Leonard Lawlor

This essay starts from a consideration of Deleuze's theory of time. It begins with the empty form of time. But the essay's aim is to understand Deleuze's reversal of Platonism in his 1968 Difference and Repetition. There is no question that the stakes of the reversal of Platonism are ontological. But I argue that what is really at stake is a movement of demoralisation. The essay proceeds in three steps. First, we determine what sufficient reason or grounding is, for Deleuze. Sufficient reason is struck with an irreducible ambiguity. It is this ambiguity in sufficient reason that allows it to be taken advantage of, to be used by representation and good sense for a moral purpose. The second part of the essay will therefore concern ‘the moralisation of sufficient reason’. Its focus will be good sense. But then, third, we must understand Deleuze's ‘demoralisation of sufficient reason’, which necessarily passes through others. Like sufficient reason, others are ambiguous, at once lending themselves to what cancels differences, and opening the way towards difference and intensity. The third step focuses on what Deleuze calls ‘the ethics of intensive quantities’. In the Conclusion, I examine Deleuze's famous, almost cliché, definition of ethics as not being unworthy of the event and, through the empty form of time, I connect it to Kant's formalistic ethics.

Drawing on a career-long exploration of 1960s French philosophy, Leonard Lawlor seeks a solution to 'the problem of the worst violence'. The worst violence is the reaction of total apocalypse without remainder; it is the reaction of complete negation and death; it is nihilism. Lawlor argues that it is not just transcendental violence that must be minimised: all violence must itself be reduced to its lowest level. He offers new ways of speaking to best achieve the least violence, which he creatively appropriates from Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze and Guattari as 'speaking-freely', 'speaking-distantly' and 'speaking-in-tongues'.

In this essay, I examine Derrida’s deconstruction (or critique) of the death penalty in his first set of lectures (The Death Penalty, Volume 1). The essay has two parts. First, I reconstruct this deconstruction. I show that the deconstruction depends on the difference between the calculable instant and the incalculable instant. Then, in the second part I show how this difference is based on the deconstruction of temporalization Derrida produced in his 1967 Voice and Phenomenon. The deconstruction of temporalization shows that the calculated instant is impossible, and the future, including the instant of my death, remains incalculable. In the essay’s conclusion, I show that the pardon from the death penalty is only a gift of time, only more time or extra time. The pardon can pardon someone from the condemnation to death, but it cannot pardon anyone from the condemnation to die. The pardon can give only a finite survival.

Being Inclined is erudite, clearly written, and well-argued. It is rich in the history of philosophy and in philosophical ideas. It is not an exaggeration when Sinclair says that “philosophy advances, and can only advance, by means of a living dialogue with the past”. This short review cannot do the book justice.Being Inclined is divided into six chapters. From a historical viewpoint, chapters 1 and 2 are revelatory for the Anglophone reader of the last two hundred years of French philosophy. Sinclair is a master at assembling all the texts that influenced Ravaisson and all the texts on which he had an influence. However, in the first two chapters, Sinclair also presents the basics of Ravaisson’s philosophy...

This essay attempts to conceive precisely what is included in the idea of reversing Platonism. It shows that there are four fundamental aspects that derive from Plato’s dialogues. First, the aspect of thought conceived as interior monologue, from the Theatetus. Second, multiplicity, which comes from the Parmenides. Third, the aspect of an involuntary stimulus to think, from the Republic, Book VII. Finally, the aspect of imagining political life on the basis of the conception of the soul, from the Republic, Book II. These four aspects revolve around two more fundamental ideas: the reversal of Platonism (as Deleuze has shown), conceiving the ideas (forms or essences) as events and (as Derrida has implied) reducing violence to the very least violence. I attempt to actualize this aim by a “hyperbolic Gelassenheit” (letting be), the only genuine reversal of Platonism.

This article attempts to elaborate on the Derridean idea of transcendental violence and his idea of “violence against violence.” It does this by examining the structure of the gift as Derrida presents it in Given Time. The article lays out in detail all of the conditions for the gift Derrida presents across Given Time. More precisely, it examines Derrida’s analysis of the giving of counterfeit money. The conclusion it draws is that the giving of counterfeit money comes closest to the golden mean between exchange and non-exchange, the golden mean between violence and non-violence. But the open question is: should we prescribe the giving of counterfeit money for all gift-giving and even for human relations of friendship and love?

The thesis of this essay, which concerns only Derrida’s Politiques de l’amitié is both anti-Kantian and hyper-Kantian. On the one hand, I show that true friendship or love breaks with the teleology that Kant calls the “humanization of man”, in which friendship has a moral goal. Love must break with the moral goal, because love aimed at the moral goal uses the beloved as a means to an end. It thereby breaks Kant’s moral imperative. It is hyper-Kantian, and in fact, Nietzschean, because the only way to break with means-ends relations lies in making the beloved as distant from me as possible.

This essay attempts to answer three types of question concerning the images of violence found in deconstructive discourse. First, there is the question of confusion between real violence and transcendental violence. Second, there is the question of a lack of vigilance in regard to real violence. And finally, third, there is the question of the need for a moral principle of non-violence. The response to the first type of question lies in the recognition that the violence Derrida attributes to the transcendental level of experience lies in the openness of experience. This openness amounts only to the potential for real or factual violence. The response to the second type of question lies in the recognition that more vigilance is needed since the transcendental level cannot be characterized in mundane terms, and that resistance to the mundane means no images of factual violence. Finally, the response to the third and most difficult question lies in an examination of Derrida’s statement that “tout autre est tout autre.” Through this statement we approach something like a principle, even a moral principle. The statement presents us with an imperative to respect every single other as if he, she, or it were absolutely other.

This article has two parts. On the one hand, it summarizes a lot of the work I have done over the last 10 years. The summary starts with three phenomenological insights: into temporalization, into intersubjectivity, and into foundations. It ends with a discussion of ethics based on Kant and Bergson. On the other hand, the article presents my responses to three commentators on my work: Emilia Angelova, Edward S. Casey, and Samir Haddad. All three raise important questions about my work. All three bring me back to the main point of my work: strategies for letting others be free. Thus, to use a phrase that probably seems out of date, this article could have been called “strategies of deconstruction.”

This essay assesses Kelly Oliver’s long publication career by focusing on two novel ideas we find in her work. Both are ideas belonging to the new kind of ethics Oliver envisions. On the one hand, there is the idea of dependency. Through dependency, she aims to ground an obligation to care for the ones who provide the care to the dependents. The second idea is sublimation. Through her studies of psychoanalysis, Oliver shows that sublimation allows the subject to distance herself from the violence of the drives. Sublimation is Oliver’s response to constitutive violence. In regard to Oliver’s ethical vision, I raise two questions. The first concerns the kind of obligation Oliver grounds; it seems to be hypothetical and not categorical. The second question concerns constitutive violence, whose existence Oliver seems to argue against. I conclude my essay by arguing that we must recognize the constitutive violence in all experience, and find a response to it.

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.

This essay attempts to conceive precisely what is included in the idea of reversing Platonism. It shows that there are four fundamental aspects that derive from Plato’s dialogues. First, the aspect of thought conceived as interior monologue, from the Theatetus. Second, multiplicity, which comes from the Parmenides. Third, the aspect of an involuntary stimulus to think, from the Republic, Book VII. Finally, the aspect of imagining political life on the basis of the conception of the soul, from the Republic, Book II. These four aspects revolve around two more fundamental ideas: the reversal of Platonism (as Deleuze has shown), conceiving the ideas (forms or essences) as events and (as Derrida has implied) reducing violence to the very least violence. I attempt to actualize this aim by a “hyperbolic Gelassenheit” (letting be), the only genuine reversal of Platonism.

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 (glossolalia) that overlap with Foucaultian speaking-freely (parrēsia) and with Derridean speaking-distantly (teleiopoesis), 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 (and Guattari's) 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’ (au profit de) others will allow us to come to understand the true meaning of the phrase ‘capitalism and schizophrenia’.