Marguerite La Caze

Immanuel Kant, in ‘What is Orientation in Thinking?’ focuses on reason as the touchstone for speculative thought. The question of how to orient ourselves in thinking is still pressing, particularly if one does not take reason as providing principles for judgment. Hannah Arendt and Michèle Le Dœuff focus on this problem of orientation from a practical point of view and build up a compelling picture of how we can orient our thought. Both take imagination to be central to good judgment, in addition to critical rationality. The project of enriching our imaginary and improving our judgments is an essential one in both ethics and politics, since imagination can either enable creative changes in our thinking or be stymied by pernicious myths. Arendt’s writings offer an account of the significance of the imagination to reliable judgment and suggest ways to avoid the extremes of arrogance and diffidence. Furthermore, Le Dœuff argues in recent work that we should challenge a range of myths in the epistemic imaginary and chart a course that involves hope for the future. I consider how it is possible to enrich the imaginary to overcome damaging myths, on Le Dœuff’s account, by taking political questions, particularly feminist ones, as reference points and also by avoiding the opposites of lack of faith in one’s own judgement and over-confidence.

In this chapter, I interpret Vladimir Jankélévitch’s work on the bad conscience and on forgiveness in relation to the film Manchester by the Sea (Kenneth Lonergan, 2016). This film is a striking meditation on remorse and the difficulty of self-forgiveness for Lee Chandler, a man who lives a monastic life as a janitor in Boston after the tragic death of his three children in a house fire. Many discussions of the film so far have focused on its depictions of despair and grief (with brief references to guilt), aspects of it that are certainly important. (Lane, 2016; Scott, 2016; Fleming, 2017) However, a focus on grief neglects the ethical dimensions of the film that Jankélévitch’s intense articulations of the solitary character of remorse and what a genuine offering of forgiveness really concerns can illuminate and engage with. His accounts demonstrate the immense complexity of remorse, self-forgiveness and the difficulty of accepting the generous forgiveness of others, even in situations where the calamity that has occurred is not a result of a deliberate, intentional action. Lee’s remorse dwells in the irreversibility of time and the irrevocability of our acts that Jankélévitch explains, and goes further in being a remorse that cannot be overcome. The film also enables us to question features of Jankélévitch’s view: that we can undo the consequences of our act or deed, in contrast to the action, and that self-forgiveness is a conceptual impossibility, because forgiveness must be a relation to another, rather than sometimes an existential one.

The philosophy of Vladimir Jankélévitch (1903-85) presents its students with the following puzzle, or, using Jankélévitch’s own terminology, we should rather say ‘secret’: despite the richness and originality of his ideas in the fields of moral philosophy, virtue ethics, metaphysics, philosophy of music and philosophy of religion, and despite his perspicacious interpretative engagements with the canonical texts of the Western philosophical tradition and the interlocutions with his contemporaries, Jankélévitch’s thought is unclassifiable within any of its major movements, and his intellectual and political allegiances, including Plotinus, Schelling, and Bergson—multiple and diverse. He was an accomplished author and a professor of philosophy at Sorbonne for over two decades, very much admired by his students, and to his contemporaries Jankélévitch was, as Jean-Christophe Goddard puts it, a “source of endless surprise” and “a champion of nonconformity.” Perhaps nowhere was Jankélévitch’s nonconformity as apparent as in his decision—following German Nazism, World War II and the Holocaust, during which he was prevented from teaching because of his Jewish background—to disengage entirely from German culture and philosophy in his academic writings and public engagements. In the introduction to the English translation of Le Pardon, its translator Andrew Kelley cites Jankélévitch’s words, expressing a feeling of homelessness within the philosophical discussions and preoccupations of his era, but also a sense of hope that the relevance of his work will become more apparent in the time to come: “I am writing for the twenty-first century, which will discuss my ideas with passion, as opposed to the twentieth century.” It is perhaps not surprising, then, that the interest in Jankélévitch’s thought, following recent translations of his works into English, Italian, and German, is growing. His original approach to ethical analysis of forgiveness and remorse, his deep conviction that philosophy should respond to historical injustice, and his keenly perceptive analysis of the moral life of the subject resonate strongly with those who seek to respond to the problems of the contemporary world without resorting to nihilism or despondency. This volume brings together scholars of Jankélévitch’s philosophy to engage analytically and exegetically with the key problems of Jankélévitch’s thought, as well as to explore its relevance for a range of pressing political and ethical questions, including historical guilt, post-secularism and forgiveness. In this collection, we gather a selection of texts from contemporary scholarship on Jankélévitch, with the aims of further popularizing his writings within and outside the philosophical community; articulating the intricate connections within his philosophical and musicological oeuvre and bringing to the surface some of its key concepts and motifs; and exploring the potential contribution of Jankélévitch’s philosophy to thinking more deeply about some of the problems that are currently galvanizing the public, such as the role of forgiveness and remorse in post-atrocity and post-colonial societies, and regarding the imprescriptibility and inexcusability of certain crimes. In this introduction we outline the key themes and approaches explored and elaborated by the contributors to this book, sketch links between them, and situate the contributing texts within the broader philosophical context of Jankélévitchean scholarship.

This book investigates the interrelations between aesthetics, ethics and politics in a variety of visual media forms, ranging across art installations, film and television, interactive documentaries, painting, photography, social media and videogames. An international mix of emerging and established authors, with interdisciplinary expertise, explores how different ethical questions, political implications and aesthetic pleasures arise and shape one another in distinct visual media. Investigating themes such as the use of cinema as a medium for ethical and political thought, how documentary subjects both conceal and reveal truth, the new ethical challenges arising from interactive media and the role of images in responding to political events and trauma, this is a groundbreaking work about the interrelations of aesthetic, ethical and political values in visual media.

_Hannah Arendt and the History of Thought_, edited by Daniel Brennan and Marguerite La Caze, enrichens and deepens scholarship on Arendt’s relation to philosophical history and traditions. Some contributors analyze thinkers not often linked to Arendt, such as William Shakespeare, Hans Jonas, and Simone de Beauvoir. Other contributors treat themes that are pressing and crucial to understanding Arendt’s work, such as love in its many forms, ethnicity and race, disability, human rights, politics, and statelessness. The collection is anchored by chapters on Arendt’s interpretation of Kant and her relation to early German Romanticism and phenomenology, while other chapters explore new perspectives, such as Arendt and film, her philosophical connections with other women thinkers, and her influence on Eastern European thought and activism. The collection expands the frames of reference for research on Arendt—both in terms of using a broader range of texts like her _Denktagebuch_ and in examining her ideas about judgment, feminism, and worldliness in this wider context.

Euzhan Palcy’s film A Dry White Season, set in apartheid South Africa, portrays a resistance not intended to lead to victimhood, yet leads to the death of the Afrikaans protagonist, Benjamin Du Toit. The narrative follows Ben as they are educated about Black South Africans’ suffering under apartheid, their growing activism and simultaneous increasing victimization beside that of their Black friends. I first examine how early political critics of the film thought it stressed the victimization of the white character at the expense of that of the Black characters. Next, I interpret the film by considering how Palcy’s aims, the influence of their compatriot Aimé Césaire’s anticolonial views, and the details of the film’s structure, illuminate the film’s philosophical insights into victimization and resistance. I show how the film’s representation of Ben’s secondary victimization and witnessing highlights the victimization of apartheid.

No presents the television campaign for the 1988 plebiscite on whether the Pinochet regime should stay as the government for eight more years (‘Yes’) or hold democratic elections (‘No’). The ‘No’ campaign uses the Aristotelian idea that happiness is an intrinsic value and thus the best concept to galvanise a traumatised nation in favour of change. My paper examines the film’s presentation of how a response to the trauma of the regime becomes transformed into resistance through the idea of a possible future happiness.

This paper explores the potential of realist cinema to portray resistance to oppression and restrictions on people’s lives. Wadjda presents a special case in world cinema in being made in Saudi Arabia, which until recently had no film industry or distribution system. The director, Hafaa Al Mansour, has been praised for making the film there at all. Yet this ignores the film’s power in taking a slice of time in the life of a young Riyadh girl, Wadjda, and focussing on her desire to own a bicycle. The film’s realism depicts restrictions on women’s lives in Saudi Arabia and at the same time affirms hope in gradual change through the natality, in Hannah Arendt’s sense, of a child who does not see these constraints as insurmountable obstacles. I argue that realist films can demonstrate the importance of gradual political progress and can anticipate those advances.

What does Le Premier Homme bring specifically to our understanding of Camus’s view of love? The novel allows us to understand love as love of specific human individuals, as well as love of life and the world, and a sense of the frailties of love. While many commentaries have touched on the idea of the importance of love in this work, they have tended to focus more on the disguised autobiographical elements concerning the people in Camus’s life. They have also centred on the descriptive aspects of the work. What I would like to do is look at how love is presented in more depth, and show how specific kinds of love are valorized, and how these different kinds of love are all connected.

The tension between the absence of identity and the feeling of presence theorised in Jacques Derrida's philosophy is revealed in D'ailleurs Derrida, a film by Safaa Fathy (1999). Fathy's film has had limited scholarly attention, yet it makes a distinctive contribution both to understanding and questioning Derridean thought. I argue that the not-meness of identity is revealed by Fathy through the theme of ‘elsewhere’ (ailleurs) in the film and yet it allows the audience to experience the tone and cadence of Derrida's speaking voice, in counterpoint with contemporary and archival images, thus providing a sense of his philosophy in relation to his life. The film shows how forms of absence such as silence, the not-said, and even pauses are essential to his work. Ultimately the film operates by giving Derrida the location, space, and time to articulate his views on identity, the close relationship between writing and filming, the experience of being ‘the Marrano's Marrano, circumcision, forgiveness and hospitality, and absence and presence. Nevertheless, Fathy's film both reflects and questions his philosophical focus on absence and spectrality through a range of cinematic techniques, including reverse shots and cross-cutting between locations.

Contemporary Perspectives on Vladimir Jankélévitch: On What Cannot Be Touched performs a cross-disciplinary theoretical analysis of the philosophy of Vladimir Jankélévitch. An international group of contributors, including both established and emerging scholars, engage with his writings from diverse disciplinary angles and consider his importance for contemporary political and cultural contexts. Edited by Marguerite La Caze and Magdalena Zolkos, the collection provides a holistic and multi-perspectival approach to Jankélévitch’s writings, one that illuminates nuanced and complex connections across the five sub-fields of philosophy to which Jankélévitch contributed: moral philosophy, virtue theory, metaphysics, philosophy of music, and philosophy of religion. The book addresses different aspects of and problems in Jankélévitch’s philosophy, with all chapters unified by a preoccupation with the motif of intangibility—that which cannot be touched.

My paper considers the role of wonder and admiration in times of crisis. I argue that wonder should be understood in René Descartes’ (1649/1989) sense, as a response to something unfamiliar that is based on the object, rather than our judgements about it. In contrast, in admiration, we must judge the objects as admirable, that they have some valuable traits. In ordinary times, it may be immoral acts that stand out as unfamiliar and so provoke wonder. However, I will focus on the importance of wonder in times of crisis, to recognise the unfamiliar, when many or most are treating the immoral as normal, as Hannah Arendt (2003) describes it. Then admiration is the response that can enable us to take the unfamiliar as valuable moral exemplars and to emulate them. Nevertheless, I will argue, contra Linda Zagzebski (2015) that we can admire a person, action, or character trait without necessarily being motivated to emulate them. Also, I contend that we can have ambivalent feelings mixed with our admiration and still be moved to emulate others. The complexity of the relation between these three emotions and attitudes—wonder, admiration, and emulation—means that while they can contribute to resistance to immorality in times of crisis, they are untrustworthy in myriad ways.

Contemporary political ethics has to face the question of how to repair relations which have broken down after crimes, oppression, and political violence. The book employs the work of European and feminist philosophers, including Jacques Derrida, Albert Camus, Simone Beauvoir, Hannah Arendt, Karl Jaspers, Jean-Paul Sartre, Giorgio Agamben, Immanuel Kant, Jean Améry, Vladimir Jankélévitch, Margaret Urban Walker and Linda Radzik to engage with historical and recent cases: the post-liberation French purge, post-genocide Rwanda and post-colonial Australia and draws out the negative and positive conditions of ethical political responses in these contexts. It develops a philosophical account of ethical restoration through focusing on just punishment, guilt and shame, rebuilding political trust, forgiveness and reconciliation, remorse and atonement, and self-forgiveness.

Le Dœuff investigated the philosophical imaginary primarily of classical philosophy, but her discussion about the philosophical image is open enough to allow an extension into the contrasting area of contemporary analytic philosophy. The flexibility of her method will be demonstrated first by attention to the function of specific images in analytic philosophy. Further possibilities of her method will be displayed by a reading of the general ‘imaginary’ of analytic philosophy —a system that I shall call the ‘analytic imaginary’.

Reflection on the relationship between sexist and racist forms of oppression can generate insights into the structure and experience of both oppressions. My argument is that while the two forms of oppression are distinctive, they share a general structure in personal experiences of oppression, in institutionalized racism and sexism, and in approaches to overcoming oppression. First I briefly sketch the central analogies between analyses of racism and sexism in feminist philosophical work. This sketch provides a background for a critical assessment of the usefulness of the analogy, one that takes into account Elizabeth Spelman’s articulation of the risks involved. Simone de Beauvoir’s account is useful in assessing the structure and experience of racist and sexist oppressions, their interaction, and strategies of resistance.

In this paper, I show how a politics of difference, in particular that of Iris Marion Young, can give a much more robust justification for feminist goals and a more cogent diagnosis of and response to oppression than other political philosophies, such as liberalism, communitarianism, and post-socialism,. Nancy Fraser has nonetheless made several compelling criticisms of Young’s conception of the politics of difference, and I address these criticisms by demonstrating how the politics of difference can be ‘split’ into different differences.

Iris Marion Young's work spans phenomenology and political philosophy. Her best‐known work in feminist phenomenology “Throwing like a girl,” drawing on the work of Simone de Beauvoir and Maurice Merleau‐Ponty, established the importance of gendered forms of bodily comportment and motility and has inspired articles both criticizing and extending her view to other fields. She has also articulated the phenomenological experience of chosen pregnancy, homemaking, the need for private space, the experience of wearing clothes, and other significant situations. Young's more political philosophy articulates the five faces of oppression: exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism and violence, and domination in order to develop an account of justice that overcomes both and respects group differences. Her book Inclusion and Democracy considers these questions on a more international scale and considers how oppressed groups can be included in political institutions. Finally, her posthumously published work on responsibility argues that we have global responsibilities for injustices that occur, although we might not have intended to harm others.

Kant suggests in The Metaphysics of Morals that we may sometimes say something untrue or insincere since others are free to interpret our statements as they wish. (1996, 6:238) Yet he also argues that even in conflict situations we should be truthful so as to not eliminate trust and to make it possible for a rightful condition to arise. My paper considers the conditions Kant believes essential to maintain basic trust so that in better times peace is possible. It also considers their relation to sincerity. I argue that Kant’s view can provide a model for building political trust after wars and other forms of conflict. Furthermore, I consider the need for the possibility of help as also necessary for trust, through the work of Jean Améry. In certain situations, sincerity is not the most important thing. More important are truthfulness and the willingness to act as if we were sincere and thought others and the world worthy of our trust.

In this paper I show how Michèle Le Dœuff’s conception of philosophy as work is central to her articulation of a fresh conception of women’s role in philosophy and philosophy’s relation to other work. In Hipparchia’s Choice (1991, 168) she writes that ‘There is at least a third way of conceiving of philosophy and the history of philosophy: we can regard both as work, and thus as a dynamic, which can lead to and from each other.’ My objective is to clarify this concept of philosophy as work and to show its significance and implications for understanding women’s relation to philosophy and the complexity of Le Dœuff’s thought concerning the nature of freedom and oppression.

Is evil an absolute difference that we must respond to with horror? Or is evil an aspect of humanity that we must approach with understanding? How we answer these questions partly determines how we should answer the question of whether we should forgive evil, particularly radical evil. Radical evil, as it is used it here, can be understood as evil that is not motivated by understandable human motives. Hannah Arendt argues that one cannot forgive radical evil because such acts completely transcend the human realm. Radical evil seems to be beyond our understanding. By contrast, Jacques Derrida argues that true forgiveness has nothing to do with measuring the extent of guilt, wrongdoing, remorse, apology, or healing. True forgiveness in this view involves forgiving the unforgivable, so forgiveness must be possible even in the most extreme cases, such as those of radical evil.

Iris Marion Young argues we cannot understand others' experiences by imagining ourselves in their place or in terms of symmetrical reciprocity (1997a). For Young, reciprocity expresses moral respect and asymmetry arises from people's greatly varying life histories and social positions. La Caze argues there are problems with Young's articulation of asymmetrical reciprocity in terms of wonder and the gift. By discussing friendship and political representation, she shows how taking self-respect into account complicates asymmetrical reciprocity.

Immanuel Kant is often thought of as an excessively austere figure of the enlightenment, eschewing especially the emotions. Yet his contribution to the enlightenment includes a distinctive sensitivity to the role that love and the beautiful, particularly in nature, play in our ethical lives. There are a number of arguments scattered through Kant’s work that aim to establish a connection between love of the beautiful and morality. My goal is to connect the most significant of these to build a picture of his concern with the topic, and to assess the arguments for their insight and their revelation of complexity and significance of Kant as an Enlightenment thinker. What I show here is that love of the beautiful is meaningfully connected to morality in a range of ways; thus this love of the beautiful indicates the crucial, if not predominant, role of emotions in Kant’s moral philosophy.

In ‘History of the Lie: Prolegomena’ (2002) Jacques Derrida examines Hannah Arendt’s analysis of the modern lie in politics in her essays ‘Lying in Politics’ (1972) and ‘Truth and Politics’ (1968/ 1993). Arendt contrasts the traditional lie, where lies were told and secrets kept for the greater good or to defeat the enemy, with the modern lie, which comprises deception and self-deception on a massive scale. My paper investigates the seriousness of different kinds of lies in political life in the light of Arendt and Derrida’s reflections on lying and contemporary lies in politics and shows where concern should focus.

This article focuses on how the work of Iris Marion Young (1949-2006) has contributed to legal and political theory. Her ground-breaking book Justice and the Politics of Difference and her later work Inclusion and Democracy, as well as numerous articles, have been very influential. These texts involve the articulation of the numerous structural ways in which oppressed groups can be treated unjustly and the kind of legal, political, and social structures that need to be put in place to overcome these injustices. The axes of injustice include gender, race and ethnicity, disability, age, and sexual orientation. The article will consider her contribution to thought concerning achieving justice and overcoming oppression and domination, especially in relation to marriage, citizenship, democracy and international relations. Let me begin with her best-known work on justice and oppression.

Derrida's purpose in ‘Death Penalties’ (2004), is to show how both arguments in favour of capital punishment, exemplified by Kant's, and arguments for its abolition, such as those of Beccaria, are deconstructible. He claims that ‘never, to my knowledge, has any philosopher as a philosopher, in his or her own strictly and systematically philosophical discourse, never has any philosophy as such contested the legitimacy of the death penalty.’ (2004, 146) Derrida also asks how it is possible ‘to abolish the death penalty in a way that is based on principle, that is universal and unconditional, and not because it has become not only cruel but useless, insufficiently exemplary?’ (2004, 137) In my paper, I examine Derrida's claim about the lack of systematic opposition to the death penalty on the part of philosophers and suggest an answer to his question concerning the possibility of a universal and unconditional opposition to capital punishment

Jean-Paul Sartre’s final ethics of the “we” or reciprocity remains controversial and less developed than his other ethics. Scholars have generally accepted the periodization of his ethics into three, as Sartre himself described them: the first ethics of authenticity, the second Marxist or dialectical ethics, and this final ethics, that considers the ontological basis of ethics, based primarily on the 1980 interviews in Hope Now (1996) (L’espoir maintenant, 1991). I will focus on Sartre’s responses in the interviews, rather than contributions of his interlocutor so that I can reconstruct the lines of his thought. Sartre’s comments in these interviews are also consonant with that in other earlier interviews, such as that with Michel Sicard (1979) and Leo Fretz (1980). This article aims to show both the continuity with Sartre’s earlier ethics in his responses to Lévy and the potential of the original ideas of the final ethics. My interpretation is that Sartre draws ideas from his earlier ethics, introduces some new ideas, and makes some startling formulations in suggesting the form of an ethics of reciprocity. I will discuss first the basis of the ethics of reciprocity, then the concepts of fraternity and democracy, and finally, Sartre’s account of hope and messianism.