Walter Brogan

My essay attempts humbly to honor and celebrate the voice of Charles Scott by thematizing one of the major insights of his body of work, namely the significance of the middle voice. I attempt in various ways to show the significance of the middle voice in the work of Charles Scott and to offer some commentary on what is meant by the middle voice. Finally, I ask about the implications of a middle-voiced philosophy for an understanding of the self of human beings and for an understanding of the theme of indifference in relation to the lives of things that Scott addresses in his later work.

This essay explains what Blanchot understands as writing and the space of literature. For Blanchot, writing is the place where the impossible interruption of the destiny of things is put into play, an interruption that world-formation needs but negates and conceals. Writing belongs to an excess outside of language, an otherness of language. The need to write is linked to the point at which nothing can be done with words. Writing is contrasted with dialectical language and the totalizing aim of the Hegelian system. The essay explains the connection between the disaster of writing (after the holocaust), the neuter and fragmentary style of writing and the passivity of writing

This article attempts to explore why it is that the “state of exception” is so pivotal to Agamben’s analysis of sovereignty and the possibility of a coming community beyond the sovereign state and its power machines. The essay distinguishes between two senses of the state of exception and tries to explain their interconnection. The “zone of indistinction” opens up an irreparable gap between sovereign power and its execution and between “bare life” and citizenship. These are the spaces that both drive and dismantle the apparatus of State power and permit Agamben to open the discussion of a coming community.

I expose facets of Nancy's notion of being singular plural. Nancy's political ontology overcomes the metaphysical dualism of theory and practice by thinking the space of the between as primary. Nancy's treatment of the event of creation and the presence of the divine rethink meta-physical notions of origin and God in a way that emphasizes the parting of unity and the plurality of the world. Nancy thinks the everyday and the existential together by affirming the importance of curiosity and wonder in the face of what is. Nancy offers an ontology of space (being-with) that uncovers what it means to be in touch as a way of being.

This article is an interpretive analysis of James Risser’s book The Life of Understanding: A Contemporary Hermeneutics. I focus on the key elements of Risser’s notion of community and what I call his hermeneutics of the strange and foreign. The article pays particular attention to some of the most important themes in Risser’s book: aesthetics and the flash of beauty; language and the poetic word; the transmission of tradition; the movement of Ruinanz and the circulation of life; weaving. Overall, I attempt to trace the nexus of Plato-Gadamer-Risser in Risser’s text in order to trace the emergence of a contemporary hermeneutics after Gadamer that is developed by Risser in this text.