Rajesh Sampath

This essay will attempt a line-by-line reading of Lacan’s famous “The Mirror Image as Formative I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience” (1949) published in the collected volume of essays, Ecrits (1966). The article attempts to show that Lacan’s essay opens a space of primordiality, whereby we can revisit Heidegger’s critique of subjectivity and the Cogito, terms that originate with Descartes and evolves to Kant’s Critiques of dogmatic metaphysics, particularly in Heidegger’s Being and Time. These are steps Heidegger takes to set up his attempted critique of Hegel, who in turn tries to surpass the history of philosophy rooted in modern subjectivity, particularly in his Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). However, missing in Lacan’s essay and what remains unarticulated in Heidegger’s Being and Time is the following: relation between time, movement, and the space of primordiality where all notions of factical existence dissolve. Being born in time, developing in time, being in or at time, and being-towards-death, as Heidegger struggles to deconstruct – by way of his unique appropriation of phenomenology in Being and Time – can be questioned. Indeed, what Heidegger fails to develop, and he admits it explicitly, is the other side of his ‘one-sided’ treatment in the investigation: he only analyzed death as a possibility of Dasein’s greatest possibility to ‘be-Whole’ authentically (1962, 277) and completely neglected ‘being-towards-birth’ as the ‘other end’ of Dasein’s movement (1962, 425). We will argue that one is never born as a biological fact of existence, a social construction assigned at physical birth, like a gender or sex, or any religious notions of a created being from God the Creator, or any notions of rebirth, reincarnation, or resurrection, namely from religions in the West, like Roman Catholic Christianity, and the East, like Hinduism. Rather, ‘being-towards-birth’ in relation to the linear time of flowing now-points (past as no longer now, present as now, future as yet to be now), or ‘being-within-time,’ (Heidegger 1962, 457) is temporalized other than a dateable origin in spatialized time or history.

This article will offer a close reading of sections 74 and 75 of “Chapter V: Temporality and Historicality” of Division Two of Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927). Our goal is to expand on a speculative metaphysical reconstruction of Chapter 17 of the Gospel of John, when Jesus is finished speaking to the disciples and is addressing the Father alone. This is right before his Passion, namely the arrest, trial, crucifixion, and ultimate Resurrection. The work is not situated in either abstract systematic or biblical theology, which seeks to defend faith, particularly using modern continental philosophical resources, such as the early Heidegger’s fundamental ontology. Then again, it is not a philosophy of religion either, in the sense that it is not concerned with investigating the nature or essence of religion. Rather, it is trying to move within Being and Time to construct anew its ‘missing Division Three’ by creating new terms and distinctions beyond what is offered in the first Two Divisions. Our hypothesis is this: the supersession of Being and Time requires an imaginative metaphysical expansion of hidden secrets buried in the Gospel regarding a strange double temporalization in the discourse of Jesus to his Father. These two temporal planes are phenomenologically irreducible to either the linear sequence of events of his life as narrated in the four Gospels; or the history of theological attempts, particularly twentieth-century theological giants (Barth, Tillich, Rahner, Moltmann, Pannenberg), to think about the time-eternity-history relation with regard to the Kairos (through the Incarnation of the Son) at the fulfilled time and the Parousia, namely the Second Coming at the eschatological end of time. The article concludes with certain criteria regarding judgements on the undecidability of theism vs. atheism when attempting to go beyond Heidegger’s Being and Time. The ontological consequences, and therefore meaning of such an undertaking at a step beyond Being and Time, remain indiscernible for specific reasons.

This paper will pose the question of the future minoritization of the white, gentile, Christian European and EuroAmerican identity, which has dominated world history from colonization through the post-Cold War historical present. The question is not how this is coming to an end in the near future as empirical fact and in what manner, but an attempt to imagine another future, another identity than what has been proscribed in the past. In order to move into this alterity, we will engage in a critical reading of Derrida’s essay “Abraham, The Other,” in the volume titled emJudeities: Questions for Jacques Derrida./em By examining the philosophical complexity of Derrida’s quasi-autobiographical reflection on his Jewish identity, we can prepare the conditions for how the future gentile white European identity could look when not grounded in its self-edifying monotheism of a white, Christiandominated political and cultural state. The relation between the future diversification of European identity is not just a matter of postcolonial immigration and multiculturalism. It has to do with the ontological problem of how to understand the origin and telos of gentile white European identity in its Christian heritage and metaphysics (from the ancient Greeks to Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger) when simple notions of origin and end are erased. This brings in the philosophical problem of historical time, movement, and epochal shifts between today’s Europe and another Europe, today’s future and what is other to that. Derrida’s text provides a guide into what is other to monotheism, unicity, oneness, and—by extension, we will argue—gentile whiteness, Christianness too, which is not simply the opposite of polytheism and today’s racial diversity, i.e., non-white and non-western Christian minorities in Europe, the United States, Canada, and the “west” in general. Having said that, this does have obvious implications regarding justice and equality as European and “western” societies in general diversify. Linking the most archaic, or the farthest in distance beyond the mythic origin of Abraham and therefore of Jewish biblical-historical identity, raises the prospects of “another” Abraham. This Other is not rooted in historical memory. This paper argues that Derrida’s reflections will help us understand an alternative future whose metaphysics is yet to be written, one that is not simply a repetition of the contents of the history of (gentile) religion and philosophy in Europe and its linear, successive, chronological historical time-frame, i.e., the Gregorian calendar./p.

This paper attempts a careful reading of chapter I of Division Two, particularly section 53, on death in Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927). Our aim is to deconstruct some of Heidegger’s assumptions while imagining the margins of his text that could warrant a comparison and contrast with the biblical theological material of the New Testament. In parallel by reading the Synoptic Gospel of Mark on Jesus’s agony in the garden prior to his arrest, trial, death, and resurrection, we can initiate a series of comparisons and contrasts. For Heidegger, there is no conception or idea beyond death, and yet death itself as a possibility, even as the greatest possibility to be, is not like any other point in time that a human being can experience, grasp, remember, or anticipate while they are alive. It is not the witnessing of the medically certified death of another person or animal. Out of this paradox, we will argue for a greater philosophical degree of complexity that Jesus the human being experiences when it comes to the possibility of death and the impossibility to surmount it. In the same token we cannot exclude the theological doctrine of the single hypostatic substance (as two natures) of the historically finite person Jesus as human flesh and divine transcendence. So philosophically speaking, his death is unique even though its event as physical expiration on the Cross is like any other human being. However, the physical death of the human called Jesus does not answer the question of the meaning of death in the split-natured unified hypostatic substance of Christ, the Second Person of the Triune Christian God, which includes the First Person of the Father and the Third Person of the Holy Spirit. By tracing a series of complicated philosophical relations, we hope to contribute to the fields of philosophical theology, albeit a heterodox one, and the philosophy of religion while attending to the inherent secular limits that Heidegger’s philosophy requires in so far as he imagines his project as ‘ontological,’ and not ‘theological’ or ‘historical.’ We conclude with certain philosophical speculations to what is other to both Heidegger’s ontology and mainstream Christian theology.

This paper excavates certain impulses that are buried in Pierre Klossowski’s 1968 edition of his original 1947 work, Sade My Neighbor. We argue that the self-suffocating nature of our historical present reveals the problem of an epochal threshold: in which twenty-first century democracy itself is threatened with death and violence in delusional neofascist attempts at national self-preservation. This speaks to a deeper enigma of time, epochal shifts, and the mystery of historical time; but it does so in a manner that escapes classical problems in the philosophy of history. Rather, by returning to Klossowski’s late 1940s and late 1960s contexts while reoccupying the New Testament question of Jesus’s foresakeness on the Cross, we unravel a series of paradoxes and aporias that attempt to deepen metaphysical problems of time, death, and the sovereign autonomy of human freedom and existence. Ultimately the paper concludes by offering certain speculative philosophical constructions on why today’s self-cannibalization of democracy has its roots in unresolved tensions that span these two poles: a.) the primordial secret of early Christian proclamation of Jesus’s death and b.) the post-Christian Sadean experiment of a philosophical revolution that was doomed to implode when the valorization of pain, suffering, and death fails to fill the vacuum left behind by atheism.

I am not concerned with whether Heidegger’s philosophy is a "secularisation" of primitive Christianity buried beneath the excrescence of a dead medieval Scholasticism and the "ontotheological constitution of its metaphysics". Nor I am concerned with seeking out the theological roots of Heidegger’s philosophy even though he and others may claim that his philosophy is rabidly a-theistic. To repeat, this paper is not interested in intellectual history and or a genealogical reconstruction of Heidegger’s true intentions and the contradictions that are displayed in his published works and what that could mean for the relation between theology and the philosophy of religion. We have to tread a path, making it new, as opposed to discovering a new path that has yet to be taken. Creation is harder than discovery; the former is active and intentional, albeit obscure, and the latter is passive, even accidental, albeit something that can be more readily followed.

This paper aims to compare and contrast Barth and Heidegger on the question of time. Although Barth speaks from the theological standpoint and Heidegger considers theology as a form of an "ontic science" distinct from his fundamental ontology in Being and Time, I pose the following question: To what extent can an appropriation of Barth, ironically, transcend the limits of Heidegger’s Being and Time, which could not offer its missing division III? We hypothesize that this step beyond Being and Time can help frame a research agenda to frame – ontologically – the problem of the very of Being of God’s time. And this agenda would go beyond the limits of Barthian theology on the one hand and Heidegger’s first two divisions of Being and Time on the other.

This paper examines Ambedkar’s critical view of certain distortions, contradictions, and instabilities in democratic norms, constitutional validity, and citizens’ rights in India’s secular, constitutional, legal, pluralistic democracy. Through a strident deconstruction utilizing Hegelian resources, the paper exposes the contortions and contradictions underpinning Hindu metaphysics in some of its most abstract texts, namely the ancient Upanishads. Through this deconstructive lens we unpack various aporias embedded in concepts of selfhood that render a truly liberal democratic political notion of citizenship impossible. The paper concludes with the necessity of further research on comparative philosophies of religion and political philosophy to better understand the limits of secular democracy, particularly for minority rights, in different metaphysical and civilizational traditions.

This paper will articulate the conditions of thinking about the transition of Division II in Heidegger’s Being and Time in order to imagine the architecture of the missing Division III, which never appeared in the published Part I of Being and Time (1927). The paper explores questions of temporality, historical temporality, and Heidegger’s confrontation with Hegel at the end of Being and Time while enlisting the resources of his very late lecture of 1962 – “On Time and Being” – to lay down the conditions of possibility to reconstruct the missing Division III. The paper argues that this feat has yet to be adequately accomplished given 90 years that have elapsed since the publication of Being and Time.

I analyze the early works of the French thinker Michel Foucault. I study the essential connections between his historical works, or "archaeologies," and his elaborate articulation on method and historical epistemology, The Archaeology of Knowledge, . Given the fact that Foucault's work has had an enormous impact on how some historians conceptualize the methods and aims of historical inquiry, I take up the question of the historical status of Foucault's method of inquiry, namely "archaeology." By analyzing interpretations of Foucault by two of his contemporaries, Louis Althusser and Michel De Certeau, I attempt to test new concepts that can determine the boundaries of the historicity of Foucault's archaeological method. I consider my work to be a theoretical conceptualization to fill epistemological gaps in a past system of thought by way of a historical analysis of the context of its interpretations . By exploring the historicity of Foucault's theory of history and its ambiguous concept of historical time, I argue for major differences between Foucault's archaeological inquiry and our modern understanding of historical practice. My main conclusion is that Foucault's archaeological field and the contemporary historical field can be contrasted in terms of how they relate to a concept of historical time, the ontological problem of origins, the epistemological problem of change and causality, and the hermeneutic question of historical consciousness and subjectivity

This paper begins with several opening passages from the most esoteric writings in Hinduism’s vast, ancient religious-philosophical heritage, namely the Upanishads. The aim is to reveal certain essential connections between the primordial relation between self and sacrifice while exploring uncanny paradoxes of eternity and time, immortals and mortals and their secret linkages. The work is entirely philosophical in its intent and does not aspire to defend a faith-perspective. The horizon for this exposition follows the spirit of Ambedkar’s critique of Brahmanic superiority inherent in this entire system of religious thought: we must expose what lies in the heart of modern Hinduism to reveal its inner-contradictory entanglements, which are not exactly innocuous. A phenomenological-deconstructive inspiration motivates our own critical theoretical-philosophical conceptualizations beyond Ambedkar’s basic attestation to liberate India from Hinduism. The enterprise derives from a speculative appropriation and extension of the depths of (CC.) ‘Religion,’ the penultimate chapter of Hegel’s indomitable Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). The aim of the paper is to advance new philosophical theses in an unrelenting metaphysical critique of Hinduism– beyond Ambedkar’s writings–but also in a manner that is irreducible to the Western philosophical cosmos within which the nineteenth-century Hegel inhabited. The paper argues that the internal contradictions and aporias of mortality, immortality, self, bodyhood, time, and eternity in the Hindu Upanishads can be contrasted with Hegel’s speculative Western-Christological propositions to expose a greater metaphysical complexity that escapes Eastern and Western religious and philosophical traditions alike. Therefore, the paper falls within the scope of comparative philosophies of religion.

This paper will attempt a Hegelian reading of Derrida’s Beast and the Sovereign Vol 1 lectures to unpack certain apories and paradoxes in Ambedkar’s brief 1932 statement on modern India’s founding figure, Gandhi. In that small text Ambedkar is critical of Gandhi’s seemingly saintly attempt at fasting himself to death. Ambedkar diagnoses that Gandhi’s act of self-sacrifice conceals a type of subtle coercion of certain political decisions during India’s independent movement from British colonialism. In order to unpack philosophical assumptions in Ambedkar’s statement, this paper examines Derrida’s startlingly original insights into animality, law, and sovereignty in confronting two of the Western tradition’s giants in political philosophy, namely Hobbes and Schmitt. My intuition is that Derridean deconstruction can be expanded further by deploying certain Hegelian resources. My ultimate aim is to show how Western notions of man, soul, God, the sovereign, and the state begin to dissolve when examining the Hindu metaphysical cosmology of the caste system. My thesis and concluding reflections argue that only by destroying that cosmological system of politico-metaphysical inequality can a true democratic notion of the sovereign state emerge in the Indian context.

This work is a two-division study of twentieth century philosophies of history in Europe. Fields engaged in the study are transcendental philosophy, speculative metaphysics, theology, historiographical theory, and intellectual history. The main question concerns the historical finitude of History and its temporal horizon. The work explores the unsolved consequences of G.W.F. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and Martin Heidegger's Being and Time in twentieth-century German and French philosophies of History.

This work is a two-division study of twentieth century philosophies of history in Europe. Fields engaged in the study are transcendental philosophy, speculative metaphysics, theology, historiographical theory, and intellectual history. The main question concerns the historical finitude of History and its temporal horizon. The work explores the unsolved consequences of G.W.F. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and Martin Heidegger's Being and Time in twentieth-century German and French philosophies of History