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72Emmanuel Levinas’s “The Spiritual Essence of Antisemitism (according to Jacques Maritain)”Levinas Studies 15 1-7. 2021.The following is an early, previously untranslated essay by Emmanuel Levinas concerning “the metaphysics of antisemitism.” This essay, published originally in 1938 for Paix et Droit, concerns the shared history and destiny of Jews and Christians, religious groups who maintain a relation of essential “foreignness” to, and so “do not belong” to, the “pagan” world. Levinas distinguishes between the long history of Jewish-Christian antagonism and the newer Nazi-style antisemitism, a particularly ins…Read more
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39The Strange and the Stranger (1958): Translated and Introduced by Michael PortalDiacritics 51 (1): 76-101. 2023.Maurice Blanchot’s “The Strange and the Stranger” (1958) is an essential text for understanding Blanchot’s thought, its development, and its enduring importance. He presents an early account of the impersonal “neuter” in subject-less experiences like “alienation,” “alteration,” “dispersion,” “disappearance,” and “absence.” These experiences of strangeness threaten thought, which is only “itself and for-itself its own experience.” Relatedly, they also reveal “the neutrality of being or neutrality…Read more
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23Gerundive thinking in Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback’s Time in ExileComparative and Continental Philosophy 13 (3): 291-296. 2021.ABSTRACT Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback’s Time in Exile illuminates being in “gerundive time.” The gerundive tense (which is similar to the infinitive tense in English) captures how our being is always already “suspended” between worlds and meanings—how our being is a “non-final verb.” Schuback considers such existence in the work of Martin Heidegger, Maurice Blanchot, and Clarice Lispector. Of the three thinkers, Lispector’s writing best reveals how existence (especially existence in exile) is a…Read more
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22Response to “Critical Commodities: Adorno on Beethoven and Jazz”Southwest Philosophy Review 38 (2): 55-57. 2022.
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21Language by Birth and Nationality by DeathAngelaki 29 (1): 85-96. 2024.Most countries provide some form of nationality or citizenship either by birthright or inheritance. This paper accepts Jacques Derrida’s invitation to imagine nationality or citizenship otherwise, this time by death and burial: you are from where you die or are buried. I read Derrida’s invitation alongside his four studies of Martin Heidegger’s use of “Geschlecht” to argue that we ought to reconsider the relationship between the nation and (its) philosophy. I show that Derrida’s proposed “law of…Read more
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20Introduction to Levinas’s “The Asymmetry of the Face”Philosophy Today 67 (2): 465-470. 2023.France Guwy and Emmanuel Levinas discuss the relationship between “the Bible and philosophy.” Levinas explains that he never “experienced” a contradiction between the two, and that they both aim at the same thing: meaning outside of immanence. Such transcendence, Levinas argues, is impossible for the Spinozist.
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15Introduction to ‘Session Six’ of ‘Donner – le temps’ ( Given Time vol. 2)Derrida Today 17 (2): 126-130. 2024.Click to increase image size.
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9Gifts for No One or Anyone: Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida on PersonneDerrida Today 17 (3): 271-284. 2024.In Parages, Jacques Derrida writes that the ‘Donner – le temps’ seminar ‘led up to’ a study of Maurice Blanchot’s La folie du jour. That study is the improvised fourteenth session of Donner le temps II. Derrida turns to La folie du jour to treat in more explicit terms the structure of the ‘ récit’ which was particularly relevant to his reading of Charles Baudelaire’s récit ‘La fausse monnaie’ earlier in the seminar, but which is almost entirely absent from the sessions included in Donner le temp…Read more
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1Emmanuel Levinas’s “Religion and Idea of the Infinite” (1982)Levinas Studies 17 1-15. 2023.In 1982 Emmanuel Levinas contributed a “lesson” on religion to a series in Le Monde. Intended for a general audience, Levinas’s lesson is a clear and concise introduction to his thought in general—and, in particular, to the curious persistence of the idea of God or the Infinite despite modernity. After the death of God, what remains, invoking Descartes, is the “idea of God” or even the “expectation” of God (and, so, of some greater “meaning [sens] and justification”). Between Pascal and Heidegge…Read more
College Station, Texas, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Jewish Philosophy |
Continental Philosophy |
Metaphysics |
Areas of Interest
Applied Ethics |
Metaphysics |
Existentialism |
Phenomenology |
Hermeneutics |