Frank Chouraqui

Porosity between Politics and the Economy addresses the relationships between politics and the economy in deeply original ways. It is a book motivated by a sense of urgency aroused by both the failure of modern capitalism and the environmental crisis. Egidius Berns argues that the relations between politics and the economy are porous, and he investigates the consequences of this porosity. By mapping out of a number of conceptual fault lines that underpin the weaknesses of post-industrial capitalist societies, Berns provides a fresh look at the current crisis of open societies. But the book also preliminarily points to a path to reforming the relations between the economy and politics. By analyzing the web of conceptual connections that will continue to inform any possible configuration between them, it finds a way into a future characterized by a certain ethics that combines restraint and combativeness.”

Merleau-Ponty et l’épaisseur temporelle dans les Notes de mai 1959L’insistance de Merleau-Ponty sur le concept de profondeur fait partie de sa stratégie générale pour créer des troubles dans les dualités bidimensionnelles traditionnelles en y introduisant une troisième dimension et, plus généralement, en opposant l’ontologie horizontale (ou « pensée de survol ») à l’ontologie verticale dont l’objet n’est plus le sujet et l’objet, mais la transcendance elle-même. Dans le présent texte, je propose d’examiner la manière dont Merleau-Ponty élabore son concept d’histoire comme sédimentation pour former une image du temps vu comme déploiement, non seulement linéaire mais aussi vertical, et comme voyage à travers l’épaisseur de l’être. Je me concentre pour cela sur certaines formulations énigmatiques relatifs à une troisième dimension du temps, qui apparaissent à la fin des notes du Visible et l’invisible. J’espère établir que l’analyse de ces textes montre que Merleau-Ponty représente l’épaisseur del’histoire comme l’espace d’une rencontre complémentaire entre le pouvoir créateur de l’homme et les déterminations sédimentées héritées du passé, et que cette rencontre n’est autre que la chair « éternelle » que les reflexions de Merleau-Ponty sur l’histoire cherchent à saisir.Merleau-Ponty e la profondità temporale nelle Note del maggio 1959L’insistenza di Merleau-Ponty sul concetto di profondità fa parte della strategia complessiva con cui egli si sforza di scompaginare i tradizionali dualismi filosofici,introducendo tra loro una terza dimensione; strategia che, in senso più generale, mira a opporre a un’ontologia orizzontale (o al “pensiero di sorvolo”) un’ontologia verticale incentrata non più sull’opposizione tra soggetto e oggetto, ma sulla trascendenza stessa. In questo testo, propongo di esaminare come Merleau-Ponty si basi sul suo concetto di storia come sedimentazione, per costruire un’immagine del tempo inteso come dispiegamento non solo lineare, ma anche verticale, vera e propria traversata dell’intero spessore dell’essere. Mi concentrerò su alcune formulazioni piuttosto criptiche in cui Merleau-Ponty parla di una terza dimensione nel tempo, alla fine delle note di lavoro per Il visibile e l’invisibile. Mi auguro che un’elaborazione di questi testi possa render chiaro che Merleau-Ponty pensa lo spessore della storia come lo spazio dell’incontro complementare tra il potere creativo umano e le determinazioni sedimentate ereditate dal passato, e che questo incontro, nella sua verità, è quella carne eterna che la riflessione di Merleau-Ponty sulla storia hanno lo scopo di cogliere.

The most intuitive, and presumably the most widely accepted description of what we do when we argue about politics is that we aim to pass our belief on to another person, and that this is done by demonstrating the truth of our claims. Although this is common sense itself, a more careful pragmatics of what happens when we argue about politics seems to raise a number of objections to this basic view. In this paper, I formulate some of these objections and argue that they suffice to justify the abandonment of this view. First, I propose an alternative account of what we do when we argue about politics, which I call the Ecological view. Then, I argue that the Ecological view is immune to these objections. In the final section, I draw a few normative conclusions from this improved model.

The recent publication of Merleau-Ponty’s work from the late Forties contributes valuable material for those interested in reconstructing a specifically Merleau-Pontian theory of value. In this paper, I examine how, in these texts, Merleau-Ponty’s political concerns show themselves to expand upon the famous analysis of the case of Schneider in Phenomenology of Perception. This retroactively offers an opportunity for a normative reading of the case of Schneider and for identifying Merleau-Ponty’s practical philosophy as concerned with preventing and healing agnosia in politics and ethics. On the basis of this negative hypothesis—that the ethical project is to oppose agnosia—it becomes possible to formulate a positive ethics. There, the unpublished texts also expand upon the Phenomenology of Perception: they propose a humanism which relies on the notion of hermeneutic freedom as the chief practical virtue and elaborate, somewhat unexpectedly, an analysis of play as the existential attitude that corresponds to this virtue. I conclude with a meta-ethical assessment of the merits of this ethical construction.

Many critics of morality seem nonetheless committed to a normative stance of some kind. This paper uses the context of Nietzsche studies as a laboratory to experiment with a solution to this problem. I argue that Nietzsche’s critique of normativity and his promulgation of normative judgments can be made consistent if we understand Nietzsche as pursuing the criterion of the size of future history. First (§1) I present the problem of normativity as it appears in Nietzsche’s work and the literature. Then (§2), I introduce the criterion of the size of future history and show that it addresses the requirements established in §1. I then address some objections to this criterion (§3). Finally, I suggest some applications of this criterion to specific areas of Nietzsche’s discourse and to some of our broader normative intuitions (§4). I conclude that the criterion of the size of future history, if well understood, can provide a solution to the problem of normative inescapability.

The terms “politics” and “political” have become so overdetermined that it is difficult to use them in any effective manner. We argue that this has dangerous political consequences, and that this could be addressed by providing a new, sounder, notion of politics. This paper argues that defining politics in relation to the notion of play can provide a notion both intuitively appealing and able to withstand the problematic overdeterminations. We argue that politics is the set of practices through which the indeterminate of Spielraum is made more determinate. This suggests that politics is always partly a matter of play: it is about instituting values without making any claims about the legitimacy of this instituting act. With reference to Huizinga and Nietzsche’s analyses of play, we define play as the living unity of seriousness and frivolity, and non-play as either seriousness without frivolity or frivolity without seriousness. In order to illustrate this, we comparatively analyse the attitudes of Barack Obama and Donald Trump in the single context of the well-known yearly White House Correspondent’s Dinner. There, we see two opposed attitudes to playfulness. Our analysis allows us to apply our _Spielraum_ model of politics to show that the thrust of Obama’s attitude involves an embrace of the non-foundational nature of politics as play, whereas Trump’s attitude is politicidal: it is animated by a refusal to acknowledge its own lack of foundation, leading to an oscillation between over-seriousness and over-frivolity.

This paper pursues three goals: First, to develop a lateral reading of Camus’ Stranger. A lateral reading is characterized by the displacement of the central conflict. In the case of The Stranger, I argue that the central conflict in the novel lies in the relation between the author and the protagonist, not, as direct readings would have it, in the relation between the protagonist and his predicament. Second, to spell out more precisely why it should be read as an anti-existentialist novel. Here I argue that a lateral reading shows that the foundational existentialist opposition between telling and living is ironically dismantled by the very lateral structure of the novel. Third, to develop the notion of a lateral reading with a view to its potential advantages. Here, I point out that literalism involves positionalism and dynamicism. Positionalism refers to the reduction of fictional entities to their role in relation to each other. Dynamicism refers to the resulting view that those roles are further reducible to forces. I conclude that the lateral reading, with its commitments to positionalism and dynamicism is a model generalizable to the analysis of other fictional works.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty is widely recognized as one of the major figures of twentieth-century philosophy. The recent publication of his lecture courses and posthumous working notes has opened new avenues for both the interpretation of his thought and philosophy in general. These works confirm that, with a surprising premonition, Merleau-Ponty addressed many of the issues that concern philosophy today. With the benefit of this fuller picture of his thought, Merleau-Ponty and Contemporary Philosophy undertakes an assessment of the philosopher's relevance for contemporary thinking. Covering a diverse range of topics, including ontology, epistemology, anthropology, embodiment, animality, politics, language, aesthetics, and art, the editors gather representative voices from North America and Europe, including both Merleau-Ponty specialists and thinkers who have come to the philosopher's work through their own thematic interest.

This essay argues that the deontological view of morality is connected to extreme and massive forms of violence through a kind of phenomenological necessity. In the first main section, I examine one family of such violence, which usually comes under the label of “religious violence”. I argue that it is not the religious element but the disqualification of context from the realm of justification which characterizes such violence. In the second main section, I examine the phenomenology of duty to conclude that duty, by definition, denies any normative relevance to context. In the third main section, I use this sketch of a phenomenology of duty to propose a hypothesis about the underpinnings of the connection between mass violence and duty, namely, that the notion of duty carries with it the exclusion of moderation, and places the agent before an impossible situation that can only be resolved by violence.

This article argues in favour of a formal definition of fanaticism as a certain relationship to one’s beliefs that is informed by the assumption that there is a mutual incompatibility between consistency and moderation. It analyses this assumption as an expression of an implicit commitment to naïve realism. It then proposes a critique of such realism and finally it sketches an ontological alternative, able to philosophically and politically respond to and oppose fanaticism by showing the compossibility, on that ontological view, of moderation and consistency.

Name der Zeitschrift: Nietzsche-Studien Jahrgang: 44 Heft: 1 Seiten: 267-290 In this paper, I examine the possibility of constructing an ontological phenomenology of love by tracing Nietzsche’s questioning about science. I examine how the evolution of Nietzsche’s thinking about science and his increasing suspicion towards it coincide with his interest for the question of love. Although the texts from the early and middle period praise science as an antidote to asceticism, the later texts associate the scientifi c spirit with asceticism. I argue that this shift is motivated by Nietzsche’s realization that asceticism and science share the same fetish of facts. It is now for Nietzsche no longer a matter of proving the so-called facts of the backworlds to be wrong (something science is very capable of doing), but a matter of rejecting the very structure of thought that reduces a shapeless reality into a series of facts, subjects and objects. It is this second attitude that Nietzsche regards as the common core of science and asceticism. From this critique of science and its correlative critique of facts, Nietzsche begins searching for a counter-attitude able to perform the reduction of the factual attitude. This is the attitude he calls love. Although Nietzsche’s concept of love has oft en been elucidated in terms of its object or its subject, I argue that such interpretations precisely defeat Nietzsche’s point, which is to recover a ground that precedes the division of the world into subjects and objects. Love becomes the name of this intra-relationship of being, opening up to new perspectives on Nietzsche’s ontology of the will to power.

This essay attempts to provide a unified analysis of two working notes from The Visible and the Invisible. In these notes Merleau-Ponty questions not only the accuracy of the ontology he is elaborating, but also the incidence and place of this ontology within the Being it describes. He finds that his ontology transforms Being as it describes it, and therefore keeps chasing its tail endlessly. This view is suggested by Merleau-Ponty’s use of Nietzsche’s expression “circulus vitiosus Deus” as a formula that both he and Nietzsche use to describe the ontological place of their ontology. Merleau-Ponty, like Nietzsche, offers an ontology in which Being is highly sensitive to ontological accounts, thereby construing Being as a principle of commensurability between action and description, language and reality, philosophy and world.

_ Source: _Volume 46, Issue 1, pp 54 - 69 In this essay, I reconstruct Merleau-Ponty’s implicit critique of Husserl in his lectures on Husserl’s concept of the earth as _Boden_ or ground. Against Husserl, Merleau-Ponty regards the earth seen as pure _Boden_ as an idealization. He emphasizes the ontological necessity for the earth as _Boden_ to always hypostasize itself into the Copernican concept of earth as object. In turn, Merleau-Ponty builds this necessity into an essential feature of being, allowing himself to retrieve ontology itself from its status as external to being, and to make room for it within the structure of being: ontology is one of the ways in which experiences become objectified, thereby allowing being to achieve its essential movement of hypostatization.