The Hidden Law of Selfhood: Reading Heidegger's Ipseity after Derrida's Hospitality

2021 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 268-289
Author(s):  
Benjamin Brewer ◽  
Ronald Mendoza-de Jesús
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Sovereign Power ◽  
Relational Thinking ◽  
Metaphysics Of Presence

Despite his wide-ranging and incisive engagement with Heidegger's thought across his career, Derrida seems to have written very little about Heidegger's Ereignis manuscripts, which, according to many commentators, constitute the place where Heidegger's thinking comes closest to Derridean deconstruction. Taking up Derrida's comments in Hospitality 1 on the figure of ‘selfhood’ ( Selbstheit) in Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophy, this essay argues that this dense but important moment of engagement with the Ereignis manuscripts reveals the extent to which Heidegger's thinking of selfhood, in spite of its fundamentally relational character, remains thoroughly determined by ipseity, the philosopheme that links selfhood, possibility, and sovereignty within the metaphysics of presence. Beginning with a reconstruction of the link between power and selfhood in Derrida's thinking of ipseity and a close-reading of the key passage in Hospitality 1, the essay then turns to Heidegger's engagement with Hölderlin to show both the depth of Heidegger's commitment to a relational thinking of selfhood and the philosophical and rhetorical safeguards by which he ensures that the relations of difference that constitute the self continue to function in the name of the ipseity, understood as the very Ur-form of sovereign power.

Let the Witness Speak: From Archi-writing to the Community to come

Derrida Today ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 260-270
Author(s):  
Francesco Vitale
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Political Tradition ◽  
Metaphysics Of Presence ◽  
The Absolute ◽  
To Come ◽  
The One ◽  
The Sacrifice

The paper aims to present a reading of the question of Testimony rising in Derrida's later works (from Faith and Knowledge to Poetics and Politics of Witnessing): the experience of Testimony as the irreducible condition of the relation to the Other, of every possible link among living human singularities and, thus, of the thinking of a community to come. This thinking is able to divert the community from the economy grounding and structuring it within our political tradition governed by the metaphysics of presence, which demands the sacrifice of the Other in its multiple theoretical and practical forms. We intend to read this proposal and to point out its rich perspectives by bringing it into the articulation of an ethical-political archi-writing. So we suggest going back to Derrida's early analyses of phenomenology and to De la grammatologie in order to present a reading of archi-writing as the irreducible condition of the relation to otherness and, thus, of the experience through which a living human singularity constitutes itself, a singularity different from the one our tradition compels us to think of within the pattern of the absolute presence to the self, free from the relation to the other.

scholarly journals Ruin philosophy, poetic discourse and the collapse of meta-narratives in Aleksandr Kushner's poetry of the 1970s

Nordlit ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andreas Schönle
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Poetic Discourse ◽  
Philosophical Background ◽  
The Face ◽  
Creative Forces ◽  
Bear Witness ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
The Way

This article offers an analysis of the trope of ruin in the poetry of Aleksandr Kushner (born 1936), in particular through a close reading of two of his poems: “In a slippery graveyard, alone” and “Ruins”. The analysis of these poems is preceded by an overview of ruin philosophy from Burke and Diderot to Simmel and Benjamin, with particular emphasis on the way the trope of ruin contemplation stages a confrontation between the self and what transcends it (death, history, nature, etc.). This philosophical background serves as a heuristic tool to shed light on the poetry of Kushner. Through the trope of ruin, Kushner explores the legitimacy of poetic speech after the collapse of all meta-narratives. Kushner has no truck with Diderot's solipsism, nor with Hegel's bold narrative of progress, nor with Simmel's peaceful reconciliation with the creative forces of nature. Nor, really, does he intend to bear witness to history, the way Benjamin does in the faint anticipation of some miracle. Instead, Kushner posits the endurance of a community united not around a grand project, but around the idea of carrying on in the face of everything, muddling through despite the lack of hopes for a transformational future and making the most of fleeting moments of positivity that emerge out of the fundamental serendipity of history.

Alternative Literary Modernities: A Voice from Colonial Punjab

2018 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-48
Author(s):  
Arti Minocha
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
The Self ◽  
Subject Position ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Discursive Space ◽  
Political Subject ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Language Content

Abstract This paper looks at the formation of colonial print publics in Punjab, the gendered subjectivities that emerged in this new discursive space, and middle-class women’s deployment of print to articulate the self. This will be done through a close reading of one of the first novels in English, Cosmopolitan Hinduani, which was published in Lahore, Punjab, by a woman in 1902. The essay examines the narrator’s notion of a gendered cosmopolitanism and the subject position that it affords, her attempt at going beyond the fault lines of religion to articulate a liberal and modern political subject, while reworking the cosmopolitan/local binary. How does her insertion of herself as a gendered subject in the provincial, national, cosmopolitan imaginary reflect in the author’s choice of language and genre? My attempt will be to see the novel and its author as part of a literary culture in which she made certain choices about the form, language, content, and audience.

Writing to redundancy: approaches to spiritual journals and early modern spirituality

1996 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Webster
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
The Self ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Cultural Resources

ABSTRACTThe ‘puritan diary’ has received attention from historians and literary critics with little exchange between the approaches. Placing the diary in the context of experimental Calvinist personal discipline reveals that the form emerged independently of the literature of practical divinity. Considering the practice as a ‘technology of the self’ draws attention to the meanings of writing in a protestant context and encourages us to consider the cultural resources available to early modern protestants. Close reading of these texts suggests a greater degree of complexity than is often admitted and allows for a tension between different views of the salvific process. This tension between ‘open’ and ‘closed’ forms is helpful in understanding the religiosity of early modern protestants.

scholarly journals The Madness of Jodh Singh: Patriotism and Paranoia in the Ghadar Archives

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 81
Author(s):  
Rohit Chopra
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
The Self ◽  
Mental Condition ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
British Government ◽  
Revolutionary Movement ◽  
Self Image ◽  
Archival Documents ◽  
American Society ◽  
The Relationship

My paper focuses on Jodh Singh, a marginal figure in the archives of the Ghadar Party, who was arrested for High Treason against the United States for his role in the “Hindu Conspiracy” plots aimed at the British government of India. Incarcerated in a California prison, Singh was moved to a sanatarium on displaying symptoms of insanity. Through a close reading of a web of archival documents and scholarly reflections—at the center of which lies the report of a commission appointed to inquire into his mental condition—I examine the account of the madness of Jodh Singh as a statement about patriotism and paranoia. In engagement with the work of Foucault, Guha, and scholars of the Ghadar movement, I describe how the record of Singh’s experiences indicts the juridical-legal-medical framework of American society as operating on a distinction between legtimate and illegitimate madness. I also examine how Jodh Singh points to the glimmers of a critique of the self-image of the Ghadar Party as a revolutionary movement committed to egalitarian principles. I conclude with a reflection on what Jodh Singh might tell us about the relationship between madness, political aspiration, and the yearning for solidarity.

scholarly journals Fantasy, Mysticism, and Eroticism in Raja Alem’s Fatma

2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 44-55
Author(s):  
Ghadir Zannoun K.
Keyword(s):  
Saudi Arabian ◽  
The Self ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Feminist Politics ◽  
Self Actualization ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
Self Discovery ◽  
Alternate Reality ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Erotic

This paper is a close reading of Raja Alem’s 2005 novel, Fatma: A Novel of Arabia. I argue that Alem depicts the erotic in ways similar to Audre Lorde’s definition – as a doorway to self-fulfillment and in honor of the “fullness” of the erotic’s depth of feelings. The Saudi Arabian writer employs the fantastic, which has been used by writers to express feminist politics, to give textual embodiment to the relationship between the erotic, self-actualization, and women’s empowerment, central to which is self-knowledge and self-discovery. Alem suggests that a deeper knowledge of the self can open women to unlimited possibilities of being and perception, including a closer relationship to the natural and the supernatural worlds. Alem thus presents a female mythology that creates an alternate reality and undermines the binaries of patriarchal thinking, such as the corporeal/transcendent, the human/nonhuman, man/woman, and nature/culture.

Disciplinary Relations/Sexual Relations: Feminist and Foucauldian Reflections on Professor–Student Sex

Hypatia ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 187-206 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chloë Taylor
Keyword(s):  
Female Students ◽  
The Self ◽  
Sovereign Power ◽  
Sexual Relations ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Bell Hooks ◽  
Technologies Of The Self ◽  
Dominant Discourses ◽  
Pedagogical Relation ◽  
The University

Drawing on Michel Foucault's writings as well as the writings of feminist scholars bell hooks and Jane Gallop, this paper examines faculty–student sexual relations and the discourses and policies that surround them. It argues that the dominant discourses on professor–student sex and the policies that follow from them misunderstand the form of power that is at work within pedagogical institutions, and it examines some of the consequences that result from this misunderstanding. In Foucault's terms, we tend to theorize faculty–student relations using a model of sovereign power in which people have or lack power and in which power operates in a static, stable, and exclusively top-down manner. We should, however, recognize the ways in which individuals in pedagogical institutions are situated within disciplinary and thus dynamic, reciprocal, and complex networks of power, as well as the ways in which the pedagogical relation may be a technique of the self and not only of domination. If we reconsider these relations in terms of Foucault's accounts of discipline and technologies of the self, we can recognize that prohibitions on faculty—student sexual relations within institutions such as the university are productive rather than repressive of desire, and that such relations can be opportunities for development and not only for abuse. Moreover, this paper suggests that the dominant discourses on professor—student relations today contribute to a construction of professors as dangerous and students as vulnerable, which denies the agency of (mostly female) students and obscures the multiplicity of forms of sexual abuse that occur within the university context.

scholarly journals Madeleine Blais-Dahlem et sa vision de l’autotraduction

2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 46-60
Author(s):  
Małgorzata Czubińska
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Creative Process ◽  
The Self ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Literary Field ◽  
Privileged Status ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Marco Micone ◽  
Patrice Desbiens

Nowadays self-translation remains a frequent practice in the literary field in Canada. A close reading of the self-translations done by Canadian writers such as Nancy Houston, Marco Micone or Patrice Desbiens allows to discover each author’s own vision of self-translation as a creative process. The aim of the paper is to determine, through a comparative analysis of excerpts from the two language versions of the play La Maculée/sTain (2012) and the latest bilingual novel La voix de mon père / My Father’s Voice (2015) by Fransaskois playwright Madeleine Blais-Dahlem, to what extent her self-translating practice guides the reading of the text. Examiningthe back and forth between the two versions of the same work will allow to delve deeper into the subject of the identity and privileged status of the translator (Tanqueiro 2009: 109, Saint 2018: 120), but also into the role and skills of the receiver of Madeleine Blais-Dahlem’s bilingual writings.

scholarly journals SICHÜBERLIEFERUNG: RE-MOVING THE HISTORY OF BEING AS PRESENCE

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-76
Author(s):  
KIMIYO MURATA-SORACI ◽  
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Being And Time ◽  
Middle Voice ◽  
Rational Animal ◽  
History Of ◽  
Metaphysics Of Presence ◽  
Magnum Opus ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
The One

How are we to responsively belong to tradition? This paper retrieves the concept of self-tradition (Sichüberlieferung) in Heidegger’s magnum opus Being and Time (1927). We will take as a guiding light Heidegger’s designation of a mode of his phenomenology as “phenomenology of the inapparent” expressed in the 1973 Zähringen Seminar. We will pay special heed to the function of the middle voice, neutrality of Da-sein, and tautology in the question of Being and history and bring to light the relation between authentic temporality and authentic historicity in a tautological turning of the selfsame. We will make a remark on the delay of Da-sein’s authentic historicity in the light of the “self-tradition” which marks Heidegger’s non-metaphysical response to the heritage of metaphysics of presence. In the wake of the phenomenology of the inapparent, we will turn to Derrida’s 2008 text The Animal that Therefore I Am to explore Derrida’s different approach to free the “I am” from that of Heidegger’s Dasein whose being is set in Jeweilig-Jemeinigkeit. We will show how Derrida’s invention of animot enables him and us to speak with the voices of our non-human animal others and enables us to free ourselves from the fixities of presence of the present in our thought, language, and sensitivity. In a relay of the two philosophers’ reading of us and their ways of self-overcoming of man as rational animal, we will learn to be in question and to learn to relate to one another without reducing one to the other and other to the one.

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