Adam Rosen-Carole

“‘[C]onscience,’” Nietzsche suggests early in Essay Two of On the Genealogy of Morals, “has a long history and variety of forms behind it” (II.3). Glossing over the explicit equivocity and irony of such statements, most commentators presume that the primary ambition of GM is to reconstruct the emergence and in so doing denaturalize and denounce the reign of conscience, which is treated as equivalent to both bad conscience and slave morality. Such presumption has obscured the central claims, operations, and stakes of the text, indeed of Nietzsche’s late work generally. Although they are intertwined, Nietzsche’s genealogy of conscience is textually, substantively, and strategically distinct from his genealogy of bad conscience, which in turn is involved in but distinct from his genealogy of slave morality. Textually, it is not until Essay Two, section four of On the Genealogy of Morals that Nietzsche begins to ask after the emergence and psychosocial (“physiological”) consequences of bad conscience, while the genealogy of conscience proceeds from the first essay. Substantively, the three genealogies are concerned with manifestly disparate objects. Strategically, the addressees of the three genealogies are diverse, thus are their modes of address: genealogy cannot be reduced to a uniform method.

Despite the historical implausibility of contemporary commitments to a sovereign state-centric geopolitical imaginary, these commitments are indeed in force. Unfortunately, though, contemporary political theory and political philosophy are unable to account for the momentum of the sovereign state-centric geopolitical imaginary.The author claims that much of International Relations theory is a symptom of, rather than a serious analytical engagement with, this imaginary. He then provides an account of sovereignty as conceptually contradictory, exposing sovereignty as caught in a transcendental deadlock wherein its conditions of possibility are at once its conditions of impossibility.Sovereignty is discussed as necessarily incoherent, leveraging the claim that sovereignty must be understood through the ill-fated attempts to instantiate it historically – attempts which, due to their conditions of possibility, are incessantly incomplete and thus ever repeated through domestic and foreign policy making

Derrida’s interest in implicating the serious in the frivolous and vice versa, or more broadly, what one might call his writerly shamelessness, evinces an exorbitant narcissism, a writerly ethos of refusing censorship, an “hyperconceptual” penchant for excess that seems to both condition his truly unparalleled and startlingly acute insights, but also to suffuse his texts with so many loose threads and frayed edges that these texts cannot but seem suspiciously underdeveloped, or brittle in their very grandiosity—as if something were being hidden, or perhaps avoided, by means of their unlimited capaciousness. This paper poses the question of whether Derrida’s writerly impudence, the iconoclastic dimension of deconstruction, squares with the requirement of mutual authorization to critique constitutive of normativity. If Derrida’s writerly practice is as given to unregulated and unregulatable excess as it seems, might there be an at once anti-democratic and philosophically problematic aspect to its seemingly anti-authoritarian ethos of unlimited affirmation? The question will be whether the “consumption of concepts that it produces as much as it inherits” renders deconstruction, by virtue of its nominalism, a form of nihilism—a creative consumerism.

Although sexual difference manifests in innumerable problems that compel our immediate attention – inthe multiplicity of discourses that surround, infuse, and delimit it; in the repeated, sometimes compulsiveperformances that give rise to its various forms and deformations; in the institutionalizations that seek tocodify and regulate its possible meanings and relevance; in the increasingly many domains where it servesas an axis of problematics and a locus of contestations – may one yet pose the question: Is sexual differencestill, if it ever was, a question? In the midst of a plentitude of voices that structure, if not saturate, the fieldsin which sexual difference either plays a pivotal role or maintains an almost muted insistence, may one yetwonder whether sexual difference is or can be primordially understood as question? In seeking toretrieve a certain suppressed, if not forgotten ethos of questioning comportment toward the fundamentaldisquietude of sexual difference, this paper proceeds toward an investigative engagement with Aristotle’sinquiries concerning sexual difference