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 essay attempts to reflect on Bergson’s contribution to the reversal of Platonism. Heidegger, of course, had set the standard for reversing Platonism. Thus the question posed in this essay, following Heidegger, is: does Bergson manage not only to reverse Platonism but also to twist free of it. The answer presented here is that Bergson does twist free, which explains Deleuze’s persistent appropriations of Bergsonian thought. Memory in Bergson turns out to be not a memory of an idea, or even of the good, which is one, but a memory of multiplicity. Therefore Bergson’s memory is really, from a Platonistic standpoint, forgetfulness or, even, a counter-memory.

But for us who are fifty years removed from these courses, they present in the clearest way possible what requirements we must still follow in order to determine what an origin or principle is. Indeed, “principle” is a word that Merleau-Ponty uses repeatedly in the courses. For Merleau-Ponty, the principle must be conceived neither as positive nor negative, neither as infinite nor finite, neither as internal nor external, neither as objective nor subjective; it can be thought neither through idealism nor realism, neither through finalism nor mechanism, neither through determinism nor indeterminism, neither through humanism nor naturalism. What makes this principle so problematic for Merleau-Ponty is that none of these concepts and modes of thought can grasp the “residue,” or in more accessible terms, the “contingency” in which nature consists. Nature is contingent insofar as it is not a “reservoir” of possibilities. Instead, nature is hollowed out, a hollow that nevertheless presents in relief what is necessary for nature to be filled in. Even more, nature is, for Merleau-Ponty, eternally hollowed out, which gives it the sense of inertia, solidity, obstinancy, a sense of life as eternally self-regenerating, even a sense of “eternal return”. Here, however, we would have to raise a question: Does this conception of nature or life truly take account of finitude understood through the phenomenon of death? Unlike Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, it seems, has no answer to this question.-Leonard Lawlor, The University of Memphis.

Let us begin by assembling some signs of the present philosophical situation. On the one hand, the most important living French philosopher, Alain Badiou, calls for a “return to Plato,” despite the movement of anti-Platonism that dominated French and German thought in the 20 th century. On the other hand, the present moment sees a resurgence of naturalism in philosophy in general (including and especially Anglophone analytic philosophy), despite the criticisms of naturalism that have appeared throughout the 20 th century. Phenomenology seems to be at the center of both of these movements. On the one hand, it is the idea of a mathematized ontology that requires the return to Plato, a mathematized ontology constructed without a reflection on its transcendental grounds. On the other, the resurgence of naturalism is so strong that a book could be imagined and published with the bastard name of Naturalizing Phenomenology , as if the transcendental moment of phenomenology did not transform the very meaning of nature. These signs seem to indicate that we have entered into a phase of regression or even decline in philosophical thinking. If this interpretation of the signs is correct, if we have indeed entered into a phase of regression -- a twofold regression toward Platonism and toward naturalism -- we must ask the following question: is it possible for us to define something like a project or even a research agenda that would allow us to define a way of thinking that might lead us out of the present situation, a situation, it must be said, that seems dire for philosophy in general? If we can determine such a research agenda, perhaps we can also begin to understand what the tradition of “continental philosophy” has stood for