Hegel and Derrida on Forgiveness: The Impossible at the Core of the Political

Derrida Today ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-68
Author(s):  
Acosta López María del Rosario

In order to illuminate the very complex relationship between ethics and politics in the thought of Jacques Derrida, this paper stages the (dis)encounter between Hegel's and Derrida's notion of forgiveness. It will be shown how for these two authors forgiveness is closely related both with certain ‘impossibility’, and with the disclosure of a condition for rethinking the ethico-political realm. Both Hegel and Derrida seem to suggest that forgiveness opens up a realm in which something must remain ‘absolute’, that is to say, ‘intact, inaccessible to law, to politics, even to morals’. And, for both, it seems to be precisely there, where something arrives at the verge of politics, that a thinking (and a re-thinking) of the ‘political’ becomes possible. The paper explores what kind of impossibility is staged in each case, and how can each one bring into light the risks and limits, but also the scope and significance of the other.

Derrida Today ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-36
Author(s):  
Grant Farred

‘The Final “Thank You”’ uses the work of Jacques Derrida and Friedrich Nietzsche to think the occasion of the 1995 rugby World Cup, hosted by the newly democratic South Africa. This paper deploys Nietzsche's Zarathustra to critique how a figure such as Nelson Mandela is understood as a ‘Superman’ or an ‘Overhuman’ in the moment of political transition. The philosophical focus of the paper, however, turns on the ‘thank yous’ exchanged by the white South African rugby captain, François Pienaar, and the black president at the event of the Springbok victory. It is the value, and the proximity and negation, of the ‘thank yous’ – the relation of one to the other – that constitutes the core of the article. 1


Author(s):  
Geoffrey Bennington

Scatter 2 identifies politics as an object of perennial difficulty for philosophy—as recalcitrant to philosophical mastery as is philosophy’s traditional adversary, poetry. That difficulty makes it an attractive area of attention for any deconstructive approach to the tradition from which we inevitably inherit our language and our concepts. Scatter 2 pursues that deconstruction, often starting, and sometimes departing, from the work of Jacques Derrida, by attending to the concepts of sovereignty on the one hand, and democracy on the other. Part I follows the fate of a line from Book II of Homer’s Iliad, where Odysseus asserts that “the rule of many is no good thing, let there be one ruler, one king,” as it is quoted and misquoted, and progressively Christianized, by authors including Aristotle, Philo Judaeus, Suetonius, the early Church Fathers, Aquinas, Dante, Ockham, Marsilius of Padua, Jean Bodin, Etienne de la Boétie, up to Carl Schmitt and Erik Peterson, and even one of the defendants at the Nuremberg Trials, before being discussed by Derrida himself. Part II begins again, as it were, with Plato and Aristotle, and tracks the concept of democracy as it regularly impacts and tends to undermine that sovereignist tradition, and, more especially in detailed readings of Hobbes and Rousseau, develops a notion of “proto-democracy” as a possible name for the scatter that underlies and drives the political as such, and that will always prevent politics from achieving its aim of bringing itself to an end.


Arts ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 91
Author(s):  
Achia Anzi

My paper examines Mieke Bal’s concept of migratory aesthetics through the prism of hospitality. Critical of academic and institutional tendencies that either deny particularism or pin agents and artefacts to their alleged context, Bal develops her concept as a way of accommodating contemporary mobility without undermining cultural specificity. While arguing that “there is no such thing as site-unspecific art”, Bal is also critical of new historicism’s and traditional art history’s overemphasis on “provenance”, and underscores the political ramifications of this approach. Her critique can be read through the framework of hospitality. The notion of “provenance” frames the guest as the other and limits her ability to participate in the host’s culture. Hospitality, however, as Jacques Derrida maintains, is an ambivalent concept. While extending a friendly welcome, it also preserves hierarchy between the host and the guest. In my paper, I examine this other side of hospitality in Yael Bartana’s film True Finn (2014) and in Lost in Space (2005) of Mieke Bal and Shahram Entekhabi. I explore how these films organise the host/guest relation and how they deal with the political entanglement of hospitality.


1980 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Richard J. Walter

Socialism, as expressed by political parties professing that ideology, has had only minimal impact on Argentina's twentieth-century political history. On the other hand socialist ideas, broadly defined, have had considerable influence, although often in an indirect manner. In the political realm, for example, popular presidents Hipólito Yrigoyen (1916-1922; 1928-1930) and Juan Perón (1946-1955; 1973-1974) sought to pre-empt and co-opt socialism's appeal to the working class by proposing and implementing socialist-inspired reforms wrapped in nationalist rhetoric. Conversely, after the fall of Perón in 1955 various military governments have based their intervention into national politics largely on the need to stem the flow of Marxist ideas, to prevent the growth of socialist organizations—especially those which would repeat the Cuban revolutionary experience on Argentine soil—and to protect the principles of free enterprise capitalism.


Religions ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (12) ◽  
pp. 381
Author(s):  
Steve Larocco

Adi Ophir has suggested that the political realm is an order of evils, producing and managing regular forms of suffering and violence rather than eliminating them. Thus, the political is always to some extent a corrupted order of justice. Emmanuel Levinas’ work presents in its focus on the face-to-face relationship a means of rethinking how to make the political more open to compassionate justice. Though Levinas himself doesn’t sufficiently take on this question, I argue that his work facilitates a way of thinking about commiserative shame that provides a means to connect the face-to-face to its potential effects in the political sphere. If such shame isn’t ignored or bypassed, it produces an unsettling relation to the other that in its adversity motivates a kind of responsibility and care for the other that can alter the public sphere.


Author(s):  
Ehab NAAS

National security is one of the most important components of the state’s entity to preserve its role and position and ensure its progress. Therefore, it is noted that most countries of the world give priority to issues related to national security. On the other hand, it can be said that Libyan national security has not received sufficient attention at the practical and academic levels, and this may be due to more than reason; The political data were not aware of the importance of the matter intentionally or unintentionally, and with the succession of events and developments in Libya in recent years, the issue began to take serious dimensions affecting the Libyan national security in its broad sense at the core, which requires concerted official, informal and academic efforts to address and address this. Topic. Libya is going through conditions and events that are not appropriate for stability and national security cohesion. Indeed, Libya is now living in a vacuum and a national reality characterized by many indicators of disintegration, conflict and violence. This is evident in the criticism of citizens, but in phenomena and events that negatively affect the coherence of national security, and this situation will inevitably lead to Citizens' lack of confidence in their state, but rather to the dissolution and disintegration of the structure of society, and the transformation of this building into groups, tribes, or regions in conflict and even warring with weapons, and this conflict will increase the disintegration of national cohesion and create a national political vacuum that helps foreign intervention in the Libyan affairs under the pretext of helping to maintain security and stability. This intervention may conceal foreign interests and agendas, and lead the country to the unknown and all the possibilities and political and security scenes whose far-reaching goals Libyans are ignorant of. Therefore, everyone in Libya is walking on a road that they do not know its end, and this requires thinking, planning and action to preserve national security and increase the degree of cohesion of all its components, whether Be it tribes, groups, or political and ideological centers, all Libyans are in one boat sailing towards the shore of safety, and it may sink in a sea that does not know the end of its end, and in view of these considerations, we saw the need to address the problems and repel the greedy in the wealth of Libya, to preserve the Libyan national security and make recommendations to strengthen it And maintain it. With our knowledge of the broadening aspects of national security in its broadest sense, we can begin to root this issue by examining its foundations and the current challenges it faces. Keywords: National Security, Geopolitics, Strategy, Foreign Policy, Threats and Risks.


Author(s):  
Iris Laner

Preservation, positive affection, hope and experience are some of the core concerns of post-critical pedagogy. In order to highlight them, post-critical approaches regard it as necessary to refuse critical action on the one hand and separate the pedagogical from the political sphere on the other. In my paper I will suggest that there is a possibility to stress post-critical ideas and the need to rethink what pedagogical thinking and action is about without abandoning the critical attitude and the orientation towards the political. This possibility is bound to an inverse perspective on critique and politics. In this inverse view, which I develop engaging with recent debates in critical theory, critique can be framed as a situated engagement that faces the other within a lively present experience. Politics can be understood as variable forms of living together with humans and non-humans on the basis of shared times and spaces. Bringing in this perspective, makes it possible to go beyond the critique-post-critique-struggle and introduce an approach that is sympathetic with both critical and post-critical concerns.


Diogenes ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 039219212097038
Author(s):  
Sarinya Arunkhajornsak

This paper examines Mencius’ view on compassion in the political realm by proposing that Mencius defends compassionate governance by reconciling the two extremes of Yangist self-love and Mohist universal love. This paper proposes a reading of two famous stories, namely, the story of a young child on the verge of falling into a well, and the story of King Xuan of Qi sparing an ox as paradigmatic cases for understanding Mencius’ account of compassion in the political realm. This paper argues that Mencius succeeds in his defense of governance with compassion against the other two extremes of self-love and altruism. To provide an argument for compatibility with egoism or self-love, this paper offers an analysis of Mencius’ idea of the ruler sharing pleasure with his people instead of denying pleasure for himself. In this sense, a good ruler does not need to sacrifice his self-interest. To counter the demand of universal love of the Mohists, Mencius develops a position that the Confucian ideal ruler, while not sacrificing his self-interests, those interests need to be guided and directed by a proper process of moral cultivation of his compassionate heart so that he can readily share his pleasures with all the peoples in his kingdom. These readings indicate Mencius’ expanded argument for political implications of compassion in the moral universe of the Confucian school.


2003 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 273-292
Author(s):  
SHARON L. WOLCHIK

Over a decade has passed since the heady days of 1989 and 1990 when communist governments fell one after the other and almost all political parties taking part in elections shared the same goals: Democracy, the Market, and Back to Europe. In December 2002, the efforts of the new leaders of these countries to ‘return to Europe’ bore fruit in an event that many had in 1989 regarded as too farfetched to imagine, the invitation of most of the countries in the region to join the EU in 2004 or 2007. The culmination of a decade-long process of harmonization and negotiation, this invitation symbolized the success of these countries in instituting political democracies and market economies. But how complete is this process, particularly in the political realm?


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