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.

Engaging contemporary notions of metaphor and drawing on his past work on the subject, Josef Stern presents a theory of metaphor which is based both on context and semantics. Over the past two decades philosophers of language, linguists, and cognitive scientists have generally believed that metaphor is external to the general conceptions of semantics and grammar. Moreover, metaphor is understood in its pragmatic sense, that is, as having its nature defined by its employment and various uses in language as opposed to the content and character present in the meaning of metaphor. Stern sets as his goal a challenge of such readings of metaphor. Dialoguing with and challenging eminent thinkers on the subject of metaphor, including Donald Davidson and David Kaplan, Stern competently sketches his vision of metaphorical meaning which underlies a speaker-hearer’s capacity to interpret a metaphor by “drawing on a deep analogy between demonstratives, indexicals and metaphors.” His engaging views raise interesting questions and give much food for thought. Issues addressed include: the literal paraphrasability of metaphors vis-à-vis cognition, the roles of exemplification and similarity in metaphorical interpretation, dead metaphors, the pictorial character of metaphors, and the relation between metaphors and the literal.

Carrying out the implications and exploring the underpinnings of themes examined in Tradition and Authenticity, Thomas Langan’s latest work, Being and Truth, attempts to explain the foundational framework in which the central question of philosophy must ground itself. Langan seeks to describe the condition for the possibility of a genuinely unified discourse which concomitantly allows for the plethora of differences incarnate in people, institutions, and traditions to be considered duly and to presence themselves fully. Langan identifies as the central and perennial question of philosophy: “How can we entice ourselves to widen our horizons to take into account the experiences of others, which challenge the fragile ideological structures of explanation we have built to cope with the world?”.

This paper argues that though Derrida is correct to bring to the fore the undecidability that is contained in his political notion of the democracy to come, his account does not extend the aporia of undecidable politics far enough. Derrida himself makes evident this gap. Though politics may be structured with undecidability, there are times when direct, decisive and definitive political interventions are required. In his campaign against capital punishment, the blitzing campaigns in Bosnia and Iraq, and in his call for les villes-refuges, Derrida makes decisive appeals which somehow seem to contradict the undecidability he sees as arch-structuring. Alain Badiou’s thinking about time as a subjective, decisive intervention executed within his ontological framework of undecidability and multiplicity can serve to extend the aporia of undecidability inherent in politics, ultimately giving an account for both the undecidability that structures politics and the decisive timely interventions that would seem to contradict Derridean undecidability

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 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.

Thomas Langan's latest work, Being and Truth, sets as its object of inquiry the possibility of a genuine and meaningful intersubjectivity wherein both self and other come fully to nurture one another. The very condition for the possibility of such a significant onto-poetic relation is grounded and intertwined within a metaphysical Fundierung of Being illumined by Truth. In order to answer the aforementioned philosophical question, Langan maintains that the philosophical question must be cast as an ontological question. In other words, the key to understanding and responding to the possibility of a genuine intersubjective relationship where both self and other come to fully interact with one another lies within the framework of a serious attempt to comprehend reflectively the constitutive dynamic between being, esse and Sein. Central to a genuine understanding and "holy" living out of self, other and the communal relationship which exists between the two is responsibility--the ability to respond to the exigencies and gifts of being. Hence, the need for our question to be cast in an ontological light.