The Phenomenology of Pain and Pleasure: Henry and Levinas

While Henry and Levinas are often juxtaposed, little attention has been given to their shared views on pain and pleasure. Both phenomenologists converge on the argument that an adequate account of pain and pleasure requires a critical confrontation with the theory of intentionality. This raises further questions. What roles do interiority and exteriority play in pain and pleasure? Should they be conceived as different tonalities of one essence or as heterogenous phenomena? Despite their shared critique of intentionality, Henry and Levinas respond differently to these questions. We argue that Henry’s account suffers from an imprisonment in immanence, leading to a homogenous account of pain and pleasure as derivatives of one essence. In our view, Levinas points toward a more fruitful phenomenological account, both in so far as he does not divorce pain and pleasure from exteriority, and also in the way his phenomenology preserves the heterogeneity of pleasure and pain

Raymond Aron and the 'Sense of Compromise' in Democracy

This article seeks to explore the relevance of compromise in Raymond Aron’s essays. The concept of compromise has never been subjected to critical scrutiny in his works. The paper offers a new interpretation of R. Aron’s democratic theory by arguing that “the sense of compromise”, mainly set out in Democracy and Totalitarianism, is a foundational and pivotal concept to highlight the specifics of his liberal thought and his understanding of democratic pluralism.It aims to provide a critical analysis, presenting a focused exploration of three types of compromise, broken down into three areas (the political-pluralist compromise; the economic compromise; the foreign policy compromise). In each of these cases, key qualities and limitations of compromise solutions for deadlocked controversies are outlined.The article argues that, for R. Aron, economic compromise is the easiest to achieve.The paper further discusses possible criteria that can help to discriminate moral from immoral compromises. It concludes that “the sense of compromise” is inseparable from any serious attempt to think afresh R. Aron’s democratic theory

Caribbean Confederations as Relationalities: The Erotics of Archipelagic Thinking

In this essay, I connect my work on Archipelago studies with Édouard Glissant’s notions of relationality and Caribbean confederations to formulate what I denominate as the erotics of archipelagic thinking. My main goal is to share my process of thinking with and through Glissant’s work to focus on a series of theoretical gestures that have allowed me to propose modes of reading literary depictions of Caribbean con/federations that go beyond the binary opposition between colonialism and nationalism. I am performing an exercise that I assign to my students when I teach the “Introduction to Critical Theory” course at the University of Miami. Instead of writing an essay with a short theoretical introduction followed by a detailed close reading of literary and cultural texts that illustrate a keyword or a theoretical insight, I conduct a methodological meditation in which I theorize the archipelagic as a form of relationality that configures an erotic imaginary beyond the nuclear family and towards affective networks. To think about the Caribbean as an archipelagic formation, I use my comparative work on the Antillean Confederation in the Hispanic Caribbean (1860-1898) and the West Indies Federation in the English Caribbean (1958-1962) as a historical context in which the region congealed as a network of locations “act[ing] in concert.

Ontological Magma: Between Difference and Relation

Édouard Glissant undertakes a radical rethinking of ontology. The relations of creolization have key political and cultural consequences: they destabilize the Eurocentric foundations of knowledge; they affirm hybridity; they dislocate the colonial systems of power. Yet they also have another, perhaps even more consequential ambition. As Glissant says in Poetics of Relation, creolization contains an “attempt to get at Being.” Relation operates at the ontological level as a process of creation of a different constitution of being. Relation, which names the “new and original dimension allowing each person to be there and elsewhere,” the diffracted “totalité-monde,” the event by which “[t]he elementary reconstitutes itself absolutely,” brings forth an ontological autopoeisis and reframing of the world

From Antillanité to the Archipelagic: Édouard Glissant’s Linked Insularities of Non-Continental Thought

The pervasive patterns of neocolonialism long at work in the Francophone Caribbean, whereby the islands have been overseas departments of France for over seventy-five years, operate through a strategic metropolitan praxis of prohibition and exclusion that has long undermined a functional framework that enables and valorizes local sociocultural self-affirmation. While France has effectively sought to efface Guadeloupean and Martinican discourses of nationalism by integrating them into an overarching metropolitan framework of domination of the Other and the disavowal of difference, carried out as part and parcel of a universalizing French policy of ethnopolitical homogeneity, the articulation of nationalist counterdiscourses and cartographies of resistance aimed at asserting the vibrancy and independence of a Franco-Caribbean identity have strategically shifted over time from the purely political to the domains of cultural identity and its corollaries of philosophy and performance

Contributor Information

Contributor biographies for special issue Thinking with Glissan

To Grasp Praxis Subjectively: Simone Weil and Michel Henry on Marx's Living Labor

This work argues that Simone Weil and Michel Henry appropriate two key insights from Marx—the critique of abstraction and the possibility of living labor—in order to philosophize subjectivity more actively. I place the two philosophers together because there is an uncanny similarity in their interpretations of Marx and specifically, in their use of his notion of praxis. The work begins with Weil’s and Henry’s criticism of philosophy for ignoring what is most human—praxis, or subjectivity. Following Marx’s First Thesis on Feuerbach, both argue that philosophy problematically abstracts subjectivity by objectifying it. In other words, philosophy too often identifies the subject as a thing that can be described, analyzed, and examined. Both assert that just as Capital deadens workers and their living laboring capacity, western philosophy is limited by various objectifications that function to deaden the individual, most notably a knowledge of consciousness. The two reject these objectifications and argue that Marx’s praxis offers another, more active, modality for considering subjectivity. The second half of this work focuses on what is unique to Weil and Henry: the suggestion that Marx’s living has not been adequately understood. Both suggest that Marx attends to praxis philosophically by creating a new method: one that emphasizes what Weil calls experiencing and Henry designates knowledge of life. Attending to this method provides the operative distinction in my work: the difference between a philosophy that objectifies by relying on a knowledge of consciousness and a philosophy that attends to experiencing and depends upon a knowledge of life. The key for Weil and Henry is that Marx attends to the active dimension of subjectivity: real, lived, existence. For both, praxis and living labor point to a singular dimension of subjectivity that is irreducible to objectification, generalization or even to theorizing. In the concluding section I discuss how both thinkers’ interpretations of Marx provide a different modality for philosophy: the possibility of considering subjectivity subjectively by focusing on cultures that foster knowledge of life and promote the singular dimension that is living labor

The Gift of Mourning

This paper explores the relationship of mourning and the gift in the work of Jacques Derrida. I argue that mourning is not a Derridean gift, but mourning does open us to the gift. Reading the works of Aristotle, Cicero, and Kierkegaard on friendship and love to the dead in the wake of Derrida’s Politics of Friendship makes this relation among mourning and the gift apparent for he presents mourning as the opening to a democracy to-come whose logic is the gift. Through these accounts, I maintain that in preparing us for the gift, mourning the dead other can help us to relate better with the living other in ethical, political, and ontological terms

“Le dépassement réalisé d’une différence”: : Tentation informatique et pensée poétique chez Glissant

“De l’information du poème” qui clôt la partie “Éléments” dans Poétique de la Relation, représente pour le lectorat habitué à l'écriture glissantienne un chapitre assez surprenant voire confondant tant au niveau de l’approche du sujet traité que de sa mise en forme rhétorique, car c’est autour de l’opposition entre poésie et informatique que démarre son propos. Tout d’abord, on a l’impression que Glissant s'écarte des riches lieux- communs qui rythment et structurent sa pensée puisque, après quelques pages consacrées au baroque, son attention se tourne ici de manière apparemment aléatoire vers l'antagonisme entre les nouvelles technologies et le parangon de la création littéraire. L'intérêt de Glissant pour la science et les nouvelles technologies n’est certes pas une anomalie lorsque l’on considère l’ensemble de son œuvre puisque cette dernière est en effet bâtie sur un éclectisme quasi programmatique qui se manifeste à travers la pensée du rhizome et le droit à l'opacité. Cependant, la dichotomie entre “ces deux ordres de la connaissance, le poétique et le scientifique” sur laquelle repose l'hypothèse de ce court chapitre semble trancher avec la rhétorique relationnelle qui caractérise son approche. Le penseur semble même souscrire aux poncifs d’un discours d'époque réduisant la complexité des nouvelles technologies et la magnitude de leurs effets sur la société contemporaine à une simple série d’oppositions entre, d’une part, une culture humaniste qui rassemblerait une communauté en présence autour de la parole poétique menacée, et, d’autre part, le pouvoir aliénant de l’information transmise à travers des circuits non-relationnels, impersonnels, sans voix et sans visage.“De l’information du poème” qui clôt la partie “Éléments” dans Poétique de la Relation, représente pour le lectorat habitué à l'écriture glissantienne un chapitre assez surprenant voire confondant tant au niveau de l’approche du sujet traité que de sa mise en forme rhétorique, car c’est autour de l’opposition entre poésie et informatique que démarre son propos. Tout d’abord, on a l’impression que Glissant s'écarte des riches lieux-communs qui rythment et structurent sa pensée puisque, après quelques pages consacrées au baroque, son attention se tourne ici de manière apparemment aléatoire vers l'antagonisme entre les nouvelles technologies et le parangon de la création littéraire. L'intérêt de Glissant pour la science et les nouvelles technologies n’est certes pas une anomalie lorsque l’on considère l’ensemble de son œuvre puisque cette dernière est en effet bâtie sur un éclectisme quasi programmatique qui se manifeste à travers la pensée du rhizome et le droit à l'opacité. Cependant, la dichotomie entre “ces deux ordres de la connaissance, le poétique et le scientifique” sur laquelle repose l'hypothèse de ce court chapitre semble trancher avec la rhétorique relationnelle qui caractérise son approche. Le penseur semble même souscrire aux poncifs d’un discours d'époque réduisant la complexité des nouvelles technologies et la magnitude de leurs effets sur la société contemporaine à une simple série d’oppositions entre, d’une part, une culture humaniste qui rassemblerait une communauté en présence autour de la parole poétique menacée, et, d’autre part, le pouvoir aliénant de l’information transmise à travers des circuits non-relationnels, impersonnels, sans voix et sans visage

The Divine Game Versus the Demonic Game: The Fourth Copernican Revolution in Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition

In Difference and Repetition1 Deleuze sets out to critique the regime of representation and common sense by developing a new conception of difference and repetition in which difference and repetition become liberated from the coherence and continuity of a self or I.2 Difference in itself means that difference has become independent not only from representation, but also from an enduring or coherent self. Difference in itself and repetition in itself are the becoming different and the repetition of a fractured or dissolved self, which Deleuze relates to both a larval subject3 and to a simulacrum.4 In Difference and Repetition Deleuze defines both the concepts of larval subject and simulacrum through the multiplicities and differential relations of the realm of the virtual.5 However, they are not the same. A simulacrum defines a condition in which an entity has become transformed into pure appearance in which nothing appears. A simulacrum is no longer an entity, but only the illusion of an entity.6 This is distinct from the larval subject because the larval subject is an embryonic entity, an entity in the process of formation.7 Through an analysis of the conceptual relation and distinction between larval subject and simulacrum in the first part of the essay, I will reinterpret Deleuze as a philosopher of indifference and the impossibility of repetition, which is a critique on the common idea that Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition is a philosophy of pure difference and pure repetition. Also, I will argue that Deleuze did not just develop a transcendental empiricism (a metaphysics of process), but a philosophy of the universal in itself (which is the collapse of metaphysics). The universal in itself emerges when experience collapses and when the self-determination of entities has become impossible