This article explores how people can come to experience constitutional conversations as meaningful. To this end, I reinterpret Habermas’s account of deliberative constitutionalism. For Habermas, constitutional discourses are not only rational procedures of opinion- and will-formation, but also sites at which a “world” gets generated. Deliberative politics, therefore, involves unruly and uncontrollable efforts to solicit others into the roles, orientations, and principles of constitutional practices. The result is a novel account of the relationship between constitutional procedures and the “anarchistic” politics (...) that radical democrats celebrate. Ungovernable inventions of and affective identifications with roles, images, and peoples occur within articulate forms, including constitutional procedures. These aspects of Habermas’s thought push past binary oppositions between legitimate constitutional procedure and radical democratic uprisings. Habermas provides a framework for examining the forms of attentiveness by which actors can come to experience constitutional rules, roles, principles, and procedures as part of their world. (shrink)

Cet article cherche à interroger Heidegger en tant que traducteur. Nous montrons d’abord que le refus de traduire hypokeimenon par subiectum rend possible une onto-héno-chrono-phénoménologie de la choséité de la chose comme constance. Ensuite, nous démontrons que la tentative visant à penser la transformation de l’ alētheia ne peut éviter la traduction et toutes ses violences. Enfin, nous faisons retour aux Grecs en vue de penser la traduction comme metalēpsis , de réinterpréter la traduction platonicienne des Idées comme choses, de (...) repenser le noūs aristotélicien comme auto-traducteur, et de suggérer que l’origine de la pensée réside peut-être aussi dans la traduction. (shrink)

Recent discussions about the cognitive value of fiction either rely on a background theory of reference or a theory of imaginative pretense. I argue that this reliance produces a tension between the two central or defining claims of literary cognitivism that: (1) fiction can have cognitive value by revealing or supporting insights into the world that properly count as true, and (2) that the cognitive value of a work of fiction contributes directly to that work’s literary value. I address that (...) tension by looking at the formal devices present in a work of fiction that enable it to realize the fictional world described by a text. When we focus on those formal elements, we can identify a connection between a work of literary fiction and the insights we gain through an encounter with the fictional world that work realizes. (shrink)

Journal Name: Philologus Issue: Ahead of print.

Das Studium von Valérys Metalepsis und Kleists hybrider Ästhetik führt den Beitrag zu einer Untersuchung von Gefühlen als »offene Objekte«. Anhand von Dopplungen und Paarungen präsentiert Kleists Theater Emotionalität als »Dinggefühl« im Doppelsinn von »das fühlende Ding« (z. B. ein menschlicher Körper) und »das Gefühl als Ding« (z. B. ein Dolch): als ein offenes, komplexes und dynamisches Gefüge von menschlichen und paramenschlichen Aktanten, die auf ihre Unstimmigkeit mit sich selbst reagieren. Via an analysis of Valéry's metalepsis and Kleist's (...) hybrid aesthetics, this essay offers an account of feelings as. Through doublings and couplings, Kleist's theater presents emotionality as in the double sense of the thing that feels (a human body, for example) and the thing that feeling is (a dagger, for example): as an open, complex, and dynamic assemblage of human and para-human actants that responds to its incongruence with itself. (shrink)

Perhaps only Tar Baby is as enigmatic and compelling a figure from Afro-American mythic discourse as is that oxymoron, the Signifying Monkey.3 The ironic reversal of a received racist image of the black as simianlike, the Signifying Monkey—he who dwells at the margins of discourse, ever punning, ever troping, ever embodying the ambiguities of language—is our trope for repetition and revision, indeed, is our trope of chiasmus itself, repeating and simultaneously reversing in one deft, discursive act. If Vico and Burke, (...) or Nietzsche, Paul de Man, and Harold Bloom, are correct in identifying “master tropes,” then we might think of these as the “master’s tropes,” and of signifying as the slave’s trope, the trope of tropes, as Bloom characterizes metalepsis, “a trope-reversing trope, a figure of a figure.” Signifying is a trope that subsumes other rhetorical tropes, including metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony, and also hyberbole, litotes, and metalepsis. To this list, we could easily add aporia, chiasmus, and catachresis, all of which are used in the ritual of signifying.The black tradition has its own subdivisions of signifying, which we could readily identify with the typology of figures received from classical and medieval rhetoric, as Bloom has done with his “maps of misprision.” In black discourse “signifying” means modes of figuration itself. When one signifies, as Kimberly W. Benston puns, one “tropes-a-dope.” The black rhetorical tropes subsumed under signifying would include “marking,” “loud-talking,” “specifying,” “testifying,” “calling out”, “sounding,” “rapping,” and “playing the dozens.”4 3. On Tar Baby, see Ralph Ellison, “Hidden Man and Complex Fate: A Writer’s Experience in the United States,” Shadow and Act, p. 147, and Toni Morrison, Tar Baby. On the black as quasi-simian, see Jean Bodin, Method for the Easy Comprehension of History, trans. Beatrice Reynolds, p. 105; Aristotle Historia Animalium 606b; Thomas Herbert, Some Years Travels, pp. 16-17; and John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 8th ed., 2 vols., 2:53.4. Geneva Smitherman defines these and other black tropes and then traces their use in several black texts. Smitherman’s work, like that of Claudia Mitchell-Kernan and Abrahams, is especially significant for literary theory. See Smitherman, Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America, pp. 101-66. See also nn. 13 and 14 below. (shrink)

Throughout his philosophical career, Eric Voegelin had much to say about literature in both his published work and his private letters. Many of his most trenchant comments regarding the analysis of literature appear in his correspondence with critic Robert Heilman, and, through his familiarity with that exchange, Charles Embry has gained extraordinary insight into Voegelin’s literary views. _The Philosopher and the Storyteller_ is the first book-length study of the literary dimensions of Voegelin’s philosophy—and the first to use his philosophy to (...) read specific novels. Bringing to bear a thorough familiarity with both Voegelin and great literature, Embry shows that novels—like myths, philosophy, and religious texts—participate in the human search for the truth of existence, and that reading literature within a Voegelinian framework exposes the existential and philosophical dimensions of those works. Embry focuses on two key elements of Voegelin’s philosophy as important for reading literature: metaxy, the in-between of human consciousness, and metalepsis, human participation in the community of being. He shows how Voegelin’s philosophy in general is rooted in literary-symbolic interpretation and, therefore, provides a foundation for the interpretation of literature. And finally he explores Voegelin’s insistence that the soundness of literary criticism lies in the consciousness of the reader. Embry then offers Voegelinian readings that vividly illustrate the principles of this approach. First he considers Graham Swift’s _Waterland_ as an example of the human search for meaning in the modern world, then he explores the deformation and recovery of reality in Heimito von Doderer’s long and complex novel _The Demons,_ and finally he examines how Flannery O’Connor’s _The Violent Bear It Away_ mythically expresses the flux of divine presence in what Voegelin calls the Time of the Tale. _The Philosopher and the Storyteller_ unites fiction and philosophy in the common quest to understand our nature, our world, and our cosmos. A groundbreaking exploration of the connection between Voegelin and twentieth-century literature, this book opens a new window on the philosopher’s thought and will motivate readers to study other novels in light of this approach. (shrink)

Gracias al invaluable aporte hecho por Foucault, hoy sabemos que la transición del acto de tortura de un espacio público y abierto a un espacio cerrado y secreto trajo consigo una serie de repercusiones filosóficas, políticas y físicas de gran complejidad. No obstante, vale la pena significar que, dentro del contexto de las dictaduras militares del cono sur, el acto de la tortura –si bien fiel a su naturaleza cerrada, inaccesible y secreta– evidenció en ciertos casos una regresión atávica a (...) espacios que si bien no eran públicos sí eran abiertos: los registros de los hombres y mujeres que tras ser sedados, golpeados y brutalmente enceguecidos fueron arrojados al mar, las montañas, los volcanes y el desierto chileno así lo confirman. Debido a esto, los rasgos físicos de la geografía chilena terminan siendo constituidos por los cuerpos anónimos de todas estas personas. Por eso, en su afán por re-construir tanto el cuerpo de la nación chilena como los cuerpos de los torturados, con su INRI (2004) Raúl Zurita apela a una inversión filosófica y física de la geografía chilena. Si bien es cierto que dicha inversión cosmogónica confirma que la redención está negada para estas almas, el despliegue astuto del recurso de la metalepsis, como concatenación metonímica que ya de por sí es, permite que estos cuerpos, antes fustigados, concebidos siempre como ajenos al país, irónicamente terminen por configurar la fisionomía misma de un Chile zuritano en el que los términos “democracia” y “muerte” resultan estar ligados de manera indisoluble. (shrink)

성 토마스(St. Thomas)의 자연법 이론을 연구함에 있어서 그의 이론에 절대적인 영향을 미쳤다고 볼 수 있는 아리스토텔레스(Aristotle)의 이론과의 관계를 살펴보는 것은 필수적이다. 그런데 성 토마스의 자연법 이론과 아리스토텔레스의 이론과의 관계를 긍정적으로 평가하는 사람들도 있고, 반면에 부정적으로 평가하는 사람도 있음을 볼 수 있다. 해리 재파(Harry Jaffa)는 매킨타이어(Alasdair Macintyre)가 언급한 대로 성 토마스에 관한 가장 설득력 있는 이론가로서 후자에 속하는 대표적인 사람이다. 그런데 재파는 성 토마스의 자연법에 관한 이론 안에는 그리스도교와 아리스토텔레스의 이론들을 ‘잘못 조화시키는’ 하나의 명백한 경향이 있다고 말하면서 그의 조화는 단지 외관상의 (...) 조화일 뿐이라고 비판하고 있다. 본 논문에서는 그가 성 토마스의 자연법에 대하여 언급한 쟁점 들 중에서 세 가지를 알아보고 나서 이에 대한 반론을 제기한 후에 본 글의 결론을 내릴 것이다. 첫째, 재파는 자연학과 자연적 도덕규범에 관련해서는 아리스토텔레스와 성 토마스의 이론에 나타나있는 사실상의 ‘자연주의적 오류(naturalistic fallacy)’를 지적함으로써 성 토마스의 이론을 공격했는데, 이에 대해서는 알래스데어 매킨타이어(Alasdair Macintyre)의 ‘기능적 관점(functual view)’을 주로해서 반론을 제시할 것이다. 둘째, 재파는 자연법과 영원법에 관해서는 "자연법은 영원법 안으로의 이성적 피조물의 참여이다(Natural law is the rational creature’s participation in the eternal law)’’에 관한 문제를 제기했는데, 이에 대해서는 존 피니스(John Finnis)의 “metalepsis”와 “participatio"라는 용어에 대한 설명을 중심으로 반론을 제시할 것이다. 마지막으로, 재파는 도덕적 원리들의 자연적인 성향에 대하여 문제를 제기했는데, 이에 대해서는 아리스토텔레스의 원문들과 성 토마스의 원문들에 대한 연구를 통해서, 그리고 앤서니 케니(Anthony Kenny)의 “habitus"라는 용어에 대한 설명과 케니(Anthany Kenny)와 스티븐스(Gregory Stevens)의 주장을 중심으로 해서 반론들을 제시할 것이다. 그리하여 본 논문에서는 성 토마스의 자연법 이론은 아리스토텔레스의 이론과의 단지 외관상의 조화가 아닌, 서로 다른 두 사상체계가 만났을 때 추구할 수 있는 가장 이상적인 수용형태인 발전적인 종합의 형태임을 드러낼 것이다. (shrink)

According to many realist philosophers of fiction, one needs to posit an ontology of existing fictional characters in order to give a correct account of discourse about fiction. The realists' claim is opposed by pretense theorists for whom discourse about fiction involves, as discourse in fiction, pretense. On that basis, pretense theorists claim that one does not need to embrace an ontology of fictional characters to give an account of discourse about fiction. The ontolog-ical dispute between realists and pretense theorists (...) is mainly a dispute in the realm of the phi-losophy of language concerning the status relative to pretense of discourse about fiction. Realists are persuaded that there is a sharp line between discourse in fiction and discourse about fiction while pretense theorists deny there exists such a line. I suggest that realists may have a wrong picture of discourse in fiction since, in many cases, discourse in fiction already contains many occurrences of discourse about fiction. Consequently, discourse about fiction, instead of ending fiction, should be regarded, following pretense theorists, as adding extra lay-ers of fiction. (shrink)