriginal Australians, who previously have been denied access to these nostalgic forms.

This paper turns to Hannah Arendt’s brief, poignant remarks about the advent of a biotechnological revolution as a starting point for a renewed reflection on her concept of natality. By expanding on Arendt's significant, but often overlooked, reference to the work of the German anthropologist Arnold Gehlen, it will be argued that that natality is a concept that subverts any rigid opposition between zoe and bios, biological birth and politico-linguistic birth. Consequently, it will be shown that Jürgen Habermas and Michael Sandel are mistaken to appeal to the concept of natality in their arguments against genetic enhancement.

Spivak translates Derrida’s “il n’y a pas de hors-texte” as “there is nothing outside the text.” By considering how the aphorism works within his study of Rousseau on sexual and textual supplements, and by reviewing related expressions in French, a mistranslation is revealed. This is not a simple error, however. The distortion is generated by Derrida’s own broader context. We must not only distinguish signification from reference but also place the aphorism within Derrida's allusion, in the first part of Of Grammatology, to an all-embracing arche-writing. The paper ends in thus opening out the discussion of a textual “inside” or “outside.”

Set in the context of the current interest among Analytic philosophers in the “epistemology of disagreement,” this paper explores the meta-philosophical problem of philosophical incommensurability. Motivated by Nietzsche’s provocative remark about philosophy as prejudices and desires of the heart “sifted and made abstract,” the paper first outlines the contours of the problem and then traces it through a series of examples. Drawing largely on the tradition of phenomenology and philosophical hermeneutics, a broadly Continental response to this formidable problem is suggested. Disagreement cannot be understood simply in terms of epistemological strategy, but needs to be regarded in a fundamentally hermeneutical light.

In this paper I consider Derrida’s anathematization during the 1992 "Cambridge affair" in the light of the 1270 and 1277 condemnations of unorthodox philosophical theses by the bishop of Paris, Etienne Tempier, the inventor of double truth. In particular, I compare these two occurrences through a reading of modernities as a re-centring on the new orthodoxy of naturalistic ontology, which began to take place in the 17th century. After the Humean attack, Kant recast such a naïve naturalistic objectivity into a more defendable shape, by internalizing the supposed universal spatio-temporal structure of Newtonian physics as transcendental conditions of possibility. Though the Kantian ontological and theological legacy is still detectable in Derrida's quasi-concept of iterability, Derrida's theoretical contributions well exceed metaphysical discourse. More generally, I argue that during the last fifty years these contributions, together with contemporary reconsiderations of modernities, produced an emerging theoretical region. Within this region, the metaphysical chain of substitution of centre for centre is displaced, so that we can evaluate practices of exclusion without having to rely on alternative injunctions.

In response to the claim that our sense of will is illusory, some philosophers have called for a better understanding of the phenomenology of agency. Although I am broadly sympathetic with the tenor of this response, I question whether the positive-theoretic blueprint it promotes truly heralds a tenable undertaking. Marshaling a Schopenhauerian insight, I examine the possibility that agency might not be amenable to phenomenological description. Framing this thesis in terms of Charles S. Peirce’s semiotic framework, I suggest a way to integrate the idea of streaming experiences with that of bodily strivings, which, owing to their primitive structure, can never be represented.

Dans cet article, nous explorons le concept de radicalité à partir de la pensée politique d’Albert Camus. Au travers des concepts d’absurde, de révolte et de mesure chez Camus, nous tenterons de comprendre le rapport entre violence et radicalité. Pour Camus, la racine propre à l’homme est double; elle se révèle dans une tension fondamentale entre liberté et égalité. En ce sens, la posture radicale de l’homme apparaît dans la mesure et la limite, plutôt que dans une forme d’absolu ou d’extrémisme. La seule démesure souhai- table, selon Camus, est l’amour, qui est le propre des « saints ». Nous illustrerons la radicalité telle que pensée par Camus par le cas du suicide politique. Nous tenterons de cerner ce qui, d’une part, fait du suicide politique un phénomène qu’on pourrait associer à une forme de sainteté païenne et, d’autre part, ce qui explique que le terrorisme, ou toute autre forme de violence sur autrui, est, selon Camus, non radical.

Method, metaphysics, metaphor: three words with a common prefix, which, for philosophy, bear an ancient pedigree. Classically, the last word, as an object of philosophical reflection, has mostly been excluded from bearing any philosophical significance; we will see how this can no longer be the case today, precisely for phenomenology. If the “method” of phenomenology is wholly determined by its goal, namely, "pure" description, and if description is paradoxically only actualized in a figurative mode through guiding metaphors, then we are compelled to ask after the meaning of such a situation for metaphysics, understood as the "redundance" or "affirmation" of existence in its declaration of itself as truth— precisely, I suggest, the work done by metaphor in its strange interlacing of being and human being in the event of language.

This article explicates the notion of face, which Emmanuel Levinasunderstands as trace, in terms of the tautegorical. In opposition to the allegorical, the tautegorical is neither representational nor referential in the traditional sense. In contradistinction to the tautological, the tautegorical indicates an a-symmetrical and therefore not to be inverted identity between the so-called origin of the trace and the trace itself. Accordingly, a smile is happiness, but happiness—qua origin of the smile—is not reducible to the smile. Now, if the face of the Other is, as Levinas suggests, the trace of the wholly Other, i.e., God, then Derrida’s question arises as to whether God is but an effect of the trace. This essay argues in the negative. Traces condition their origins as after-effects without the origins becoming mere consequences of the posterior; this is the proper way of accounting for Levinas’s notion of the “posteriority of the anterior.”

In this paper, I embark upon a hermeneutic phenomenological analysis of the emotion of grief, based upon three experiences of grief I witnessed over the preceding year. I find that grief is best construed not as an emotion akin to sadness or anger, but as an affective-behavioural complex resulting from a discord between the world that we affectively inhabit and the world in which we currently find ourselves. I therefore conceive the process of getting over grief, or grieving, as an active process of readjusting our affective and behavioural habits on both a thematic and a pre-thematic level.

Contre Regis Débray qui ne voit en Tocqueville qu’une figure emblématique de la démocratie et non un républicain, cet article cherche à réhabiliter le républicanisme tocquevillien. Cela implique d’emblée de comprendre, il est vrai, I’importance réelle accordée par Tocqueville à I’analyse de la démocratie, mais ceci non pas dans le but de l’encenser mais parce que tout indique - et même la Providence divine - qu’elle est amenée à s’imposer en Europe tout comme elle I‘a fait prioritairement aux États-Unis. Après avoir étudié en détail cette analyse de la démocratie, nous montrerons que Tocqueville cherche aussi bien à en vanter les merites qu’à en relever les défauts, qu’il ne dissimule guère. Il s’agira dès lors pour lui de faire triompher I’esprit républicain sur I’esprit égalitariste, ce qui nous amènera à mettre en valeur son attachement réel aux valeurs républicaines, attachement qui, bien qu’exigeant et profond, ne pourra néanmoins transcender les bornes idéologiques de son siècle.In this paper I argue, against Regis Debray who sees in Tocqueville someone who is merely representative of democracy, that Tocqueville was indeed a true republican. This presupposes an adequate understanding of Tocqueville’s analysis of democracy; indeed democracy is important for Tocqueville not so much because it is the best regime but one which is destined to impose itself across Europeas it had already done in the United States. After examining Tocqueville’s analysis of democracy, I will show that he is as keen to point out its merits as to underscore its faults. It will be a matter for him to show the superiority of republicanism over egalitarianism. We will thus see that Tocqueville’s attachment to republican ideals is sincere even though it cannot transcend the ideological limits of his time.

In What is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari think the concept of concept otherwise. In keeping with Deleuze’s professed empiricism, he and Guattari study various concepts and ‘extract’ a new concept of the concept. This constructive method does not illuminate how and why their proposed concept differs from the traditional. This paper considers how Deleuze and Guattari’s concept does differ, as a first step towards arriving at some evaluation of their analysis.Dans Qu’est-ce que la philosophie?, Deleuze et Guattari pensent le concept autrement. Tout en s’en tenant à I’empirismé avoué de Deleuze, ce dernier et Guattari analysent différents concepts et en ‘extraient’ un nouveau concept de concept. Cette méthode constructive n’éclaire cependant pas comment et pourquoi le concept qu’ils proposent diffère du concept traditionnel. Après avoir considéré la façon dont le concept de Deleuze et Guattari diffère en effet de I’acception traditionnelle, cet article pourra se pencher sur la question de I’évaluation de leur analyse.

Most accounts of recent French intellectual history are organized around a fundamental rupture, which divides thought and thinkers into two eras: ‘modern’ and ‘postmodern’. But the attempts to identify the features which characterise these eras seem, at best, inconclusive. In this paper, I examine this rupture, by way of a comparison of two thinkers representative of the divide. Sartre seems as uncontroversially modern (and therefore out of date) as any twentieth-century can be, while Foucault’s work is often taken to be definitive of postmodern thought. In addition, the two engaged in a brief polemic which concerned, precisely, each other’s relevance to our times. Each attacks the other’s work as untimely, as out of step with today. In the end, however, it is precisely this very aspect of their work - the fact thatit is untimely - which constitutes its strongest claim to being postmodern. If this is the case, however, then the attempt to locate a point of rupture in intellectual history, before which thinkers are irrelevant and after which they speak to us, must fail.L’histoire du mouvement intellectuel français des dernières années est organisée autour d’une rupture qui sépare la pensée et les penseurs en deux categories: ‘moderne’ et ‘postmoderne’. Or les tentatives d’identification des traits qui caractérisent ces catégories demeurent peu concluantes. Dans cet article, j’examine cette rupture en comparant deux penseurs représentatifs de cette ligne de partage. Sartre semble aussi moderne (et donc obsolète) quefaire se peut, alors qu’on rapproehe communément I’oeuvre de Foucault à la pensée postmoderne. Par ailleurs, les deux se sont engagés dans un débat qui portait précisément sur leur pertinence respective pour notre temps. Chacun accuse I’autre d’être intempestif, c’est-à-dire de ne pas être actue!. Cependant, il ressortira à la fin que c’est précisément cet aspect de leur pensée qui justifie de la façon la plus décisive leur prétention à la postmodernité. Si tel est le cas, par contre, la tentative de localiser un point de rupture dans I’histoire intellectuelle à partir duquel un penseur devient pertinent doit échouer.