Leonard Lawlor

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 Thus, to use a phrase that probably seems out of date, this article could have been called “strategies of deconstruction.”

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 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.

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?

In the 1970's Paul Ricoeur and Jacques Derrida participated in a published debate over the nature of philosophical discourse. The question of the possibility of univocal discourse in philosophy drives the published debate. I provide a commentary on this debate and situate it in a broader confrontation over the nature of language in general. Ricoeur sees language as the discursive event which aims at the communication of univocal meaning. I show that the discursive event, for Ricoeur, happens in the present, and that presentness implies singularity and wholeness. In contrast, Derrida holds that the unavoidable use of iterable forms of phonemes and graphemes, what Derrida calls traces or traits, can always threaten communication by producing an irreducible metaphoricity. I show that the primary characteristic of iterability is absence or nonpresence and that nonpresence implies plurality and differentiality . ;Yet, the confrontation between Ricoeur and Derrida is not a simple opposition between event and iterability, between univocity and metaphoricity. Ricoeur always asserts that language possesses a type of iterability or repeatability and a type of metaphoricity or plurivocity. I show, however, that, for Ricoeur, repeatability designates repeatability of meaning and it always functions teleologically. It always aims at unity, identity and univocity. For Derrida, iterability designates not simply repeatability of meaning but repeatability of linguistic forms, from which meaning is inseparable. Iterability never functions teleologically. It is the essential possibility of deviation from any normative precedent, from any unity, from any identity, from any univocity. ;I conclude by taking up two points which Derrida makes throughout his writings. First, Derrida shows the absolute necessity of the externalization of meaning in iterable linguistic forms. Second, a linguistic form is not strictly or identically repeatable. I argue that these two points are undeniable. Thus I conclude that Ricoeur's attempt to assure a certain type of philosophical univocity, his attempt to revitalize metaphysics, the very project which animates perhaps all of Ricoeur's hermeneutical philosophy, cannot succeed

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.

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.