Hans-Georg Gadamer reads Georg Trakl’s “Ein Winterabend” (“A Winter Evening”) almost in the way Martin Heidegger does, but he alters Heidegger’s interpretation of a single image in the poem. Whereas Heidegger sees the image “Golden blooms the tree of grace” in terms of candlelight on a church altar, Gadamer sees it as the glow of a kerosene lantern, perhaps in a country inn. That one alteration, this essay argues, brings Gadamer closer to the Trakl-world than Heidegger ever manages to be.

This paper proposes a reading of Walter Benjamin’s “The Storyteller” in connection to what Nelly Richard, in her diagnosis of traumatic forms of violence, has called “catastrophes of meaning.” Written, like Freud’s theory of trauma, in the wake of the first World War, I argue that Benjamin sees in storytelling the experience of an imparting or communication (Mitteilung) capable of conveying trauma without betraying its paradox—and thus, without either interpreting its excesses as meaningless or reducing its absences to mere silences. Storytelling and the community of listeners it both depends on and institutes with its imparting, develops the possibility of a grammar of listening that would attend to what Richard diagnoses as the silences in traumatic testimony, the moments of rupture and breakdown that communicate the truth of its experience. Reading Benjamin along with Richard, the paper argues that Benjamin’s theory of storytelling is an attempt to search out new ways of truly listening to the fractures and shattering of language resulting from traumatic forms of violence, rather than merely filling the gaps left by their discontinuities and absences of “meaning.”

Addressing the place of the Austrian poet, Georg Trakl, in the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer, this article turns in particular to Trakl’s poem “A Winter Evening” in order to unfold a sense of language in dialogue with the poet. This engagement equally becomes the occasion for Gadamer to confront Heidegger, whose own reading of Trakl becomes both an inspiration and a challenge.

By Aristotle’s own admission, homonymy and amphiboly, or syntactic homonymy, are unlikely to be accidental features of the Greek language (nor of any language, nor of language as such), but rather a radical evil that can at best be subdued, through recourse to categories, for example. Or we could choose to follow the sophists and exploit it by aiming at an essentially sonorous consensus. But then such texts would constitute a radical evil for translation.

The guiding suggestion of this article is intimated in the title: “Platonism,” that set of “philosophical positions” supposedly present in the Platonic dialogues (pre-eminently the “theory of forms,” but also “Plato’s metaphysics,” his “epistemology,” his “moral theory,” his “political theory” etc.) are not so much discovered in the dialogues as they are invented out of a very specific (mis) reading of those dialogues. And the first great “misreader” was Aristotle, who, I argue, first made possible the set of assumptions about philosophy and about philosophic writing that, in turn, made anything like “Platonism” possible.

This essay offers a close reading of a poem written by Paul Celan in 1962: Ars Poetica 62. I choose this neglected text since it offers genu­ine insight into Celan’s torturous relationship with German culture in the early 1960s especially against the background of the German unwillingness to confront the horrors of the war and camps. Celan situates this poem not only against German silence and forgetfulness, but against the way it defines them in terms of literary history—especially as concerns the German-Jewish (non-)conversation about identity, belongingness, and integration. In terms of this tradition, Celan integrates two principal figures (Hölderlin & Kafka) to explore the contradictions, paradoxes, and caesurae of the recent German past. I also look at the role that Heidegger plays within the Rezeptionsgeschichte Hölderlins as it affects both Celan and the German philosophical tradition.

This essay takes as its point of departure Jacques Derrida’s analysis of the phantasm of a mother tongue in his recently published seminar from 1995–1996 on hospitality (Hospitalité I, Éditions du Seuil, 2021). The essay begins by showing that Derrida’s analysis of this phantasm is per­fectly consistent with several of his most important works of the 1960s (from Of Grammatology to Voice and Phenomenon) on the auto-affection of speech and the phantasm of self-presence to which it gives rise. But the essay then demonstrates how those earlier analyses of language and voice are supplemented in Hospitalité by important reflections on what were then very new teletechnologies—including the cell or mobile phone—that do not, as we might have thought, deflate the phantasm of self-presence and of a natural mother tongue but actually lend themselves to it. What these teletechnologies thus end up underscoring, according to Derrida, is the original exappropriation at the heart of all language, including the so-called mother tongue.

Nothing is more definitive of war than its relationship with peace. But what is peace? This paper investigates the problematic nature of peace in the philosophical discourse on war, by investigating two key strands of thinking. Firstly, Hobbes and Foucault see peace as the place where the impulses that give rise to war can be re-directed and even satisfied, often in disguise. Another strand, in Kant and Levinas, different but not fully separable from the first, sees peace as what lies beyond war, though war must be endured in order to reach it. These different accounts present war and peace not as binary opposites, nor even as fully distinguishable from one another. Instead, they are shown to be mutually dependant and entangled with one another. The paper ends with a brief analysis of the January 6, 2021 insurrection in the United States, in order to illustrate this complex entanglement between war and peace and reveal the obscure, even hallucinatory nature of the concept of peace.

Fritz Mauthner’s essay Die Philosophie und der Krieg, published in October 1914, is among the nationalist writings of Mauthner written during the First World War. The essay explores the question of returning to philosophy after the war. Asking this question, Mauthner examines the relationship between war and philosophy and argues that the two concepts do not share any substantial points of contact. During his discussion, an unspoken premise of the question about the return to philosophy is revealed: as the science of reason, philosophy cannot understand war. The profession of philosophy can neither contribute to a military victory nor end the people’s suffering. Hence, philosophers should remain silent in times of war. Mauthner himself did not adhere to his demand. In 1914, he believed that Germany would be victorious, and emphasised in his essay that war reveals a new meaning of life by giving a meaning to death.

Detailing the logic of Clausewitz’s depiction of war as the violent pursuit of the politics of submission, I read the recent protests in Iran as a feminist revolt against Iran’s fundamentalist Islamic war on women. This war is institutionalized in the war-like violence of veiling, gender apartheid, and marriage and family law. Rebelling under the slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom” the people of Iran tie the destiny of women to the destiny of all. The government has crushed the uprising. It has not quelled the protestors’ demands. Signs of resistance continue as the rebellion inhales the hope of a time to come of freedom.

Classical liberalism stipulates that individuals may only reliably escape a state of war by joining a body politic whose unity is consolidated and preserved by the formation of a sovereign government. Frederick Douglass, through his own experience of slavery and then as a radical abolitionist critiquing the racialized laws and society of the United States, shows that there is an inherent scandal, a schism in the very idea of a body politic. This scandal cannot be overcome, but Douglass enacts a treatment for it through a polemical ethic that endeavors to reconstruct political community, expansively and inclusively understood, by ever again bringing the ideal, as a regulative idea, into confrontation with the real. By putting Douglass and the historical situation of his time into dialogue with the natural law tradition of Aquinas, Locke, and the American Founding, this essay argues that Douglass’s thought and example provide a fresh way to address the crisis of liberal democracy in our time. This requires understanding the instability of the body politic as a source of strength rather than weakness, if properly confronted in a polemical ethics.

Hegel sees war as contributing positively to the experience of social and political life. Of course, his support for war is qualified in that the overall aim is to maintain peace and to mitigate the violence and destruc­tion of warfare. Nonetheless Hegel takes individual citizens to appreciate the achievement of social and political life in the light of war, and how the patriotism evidenced in war reinforces their recognition of the freedom and unity of public life. Hegel’s support for war arises in part out of a real­ism that he shares with Hobbes. But he also considers the significance of war on more general philosophical grounds. War, like the life and death struggle between individuals that is set out in the Phenomenology, plays a role in the development of recognition. If the life and death struggle brings out the sociality of recognition, war is a graphic reminder of the social and public operation of freedom. While Hegel’s philosophical justification of war and death make sense in the context of his wider philosophy, his dramatic depiction of death and war tends to supersede the systematic style of his philosophy. It is excessive in a way that is similar to how the figurative language of Hobbes’s Leviathan supersedes Hobbes’s own sense of the limits of language.

In this text, Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand Solger (1780–1819), an influential but often overlooked figure in German Idealism and German Romanticism, offers an account on the relationship between revelation and philosophical thought. For Solger, the being of the eternal reveals itself in and to existence as a “creation out of nothing.” Similarly, existence seen from the position of the being of the eternal is the “nothing of being.” For the being of the eternal to enter into existence requires the sacrifice of existence, that is, the annihilation of the nothing of being. For Solger, the task of philosophy is to think these oppositions of the eternal and existence as a complete “passing over” movement, one which is comprised of creation and annihilation. Ultimately, “true philosophy” should attempt to think the “absolute fact” of revelation, namely, revelation as both thought in consciousness and experienced in its actuality in existence.

In this article, Ferraris examines the notion of sacrifice in the philosophy of Heidegger. Focusing specifically—but not exclusively—on Heidegger’s Beiträge zur Philosophie, Ferraris shows that sacrifice is a fundamental aspect of Heidegger’s thematization of human finitude. More specifically, Ferraris shows the central role played by sacrifice in highlighting the radical level of truth and authenticity that the event of death carries within itself. Hence, Ferraris argues that it is through sacrifice—and mourning—that we understand what death is, as the self-transcendence of Dasein makes the transcendence of Being possible.

In 1972, René Girard’s La Violence et le Sacré was published, bringing widespread attention to his insights correlating religion, violence, and social and cultural formation. In 1992, the British philosopher Gillian Rose published an acerbic critique of Girard, taking issue with his demonization of the language and concept of sacrifice. For Rose, this placed Girard in the company of “postmodern” philosophers whose distrust of modern rationality and embrace of messianic alternatives amounted to an “exodus” from the imperium of reason. This article will revisit the dispute thirty years on: is it true that Girard has “left the city,” as Rose maintains? The charge is countered by a demonstration of the connection between Girardian theory and two areas of philosophical investigation: theodicy and the problem of evil; and political theory in the light of the ”return of the theo-political.” In the light of these, an overall re-assessment of Rose’s critique will be offered. Throughout, the persistence of ”sacrifice” as a philosophical and theological category will be noted.