Four Transcendental Illusions of the Digital World: A Derridean Approach

This article considers the remote meeting technologies that have become the unavoidable framework of (academic) work during the COVID-19 epidemic. I analyze them with the help of Jacques Derrida’s concepts, thus also illustrating the reach of the latter. The article presents four “transcendental illusions” as supporting the digital world and, according to Derrida, experience. The illusion of proximity: digitality relies on a haptocentric illusion but it also reveals the distance at the heart of touching. The illusion of presence: digitality functions under the illusion of presence, but it also reveals the spectrality of digital presence. The illusion of a complete memory: although the Internet appears to be a total memory, it is really an archive, that is, a finite set of traces. The illusion of worldwide community: teletechnologies pretend to constitute a universal place, but they only generate a finite dis-place of common alienation.

Divining: ΥΔΩΡ, Opacity, and Thalean Considerations

Dowsing, water-witching, divining – the procedure seeks a flow or spring beneath the surface of earth. So too this inquiry attempts to locate and sound the meanings associated with the polestar of Thalean considerations, ὕδωρ, that course beneath the interpretative strata of an overly-familiar tradition grounded in the principles of clarity and intelligibility. If these principles are held in suspension, what meanings flow from the Thalean considerations of ὕδωρ? A twofold task guides this inquiry. First is to show opacity as the primary valence of ὕδωρ, challenging the prevailing tendency to imagine Thales and other Milesian thinkers as positing a principle of clarity in the form of what can be brought under the Aristotelean concept of underlying thing and matter (ὕλη). Second, in the course of drawing up the opacity of ὕδωρ form varied archaic sources emerge some connections to important terms for Greek thinking: φύσις, λόγος, ἀλήθεια.

Fighting Fire with Fire: Thinking Φύσις at the Inception

This essay explores the role of flame in Heidegger’s 1943–44 lectures on Heraclitus (GA 55). Specifically, I trace a tension that unfolds within the text between two flames: namely, “the flames of presumptuous mismeasurement” characteristic of modernity, and the flames of beyng. As I show, in GA 55 Heidegger argues that a certain Seinsvergessenheit has come to dominate the modern world and has resulted in an attitude of hubris on the part of the human being. As a corrective to this hubris, Heraclitus’s thought serves as a reawakening of the meaning of being (as clearing). Heidegger, for reasons which I explore in the essay, understands both the forgetfulness of being, and being itself, in terms of flame. I trace the origins and perimeters of these two flames, marking the character and consequences of this conflict, having recourse to the Heraclitus lectures as well as a number of texts that inform them. I then conclude by broadening the scope of the conflict by examining the role that Christianity plays in fanning the flames of modernity (for Heidegger).

“Clinging Stubbornly to the Antithesis of Assumptions”: On the Difference Between Hegel’s and Spinoza’s Systems of Philosophy

This essay re-examines Hegel’s critique of Spinoza’s Ethics, focusing on the question of method. Are the axioms and definitions unmotivated presuppositions that make the attainment of absolute knowledge impossible in principle, as Hegel charges? This essay develops a new reading of the Ethics to defend it from this critique. I argue that Hegel reads Spinoza as if his system were constructed only according to the mathematical second kind of knowledge, ignoring Spinoza’s clear preference for knowledge of the third kind. The Ethics, I argue, is a book with several layers: it is at once a deductive mathematical system, and a handbook to aid the intuitive power of the active philosophical reader. The letter of each text may be identical, but they have little else in common – Pierre Menard’s rewriting of Don Quixote given systematic philosophical form.

Subjectivity Viewed as a Process

Husserl, in his late manuscripts, made a number of apparently opposing assertions regarding the subject. These assertions are reconciled once we realize that they apply to the different stages of the genesis of the subject. This means that the subject has to be understood as a process – i.e., as continually proceeding from the living present, which forms its core, to the developed self that each of us is. As such, the subject cannot be identified with any of the particular stages of its genesis. The genetic account of its becoming must be understood accordingly. It is not an account that details the progressive acquisition of features that remain as “sedimented layers” of our selfhood. Rather, such layers, like the selfhood they form, exist as part of the ongoing process, the motion, that is our subjectivity. This view, I argue, is Husserl’s final, if undeveloped, insight into the nature of our selfhood.

Where Is Negation in Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology? Symbolic Formation and the Implex

This paper concerns a basic ambiguity in Merleau-Ponty’s ontology between the reversibility of flesh and its écart. Where the former suggests continuity between the sensing and the sensible, the latter suggests their separation. It is difficult to know from reading The Visible and the Invisible which is to be prioritized or how one is to be read alongside the other. I argue that such a relation comes to light by thinking through the negation that is, for Merleau-Ponty, always constellated with being. This becomes more explicitly an ontology of differentiation or difference itself which does not prioritize identity. Such an ontology is, I argue, prefigured in Merleau-Ponty’s work on passivity and its symbolic formation. The idea is that the dynamic between negation and being and of symbolic formation happens at the level of, or even in, the body. The final section is thus a consideration of “the implex,” a term Merleau-Ponty borrows from Paul Valéry along with “chiasm.”