Bettina Bergo

Inspired by three monographs of Gladys Swain and Marcel Gauchet, my presentation traces the rise of the new science of psychiatry in Revolutionary France, with Philippe Pinel and his student J.-E. Esquirol. As the directors of the division of the aliénés in the Hôpital Bicêtre (Paris), Pinel and Esquirol pioneered a therapeutic programme that spread out between their “traitement moral” (reasoning with the passions) and an “energetic repression,” wherever necessary. The discipline they created sought to gain autonomy from medicine treating diseases of the body, much as pathology would do in regard to physiology, some fifty years later. Using Canguilhem, Foucault’s teacher and significant influence, I show how the unfolding of a science of disorders (for Canguilhem, this was pathology) poses questions of taxonomy and runs the inevitable ‘risk’ of extensive fragmentation. This is what happens in France after Pinel. However, Pinel, above all, will have made one contribution that—by Swain and Gauchet’s argument—stands in stark contrast to the theses of the young Foucault. Rather than sequestering and excluding the fou by forcing him or her into exaggerated, discursive revelations or silence, Pinel and Esquirol “discover” the sense, or sens, at the heart of madness, notably in what Pinel called “manie intermittente.” Esquirol takes this discovery one step further, to discern in various attacks, a certain rationality. This rather modern conception of madness exerts a considerable influence on literature, criticism, philosophy, and medicine in their time. Hegel’s understanding of madness will come directly from Pinel, and it will see in folie the internal division of subjective Reason. From this characterization comes a therapeutics based on the conviction that one could often reintegrate the mad into society, and avoid prolonged sequestration and exclusion. Thus the presentation focuses on Swain and Gauchet’s question to Foucault ( Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique, notably), using the work of Pinel and Hegel to illustrate their claim.

This is a study of the way in which Levinas approaches the experience of human expression from two perspectives: firstly, as a pre-thematic or pre-cognitive “experience,” which requires that he revisit Husserl's pre-objective intentionality and explore the relationship between the upsurge of sensation and its “intentionalization” as consciousness self-temporalizing. Thereafter, Levinas must contend with the implications of his own writing, which includes his claims for the face. This implies that he must grapple with criticism to the effect that he is providing a hermeneutics of face-to-face encounters. Levinas acknowledges that his writing is a “dramatique des phénomènes” and not a phenomenology of actions. How, then, to avoid charges of arbitrary description? How to step outside the primordiality of “the phrase” or the conceptualization that threatens claims to “pure” phenomenology? This is really what is at stake in Levinas's second great work. In this essay, I explore the role that “substitution” plays in weaving together conceptuality and phenomenality. I contrast this with other forms of “dramatization,” from narrative witnessing, to minimalist sculpture.

The philosophical work of Jean-François Courtine suffers undeservedly from under-representation to English-speaking readers. Over the last fifteen years, his commentaries and translations have made available to French students of German idealism, significant works of Schelling and J. G. Hamann. Now the present collection of essays shows that Courtine is as much at ease in the universe of late idealism as he is before the fundamental ontology of Martin Heidegger. Heidegger et la Phénoménologie assembles articles and lectures published from 1978 through the end of the 1980’s. If one were to imagine, for the sake of heuristics, a subtitle for the present work, it might read, “the cause of phenomenology and the possibility of a teleology of the I and the other.” Indeed, the first part of the book, “Phénoménologie et histoire de l’être”, examines the unfolding of Heidegger’s project of fundamental ontology in light of the reciprocal questions ‘what is the meaning of Being?’ and ‘what is man?’. Courtine’s reading of the Heideggerian corpus is polemical to the extent that it argues for, and justifies, the essential continuity of the latter’s investigation into the meaning and historiality of Being, against interpretations that interpret the Kehre in Heidegger’s thought as a profound thematic rupture, with a view to highlighting discontinuities in that thought. Courtine’s reading also rejects claims that a surreptitious, formal anthropomorphism hides at the root of the analytic of Dasein. Instead, the tone of Heidegger et la Phénoménologie is set by Courtine’s arguments for reading Heidegger’s work as a comprehensive deconstruction of the philosophic tradition, committed to liberating the most radical, underlying sense of the meaning of Being.

This essay discusses Jean-Luc Nancy’s Dis-Enclosure: Deconstruction of Christianity (2008). Nancy’s engagement with Christianity in this work contrasts with the so-called theological turn in phenomenology. This raises probing questions regarding the name of God and the sense of the “divine” in a demythified world, as well as the question of the exhaustion of Christianity and its self-deconstruction. I address Nancy’s exploration of the overcoming of nihilism and the possibility, and “look,” of a faith that is not tied to a god or a master signifier, thereby moving beyond certain ‘orthodox’ oppositions between atheism and Christianity. I use Gérard Granel’s deformalization of phenomenology and the Gospel of James’s “Epistle of straw” to adumbrate a minimalist faith in the world, and I alsoinvestigate Jean Pouillon’s study of the senses of “croire” and Émile Benveniste’s archeology of credere in light of Nancy’s approach to faith. I close with reflections on Nietzsche’s psychology of “the redeemer.”

This essay discusses Jean-Luc Nancy’s Dis-Enclosure: Deconstruction of Christianity. Nancy’s engagement with Christianity in this work contrasts with the so-called theological turn in phenomenology. This raises probing questions regarding the name of God and the sense of the “divine” in a demythified world, as well as the question of the exhaustion of Christianity and its self-deconstruction. I address Nancy’s exploration of the overcoming of nihilism and the possibility, and “look,” of a faith that is not tied to a god or a master signifier, thereby moving beyond certain ‘orthodox’ oppositions between atheism and Christianity. I use Gérard Granel’s deformalization of phenomenology and the Gospel of James’s “Epistle of straw” to adumbrate a minimalist faith in the world, and I alsoinvestigate Jean Pouillon’s study of the senses of “croire” and Émile Benveniste’s archeology of credere in light of Nancy’s approach to faith. I close with reflections on Nietzsche’s psychology of “the redeemer.”

This article summarizes the Afro-centric ‘Copernican Revolution’ of Cheikh Anta Diop between 1960 and 1974, the dates on which he defended his thesis on the African identity of Egypt and argued his thesis, with Théophile Obenga, before the UNESCO Cairo Conference on the “General History of Africa.” I discuss both the unhappy reception, by European Egyptologists and others, of Diop’s ground-breaking, multidisciplinary research, as well as its gradual spread, among others, to Diasporic thinkers. One such thinker, Marimba Ani took a further step by rethinking, in Africanist terms, the philosophical bases underlying the unfolding of what she probatively shows is the European Asili, as exemplified in its patterns of thought and affective-ideological patterns. I attempt to show, here, how Ani inherits and prolongs Diop’s “Copernican” displacement.

This essay studies the unfolding of Levinas' concept of transcendence from 1935 to his 1984 talk entitled "Transcendence and Intelligibility." I discuss how Levinas frames transcendence in light of enjoyment, shame, and nausea in his youthful project of a counter-ontology to Heidegger's Being and Time. In Levinas' essay, transcendence is the human urge to get out of being. I show the ways in which Levinas' early ontology is conditioned by historical circumstances, but I argue that its primary aim is formal and phenomenological; it adumbrates formal structures of human existence. Levinas' 1940s ontology accentuates the dualism in being, between what amount to a light and a dark principle. This shift in emphasis ushers in a new focus for transcendence, which is now both sensuous and temporal, thanks to the promise of fecundity. Totality and Infinity (1961) pursues a similar onto-logic, while shifting the locus of transcendence to a non-sexuate other. The final great work, Otherwise than Being or beyond Essence (1974) offers a hermeneutic phenomenology of transcendence-in-immanence. It rethinks Husserl's focus on the transcendence of intentionality and its condition of possibility in the passive synthesis of complex temporality. If the 1974 strategy 'burrows beneath' the classical phenomenological syntheses, it also incorporates unsuspected influences from French psychology and phenomenology. This allows Levinas to develop a philosophical conception of transcendence that is neither Husserl's intentionality nor Heidegger's temporal ecstases, in what amounts to an original contribution to a phenomenology both hermeneutic and descriptive.

Starting from Mal d'archive and La bête et le souverain II, I explore what Derrida argues is the cleaved nature of Freud's concepts, and which he compares to the contradictory characteristics of every archive : to be revolutionary in its institution of the new and simultaneously to be or become conservative, even reactionary. For Derrida, Freud's later writing will tie the motivation to create an archive to the destructive logic of the death drive. An interesting example of Freud's cleaved concepts first emerges in his early study of the brain. It is elaborated in his deconstructive approach to aphasia and to the acquisition of language. I argue in this essay that Derrida understood Freud's logic as present over the course of his entire life, and this, in a way that justifies my showing its presence in Freud's earliest neurological texts. I show that in its radicality, which includes an interactionist neurology based on inscription and archiving, opposition to 19th century cortico-centrism, and a rethinking of traditional “localizationism,” Freud's model of the brain and mind would have advanced understanding of the mental “archive” decades before this upheaval took place in neuroscience.

This article reads Levinas’s “And God Created Woman” in light of its socio-political context, Mai soixante-huit. It explores themes from his “Judaism and Revolution,” in which he reframed concepts of revolution, exegesis, the revolutionary, and human alienation. Following these themes, which run subtly through his Talmudic remarks on women and indirectly on feminism, I examine his arguments about a “signification beyond universality” and the fraught relationship between formal equity in gender relations and the practice of justice, as embodied by the Antigone-like Rizpah bath Aiah and analyzed in Levinas’s Talmudic reading “Toward the Other.” I summarize the Rabbinic debate about the meaning of an extra yod in the term often translated as “to create” in Genesis, turning to the significance of dissymmetry between the Hebrew names of “man” and “woman,” Ish and Isha. In light of this, Biblicist and psychoanalyst Daniel Sibony opens further insights into gender, naming, and identity.

We have now had some two decades of Levinas commentary. What remains to be said? Certainly one thing we have learned since Otherwise than Being is that Levinas’s philosophy and his talmudic and confessional writings nourish each other so profoundly that to approach Levinas without understanding the historyof Jewish philosophy — in its confrontations with neo-Platonism, Aristotle, Kant — is to risk misunderstanding Levinas. Insights into the interrelationships between Jewish thought and Levinas’s other humanism have been provided by thinkers like Robert Gibbs, Claire Katz, Catherine Chalier, Shmuel Trigano, and Gérard Bensussan, to name but a few. But if one is not well versed in Jewish thought, will one be liable to abandon Levinas’s thought as an existentialized confessionalism? Perhaps. But I think the loss to philosophy would be considerable.

This article opens with a discussion of incarceration in the time of Covid 19. The story of one of the inmates in the high-security prison of Puente Grande leads us back to the beginning of the fifteen-year-long imprisonment of an innocent and, with it, to a complex narrative. The story concerns the use of the juridical concepts of delincuencia organizada, racketeering, and kidnapping. As a charge it has been repeatedly implemented in what has come to be called la fabricaciόn de culpables in Mexico, Columbia, Argentina, and Brazil. Although the legal terminology changes, false incarceration is hardly limited to Central and South America. This is therefore a cautionary tale about how charges – and people – are framed, and how the latter are tried on social and corporate media, even before their official trials begin.

The act of thought-thought as an act-would precede the thought thinking or becoming conscious of an act. The notion of act involves a violence essentially: the violence of transitivity, lacking in the transcendence of thought... Totality and Infinity The work of Emmanuel Levinas revolves around two preoccupations. First, his philosophical project can be described as the construction of a formal ethics, grounded upon the transcendence of the other human being and a subject's spontaneous responsibility toward that other. Second, Levinas has written extensively on, and as a member of, the cultural and textual life of Judaism. These two concerns are intertwined. Their relation, however, is one of considerable complexity. Levinas' philosophical project stems directly from his situation as a Jewish thinker in the twentieth century and takes its particular form from his study of the Torah and the Talmud. It is, indeed, a hermeneutics of biblical experience. If inspired by Judaism, Levinas' ethics are not eo ipso confessional. What his ethics takes from Judaism, rather, is a particular way of conceiving transcendence and the other human being. It owes to the philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Buber a logos of the world and of the holy, which acknowledges their incom mensurability without positing one as fallen and the other as supernal.

Among the extraordinary Polish philosophers of the past one hundred years, Zygmunt Zawirski deserves to be given particular attention for his fusion of analytic and historical scholarship. Strikingly versatile, and con tributing original work in all his fields of competence, Zawirski thought through issues in the philosophical aspects of relativity theory, on the claims of intuitionalistic foundations of mathematics, on the nature and usefulness of many-value Logics, and on the calculus of probability, on the axiomatic method in science and in the philosophy of science, on the genesis and development of scientific and philosophical concepts, and in his crowning achievement, the conceptual history of notions of time. His work has been too little known in English despite the respect which has been so clearly shown by his Polish COlleagues and students. In this generous selection from his papers and from his great critical study L' Evolution de la Notion du Temps, Dr. Irena Szumilewicz-Lachman has provided a clear account of Zawirski's achievement; and she has written a fine comprehensive introductory essay which provides both the personal and historical context of his work and a systematic survey of his principal publications.