Leonard Lawlor

This article tries to show the irreducible connection between vulnerability and violence. This connection leads us back to the ethical level of experience. If vulnerability makes violence irreducible, then at least two reactions to violence are possible. On the one hand, a reaction is possible in which one attempts to negate vulnerability in order to close down the very thing within us that allows violence to enter. This negative reaction is actually the worst violence. On the other hand, a reaction is possible in which one attempts to affirm vulnerability, even though its affirmation opens us to the violence that will happen. Affirming vulnerability is the least-violent reaction. If the formula for the worst violence is apocalypse without remainder, then the least violence is the maintenance of the remainder. The maintenance would happen only by not possessing the remainders, which places us in a new situation of poverty.

Blindness has been a pervasive theme throughout Derrida’s career. But Derrida uses the word “blindness” only once in the title of one his works. This text is, ofcourse, Memoirs of the Blind, Mémoires d’aveugle, an essay he wrote for the catalogue for an exhibition he organized at the Louvre in 1990. I argue that Memoirs of the Blind is more than just a phase in Derrida’s deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence. Instead, it opens a larger, more ambitious project that we can call “the deconstruction of Christianity.” The article ends with a consideration of a new form of vitalism.

In this essay, I examine the ‘Postulates of Linguistics’ chapter of A Thousand Plateaus. In regard to this chapter, I aim to demonstrate something that has remained unrecognised about minor language in Deleuze and Guattari. I aim to show not only the characteristics of Deleuzian speaking in tongues that overlap with Foucaultian speaking-freely and with Derridean speaking-distantly, but also and more importantly, I hope to show how it is possible for us to make a language speak in tongues. Derrida's way of speaking is made only by forming an enunciation that states a self-contradiction, which thereby makes the enunciation imply more than it says. Foucault's way of speaking is made only by forming an enunciation that states the truth directly and loudly, which thereby makes the enunciation do more than it says. And finally, Deleuze way of speaking is made only by forming an enunciation that states a command abstracted from its context, which thereby makes the enunciation proliferate. All three ways of speaking are made not for the benefit of the speaker, but ‘in favour of’ others. And perhaps this speaking ‘in favour of’ others will allow us to come to understand the true meaning of the phrase ‘capitalism and schizophrenia’.

This book concerns contemporary debates in the philosophy of mind. Therefore, McCulloch starts with Descartes. On the basis of well-known argumentation, McCulloch develops what he calls “the demonic dilemma”. The dilemma is that we cannot explain or understand intentionality, consciousness being directed at the world, on the basis of “the ontological Real Distinction.” The “ontological Real Distinction” is the belief that there are two independent substances, mind and matter, really distinct from one another. Intentionality then has to be either on the mind side or on the world side, but not on both sides, since if it were on both sides, the Distinction would no longer be Real. The first horn of the dilemma would be that the mind possesses its property of being intentional without the world being there, even if, in other words, there is an evil genius or a scientist manipulating input into our brain in a vat. But, if this is the case, then the mind really exists in indifference to the world. Connected to this first horn is what McCulloch calls “the Idea idea,” that is, that the mind possesses ideas or mental representations that are intrinsically contentful or intentional. The second horn would be that the world possesses intentionality. But, if that is the case, then, if we are a brain in a vat, the world does not exist, and the mind again has no intentionality. For McCulloch, clearly, what is really interesting about the ontological Real distinction is not the apparent skepticism it results in about our knowledge of the world, but that it makes intentionality the central issue.

In this paper I examine how well Merleau-Ponty's philosophy can respond to Deleuze's challenge to phenomenology. The Deleuzian challenge is double, that of immanence and that of difference; in other words, the double challenge is what Deleuze calls the paradox of expression. I bring together, in particular, Deleuze's 1969 The Logic of Sense and Merleau-Ponty's 1945 the Phenomenology of Perception, and am able to discover a lot of similarities mainly centered around the notion of a past that has never been present. However, this comparison is not decisive; what alone can decide is an interpretation of expression in Merleau-Ponty's final, unfinished The Visible and the Invisible.