Canadian Society for Continental Philosophy La société canadienne de philosophie continentale

Martine Béland, Université de Montréal Du combat contre un essayiste à la construction du philosophe Nietzsche Cette communication présente les thèses soutenant un projet de recherche en cours sur la première réception germanophone de la pensée nietzschéenne (1872-1889). Elle prend comme fil conducteur trois suggestions faites par Georg Brandes. L‘auteur de la première étude d‘envergure sur Nietzsche (1888) avance que Nietzsche était inconnu en Allemagne et que sa pensée devait faire l‘objet de combats et d‘appropriations. Par un premier dépouillage de certains textes formant la première réception de Nietzsche, et qui montrent que Brandes a vu vrai, je présente les thèses suivantes : en leur temps, les écrits de Nietzsche ont été reçus en fonction de leur rapport (critique ou non) au wagnérisme; Nietzsche n‘a pas été considéré comme un philosophe avant le tournant du siècle; son statut proprement philosophique est donc le résultat d‘un travail de construction ayant passé par des phases successives de combat (de et contre Nietzsche) et d‘appropriation. Noah Moss Brender, Boston College Life is Intentional: Hans Jonas’ Phenomenology of the Organism The goal of this paper is to place Hans Jonas‘ philosophical biology within the phenomenological tradition, and to argue for the importance of Jonas‘ work to phenomenology‘s project of overcoming Cartesian dualism. Merleau-Ponty‘s insight that motility is basic intentionality has shown us the way to an understanding of consciousness as bodily. However, this account is not yet complete. Merleau-Ponty‘s body does not eat—it is involved in the world only as agent and perceiver. Thus, this account misses our most basic dependence on the world, as the source of the very matter from which our bodies are made and re-made. Jonas deepens Merleau-Ponty‘s insight by showing that motility is grounded in the still more fundamental intentionality of metabolism. In other words, the body is intentional not simply because it moves and perceives, but because it is alive. Jonas‘ basic claim is that intentionality is not only the structure of consciousness, or Dasein, or even the human body, but of life itself. Joseph Carew, Memorial University Psychosis and Givenness in Marion’s Phenomenology of Self Jean-Luc Marion's phenomenology of self is an attempt to exceed metaphysics and the traditional paradoxes of subjectivity. Made destitute by the unconditional givenness of phenomena, the self is stripped of any originary self-positing interiority and only receives itself from the dislocating experience of excess. But, inexplicit and absent within his work, is the possibility within his theory of selfhood for an account of psychosis that displaces standard phenomenological and psychoanalytic models. Working primarily with Book V of Being Given, my paper sketches the formal possibilities exhibited in a self who cannot manage the superabundance of the given and, swept away by an incontrollable flood of givenness, thereby falls into a hysteria of self-experience and loses its ipseity. Then, contrasting psychosis with positive figures of the self, I explore the dynamic relationship between givenness and the gifted highlighted by the phenomenological diremption and effacement of selfhood displayedvin both. David Ciavatta, Ryerson University Merleau-Ponty on the Generality of Existence In the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty argues that there is a ―halo of generality‖ that is fundamental to us as embodied beings. He thereby implies that our particular experiences and actions are never wholly singular and selfcontained, for they are inescapably informed by how we experience and act in general. My concern in this paper is to examine the nature of this ―in general,‖ and I pay particular attention to what it tells us about the temporal structure of human existence in Merleau-Ponty‘s view. I argue that, for Merleau-Ponty, human existence takes place as a multiplicity of interrelated temporal durations at once, some of which are more clearly circumscribed and episodic, others of which are indefinitely extended and generalized in nature. For instance, while some of the events that make up our lives are over in seconds, others can take years, and still others are much more indefinite and are oriented towards no specific end. I suggest that by understanding how our existence is stretched across such generalized durations we can gain insight both into the fundamental ambiguity that characterizes practical life for Merleau-Ponty, and into how this ambiguity makes freedom possible. Marguerite La Caze, University of Queensland Derrida: opposing death penalties Derrida‘s purpose in ̳Death Penalties‘ (2004) is to show how arguments in favor of capital punishment and arguments for its abolition are deconstructible. He claims that ̳never, to my knowledge, has any philosopher as a philosopher, in his or her own strictly and systematically philosophical discourse, never has any philosophy as such contested the legitimacy of the death penalty.‘ (2004, 146) Derrida asks how it is possible ̳to abolish the death penalty in a way that is based on principle, that is universal and unconditional, and not because it has become not only cruel but useless, insufficiently exemplary?‘ (2004, 137) His analysis of other unconditional concepts such as hospitality and forgiveness implies that such an approach is in fact impossible. I examine Derrida‘s claim concerning philosophers‘ lack of systematic opposition to the death penalty and consider the possibility of a universal and unconditional opposition to capital punishment. Christine Daigle, Brock University L’ambiguïté du corps vécu chez Beauvoir Ma communication examinera le point de vue Beauvoirien, exprimé dans Le Deuxième sexe, selon lequel l'individu est un être ambigu, soit une liberté située et incarnée. La situation, qui inclut la facticité du corps, fait en sorte que le sujet est sexué et d'un certain genre mais aussi que sexe et genre ne sont pas nécessairement interreliés puisque le sexe ne détermine pas le genre. L'ambiguïté se retrouve donc au niveau de la sexualité et de l'identité. J'expliquerai la façon dont le point de vue de Beauvoir sur le pour-soi en tant qu'être incarné peut agir à titre de fondement pour l'élaboration d'une éthique au sein de laquelle l'altérité ne se réduit pas au conflit. Eleanor Godway, Central Connecticut State University The Logic of "chiasm" in Merleau-Ponty and Macmurray An interpretation of Merleau-Ponty's chiasm, allowing for "a new kind of intelligibility", which goes beyond the Gestalt in affording "a rehabilitation of the sensible", is offered as a way to introduce ideas of Scottish philosopher John Macmurray (1891 – 1976.). These thinkers diagnose an impasse facing philosophy and a resulting crisis for western culture, and both envisage the need for a new logic. Macmurray attributes what phenomenologists call "the natural attitude" to the (―modernist‖) tradition of regarding the subject as thinker, which he would replace with "the self as agent," thus overturning the hegemony of theory. His account of immediate experience (primary knowledge) as non-conceptual (pre-reflective), of objectivity as the capacity to be affected by what is not oneself, make interaction with others and the world we share of paramount importance. Both thinkers open up the possibility of a fruitful rethinking about ―logos.‖ Lawrence Hatab, Old Dominion University Nietzsche's Unique Naturalism: Philosophy Read with Tooth and Claw In this paper I aim to sketch the way in which Nietzsche's thought can be called naturalistic, with an emphasis on how many readings of Nietzsche as a naturalist are misguided when aligned with current senses of philosophical naturalism. I will address some central Nietzschean themes (will to power, agonistics, perspectivism, and tragedy) and show how his philosophy is a critique of both metaphysics and the tendency to tie naturalism too closely to science. Dawne McCance, University of Manitoba Theatre of the Prosthesis: Derrida, Freud, Psyche In this paper, I turn to Derrida‘s reading, in ―Freud and the Scene of Writing,‖ of a transition in Freud‘s work between the Project of 1895 and the 1925 ―Note Upon the Mystic Writing Pad,‖ a ―strange progression‖ (FSW 200) in the direction of ―psychical writing‖ and of ―a configuration of traces which can no longer be represented except by the structure and function of writing‖ (200). According to Derrida, Freud‘s transition ―makes what we believe we know under the name of writing enigmatic‖ (199). My paper takes up this enigma, which has to do not only with writing but also with memory and psyche – as embodied. The paper situates Freud‘s transition in relation to his so-called abandonment of neurology, and of the neurology dominated by his mentor, Jean-Martin Charcot; and it attempts to ask what, for Derrida, ―psychic writing‖ has to do with neurology and/or physiology. Diane Perpich, Clemson University Veils of Suspicion: Feminism and Multiculturalism in France It hardly needs to be said that the various forms of veiling practiced by Muslim women have been the subject of undue scrutiny and debate in Europe and North America in recent years. The bans on headscarves in schools in France and Turkey are two of the best known attacks on hijab, but there are myriad instances where ―the veil‖ has become the symbol of a supposed conflict between the institutions of Western democracy and the demands of Islamic faith. Focusing on the debate in France, this paper argues that though the veil has been politically instrumentalized by an anti-Islamic, anti-immigration and racist right-wing, it is equally instrumentalized by fundamentalist Islamic groups (l‘Islam intégriste). As a result, it is not clear that American-style multiculturalism or an attendant identity-based politics is a theoretically cogent or practically efficacious response. Exploring the conditions that contributed to the instauration of the veil as a ―saturated‖ symbol within contemporary Western politics, this paper considers the possibilities for moving beyond an empty commitment to sameness and a blind allegiance to difference in pluralist democracies. Claude Piché, Université de Montréal La question de la théodicée chez Kant et Lévinas Dans un texte de 1982 portant sur le sens de la souffrance, Lévinas fait allusion à l‘opuscule de Kant « Sur l‘insuccès de toutes les tentatives philosophiques en matière de théodicée », qu‘il qualifie de « très extraordinaire ». Il approuve en outre l‘interprétation qu‘y donne Kant du Livre de Job. Nous allons tenter ici d‘évaluer la portée et les limites d‘un rapprochement entre Lévinas et Kant sur le thème de la théodicée. Ewa Plonowska Ziarek, University at Buffalo Towards A Feminist Aesthetics of Embodiment: Speculations after Hegel and Adorno In this paper I reclaim for feminist theories of embodiment an aesthetic mediation of materiality that Hegel associates with symbolic art and Adorno with ―radical spiritualization‖ performed by the modern artwork. I reread Hegel‘s and Adorno‘s aesthetic theories in the context of Hortense Spillers‘ critical deployment of the monstrosity of the black female body and Luce Irigaray‘s notion of the ―sensible transcendental.‖ I will also refer briefly to the fictional works of Virginia Woolf and Nella Larsen. Although I approach bodies as always already regulated by discursive mechanisms, political decision, and economic exchange, an aesthetic paradigm of mediation I propose on the basis of these divergent texts preserves remnants of non-sublatable materiality as a source of resistance. Such a ―monstrous‖ mediation not only submits bodies/matter to power, labor and language; it also exposes materialization of political/economic discourses up to the point where the hold of abstract equivalence breaks down and reverses into divergence, where the semblance of the reconciliation between the universal and the particular, the abstract and the sensible, turns into a conflicting and contested relation between them. Yet, the significance of this mediation of embodiment is not limited to aesthetics alone. On the contrary, by providing an alternative to commodity fetishism and sovereign decision on what Agamben call ―bare life‖, aesthetic mediation of embodiment also reveals crucial implications for the politics of democracy. Feminist democratic politics too has to embrace antagonism and the unresolvable contradictions between equivalence and divergence, the particular and the universal, the material and the discursive, as the condition of embodied political practice. Marie-Andrée Ricard, Université Laval Moralité et affectivité Mon but sera de déterminer la relation qui existe entre la moralité et l‘affectivité, malgré la tension irréductible qui la caractérise. En effet, comprise comme le rapport définissant originairement le moi en tant qu‘existence passible et passive, l‘affectivité semble à l‘opposé de la spontanéité du sujet qui, comme Kant l‘a montré, est requise pour l‘agir moral. À l‘encontre de cette apparence d‘incompatibilité, je vais tenter de faire valoir que ce qui unit l‘affectivité et la moralité consiste en une expérience spécifique d‘humanité qui se fonde en dernière analyse sur le sentiment. Jason Robinson, University of Guelph The Progress of Natural Science and the Self-Forgetfulness of Hermeneutics I ask three interrelated questions: 1) of what does scientific and hermeneutic progress consist?; 2) is the scientific production of knowledge a public good and dominant social force for change because it represents ―the world as it is?‖; and 3) might we retain the value of progressive (scientific) understanding while rejecting foundationalist (epistemicrepresentational) claims to objectivity, permanency, cumulation, and linear progress? I answer these by situating my interpretation of Gadamer‘s philosophical hermeneutics alongside the major claims of progress made by the natural sciences. It is shown that hermeneutics recognizes what the natural sciences do not, namely, that the problem of progress resides chiefly in our view of the (embodied) self. Moreover, I argue, a hermeneutics of progress need not be arbitrary if understanding is underdetermined, incomplete, and largely circular. It need be self-forgetting, vulnerable, and temporally flexible. Cyndie Sautereau, Université Laval Unicité hors sujet. Une analyse de la figure du sujet chez Levinas Descartes a ouvert une porte. Le cogito cartésien marque le début d‘une tradition, celle des philosophies du sujet. Si Husserl nous conduit au point culminant de la philosophie réflexive, Levinas nous propose d‘en sortir. Il rompt avec l‘idée de l‘autoposition du sujet. Sujet qui est plutôt un pour-l‘autre. Subjectivité comme responsabilité pour autrui. Négation de la visée fondationnelle du sujet au profit de l‘exacerbation de sa passivité. Levinas ébranle ainsi le piédestal qui a été celui du sujet depuis Descartes. Mais peut-on dire pour autant que le sujet perd définitivement pied? La responsabilité du moi pour l‘autre, qui caractérise la figure du sujet levinassien, n‘est-elle pas le nouveau sol où prend pied le sujet? Et dès lors, ne peut-on pas questionner cette figure du sujet? Se laisse-t-elle appréhender à l‘aune d‘un fondement unique? Ne devrait-on pas plutôt penser le sujet, avec Ricœur par exemple, à partir d‘une multitude de foyers? Hasana Sharp, McGill University Desire for Recognition? Butler, Hegel, and Spinoza This paper examines Butler‘s claim that the Spinozan conatus prefigures the Hegelian desire for recognition. The desire to persevere in being, for Butler, can only be actualized by way of recognition. In ascertaining the basis of the heretical alliance that Butler forges between Hegel and Spinoza in the service of her own political theory, I outline some important differences between Spinoza‘s affective analysis and Hegel‘s account of recognition. In contrast to a number of current Spinozists, I argue that what is at stake in posing Spinoza and Hegel as alternative foundations for social and political theory is less a matter of a priority of joy over despair than a question of two competing models of relationality and freedom. Bronwyn Singleton, University of Toronto Derrida, the HPV Pharmakon, and the Metaphysics of Virgin Sacrifice Reading Plato‘s Phaedrus, Derrida tracks the pharmakon as an ambiguous signifier meaning both poison and antidote. Such undecidability threatens, since Derrida sees that the metaphysics of presence is obsessed with maintaining clear categorical distinctions, and preserving the purity of logic and Law. My analysis of Derrida‘s essay, ―Plato‘s Pharmacy,‖ explores the debate surrounding a contemporary pharmakon: the HPV vaccine. This vaccination offers an antidote to the human papilloma virus, the leading cause of cervical cancer. But conservative critics fear this pharmakon may ultimately operate as a poison, prematurely inducing a mysterious sexual potency in our virgin daughters, and making these girls dangerous to the health and order of the good community. I read the debate over the HPV vaccine as an example of a present-day virgin sacrifice, and credit Derrida with permitting us to glimpse how objectors to this pharmakon risk scapegoating our girls in order to chase some impossible, puritanical ideal. Fanny Söderbäck, New School for Social Research Impossible Mourning: Private and Public in Arendt and Hegel Focusing the way in which sexual difference is articulated in Sophocles‘ Antigone, I offer a reading that reverses the dialectic most commonly ascribed to the play. While most interlocutors of this classic tragedy connects its heroine to divine law and the private realm and see Creon as a representative of human law and politics, I trace what I call a Sophoclean reversal at the core of the play, suggesting that things, in fact, are the opposite of what they seem to be. Using Hannah Arendt‘s distinction between the private and public realms as my main point of departure, I show how such a reading (contrary to what most people have suggested) parallels that of Hegel, thus offering a defense and deepening of his controversial claim that woman is the ―everlasting irony‖ and ―internal enemy‖ of the community. But while Arendt is full of praise for the Greek polis, Hegel, I argue, reveals the internal contradiction and inherent impossibility of a society whose foundation is the exclusion of women altogether. Lukas Soderstrom, Université de Montréal Nietzsche as a reader of Wilhelm Roux, or the Physiology of History This paper explores one of the main sources of Nietzsche‘s knowledge of physiology and considers its relevance for the philosophical study of history. Beginning in 1881, Nietzsche read Der Kampf der Theile im Organismus by Wilhelm Roux, which exposed him to a dysteleological account of organic development emphasizing the excitative, assimilative and autoregulative processes of the body. These processes mediate the effects of natural selection. This reading contributed to a physiological understanding of history that borrowed Roux‘s description of physiological processes. This physiological description of history proceeded from the similarity between the body‘s mediation of the milieu and history‘s mediation of the past. Anne van Leeuwen, New School for Social Research Sexual Difference, Ontological difference:” Between Irigaray and Heidegger Luce Irigaray‘s work contains two indissociable projects: the disruption of Western metaphysics and the thinking of sexual difference. Indeed, the philosophical radicality of Irigaray‘s work lies in her diagnosis of the these two projects as inseparable: the history of metaphysics is a history of the forgetting of sexual difference, while to formulate the ―problematic of Being‖ vis-à-vis sexual difference would incite a disruption of this tradition. In this paper I attempt to elaborate Irigaray‘s diagnosis of the intersection of sexual difference and metaphysics through her engagement with Heidegger‘s work on the Principle of Identity. For Irigaray, metaphysical discourse, defined by its commitment to Parmenidean identity, reaches its culminating articulation in Heidegger‘s work. However, by turning to a reading of Derrida‘s second Geschlecht essay that is informed by Irigaray‘s project, I attempt to motivate of a re-reading of Heidegger‘s work as gesturing towards the deep intersection of sexual difference and fundamental ontology. My claim is that Irigaray‘s work opens up the possibility of reading Heidegger‘s formulation of the ―problematic of being‖ outside the auspices of identity, while Heidegger‘s work makes perspicuous the possibility of thinking sexual difference nonmetaphysically. By elaborating the mutually sympathetic nature of their projects, we can begin to see more clearly precisely why, as Irigaray insists, the disruption of metaphysics and the thinking of sexual difference are indissociable. Kryzsztof Ziarek, University at Buffalo The Way of World: Cosmo-technology or Nothing While the dominant discourse of the technologies of biopower works on the presupposition that it is indeed biopower in its global deployment that forms the operating dispositif of the modern world, for Nancy and Heidegger the inverse holds true: it is only when existence comes to be disposed technically, that relations can become the purview of power and its modern technologies to the unprecedented degree seen today in the macroscopic operations of global capital and worldwide telecommunications and in the microscopic scale of genetic manipulations. Biopower can be said thus to operate its regimens with respect to one, however extensive and varied, dimension of the technic revealing of being: namely, ―life,‖ in its ambiguously delineated and interpenetrating zones of bios and zōē. At issue is thus a broader critique of cosmo-technics and the question of freedom, where freedom is seen as the possibility of an otherwise to techno-power, seen as ―action in the middle voice,‖ or an otherwise which would open up world as an alternative to the way in which cosmo-technics makes the globe available. Panel: Disenclosure: Nancy’s Deconstruction of Christianity François Raffoul Louisiana State University The Self-Deconstruction of Christianity Marie-Ève Morin University of Alberta It is not so simple to be ‘without God’: Jean-Luc Nancy and the Deconstruction of Monotheism Bettina Bergo Université de Montréal The Black Rectangle and the ‘Ungraspability of Being’: Nancy Reads Gérard Granel. This panel discusses the recently translated work of Jean-Luc Nancy, Dis-enclosure, originally entitled La déclosion: déconstruction du christianisme. Jean-Luc Nancy's engagement with Christianity in this work contrasts with the so-called ̳theological turn‘ in phenomenology. This is important because it raises probing questions regarding the name of God and the sense of the ̳divine‘ in a demythified world—as well as that of the exhaustion of Christianity and its selfdeconstruction, which Nancy understands in terms of a non-theological opening (and creation) of a world. We will address Nancy‘s exploration of the overcoming of nihilism and the possibility, and look, of a faith that is not tied to a god or a master signifier, thereby moving beyond the traditional opposition between atheism and Christianity. The panel seeks to engage Nancy's important work while raising points of criticism and opening related perspectives in deconstruction and political philosophy.