Alejandro Vallega

_ Source: _Volume 46, Issue 3, pp 390 - 404 This article puts into play the ghostly horizon of “death” as it follows its semblances through Derrida’s reading of Heidegger in the French thinker’s last seminars as published in _The Beast and the Sovereign_ Vol. II. The moments I underscore are three, always marking the playing out or releasing of death’s ghost, its sovereignty over life, while the readings, drift off driven by other forces: 1. In Session IV, Derrida’s enjambment of Heidegger’s sense of _dasein_ and _Welt_ with Celan’s line from _Atemwende, “Die Welt ist fort, Ich muß dich tragen”_ ; 2. The mutual displacement of the question of the other and the question of death at the beginning of Session V ; and 3, the unfolding of Crusoe’s desire and fear of “living a living death” in Derrida’s discussion of _survivance_, also in session V. The discussion closes with the interpolation of Latin American thought through the introduction of the temporalizing movement of _différance_ read in light of the non-linear simultaneous asymmetric temporality one finds constitutive of Latin American consciousness. Thus, the reading moves from the deconstruction of various figures of death that permeate in an almost transcendental manner the organizing of the meaning of Derrida and Heidegger’s thought, to a thinking with the temporalizing movement of _survivance_ or living-dying, in which the binomial reasoning and teleological structures of temporality held by the figures of life and death are released to a thought beyond their supposed mutually exclusive timeline.

Giorgio Agamben’s thought arises out of thinking through the concrete negativity or ungroundedness figured by “life” as understood under the sovereign exception. His work is sustained by the continuous exposure of philosophical concepts to what remains excluded, silenced, and to an extent unsayable for philosophy: Thus, disfiguring, decentering, and violating the temporality of Western history and philosophy as well as the concepts that order it. This means that Agamben thinks out of the ungrounded occurrences of language and history, and that the transformative potency of his thought arises from sheer negativity and yet, in his engagement of thought’s concrete situation.

The author presents this volume as “a companion to Plato’s Phaedo”; as such, one expects it to engage closely the dialogue without abandoning critical rigor, while at the same time exposing us to some of the varied and rich issues that sustain today’s readings of Plato. As Beets’s Prologue indicates, his work focuses on “the issue of the coexistence and transition from the world of becoming to that of being”. The work is divided in two parts. The first part takes up one third of the book and begins by discussing human thought in terms of two main levels of thinking: intuitive and entirely determined by the world, and purely formal and “truly free thinking”. Setting out from this differentiation, the first chapter offers a conceptual structure that will determine the rest of the book. In the same chapter Beets goes on to present philosophical thought as the task of “calling up” from the deeper recesses of our mind our knowledge of “the universal a priori,” or the purely formal, which in turn turns us toward the objective nature of reality and free thinking. The chapter closes as Beets establishes the limitations of conceptual human knowledge in terms of the striving for a knowledge of absolute being or the noumenal, which, although available to the mystic, cannot be accomplished by conceptual knowledge but does serve as “the foothold for meaningful cultural, religious, philosophical, and scientific life and for human ethics”. In following Beets’s itinerary we find out that knowledge of the intuited world can be turned to knowledge of the purely structural, and that in this sense human life through critical conceptual knowledge may be a passage toward the eternal. This occurs if one realizes that the world as it appears is a lie and if we listen to the silent voice in the recess of our mind, which tells us of the a priori. This knowledge of the purely formal in the intuited also leads to Beets’s final insight, namely, that ultimately death will lead us to know the eternal. At this point the author equates absolute being, the noumenal, and God. Thus, the path is laid for the passage from time to the eternal.

The following article discusses a certain concrete ethical-historical sensibility that opens, in part, in the work of Hegel and serves as an introduction to two figures of spirit beyond Hegel’s onto-theological thought: namely, Frantz Fanon and Gabriel García Márquez. The discussion seeks to introduce a “thinking sensibility,” i.e., an opening toward the articulate understanding of history in and through its singularities. This figures a space for a way of thinking arising in the concrete unfolding of spirits out of singularities that overwhelm any single or universal call for unity. In terms of history, this concerns not a thinking that gives sense to history through concepts, but a thought that from its specificity and situation unfolds diverse articulations, and hence configurations of the senses of spirit or histories.

Paul Klee’s sense of modern art and his own painting as the channeling of the originary movement of life leads to an insight beyond modern art, and back towards such dynamic cosmological experiences as that of the Onas people of Patagonia. In their daily life and their rituals their painted bodies expressed the living force of their cosmos, an originary energy that occurred at the limit of what one may call art and nature. In engaging Klee’s painting and drawing, one is brought to such an open space of living transformative movement; one finds a place wider than our present imagination, a time-space that in our being exposed to his works and experience remains for us to inhabit.

Dynamic mental images are co-constitutive of the determinations of reality and possibility under which our senses of life open and unfold. Ultimately, this dynamic sense of images introduces the difficulty of thinking in light of their role in the configuration of human knowledge and their power over interpretations and determinations of the many senses of beings. This relationship between images and philosophical knowledge is further complicated when one looks at it from the perspective of a colonized consciousness. In such cases self-knowledge and the very possibility of philosophical knowledge depend on images that are not one's own. This makes the articulation of the senses of distinct existences an impossible project. By looking at the work of Fanon, Anibal Quijano, and Alfredo Jaar, this article discusses how such pernicious images occur in spite of one's distinct sense of existence, and how the distorted displacement of existence may be challenged and overcome

Through a discussion of “translucence” in Plato’s Phaidros and in Juan Jose Saer’s “On Line,” in this essay I attempt to engage the simultaneous experience of the concrete sense of language and of the appearing of beings in their materiality through language. The discussion ultimately suggests that, when taken in its full force, the philosophical logos figures the elemental translucence of beings in their intelligibility; a formulation meant to resist the separation of language and concreteness. Such an interpretation of the philosophical logos also leads to the understanding of thought as an elemental, interpretative, transformative, and “marginal” experience.