Introduction
1 Jer. 2:20 (LVB).
Chapter 1
1 Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (London: Verso, 2001), liv.
2 Badiou, Ethics, 10.
3 Ibid., 30 and 38.
4 Ibid., 38.
5 Ibid., 13.
6 Ibid., 60.
7 Ibid., 16.
8 Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2005).
9 Badiou, Ethics, 25.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid., 44.
13 Ibid., 42.
14 Ibid., 25.
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid., 47.
17 Ibid., 67.
18 Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (London: Bloomsbury, 2008), 48.
19 Ibid., 47.
20 Ibid., 44.
21 Ibid., 44–5.
22 Ibid., 45.
23 Ibid., 49.
24 Cf. Ibid., 46. The problem of pursuing the absolute via faith or fidelity will become all the more clear in the interlude via a detailed investigation of the thought of Søren Kierkegaard.
25 Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, ed. C. Stephen Evans and Sylvia Walsh, trans. Sylvia Walsh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
26 Meillassoux, After Finitude, 32 (italics mine).
27 Ibid., 33 (italics mine).
28 Ibid., 34.
29 What Meillassoux has in mind here is something like Hegel’s concept of the absolute spirit in his lectures on the history of world philosophy, the development of which, in and through historical events, not only demands, but justifies and redeems any number of concrete human horrors. It is this underlying logic to Hegel’s conception of the absolute in history which led Theodor Adorno to ask whether it was possible to take Hegel seriously after Auschwitz. It is this question which seems to motivate at least in part Meillassoux’s critique of dogmatic conceptions of the absolute here. For more on the problem of Hegel’s concept of the absolute in history, see: Theodor Adorno, Can One Live After Auschwitz, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003); Martin Shuster, Autonomy After Auschwitz: Adorno, German Idealism, and Modernity (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2014); and Nemli Osman, “Adorno, History ‘After Auschwitz,’” in Adorno and the Concept of Genocide, ed. Ryan Crawford and Erik M. Vogt (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 49–60.
30 Quentin Meillassoux, “Appendix: Excerpts from L’Inexistence divine,” in Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making, trans. Graham Harman (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 235.
31 Meillassoux, L’Inexistence divine, 227.
32 Meillassoux, After Finitude, 51.
33 Ibid., 34.
34 Ibid., 28.
35 Ibid., 79; cf. 128.
36 Ibid., 10.
37 Ibid., 28.
38 Ibid., 5.
39 Ibid., 27.
40 Ibid., 21.
41 Ibid., 53.
42 Ibid., 62.
43 Meillassoux, L’Inexistence divine, 177.
44 Meillassoux, After Finitude, 128.
45 Ibid., 34.
46 Ibid., 76.
47 Ibid., 49.
48 Ibid., 33 and 34.
49 Meillassoux, L’Inexistence divine, 196.
50 Ibid., 195.
51 Ibid.
52 Ibid., 210.
53 Ibid., 189; cf. 190.
54 Ibid., 193.
55 Ibid.
56 Ibid., 189.
57 Ibid., 190.
58 Ibid., 188.
59 Ibid., 205.
60 Ibid., 192.
61 Alain Badiou, “Interview (with Ben Woodward),” in The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, ed. Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman (Melbourne: re.press, 2011), 20.
62 Badiou, “Interview,” 20.
63 Ibid.
Chapter 2
1 Meillassoux, After Finitude, 5.
2 Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman, “Towards a Speculative Philosophy,” in The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, ed. Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman (Melbourne: re.press, 2011), 4.
3 Bryant, Srnicek, and Harman, “Towards a Speculative Philosophy,” 3.
4 Ibid.
5 Meillassoux, L’Inexistence divine, 195.
6 Bryant, Srnicek, and Harman, “Towards a Speculative Philosophy,” 7.
7 Tom Sparrow, The End of Phenomenology: Metaphysics and the New Realism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014).
8 Gottlob Frege, “Review of Dr. E. Husserl’s Philosophy of Arithmetic,” trans. E. W. Kluge, Mind: A Quarterly Review of Philosophy and Psychology 81, no. 323 (1972): 321–37.
9 Edmund Husserl, Philosophy of Arithmetic: Psychological and Logical Investigations with Supplementary Texts from 1887–1901, trans. Dallas Willard (Dordrecht: Springer, 2003).
10 Alain Badiou, Conditions, trans. Steven Corcoran (London: Continuum, 2008), 110–12.
11 Badiou, Ethics, 127.
12 Meillassoux, After Finitude, 126.
13 Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of The European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 43–57.
14 Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations: Volume I, trans. J. N. Findlay (London: Routledge, 1970).
15 Husserl, Crisis of The European Sciences, 202.
16 Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: First Book, General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology, trans. F. Kersten (Dordrecht: Springer, 1998), 131 and ff.
17 Edmund Husserl, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Ingo Farin and James G. Hart (Dordrecht: Springer, 2006), 62.
18 Husserl, Basic Problems of Phenomenology, 53 and ff.
19 Dan Zahavi, “The End of What? Phenomenology vs. Speculative Realism,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 24, no. 3 (2016): 289–309.
20 Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, ed. and trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 193–4.
21 Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology: I, 214–15.
22 Ibid.
23 See, for example, Chapters 10 and 11 of: Edward Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
24 Husserl, Crisis of the European Sciences.
25 Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. Second Book, Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution, trans. R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer (Dordrecht: Springer, 1990).
26 Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology: II, §18.
27 Husserl, Basic Problems of Phenomenology, §3.
28 Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations: Volume II, trans. J. N. Findlay (London: Routledge, 1970), 82–4.
29 Edmund Husserl, Thing and Space: Lectures of 1907, ed. and trans. Richard Rojcewicz (Dordrecht: Springer/Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997), §47.
30 Husserl, Logical Investigations: Vol. II, 48–50, 129–32, and 184–6.
31 Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. Dorion Cairns (Dordrecht: Springer/Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991), §62.
32 Edmund Husserl, Erste Philosophie (1923/4), Erste Teil: Kritische Ideengeschichte, ed. Rudolf Boehm (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1956), 435.
33 Husserl, Crisis of the European Sciences, 108.
34 Emmanuel Levinas, “Transcendence and Height,” in Basic Philosophical Writings, ed. Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 14.
35 Levinas, “Transcendence and Height.”
36 Emmanuel Levinas, “Freiburg, Husserl, and Phenomenology,” in Discovering Existence with Husserl, ed. and trans. Richard A. Cohen and Michael B. Smith (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 38.
37 Hannah Arendt, “Martin Heidegger at Eighty,” New York Review of Books, October 21 (1971): 50–4.
38 Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985), 38.
39 Levinas, “Freiburg, Husserl, and Phenomenology,” 38.
40 Levinas, “Transcendence and Height,” 14.
41 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 33–5.
42 Levinas, “Freiburg, Husserl, and Phenomenology,” 39.
43 Heidegger, Being and Time, 149.
44 Ibid., 67–8 and 151.
45 Ibid., 284.
46 Ibid., 307.
47 Ibid., 308.
48 Ibid., 220.
49 Ibid., 312–19.
50 See, for example: Richard Capobianco, “Lacan and Heidegger: The Ethics of Desire and the Ethics of Authenticity,” in From Phenomenology to Thought, Errancy, and Desire: Essays in Honor of William J. Richardson, ed. Babette Babich (Dordrecht: Springer/Kluwer, 1995): 391–6.
51 For more on this connection, see: Drew A. Hyland and John Panteleimon Manoussakis, eds. Heidegger and the Greeks: Interpretative Essays (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006).
52 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 71 and 173.
53 Emmanuel Levinas, “Humanism and An-Archy,” in Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998), 133.
54 Emmanuel Levinas, “Enigma and Phenomenon,” in Basic Philosophical Writings, 70.
55 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 195–6.
56 Ibid., 50.
57 Ibid., 194.
58 Ibid., 101. For more on these phenomena, see Chapter 3 of: Drew Dalton, Longing for the Other: Emmanuel Levinas and Metaphysical Desire (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2009).
59 Emmanuel Levinas, On Escape, trans. Bettina Bergo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 54–5. See also, Levinas, “Substitution,” in Basic Philosophical Writings, 94.
60 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 84 and 86.
61 Ibid., 101.
62 Levinas, “Transcendence and Height,” 12 and 18. See also: Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 34–5, 200, and 297.
63 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 87.
64 Ibid., 101.
65 Ibid., 171.
66 Ibid., 84.
67 Levinas, “Transcendence and Height,” 16 (italics mine).
68 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 88.
69 Ibid., 245.
70 Ibid.
71 Ibid., 100.
72 Ibid., 35.
73 Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998), 17.
74 Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, 17–18.
75 It should be noted that there is a subtle difference in Levinas’s early accounts of the nature of subjectivity from his later ones. Whereas in his earlier work Levinas seemed much more comfortable in identifying the I of subjectivity with a mode of being, in his later work he strives to avoid any nomination of the subject as a form of being. Nevertheless, in both his early work and later work, Levinas consistently identifies the subject as the site wherein a relation with that which is beyond being is established. It is for this reason that we can present a relatively synoptic vision of his account of the nature of the subject here.
76 Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987), 53.
77 Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 14.
78 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 290.
79 Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 49.
80 Ibid., 54–5.
81 Ibid., 3–5.
82 Levinas, “Is Ontology Fundamental?” in Basic Philosophical Writings, 7.
83 Emmanuel Levinas, “Ethics as First Philosophy,” in The Levinas Reader, ed. Sean Hand (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 76.
84 Levinas, “Meaning and Sense,” in Basic Philosophical Writings, 53 (italics mine).
Chapter 3
1 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 194.
2 Levinas, “Enigma and Phenomenon,” in Basic Philosophical Writings, 73.
3 Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 57.
4 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 290.
5 Levinas, “Enigma and Phenomenon,” in Basic Philosophical Writings, 76–7.
6 Ibid., 72.
7 Ibid., 75.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid., 76.
10 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 103–4.
11 Levinas, “God and Philosophy,” in Collected Phi losophical Papers, 160.
12 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 195 (italics mine).
13 Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, ed. David Weissman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 78 and ff.
14 See, for example: Kevin J. Harrelson, The Ontological Argument from Descartes to Hegel (Amherst: Humanity Books, 2009).
15 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 49 (italics mine).
16 Levinas, “Philosophy and the Idea of Infinity,” in Collected Philosophical Papers, 54.
17 Levinas, “Philosophy and the Idea of Infinity.”
18 See, for example: Emmanuel Levinas, Of God Who Comes to Mind, trans. Bettina Bergo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).
19 Levinas, “God and Philosophy,” in Collected Philosophical Papers, 167.
20 Levinas, “Meaning and Sense,” in Basic Philosophical Writings, 53.
21 Emmanuel Levinas, “A Religion for Adults,” in Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, trans. Sean Hand (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1990), 11–23. See also: Levinas, “Is Ontology Fundamental,” in Basic Philosophical Writings, 7–8; and Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 80.
22 Dominique Janicaud, “The Theological Turn of French Phenomenology,” in Phenomenology and the “Theological Turn”: The French Debate, trans. Bernard G. Prusak (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000), 16–103.
23 Levinas, “Is Ontology Fundamental?,” in Basic Philosophical Writings, 8. See also: Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 58.
24 Emmanuel Levinas, Nine Talmudic Readings, trans. Annette Aronowicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 147.
25 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 89.
26 See, for example: John Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997).
27 Levinas, “Transcendence and Height,” 17.
28 Levinas, “No Identity,” in Collected Philosophical Papers, 151. See also: Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 148.
29 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 143.
30 Levinas, “Transcendence and Height,” 18.
31 Emmanuel Levinas, Alterity and Transcendence, trans. Michael B. Smith (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 59–76.
32 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 171.
33 Ibid.
34 Ibid.
35 Ibid., 84.
36 Ibid., 34–5. For more on the contrast between Levinas’s account of need and desire, see: Dalton, Longing for the Other.
37 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 197.
38 Ibid., 88.
39 Ibid.
40 Ibid., 203.
41 Ibid.
42 Ibid., 178–9.
43 Ibid., 178.
44 Levinas, “Meaning and Sense,” in Basic Philosophical Writings, 55.
45 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 150.
46 Ibid., 219.
47 Ibid., 197.
48 Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 11.
49 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 43. While this emphasis of the nonallergic intervention of the Other is perhaps more representative of Levinas’s earlier works and is challenged and complicated by hi s later works, as will be shown shortly there is nevertheless ground to argue that it represents a synoptic account of Levinas’s take of the ethical dilemma throughout his career. Indeed, these themes are repeated throughout Otherwise than Being and his groundbreaking essay “Substitution” (in Basic Philosophical Writings). The only difference is that there, and in other later works, they are accompanied by other, more troubling accounts of the ethical solicitation of the Other, accounts which, as has been mentioned, will be explored in greater detail shortly.
50 Levinas, Alterity and Transcendence, 59–76.
51 Levinas, “Meaning and Sense,” in Basic Philosophical Writings, 59. For more on this distinction, see: Drew Dalton, “Phenomenology and the Infinite: Levinas, Husserl, and the Fragility of the Finite,” in Levinas Studies 9 (2014): 23–51.
52 Levinas, “Transcendence and Height,” 18.
53 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 281.
54 Levinas, “Transcendence and Evil,” in Collected Philosophical Papers, 180.
55 Levinas, Time and the Other, 49.
56 Levinas, On Escape, 54.
57 Maurice Blanchot, “Our Clandestine Companion,” in Face to Face with Levinas, ed. Richard A. Cohen (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), 49: “The there is is one of Levinas’s most fascinating propositions. It is his temptation too, since as the reverse of transcendence it is thus not distinct from it either. Indeed, it is describable in terms of being, but as the impossibility of not being, as the incessant insistence of the neutral, the nocturnal murmur of the anonymous, as what never begins (thus, an an-archic, since it eternally eludes the determination of a beginning); it is the absolute, but as absolute indetermination.”
58 Levinas, “God and Philosophy,” in Basic Philosophical Writings, 138.
59 Levinas, “Humanism and An-Archy,” 136.
60 Levinas, “God and Philosophy,” in Basic Philosophical Writings, 138.
61 For more on this ambiguity see, for example: John D. Caputo, “To the Point of a Possible Confusion: God and il y a,” in Levinas: The Face of the Other (Pittsburgh: Simon Silverman Center, 1998): 1–36. See also: Rudi Visker, “No Privacy?” in Truth and Singularity: Taking Foucault into Phenomenology (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1999), 235–73.
62 Jacques Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas,” in Writing and Difference, ed. Alan Bass (London: Routledge Press, 2001), 97–192.
63 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 245.
64 Levinas, “Meaning and Sense,” in Basic Philosophical Writings, 52.
65 Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 111–12.
66 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 101.
67 Ibid., 219.
68 Ibid., 171.
69 Ibid., 203.
70 Ibid., 197.
71 Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 10.
72 Ibid., 11.
73 Ibid., 15 and 111.
74 Ibid., 15 and 156, respectively.
75 Ibid., 54, 84, and 87, respectively.
76 Ibid., 13.
77 Levinas, “Language and Proximity,” in Collected Philosophical Papers, 121.
78 F. W. J. Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. Jeff Love and Johannes Schmidt (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006).
79 Schelling, Human Freedom, 47–8.
80 Martin Heidegger, Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Oxford: Ohio University Press, 1985), 97.
81 Schelling, Human Freedom, 23.
82 Ibid.
83 It is this element of Schelling’s argument which distinguishes his work so decisively from that of his contemporaries, most notably Hegel. For Hegel, what we consider to be evil is ultimately nothing more than a necessary moment in the development of the absolute good/God. Thus while his account of evil is not necessarily privative, nevertheless evil does not appear in his work as a real, independent potency. In this regard, Hegel’s account of evil does not differ significantly from that of the medieval scholastics. Evil remains for him, as it does for Augustine and Aquinas, only ever a relative value. For Hegel, the only absolute value is the good, hence his ability, as Meillassoux shows, to justify the evils of human history as not only necessary, but as an essential element in the emergence of the good. Schelling’s genius lies in his assertion of the ontological originality and independence of evil as its own moral force, one which is radically distinct from the good. By asserting the radical positive independence of evil from the good in this way Schelling’s work mobilizes a completely novel understanding of both the concept of evil and, more pertinently, the concept of the absolute. What Schelling’s concept of evil allows is a rereading of the absolute as a morally ambiguous force, a possibility which Hegel and the rest of the history of philosophy could never have accepted.
84 Schelling, Human Freedom, 37.
85 Ibid.
86 F. W. J. Schelling, “Stuttgart Seminars,” in Idealism and the Endgame of Theory: Three Essays by F.W.J. Schelling, trans. and ed. Thomas Pfau (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 203.
87 Gen. 1:2 (ESV).
88 Schelling, Human Freedom, 29.
89 F.W.J. Schelling, The Ages of the World, trans. Jason M. Wirth (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 22.
90 Schelling, Human Freedom, 31.
91 Ibid., 63–4.
92 Ibid., 29.
93 This conviction has to have been informed in no small part by the death of Schelling’s wife Caroline in 1809 as well as her daughter in 1803, both of whom Schelling endeavored to treat medically, perhaps unintentionally poisoning in the process—a reality which caused public scandal at the time and nearly cost Schelling his professional appointments and personal freedom.
94 Schelling, Human Freedom, 29.
95 Ibid., 29 and 34, respectively.
96 Ibid., 47 and 41, respectively.
97 Ibid., 63–4.
98 Ibid., 47.
99 Ibid., 67.
100 Ibid., 30.
101 Ibid., 23.
102 Heidegger, Schelling’s Treatise, 157.
103 Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991).
104 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin, 1963), 252.
Interlude
1 Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling.
2 Ibid., 22.
3 Ibid., 22–3.
4 Ibid., 23.
5 Ibid., 49.
6 Ibid., 24.
7 Ibid., 46.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid., 47.
10 Ibid., 32 ff.
11 Ibid., 34.
12 Ibid., 48 (italics mine).
13 Kierkegaard is clearly making reference here to 1 Cor. 1:25 (ESV): “The foolishness of God is wiser than men.”
14 Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 34.
15 Ibid., 39.
16 Ibid., 31 and 61.
17 1 Cor. 1:25 (ESV).
18 Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 49 and 58.
19 Ibid., 51.
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid., 50–1.
22 Ibid., 61.
23 Ibid.
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid.
26 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 293–4.
27 Ibid., 24.
28 Ibid., 22.
29 Ibid.
30 Ibid., 26.
31 Ibid., 287.
32 Ibid., 252.
33 Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, ed. Mary McCarthy (Orlando: Harcourt, 1978).
34 See, for example: Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Orlando: Harcourt, 1968), 476–9.
35 Bettina Stangneth, Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer, trans. Ruth Martin (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014), 218.
36 Stangneth, Eichmann Before Jerusalem.
37 Ibid., 303.
38 Ibid., 218.
39 Ibid., 303.
40 Ibid.
41 Ibid., 218.
42 Ibid., 304.
43 John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. William Kerrigan, John Rumrich, and Stephen M. Fallon (New York: The Modern Library, 2008).
44 William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (Mienola, NY: Dover Publications, 1994).
45 Milton, Paradise Lost, 38.
46 Ibid., 17.
47 Ibid.
48 Ibid., 18.
49 Ibid., 20, italics mine for emphasis.
50 Ibid., 59.
51 Ibid., 24.
52 Ibid., 76.
53 Ibid.
54 The spirit of this call to resist the absolute is poeticized forcefully in Algernon Charles Swinburne’s 1865 poem Atlanta in Calydon which reads: “Because thou art over all who are over us;/Because thy name is life and our name death;/Because thou art cruel and men are piteous,/And our hands labour and thine hand scattereth;/Lo, with hearts rent and knees made tremulous, / Lo, with ephemeral lips and casual breath, / At least we witness of thee ere we die/That these things are not otherwise, but thus;/That each man in his heart sigheth, and saith,/That all men even as I,/All we are against thee, against thee, O God most high.” See: Charles Algernon Swinburne, “Atlanta in Calydon,” in Major Poems and Selected Prose, ed. Jerome McGann and Charles L. Sligh (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 35.
55 Prov. 9:10 (ESV).
56 Voltaire, “Epistle to the Authors of the Book, The Three Impostors,” in The Works of Voltaire: A Contemporary Version, trans. William F. Fleming (New York: E. R. DuMont, 1901): vol. XV, 21–4.
Chapter 4
1 See, for example: Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); Lorenzo Chiesa, Subjectivity and Otherness: A Philosophical Reading of Lacan (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007); or, Philippe Van Haute’s close reading of Lacan’s famous essay from the Ecrits “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious” in Against Adaptation: Lacan’s “Subversion” of the Subject, trans. Paul Crowe and Miranda Vankerk (New York: Other Press, 2002).
2 See, for example: Sarah Harasym, ed. Levinas and Lacan: The Missed Encounter (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998); Simon Critchley, “Das Ding : Lacan and Levinas,” Research in Phenomenology 28 (1998): 72–90; Steven Gans, “Lacan and Levinas: Towards an Ethical Psychoanalysis,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 28, no. 1 (1997): 30–48; and Drew Dalton, “The Intrigue of the Other and the Subversion of the Subject: Levinas and Lacan on the Status of Subjectivity after Heidegger,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 34, no. 2 (2013): 415–38.
3 See, for example: Drew Dalton, “Phenomenology and the Problem of Absolute Materiality: Psychologism, Correlationism, and the Possibility of an Ethics of the Inhuman,” in Unconscious: Between Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis, ed. Dylan Trigg and Dorthée Legrand (Dordrecht: Kluewer, 2017): 141–59.
4 Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures (The Standard Edition), ed. and trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1965), 100.
5 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton, 1988), 144.
6 Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Routledge, 1996), 332.
7 Sigmund Freud, The Ego and Id, ed. James Strachey, trans. Joan Riviere (New York: W. W. Norton, 1960), 8–9.
8 Lacan, Ecrits, 163.
9 Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 25 and 29.
10 Ibid., 131.
11 Ibid., 20.
12 Cf., Sean Homer, Jacques Lacan (New York: Routledge, 2005), 66: “Lacan developed a number of different definitions of the unconscious and the emphasis that he placed on each conceptualization changed throughout his career.”
13 See, for example: Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 84, 188, and 199.
14 Jacques Lacan, “Position of the Unconscious,” in Reading Seminar XI: Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Richard Feldstein, Bruce Fink, and Maire Jaanus, trans. Bruce Fink (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 263.
15 Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 14.
16 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–1955, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 9.
17 Lacan, Ecrits, 292.
18 Ibid., 155.
19 Hans-Dieter Gondek, “Cogito and Separation: Lacan/Levinas,” in Levinas and Lacan: The Missed Encounter, 31.
20 Gondek, “Cogito and Separation: Lacan/Levinas,” 31.
21 Homer, Jacques Lacan, 70 (italics mine).
22 Lacan, The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 236.
23 Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 130.
24 Ibid., 14.
25 Ibid., 147.
26 Chiesa, Subjectivity and Otherness, 43.
27 Lacan, Ecrits, 155.
28 Ibid., 337.
29 Ibid.
30 Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 199.
31 Ibid., 144.
32 Lacan, Ecrits, 189.
33 Lacan, The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 247.
34 Ibid., 9.
35 See, for example: Lacan, Ecrits, 350: “This is what the subject lacks in order to think himself exhausted by his cogito, namely that which is unthinkable for him.”
36 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: Encore, On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge, 1 972–1973, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 21–2.
37 Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 29.
38 Ibid., 275.
39 Lacan, Ecrits, 333, 344, and 354.
40 Van Haute, Against Adaptation, 104.
41 Ibid.
42 Lacan, Ecrits, 344.
43 Ibid., 333.
44 Ibid., 345. See also: Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 235.
45 Lacan, The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 228.
46 Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 29.
47 Chiesa, Subjectivity and Otherness, 6.
48 For an excellent reading of the status of the Lacanian subject as a lack, see: Paul Verhaeghe, “Causation and Destitution of a Pre-ontological Non-entity: On the Lacanian Subject,” in Key Concepts of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, ed. Dany Nobus (New York: Other Press, 1998), 164–89.
49 Lacan, Ecrits, 349.
50 Lacan, Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 29.
51 Ibid., 30.
52 Lacan, Ecrits, 317.
53 Ibid., 332.
54 For an excellent explication of the curious ontological status of the subject, see: Mladen Dolar, “Cogito as the Subject of the Unconscious,” in Cogito and the Unconscious, ed. Slavoj Zizek (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 11–40.
55 Lacan, Ecrits, 339.
56 Van Haute, Against Adaptation, 160.
57 Slavoj Zizek, The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters (London: Verso, 2007).
58 Fink, The Lacanian Subject, 45.
59 Ibid.
60 Van Haute, Against Adaptation, 71.
61 See, for example: Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 184.
62 Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 172.
63 Ibid., 52.
64 Ibid., 84. See also: Ibid., 71.
65 Ibid., 55.
66 Ibid., 73.
67 Ibid.
68 Ibid., 63.
69 Ibid., 55.
70 Ibid., 70 and 95.
71 Ibid., 319.
72 Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 33.
73 Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 319.
74 Ibid., 54.
75 See, for example: Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 11: “The question of ethics is to be articulated from the point of view of the location of man in relation to the real,” as expressed in the absolute otherness of the Thing.
76 Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 314.
77 Ibid., 63.
78 Ibid., 319. It is important to note here the doubleness of the phrase “céder pas” in French, which signifies both “to give up on,” and “to give in to.” Recognizing the doubleness is essential to understanding properly Lacan’s formulation of ethical resistance.
79 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I: Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953–1954, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. J. Forrester (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 222. See also: Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 242–50, 316, and 319.
80 Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 73, 76, and 83.
81 Ibid., 176–7.
82 Ibid., 89.
83 Ibid.
84 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III: Psychoses, 1955–1956, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Russell Grigg (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 250–1.
85 Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 35.
86 Ibid., 58–9.
87 Ibid., 46–7, 57–8, and 319.
88 Ibid., 7.
89 Ibid.
90 Ibid., 176–7.
91 Lacan, The Psychoses, 221. For more on the difference between psychosis and neurosis in Lacan see: Van Haute, Against Adaptation, 231–2, 248, and 265.
92 Lacan, The Psychoses, 194.
93 Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 184.
94 Ibid., 197.
95 Lacan, The Psychoses, 202.
96 Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 185.
Chapter 5
1 Michel Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress,” in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, ed. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 231.
2 Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 216.
3 Michel Foucault, The Government of Self and ther: Lectures at the Collége de France, 1982–1983, ed. Frederic Gros, trans. Graham Buchell (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008), 5.
4 Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 144.
5 Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 146.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid., 146 and 148–9, respectively.
8 For more on the relationship between Foucault and Lacan on the nature of subjectivity in relation to the Other, see: Louis Sass, “Lacan, Foucault, and the ‘Crisis of the Subject’: Revisionist Reflections on Phenomenology and Post-Structuralism,” Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 21, no. 4 (2014): 325–41.
9 Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 144 (italics mine).
10 Cf. ibid., 154.
11 Foucault, “Subject and Power,” 208.
12 Ibid., 209.
13 Michel Foucault, “The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom: An Interview with Michel Foucault on January 20, 1984. Conducted by Raul Fornet-Betancourt, Helmut Becker, and Alfredo Gomez-Muller,” trans. J. D. Gauthier, S. J. in The Final Foucault, ed. James Bernauer and David Rasmussen (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1987), 9–10.
14 Foucault, “The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom,” 10.
15 Michel Foucault, An Introduction. History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), 136.
16 Foucault, History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, 139.
17 Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collége de France, 1977–1978, ed. Michael Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2007), 107–8.
18 Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power,” in Power/Knoweldge: Selected Interviews and Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, and Kate Soper (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 121.
19 Michel Foucault, “What is Enlightenment,” in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1997), 305.
20 See, for example: Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the Collége de France, 1974–1975, ed. Arnold L. Davidson, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2003), 25.
21 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Press, 1995), 184.
22 Foucault, “Truth and Power,” 109.
23 Foucault, History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, 137.
24 Ibid., 140
25 Ibid., 139.
26 Ibid., 140.
27 Ibid., 137.
28 Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collége de France, 1978–1979, ed. Michael Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2007), 107–8.
29 See, for example: Foucault, History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, 41; and Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, Chapters 5 ff.
30 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 200 ff.
31 Ibid., 176–7.
32 Ibid., 30.
33 Foucault, “The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom,” 19.
34 For more on Foucault’s ethics as a form of resistance, see: Johanna Oksala, Foucault on Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 164–5.
35 Foucault, “Subject and Power,” 211.
36 Ibid., 216.
37 Foucault, “The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom,” 20.
38 Foucault, “Subject and Power,” 210.
39 Ibid., 212.
40 Michel Foucault, Preface to Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, trans. Robery Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), xiii.
41 Michel Foucault, “Critical Theory/Intellectual History,” in Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977–1984, ed. Lawrence Kritzman, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Routledge, 1988), 36.
42 See, for example: Foucault, “The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom,” 2–3.
43 Foucault, The Birth of BioPolitics, 63.
44 Ibid.
45 Foucault, “The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom,” 20.
46 Foucault, “Subject and Power,” 216.
47 Foucault, “The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom,” 5.
48 Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics,” 231.
49 Ibid., 234.
50 Ibid.
51 Ibid., 235.
52 Ibid., 236.
53 Ibid., 235.
54 Ibid.
55 Oksala, Foucault on Freedom, 12.
56 Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics,” 231
57 Ibid.
58 Ibid., 234–5.
59 Ibid., 235.
60 Ibid., 237.
61 Michel Foucault, Fearless Speech, ed. Joseph Pearson (Los Angeles: Smeiotext(e), 2001), 166.
62 Foucault, Fearless Speech.
63 Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics,” 235.
64 Michel Foucault, “Technologies of the Self,” in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1997), 230.
65 Foucault, “Technologies of the Self,” 232.
66 Foucault, The Government of Self and Others, 66.
67 Ibid., 67.
68 Ibid., 54.
69 Ibid., 104.
70 Ibid., 161.
71 Ibid., 71.
72 Foucault, “Truth and Power,” 126.
73 For more on how Foucault’s concept of genealogy functions as an exercise of parrhésia and critique see: Rudi Visker, Foucault: Genealogy as Critique, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 1999).
74 Michel Foucault, The Care of the Self: Volume 3, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1986/1988), 58–64.
75 Foucault, Fearless Speech, 143.
76 Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collége de France, 1981–1982, ed. Frederic Gros, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2001/2005), 371.
77 Foucault, Fearless Speech, 145–50.
78 Ibid., 150–60.
79 Ibid., 160–4.
80 Foucault, The Care of the Self, 64–5.
81 Ibid., 66. For more on Foucault’s concept of ethics as askesis, see: Edward McGushin, Foucault’s Askesis: An Introduction to the Philosophical Life (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007).
82 Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, 319–20.
83 Michel Foucault, “A Preface to Transgression,” in Language Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 29–52. Foucault’s heroization of Sade seems to be derived in some part from Camus’s portrait of Sade in The Rebel. See, for example: Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt, trans. Anthony Bower (New York: Vintage, 1991), 36 ff.
84 Michel Foucault, “Self Writing,” in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1997), 213.
85 For more on this see, for example: Eduardo Mendieta, “The Practice of Freedom,” in Michel Foucault: Key Concepts, ed. Dianna Taylor (New York: Acumen, 2011), 116–19.
86 Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, 359–62.
87 Foucault, “Self-Writing,” 208.
88 Ibid., 213.
89 Michel Foucault, Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a 19th Century Hermaphrodite, trans. Richard McDougall (New York: Vintage, 1980), xii.
90 Foucault, “What is Enlightenment,” 311.
91 Again, Foucault seems to have drawn extensively from Camus’s The Rebel here. See: Camus, The Rebel, 295–6.
92 Jean Genet, The Blacks: A Clown Show, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Grove Press, 1960), 27.
93 Oksala, Foucault on Freedom, 84.
94 Foucault, “What is Enlightenment,” 306.
95 Oksala, Foucault on Freedom, 187.
96 Foucault, “What is Enlightenment,” 316.
97 Ibid., 311.
98 Ibid., 319.
Conclusion
1 In this regard, despite the revolutionary spirit of the modern project, much of modern philosophy remains firmly within the tradition it tried so desperately to free itself from. Nowhere is the irony of modernity’s fealty to the history of philosophy more obvious than in the so-called revolutionary philosophy of Hegel whose concept of the absolute is really nothing other than a kind of “immanentization” of the idea of the absolute good maintained from Plato onward. Indeed, in many ways Hegel’s project on this count is really not all that distinct from Aquinas’s: the attempt to forge a kind of summa theologica, only one in keeping with his Protestantism and idealism whereby God becomes not only the ground and condition for all understanding, but the living immanent essence of all reality.
2 Jonathan Barnes, Early Greek Philosophy (London: Penguin Books, 1987), 71.
3 Barnes, Early Greek Philosophy, 72.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid., 50 (translation amended).
6 Ibid., 70–1.
7 Indeed, it was for this reason that so many of the ancients saw Heraclitus’s work as a counterpart to the logic of Parmenides’s concept of the One, one which, while at first glance its opposite, could actually operate within it. For more on this connection, see: Christian H. Sötemann, Heraclitus and Parmenides—An Ontic Perspective (Munich: GRIN Publishing, 2009).
8 Levinas, “Transcendence and Height,” 20; Jean-Paul Sartre. Existentialism is a Humanism, ed. John Kulka, trans. Carol Macomber (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 20.
9 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 78.
10 John Stuart Mill, On Liberty and Other Essays, ed. John Gray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 5.
11 Mill, On Liberty and Other Essays.
12 Ibid., 8–9.
13 Ibid., 9.
14 Ibid., 6.
15 Ibid., 9.
16 Alexander Berkman, The ABC of Anarchism (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1972), 190–1.
17 Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013), 4–5.
18 See, for example: Mikhail Bakunin, “The Immorality of the State,” in The Selected Works of Mikhail Aleksandrovich Bakunin, ed. Carlo Cafiero and Èlisée Reclus (Online: Library of Alexandria Press, 2009).
19 See, for example: Michael Bakunin, God and the State, ed. Paul Avrich (New York: Dover Publications, 1970).
20 Berkman, The ABC of Anarchism, 22–9.
21 See, for example: Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays, 3.
22 Berkman, The ABC of Anarchism, xxv.
23 The link between these thinkers and nineteenth-century political anarchism has been traced in: Todd May, The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995).
24 Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, ed. and trans. Steven Corcoran (New York: Continuum, 2010), 27.
25 Rancière, Dissensus, 30.
26 Ibid., 33.
27 Ibid., 36–7.
28 Ibid., 36.
29 Ibid., 38.
30 Ibid., 41.
31 Ibid., 40.
32 Ibid., 33.
33 Ibid., 41.
34 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brain Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 216. For more on Deleuze’s conception of politics qua anarchy, see: Paul Patton, Deleuze and the Political (London: Routledge, 2009).
35 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 214–31.
36 Ibid., 508–9.
37 Ibid., 238.
38 Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations: 1972–1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 171.
39 Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 141–2.
40 Lyotard, The Differend.
41 Ibid., 142–3.
42 Ibid., 143.
43 Albert Camus, Notebooks: 1935–1942, trans. Philip Thody (New York: The Modern Library, 1963), 54.