Jason Winfree

This paper addresses the self-overcoming of historical consciousness in Nietzsche’s “The Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life” and contemporaneous texts. I argue that Nietzsche’s particular historical awareness, which conditions his treatment of historiography [Historie], is indebted to the lineage of German Idealism it also overtly contests. That contestation reaches its apex in Nietzsche’s valorization of appearance and the redirection of poietic power, which enables him to affirm an art of history rather than a science thereof, indeed, an art aligned with justice.

This paper approaches the experience of wonder phenomenologically. The account is descriptive. I suggest that in addition to the familiar treatments of wonder as constituted through a break with everyday involvement, on the one hand, and an awareness of the sheer fact of existence, on the other, the experience of wonder involves an intensification of the primary contact by which the world is given. That contact is prior to and presupposed by both our involvement with objects as implements of mediation and our relation to others as persons. Because of that, wonder is depersonalizing and neutralizing, and so takes place outside any sense of ethical obligation. In contrast to efforts that aim at linking wonder and the good, I suggest that wonder is more aptly understood as making us deeper without making us better.

This paper offers a genealogy of national unity in the United States approached through practices of consumption and punishment. Drawing on the work of Foucault, Mauss, and Bataille, the analysis shows how these practices are mutually determining, how they demonstrate an economy of excess as opposed to one of utility or conservation, and how they depend on and reinforce specific patterns of discursive and emotional coding. The Thanksgiving holiday serves as a privileged site for locating the elements of an apparatus that stretches from the earliest days of colonization to the present, and that operates across diverse political, religious, and ethnic lines.

This paper examines Bataille’s role in the formation of the question of community, as developed by Nancy and Blanchot. The paper aims to situate the problematic status of Bataille’s influence—as both formative but ultimately insufficient—in his relation to Nietzsche and what Bataille understands as the experience of an irrecoverable loss. What it would mean to share such loss, what is at stake in bringing that experience to articulation, and what happens to those who endeavor to do so constitute the recalcitrant elements in Bataille’s thought, which solicit but cannot sustain a renewal of the question of community.

Abysses: Writing and Transformation in Nietzsche and Heidegger is an attempt to determine the question of philosophical discourse in the work of these two thinkers as abyssal. That is, it argues that Nietzsche's and Heidegger's philosophical writings are best understood in terms of movements away from traditional grounds of philosophical discourse, such as the subject, truth, and being. These movements require of each thinker new strategies, questions, and difficulties, which eventually lead them to questions concerning the possibilities and formation of their own discourses. The dissertation argues not only that this difficulty is central to Nietzsche and Heidegger, however, but also to those who read Nietzsche and Heidegger, such that it requires of the reader new strategies and risks. In this way, the question of philosophical discourse, as engaged by Nietzsche and by Heidegger, opens onto the question of writing and transformation, which the dissertation attempts to maintain or hold open through an interrogation of its limits and formation

This paper aims to situate Agamben’s treatment of the issue of community. It shows how Agamben departs from and supplements the French discourse on community through a critique of negativity; how the significance of community is measured against the society of the spectacle; and how the alienation from our linguistic being, which the spectacle effects, conditions a politics opposed to the State apparatus. Agamben’s coming community appropriates the dispossession and impropriety of contemporary human being in order to reconfigure the relation of belonging and singularity.

This paper investigates the fragmentation required of the philosophy of history in light of three key moments in its formation: German Idealism’s desire to see freedom realized in the world, the death of God, and the disasters of the twentieth century. I argue that Walter Benjamin and Maurice Blanchot respond to these threads of the philosophy of history with revolutionary imperatives that belong to no program or project, imperatives that both reorganize and destructure the work of education, affirmations of transience and unmediated violence. I argue, following their lead, that any philosophy of history today must begin in a refusal of state power and the mediated violence of contemporary forms of community.

This paper traces the (de)formative force of Heidegger's thought on Blanchot's writing. In the paper, I attempt to show how the question of nihilism and the question of truth in the work of Heidegger impose on Blanchot what he calls the exigency of the fragment. This exigency arises more specifically from an affinity and attunement in Blanchot's work to Heidegger's sense of Aus-setzen, on the one hand, and a resistance in Blanchot's work to Heidegger's sense of Ent-wurf, on the other. Fragmentation responds to the risk of ex-posure in a way that withdraws the horizon against which something like Entwurf might be "measured." This response can be characterized as a renewed atentiveness to the relation of errancy and withdrawal.