Antonio Calcagno

This article focuses on Michel Foucault’s concepts of authorship and power. Jacques Derrida has often been accused of being more of a literary author than a philosopher or political theorist. Richard Rorty complains that Derrida’s views on politics are not pragmatic enough; he sees Derrida’s later work, including his political work, more as a “private self-fashioning” than concrete political thinking aimed at devising short-term solutions to problems here and now. Employing Foucault’s work around authorship and the origins of power, I show that Derrida is indeed fashioning himself. This self-fashioning is not merely private or fanciful. Rather, I argue that Derrida can be read as employing what Foucault would call “technologies of the self” to not only show the play of possibility and impossibility at work in all politics and thought, but also to use his savoir to create two important and potentially constructive power structures. First, there is the power of deconstruction itself as a “militant critique” that calls for a forceful and irreducible justice. Second, there is the power of Derrida himself, understood as leaving behind a legacy of himself as the “originator” of deconstruction and as a public intellectual.

If community is determined primarily in consciousness as a mental state of oneness, can community exist when there is no accompanying mental state or collective intentionality that makes us realise that we are one community? Walther would respond affirmatively, arguing that there is a deep psychological structure of habit that allows us to continue to experience ourselves as a community. The habit of community works on all levels of our person, including our bodies, psyches and spirits (Geist). It allows us to continue to be in community even though we are not always conscious of it. Husserl would describe this as part of the passive synthesis of Vergemeinschaftung. Walther’s analysis of the passive structure of habit opens up important possibilities for the inner consciousness of time. Drawing from Husserl’s and Walther’s analyses, I argue for the possibility of a communal inner time consciousness, or an inner awareness of timeconsciousness of the community, which gives rise to three constitutive moments: communal retention or communal memory, a sense of the communal present or a communal “now,” and communal protentions or anticipations. Ultimately, I will show how Walther’s treatment of habit demonstrates that time conditions the lived experience of community. One can, therefore, speak of a time of the community—its past, present and future—even though Walther herself does not explicitly develop this possibility.

This article seeks to present for the first time a more systematic account of Edith Stein’s views on death and dying. First, I will argue that death does not necessarily lead us to an understanding of our earthly existence as aevum, that is, an experience of time between eternity and finite temporality. We always bear the mark of our finitude, including our finite temporality, even when we exist within the eternal mind of God. To claim otherwise, is to make identical our eternity with God’s eternity, thereby undermining the traditional Scholastic argument, which Stein holds, that there is no real relation between the being (and, therefore, (a)temporality) of God and the being of human persons. Second, I will argue that Stein excludes the category of potentiality from her discussion of death as a relation between the fullness or actuality of being and nothingness. In fact, death is more a relation between possibility/potentiality and nothingness than a relation between actual fullness and nothingness. What Stein describes as fullness ought to be read as potential.

This article questions whether we can posit a more radical desuturing of the law from the event: Can radical shifts in law produce events? Can the law itself be an event, thereby conditioning the very nature of the event itself, creating a new subjectivity and a new time? I would like to argue that the law can do so. How? Badiou begins “The Three Negations” by discussing the work of the German jurist Carl Schmitt. I would like to argue that the state of exception, as elaborated by Carl Schmitt, can serve as the willed decision of a sovereign that brings about an event. We can understand the sovereign as a kind of legal subject that has the force to bring about a new event, rupturing with an established order and introducing a new form of subjectivity and time.

In Logics of Worlds, Badiou claims that his concept of inexistence is similar to Derrida’s différance. This paper argues that Derrida’s double bind of possibility and impossibility, which co-constitutes and flows from the spatio-temporising that is différance, is less binary in its logic than Badiou’s notion of inexistence allows. For Badiou, time and the subject are constituted by the event, by a decision and the fidelity to a decision. He has no real sense of Derridean space: Badiou discusses space as localisation, atoms, situations or the containment that is proper to any set. Derridean spatialsing stems from de Saussure and his view of the differentiation between signs and words and phrases that produces meaning. I maintain that though there may be a resemblance between the two philosophers qua what they see is unaccountable or lies closed or hidden yet conditions any given “system” or “meaning-structure,” the way they justify such accounts would suggest a greater gap than what Badiou may be prepared to concede.

Arendt a écrit deux volumes dédiés à la pensée et la volonté qui sont réunis dans le texte La vie de l’esprit, mais en raison de sa mort inopportune, son travail consacré au jugement, et plus spécialement au jugement politique, n’a jamais été achevé. Cependant, nous disposons d’une quantité significative d’écrits sur ce thème, provenant de ses conférences sur la troisième Critique de Kant. Le jugement et la pensée sont essentiels pour empêcher ce qu’Arendt appelle «la banalité du mal». En s’inspirant de saint Augustin et du travail d’Arendt sur Augustin, cet article entend démontrer qu’une autre forme de mal sérieux trouve sa racine dans ce qu’Augustin appelle la libido habendi et la libido dominandi, le désir ou la pulsion de dominer et posséder. Nous essaierons de montrer que la solution d’Arendt au problème de la banalité du mal peut aussi s’appliquer au désir et au plaisir très humains de causer ou d’infliger du mal.

Edith Stein’s early phenomenological texts describe community as a special unity that is fully lived through in consciousness. In her later works, unity is described in more theological terms as participation in the communal fullness and wholeness of God or Being. Can these two accounts of community or human belonging be reconciled? I argue that consciousness can bring to the fore the meaning of community, thereby conditioning our lived-experience of community, but it can also, through Heideggerian questioning, uncover that which remains somewhat hidden from consciousness itself: its own ground or condition of possibility, namely, being—a being that is both one and many, unified, communalised, and very diversified. If my reading of Stein is correct, the traditional understanding of the split between Stein’s strictly Husserlian/phenomenological period and her later Christian philosophical period must be renegotiated, at least when it comes to the philosophical problem of community or human togetherness.

Jacques Derrida, Alain Badiou and Sylvain Lazarus have devoted significant consideration to the problem of time and politics, especially in their more recent works. ;For Derrida, the relationship between and time and politics is articulated in his notion of the democracy to come and the undecidability that ensues from the double bind 'folded into' the democracy to come. Sylvain Lazarus argues that in order to think the "interiority" of politics we have to abolish the category of time altogether. Finally, Badiou develops a philosophy of the event. Political events come about through decisive subjective interventions that are described as temporal. Interventions may be seen as representing a theory of subjectivating time. ;Ultimately, my thesis is this: emergent French thought on the nature of politics and time suggests that time conditions politics in such a fashion that time makes accessible the limits of political philosophy/thinking and political decision-making, both as simultaneously possible and impossible. We find ourselves in a state of political undecidability. Yet, this undecidability also brings to light an aporia as evidenced by Derrida's decisive stands on certain political issues. The aporia consists in the fact that in the midst of such undecidability we are called upon or forced to make certain decisive political interventions. Though political situations may be undecidable, we are called to respond to these situations because of their injustice, inhospitality, irresponsibility and terror and violence. Following Badiou, we should think of such decisions as timely interventions that make political events appear and thinkable. Badiou's notion of timely interventions that yield political events can be employed to complete the philosophical account of the aporia. The aporia can never be resolved. It is the philosophical account of the paradoxical situation we find ourselves in and is a philosophical account of the relation that exists between time and politics. This relation is aporetic because it paradoxically brings together two fundamentally human realities, namely, the undecidability of the world we find ourselves in but also the very human reality of decisively thinking politically and making decisive political actions. Yet, such political events are not merely extensions of subjective volition, rather they are also conditioned by a sense of the kairos or extra-subjective or pre-political sense of the "timely" occasion to act. The world may force or elicit us to act, forcing moments to their crisis---a crisis to which the Badiouan subject responds through her interventions.