En 2010, une de mes sœurs vivant en Belgique nous a envoyé un livre rédigé par Günther Anders Hiroshima est partout et introduit par une préface très élogieuse de Jean-Pierre Dupuy. Ancien étudiant de Martin Heidegger et de Edmund Husserl, Günther Anders avait compris, longtemps avant ses contemporains, à quel point les humains s’étaient trompés sur l’impact que les rapports entre les humains et les machines avait eu sur la déshumanisation. Les machines se sont solidement imposées sur les humains.

One of the world's most famous philosophers, Jacques Derrida, explores difficult questions in this important and engaging book. Is it still possible to uphold international hospitality and justice in the face of increasing nationalism and civil strife in so many countries? Drawing on examples of treatment of minority groups in Europe, he skilfully and accessibly probes the thinking that underlies much of the practice, and rhetoric, that informs cosmopolitanism. What have duties and rights to do with hospitality? Should hospitality (...) be grounded on a private or public ethic, or even a religious one? This fascinating book will be illuminating reading for all. (shrink)

"Recounts the story of Joseph Jacotot" -- vii.

" This book intertwines theoretical reflection with historical and cultural particularity to enunciate, then analyze this conundrum in terms of the distinguished author's own relationship to the French language.

"When he died in 2004, Jacques Derrida left behind a vast legacy of unpublished material, much of it in the form of written lectures. With The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume I, the University of Chicago Press launches an ambitious series of English translations of these important works based upon the meticulously established original French editions." "In this seminar from 2001 and 2002, Derrida explores the persistent association of bestiality or animality with sovereignty and continues his deconstruction of the (...) traditional determinations of the human. The beast and the sovereign are connected, he contends, because neither animals nor kings are subject to the law - the sovereign stands above it, while the beast falls outside the law from below. He then traces this association through an astonishing array of texts, including La Fontaine's fable "The Wolf and the Lamb," Hobbes's biblical sea monster in Leviathan, D. H. Lawrence's poem "Snake," Machiavelli's Prince with its elaborate comparison of princes and foxes, a historical account of Louis XIV attending an elephant autopsy, and Rousseau's evocation of werewolves in The Social Contract." "Deleuze, Lacan, and Agamben also come into critical play as Derrida focuses in on questions of force, right, justice, and philosophical interpretations of the limits between man and animal." --Book Jacket. (shrink)

This book makes available for the first time in English—and for the first time in its entirety in any language—an important yet little-known interview on the topic of photography that Jacques Derrida granted in 1992 to the German theorist of photography Hubertus von Amelunxen and the German literary and media theorist Michael Wetzel. Their conversation addresses, among other things, questions of presence and its manufacture, the technicity of presentation, the volatility of the authorial subject, and the concept of memory. (...) Derrida offers a penetrating intervention with regard to the distinctive nature of photography vis-à-vis related technologies such as cinema, television, and video. Questioning the all-too-facile divides between so-called old and new media, original and reproduction, analog and digital modes of recording and presenting, he provides stimulating insights into the ways in which we think and speak about the photographic image today. Along the way, the discussion fruitfully interrogates the question of photography in relation to such key concepts as copy, archive, and signature. Gerhard Richter introduces the volume with a critical meditation on the relationship between deconstruction and photography by way of the concepts of translation and invention. Copy, Archive, Signature will be of compelling interest to readers in the fields of contemporary European critical thought, photography, aesthetic theory, media studies, and French Studies, as well as those following the singular intellectual trajectory of one the most influential thinkers of our time. (shrink)

Traces the development of Heidegger's ontology, its origin, shifts, and final outcome within the field of phenomenology, also noting the coherence and ambiguity of his association with the Nazis.

Twelve essays exploring aspects of literacy and art criticism, retrospective sociology and the effects of relativism on moral behavior.

The Gift of Death, Jacques Derrida’s most sustained consideration of religion, explores questions first introduced in his book Given Time about the limits of the rational and responsible that one reaches in granting or accepting death, whether by sacrifice, murder, execution, or suicide. Derrida analyzes Czech philosopher Jan Patocka’s Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History and develops and compares his ideas to the works of Heidegger, Lévinas, and Kierkegaard. One of Derrida’s major works, The Gift of Death resonates (...) with much of his earlier writing, and this highly anticipated second edition is greatly enhanced by David Wills’s updated translation. This new edition also features the first-ever English translation of Derrida’s Literature in Secret. In it, Derrida continues his discussion of the sacrifice of Isaac, which leads to bracing meditations on secrecy, forgiveness, literature, and democracy. He also offers a reading of Kafka’s Letter to His Father and uses the story of the flood in Genesis as an embarkation point for a consideration of divine sovereignty. “An important contribution to the critical study of ethics that commends itself to philosophers, social scientists, scholars of religion... [and those] made curious by the controversy that so often attends Derrida.”—Booklist, on the first edition. (shrink)

We apply Benacerraf’s distinction between mathematical ontology and mathematical practice to examine contrasting interpretations of infinitesimal mathematics of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, in the work of Bos, Ferraro, Laugwitz, and others. We detect Weierstrass’s ghost behind some of the received historiography on Euler’s infinitesimal mathematics, as when Ferraro proposes to understand Euler in terms of a Weierstrassian notion of limit and Fraser declares classical analysis to be a “primary point of reference for understanding the eighteenth-century theories.” Meanwhile, scholars like (...) Bos and Laugwitz seek to explore Eulerian methodology, practice, and procedures in a way more faithful to Euler’s own. Euler’s use of infinite integers and the associated infinite products are analyzed in the context of his infinite product decomposition for the sine function. Euler’s principle of cancellation is compared to the Leibnizian transcendental law of homogeneity. The Leibnizian law of continuity similarly finds echoes in Euler. We argue that Ferraro’s assumption that Euler worked with a classical notion of quantity is symptomatic of a post-Weierstrassian placement of Euler in the Archimedean track for the development of analysis, as well as a blurring of the distinction between the dual tracks noted by Bos. Interpreting Euler in an Archimedean conceptual framework obscures important aspects of Euler’s work. Such a framework is profitably replaced by a syntactically more versatile modern infinitesimal framework that provides better proxies for his inferential moves. (shrink)

Traite des rapports entre force et raison au sein des démocraties. Deux conférences de J. Derrida se font écho pour interroger le concept de souveraineté de l'Etat.

Que peut le bon sens comparé à ce que peut peut-être la connaissance scientifique ? Noam Chomsky a rappelé que le progrès des sciences a amené à se rendre compte que le bon sens, ou sens commun, pouvait se tromper de façon spectaculaire. La même chose n’est-elle pas susceptible de se passer en matière morale et politique ? Après tout, le sens commun un peu éduqué ne peut-il suffire pour nous procurer les lumières dont nous avons besoin pour l’action ? (...) Pierre Bourdieu était évidemment convaincu que la connaissance procurée par les sciences sociales est finalement la seule qui soit susceptible de nous permettre de comprendre réellement les mécanismes qui engendrent l’inégalité, l’injustice, l’oppression, etc. [Jacques Bouveresse se souvient] d’avoir pris la défense de Noam Chomsky, au moins une fois, devant Bourdieu, parce que Chomsky avait écrit que comprendre comment opèrent ces mécanismes d’assujettissement et d’oppression qui engendrent l’inégalité et l’injustice n’est pas très difficile ; il suffit d’un peu de bon sens, de psychologie – et de cynisme, ajoutait-il. (shrink)

In this newest installment in Chicago’s series of Jacques Derrida’s seminars, the renowned philosopher attempts one of his most ambitious goals: the first truly philosophical argument against the death penalty. While much has been written against the death penalty, Derrida contends that Western philosophy is massively, if not always overtly, complicit with a logic in which a sovereign state has the right to take a life. Haunted by this notion, he turns to the key places where such logic has (...) been established—and to the place it has been most effectively challenged: literature. With his signature genius and patient yet dazzling readings of an impressive breadth of texts, Derrida examines everything from the Bible to Plato to Camus to Jean Genet, with special attention to Kant and post–World War II juridical texts, to draw the landscape of death penalty discourses. Keeping clearly in view the death rows and execution chambers of the United States, he shows how arguments surrounding cruel and unusual punishment depend on what he calls an “anesthesial logic,” which has also driven the development of death penalty technology from the French guillotine to lethal injection. Confronting a demand for philosophical rigor, he pursues provocative analyses of the shortcomings of abolitionist discourse. Above all, he argues that the death penalty and its attendant technologies are products of a desire to put an end to one of the most fundamental qualities of our finite existence: the radical uncertainty of when we will die. Arriving at a critical juncture in history—especially in the United States, one of the last Christian-inspired democracies to resist abolition—The Death Penalty is both a timely response to an important ethical debate and a timeless addition to Derrida’s esteemed body of work. (shrink)

Devenu une figure emblématique de l'opposition à l'ascension du nazisme, Theodor Lessing (1872-1933) - philosophe allemand d'origine juive - fut l'objet à partir de 1925 d'une virulente campagne de diffamation qui aboutit à son assassinat le 31 août 1933. Cet essai se propose non seulement d'éclairer les circonstances de sa vie et de sa mort, mais surtout de mieux faire connaître l'évolution de sa pensée et de son action à travers un choix de textes rédigés entre 1906 et 1933, et (...) toujours inédits en français. (shrink)

In his Confessions Jean-Jacques Rousseau tells the story of his life, from the formative experience of his humble childhood in Geneva, through the achievement of international fame as novelist and philosopher in Paris, to his wanderings as an exile, persecuted by governments and alienated from the world of modern civilization. In trying to explain who he was and how he came to be the object of others' admiration and abuse, Rousseau analyses with unique insight the relationship between an elusive (...) but essential inner self and the variety of social identities he was led to adopt. The book vividly illustrates the mixture of moods and motives that underlie the writing of autobiography: defiance and vulnerability, self-exploration and denial, passion, puzzlement, and detachment. Above all, Confessions is Rousseau's search, through every resource of language, to convey what he despairs of putting into words: the personal quality of one's own existence. (shrink)

Without a proper restriction on mappings, virtually any system could be seen as implementing any computation. That would not allow characterization of systems in terms of implemented computations and is not compatible with a computationalist philosophy of mind. Information-based criteria for independence of substates within structured states are proposed as a solution. Objections to the use of requirements for transitions in counterfactual states are addressed, in part using the partial-brain argument as a general counterargument to neural replacement arguments.

Psycho-physical origins.-- Spatial nothingness.-- The origin of space.-- Moral facts and origins.-- Psycho-physical relationship.-- Morality and moral ideals.-- The economic solution.-- Principles of psychotherapy.

Réflexion sur la philosophie et les lettres qui tente de répondre à la question : qu'est-ce que penser pour un homme dont l'expérience vécue est la source de l'écriture?

This book asks the question, how could we convince or compel modern business to apply ethical standards and is it essential to the success of economy? In order to answer the question, this book examines the evolution of the activist business ethics in business, in democracies, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, in philosophy, psychology and psychoanalysis. The book examines international aspects, the personification of stakeholders, the predominance of values and ethics for CEOs and the inefficient safeguards of the stakeholders’ interests.

These essays define three significant “periods” in Derrida’s writing: his early, seemingly revolutionary phase; a middle stage, often autobiographical, that included spirited defense of his work; and his late period, when his persona ...

As regards cognitive capacities, the point of view of classical Artificial Intelligence has been much challenged by the so-called emergentist point of view. This paper attempts to outline,on the basis of logical considerations dealing with practical feasibility, a general theory of incompressible unfolding that is consonant with an old Leibnizian stance rather with the contemporary theory of complexity. I defend a variant of emergentism according to which any process that leads to endow a system with cognitive capacities is such an (...) incompressible unfolding. (shrink)

Texte d'une conférence prononcée à la mémoire de Hans-Georg Gadamer à l'université de Heidelberg en février 2003 qui contient la lecture d'un singulier poème de Paul Celan.

Censures au XVIIIe siecle, les ecrivains-philosophes des Lumieres demeurent controverses ou singes de nos jours. Cette etude privilegie leurs idees-forces sans negliger les porte-parole. Celebres (Bayle, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Helvetius, d'Holbach...) ou reconnus (d'Argens, Mably, Mirabeau, d'Alembert, Volney, Mme de Stael...) ils n'enferment point leur oeuvre dans le moule d'une pensee unique. Ne parlant jamais d'une seule voix, tous associent l'invention de la liberte et l'idee neuve de bonheur. La Mettrie, materialiste medecin des ames, ecrit en precurseur de Freud. (...) Immoraliste visionnaire, Sade anticipe les derives d'une philosophie deshumanisee. Les debats seculaires avec les apologistes (Abbadie, Barruel, Bergier, Gerard, Holland, Vernes...) elaborent les fondements universels d'une morale non confessionnelle. Du refus des dogmes et de tout esprit de systeme nait une ethique transcendant les revelations. (shrink)