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.

Edith Stein and Simone Weil both trained as Red Cross nurses for wartime service. For both philosophers, the activity of a nurse demands an empathic attention to the afflicted. Stein envisions herself as an attendant nurse in her memoirs; Weil similarly casts herself in a nurse’s role in her proposal for an elite, sacrificial nurses’ corps. This essay examines the practice of wartime nursing as a school for, and an expression of, their complimentary philosophies of human beings seen in their physical, epistemological, and spiritual interrelatedness.

Simone de Beauvoir’s discussion of the place of aging and menopause in The Second Sex offers only brief glimmers of older women’s agency tucked in among descriptions of the female elderly frantically, but futilely, searching for meaningful roles. Aging is particularly difficult to think through from an existentialist perspective that emphasizes agency and control over one’s world. Beauvoir’s later work in The Coming of Age offers more carefully detailed perspective for considering aging and the meaning of the sacrifice of life’s projects. The difficulty of maintaining a sense of identity and meaning increases as agency becomes limited and the weight of one’s past life and decisions becomes greater. Moving from The Second Sex to The Coming of Age in dialogue with Beauvoir clarifies when loss of control and agency destroys life’s value, but also when a deliberate choice to sacrifice agency may be meaningful and value-laden.

In this 2017 conversation, Gianni Vattimo discusses with Paolo Diego Bubbio the core themes of his own philosophical journey. Vattimo first comments on the legacy of his mentor Luigi Pareyson and on the differences between Pareyson’s conception of the relation between truth and interpretation and his own. Vattimo and Bubbio then elaborate on the return to Hegel and the possibility of a “hermeneuticized” Hegelianism. The participants also discuss Vattimo’s view of religion and the role that the Christian notion of caritas plays in his “weak hermeneutics.” Finally, Vattimo comments on his recent political writings and on his view of a “hermeneutic communism,” arguing that revolution is possible only as a collective inner transformation. Vattimo concludes by mentioning his recent essays, collected under the title Being and Its Surroundings, in which he presents the radical thesis of Heidegger’s philosophy as a new form of theology.

In this 1996 interview, published here in English translation for the first time, René Girard retraces some of the main aspects of his mimetic theory, such as the mimetic nature of desire and sacrificial scapegoating. In particular, Girard focuses on the similarities and differences between the role of sacrifice in primitive societies and in our contemporary Western society. Girard argues that fashion is essentially mimetic and that nowadays fashions incline towards forms of negative escalation, and finds evidence of such “minimalism” both in art and literature. In Girard’s view, all forms of scapegoating are founded on the crisis of differences, and the victimage mechanism is a fundamental structure of society. Girard concludes by advocating for a renunciation of rivalry, which he argues is one of the fundamental messages of the Christian Gospels.

In this review, Hegel responds to criticisms leveled against his philosophy by the anonymous author of Ueber die Hegelsche Lehre, oder: absolutes Wissen und moderner Pantheismus (1829). Frustrated by his interlocutor’s apparent inability to coherently interpret his work, Hegel scathingly attempts to discredit the character of the text in focus and its author’s critical capacity. He does so by showcasing examples of misrepresentation and misunderstanding in the author’s writing. Hegel contests the increasingly common charge of “pantheism” being leveled against him at that time, wielded here by the anonymous author in a fairly unoriginal comparison between Hegel’s “doctrine” and Spinoza’s system. This review gives insight into the character of early theological responses to Hegel, and highlights Hegel’s polemical tendencies.

Didi-Huberman conceptualizes images as unstable and incongruent events in disagreement with the art historiographic discourses that reduce visuality to the contents of representation. I analyze the link between Freud’s dream-theory and Didi-Huberman’s philosophy of images, focusing on the notion of dreams and images as instance of (up)rising against repression and erasure. Didi-Huberman does not simply “apply” psychoanalysis to disrupt the dominant art historiography; his interpretation of the dream book speaks to his originality as a reader of Freud who brings to the fore the importance of visual categories in psychoanalysis. Viewing images as disunified and “rent” has also political implications. The name of this power in Didi-Huberman’s project is anadyomene (“she that rises”); the imaginal rhythm of pendular dialectical movement between appearance and disappearance. I discuss Didi-Huberman’s analyses of photographs of camps and ghettos, and of uprisings, which highlight the link between the imaginal unconscious and aesthetics of anadyomene, and political subjectivization and resistance.