Journal articles on the topic 'Jacques Ethics'

This article argues that the most widely disseminated reading of Lafitte’s writings, which aligns his proposals for ‘mechanology’ with cybernetics, overlooks the broader ethical and social project to which he hoped his ideas would contribute. It is shown that the purpose of mechanology articulated by Lafitte was the development of an ethical relation to machines, a theme he developed in his later publications. It is argued that Lafitte’s position resonates with positions taken by contemporary works focused on the renewal of a critical approach to the philosophy of technology, particularly those that seek to transform the relationship between humans and the natural world.

The body in need of care is the subaltern of the neoliberal epistemic order: it is that which cannot be heard, and that which is muted, partially so even in care ethics. In order to read the writing by which the needy body writes the world, a new ethics must be articulated. Building on Jacques Derrida’s philosophy of deconstruction, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s notions of subalternity and epistemic violence, critical disability scholarship, and corporeal care theories, in this article I develop an ethics of needs. This is an ethical position that seeks to read the world that care needs write with the relations they enact. The ethics of needs deconstructs the world with a focus on those care needs that are presently responded to with neglect, indifference, or even violence: the absence of care. Specifically, the ethics of needs opens a space—a spacing, an aporia—for a more ethical politics of life than neoliberal biopolitics can ever provide, namely, the politics of life of needs.

Abstract Jacques Lacan. The Traumatic Entry into the World With the development of modernity, previous ideas of ethics and morality came into crisis. In order to open the door to a new way of moral education, the article analyzes how human predisposition is understood in Lacan’s works. The focus on the traumatic entry into the language shows how the subject loses its immediacy and how this process troubles the educational theory of ethics.

This paper looks at mourning and melancholia, and their ethical implications through the work of Sigmund Freud and mostly Jacques Derrida. The attempt here is to read through Derrida’s auto thanatological oeuvre through questions of fidelity, interminability, impossibility and ethics. In our perpetual struggle as scholars dealing with questions of meaning, existence, loss, life and death this paper tries to navigate the discursive traditions of looking at mourning and melancholia and what their radical potential is or can be where the mourning; melancholic; haunted; living subjects bear an impossible task unto the dead.

In this paper, I examine the connections between ethics and aesthetics in the writing of Seamus Heaney. Looking at Heaney’s neologism of ‘po-ethics’, I move through his poetry and especially his translation of Sophocles’ Philoctetes, entitled The Cure at Troy, and focus on his Fourth Irish Human Rights Commission Annual Human Rights Lecture: Writer & Righter, wherein he traces a number of strong connections between human rights workers and creative writers. The essay is written through a theoretical matrix of the ethical theories of Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas and Simon Critchley. It looks at poems from Heaney himself, as well as work from Shakespeare, Dante Alighieri, Czeslaw Miłosz, and Primo Levi. It focuses on poetic language as a discourse that can act as a counterweight and as a form of redress on behalf of the dignity of the individual human being against the pressures of mass culture and society.

Abstract In this article, we argue that the animated TV-show Rick and Morty depicts several important and relevant themes about the impact of technology in contemporary societies. By using certain concepts and ideas from the philosophy of technology, especially from thinkers like Jacques Ellul, Jacques Derrida, Neil Postman, and George Ritzer, we investigate how this show brings to the fore certain ontological and ethical assumptions and problems that stem from the advance of technology. We shall use the term technopolitical thinking to refer to these core assumptions and principles which are inherent in contemporary technological societies. By providing various examples from certain episodes and scenes of the show, we shall illustrate how this animated series can provide a basis for a more extensive discussion.

This article examines Marilynne Robinson's novel Gilead in dialogue with her speculative reflection upon Dietrich Bonhoeffer's theology to read the novel as a radically ambivalent text which exposes an aporia at the core of the Reverend Ames's Christian ethics. This ambivalence appears in the way that Ames's version of his own family history works assiduously to expiate the perceived violence done to ethics by his grandfather's support for abolitionist violence while remaining haunted by the thought that in the unforgiving context of Bleeding Kansas simply to insist upon an absolute distinction between violence on the one hand and ethics and law on the other may be irreconcilable with the workings of good faith and the ends of justice. Reinterpreting Ames's narrative in the light of Jacques Derrida's reflection on the paradoxical structure of ethical responsibility, the article argues that the violence done to Ames's ethical reflection by the memory of the grandfather, John Brown, and the excluded black body reveals the agonistic location of the ethics of abolitionist history between two kinds of violence on the uncertain border between justice and law which defines the ground of every genuinely ethical decision.

The twofold aim of this article is to demonstrate (1) that a moreconstructive and mutually productive relationship is possible betweentheology and psychoanalysis, and doing this arguing (2) that psychoanalysis can assist theology understand the injunction of neighbour love as a form of ethical anti-ethics while theology can assist psychoanalysis maintain the ethical insight that there is something about human existence that is beyond the pleasure principle, something that cannot be reduced to a matter of pure survival and life sustainment, and that this constitutes a challenge for ethics. The article’s first three sections can be divided into two main parts. The first part (section 2) accounts for the criticism of the Christian variation of the injunction of neighbour lovethat Freud presents in Civilization and Its Discontents, and examines thebackground for this critique. The second part (section 3-4) encirclesthe concept of the neighbour as the hub of a form of ethical anti-ethicsthrough a reading of some key passages from Jacques Lacan’s famousSeminar VII on psychoanalytic ethics and Søren Kierkegaard’s Worksof Love. The article last section (section 5) provides a brief concludingsummary.

This paper proposes a conversation between Jacques Rancière and feminist care ethicists. It argues that there are important resonances between these two bodies of scholarship, thanks to their similar indictments of Western hierarchies and binaries, their shared invitation to “blur boundaries” and embrace a politics of “impropriety”, and their views on the significance of storytelling/narratives and of the ordinary. Drawing largely on Disagreement, Proletarian Nights, and The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, I also indicate that Rancière’s work offers crucial and timely insights for care ethicists on the importance of attending to desire and hope in research, the inevitability of conflict in social transformation, and the need to think together the transformation of care work/practices and of dominant social norms.

David Campbell has been at the forefront of showing how deconstruction, and the philosophy of Jacques Derrida, can help us to think international relations differently. Like Derrida himself, Campbell has eschewed the goal of an ethical theory in favour of an ‘ethos of political criticism’ concerned to question and go beyond our assumptions and limits. In order to continue such an ethos of criticism, to push our understanding of ethics in international relations further still, it is surely important to question the assumptions and limits Campbell himself imposes. It is with this in mind that I wish to take a particular political intervention by Derrida in 1993 and read it against Campbell’s Derridean analysis of the Bosnian conflict which began in 1992.

Abstract The following interview took place between Jacques Bouveresse and Hilary Putnam on May 11, 2001 in Paris at the Collège de France. Sandra Laugier was present, preserved the transcription, and proposed that we publish the text here. It was translated into English by Marie Kerguelen Feldblyum LeBlevennec and lightly edited by Jacques Bouveresse, Juliet Floyd, and Sandra Laugier. Themes covered in the interview include the question of Wittgenstein’s importance in contemporary philosophy, Putnam’s development with respect to realism, especially in philosophy of mathematics, and the differences and motivations for realism in mathematics, physics, and ethics. The editors thank Marie Kerguelen Feldblyum LeBlevennec for her translation, and Jacques Bouveresse, Mario De Caro, and Sandra Laugier for permission to publish this transcription.

This article presents a deconstructionist perspective on the environmental eth-ics. This model realizes a multi-criterial approach to normativity in the environ-mental ethics. The fi rst part of this study is devoted to the most important con-cepts of environmental philosophy, as represented by Peter Singer, Hans Jonas, Holmest Rolston and Aldo Leopold. In the second part, I show that the philos-ophy of Jacques Derrida contains an interesting vision of environmental ethics,

The field of post-anthropocentrism in current animal philosophy and related disciplines is structured by heterogeneous concepts of anthropocentrism on the one hand and different usages of the prefix ‘post’ on the other. This paper expounds different perspectives on anthropocentrism, while additionally focusing on the possibilities of its overcoming: on how anthropocentrism is problematized rather than on what is problematized. Two different positions are used as examples: humanist post-anthropocentrism, as advocated by Gary Steiner, and post-humanism, as advocated by Cary Wolfe in reference to Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction. In conclusion, the notion of ‘excess’ is analysed to illustrate the structural differences regarding a crucial term for both positions.

This essay argues that it is the machine that constitutes the symptom of ethics— “symptom” understood as that excluded “part that has no part” in the system of moral consideration. Ethics, which has been historically organized around a human or at least biological subject, needs the machine to define the proper limits of the moral community even if it simultaneously excludes such mechanisms from any serious claim on moral consideration. The argument will proceed in five steps or movements. The first part will define and characterize “the symptom” as it has been operationalized in the work of Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek. Although Žižek appropriates this term from Jacques Lacan, he develops the concept in a unique way that exceeds Lacan’s initial psychoanalytic formulations. The second and third parts will demonstrate how the machine constitutes the symptom of moral philosophy, showing how and why it comprises the always already excluded element necessary to define the proper limits of moral subjectivity. The fourth part will then consider two alternatives that promise, but ultimately fail, to accommodate this symptom. And the final section will draw out the consequences of this analysis for ethics and its excluded others.

The article studies relation between ethics and economics to what role moral and economic principles play in Islamic economics. The article includes introduction, two sections and conclusion. The first section discusses a relation between ethical norms and economics. We attempted to critically analyze moral and ethical norms proposed by the western economists such as Jean-Baptiste Say, Leon Walras, Alfred Marshal in XIX century. Muslim social scientist Ibn Khaldun and French thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau proposed not to consider an individual only as economic unit but develop his other aspects and potential as part of their economic research. The second section considers how far ethical norms of Islamic economics were researched. The article emphasizes that norms and principles of Islamic economics derive from Quran and Sunnah, researches ethics of those economic principles. To be exact, we will determine that Islamic economics is based on fair trading, economic equality, property protection and scrutinize each that aspect. The research results will prove that moral and ethical norms play a crucial role in general economic science, ethical norms of Islamic economics consist an integral part of economic decisions and actions.

In the introduction to a 2002 special issue of diacritics on ethics and interdisciplinarity, mark sanders asks us to consider, “What points of contact, if any, are there between the current investment in ethics in literary theory, and the elaboration of ethics in contemporary philosophy?” (3). Yet the question behind this question—the one that motivates his selection of essays for the issue—is why literary critics and theorists have drawn their ideas about ethics from Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, and Alain Badiou but have felt little or no need to consult past or present moral philosophers. As Sanders goes on to note, while “in North America and the Anglophone world generally, the tendency in ethics has been to bring moral reflection to bear on questions in political theory,” there “has been relatively little attention among literary theorists to developments in disciplinary philosophy” (4).

The publication of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s play Der Müll, die Stadt und der Tod (Garbage, the City, and Death; 1976) constitutes one of the major scandals in German cultural history. The play was accused of being anti-Semitic, because one of its key characters, a real estate speculator, was merely called the Rich Jew. Furthermore, some (negative) dramatis personae in the play openly express anti-Semitic views. When asked to respond, Fassbinder retorted that philo-Semites (in the West Germany of the time) are in fact anti-Semites, because they refuse to see how the victims of oppression can at times assume the roles and positions assigned to them by pernicious social structures. Fassbinder’s vilification on the part of the right-wing press prevented the play’s staging; subsequently, in 1984 and 1985–86 two Frankfurt productions were banned due to the reaction on the part of the local Jewish community. A similar controversy sparked off by the film adaptation of the play Shadow of Angels by Daniel Schmid. During the film’s screening at the Cannes Film Festival the Israeli delegation walked out, while there was also rumor of censorship in France. Gilles Deleuze wrote an article for Le Monde titled “The Rich Jew” defending the film and the director. Deleuze’s article triggered a furious reaction from Shoah (1985) director, Claude Lanzmann, who responded in Le Monde and attacked the cultural snobbery and “endemic terrorism” of the left-wing cinephile community. Lanzmann saw the film as wholly anti-Semitic and suggested that it identifies the Jew—all Jews—with money. While the author acknowledges the complexity of the subject, he revisits the debate and the film to unpack its ethical/aesthetic intricacy and propose a pathway that can potentially enable us to think of ways that political incorrectness can function as a means of exposing the persistence of historical and ethical questions that are ostentatiously resolved. He does this by drawing on Alain Badiou’s idea of militant ethics and Jacques Rancière’s redefinition of critical art as one that produces dissensus.

This article compares Paul Ricoeur and Jacques Derrida on the theme of translation and in particular the ethical implications of the different ways in which they approach the untranslatable. While Ricoeur’s account of translation as linguistic hospitality does offer a model for an ethical encounter with the other, I argue that this account does not go far enough. My central claim is that Ricoeur’s treatment of translation overemphasizes the movement of appropriation and integration. While it may not be his intention, this emphasis could lead to a certain kind of complacency that would challenge the ethical claims Ricoeur makes in favour of translation as a paradigm. I propose to supplement Ricoeur’s hospitality with Derrida’s untranslatable, in order to create a situation of constant discomfort thereby guarding against ethical complacency.

Bioethics tends to be dominated by discourses concerned with the ethical dimension of medical practice, the organization of medical care, and the integrity of biomedical research involving human subjects and animal testing. Jacques Derrida has explored the fundamental question of the “limit” that identifies and differentiates the human animal from the nonhuman animal. However, to date his work has not received any reception in the field of biomedical ethics. In this paper, I examine what Derrida’s thought about this limit might mean for the use/misuse/abuse of animals in contemporary biomedical research. For this, I review Derrida’s analysis and examine what it implies for scientific responsibility, introducing what I have coined the “Incompleteness Theorem of Bioethics.”

In his seminar on ethics Jacques Lacan suggests there exists a ‘filiation’ between Freudian psychoanalysis and a ‘new direction of thought’ that starts with Luther’s conceptualization of ‘a hatred that existed even before the world was created’, and is then further continued in Calvinism. In this article this thesis is explored. The author argues that there is not only a familiarity between the protestant doctrines of predestination and Freud’s reconstruction of prehistoric events, but also that Lacan’s project on ethics and his elaboration of desire, superego and morality shows an affiliation with Calvinist thought on the nature of conscience and the longing for restoration of a lost image of God.

JACQUES ELLUL: A Companion to His Major Works by Jacob E. Van Vleet and Jacob Marques Rollison. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2020. 187 pages. Paperback; $25.00. ISBN: 9781625649140. *Jacques Ellul stands as a towering figure in this discourse on theology, politics, violence, and technology. Ellul was a professor of history and sociology of institutions at the University of Bordeaux in France, but he is most known in the English-speaking world as a technological critic and lay theologian. Over the course of his life, he wrote over fifty books and over one thousand essays on topics ranging from cultural critique to biblical exegesis. In his early life, Ellul was influenced by the French personalist movement, especially by his friend Bernard Charbonneau, and played a role in the French Resistance during World War II. As an academic, thinker, and commentator he considered his three main intellectual influences to be--perhaps a strange mixture--Karl Marx, Søren Kierkegaard, and Karl Barth. Throughout his life, he was a committed member of the Reformed Church in France although, in significant ways, his thought diverged from both historic Calvinism and varieties of modern, liberal Protestantism. *In Jacques Ellul: A Companion to His Major Works, Jacob E. Van Vleet and Jacob Marques Rollison take readers through succinct, well-ordered summaries of eleven of Ellul's most important works, including a one-chapter summary of his theological ethics. Both scholars are well versed in Ellul's corpus. Van Vleet, a professor of philosophy at Diablo Valley College in California, has already published at least two books on Ellul. Rollison, an independent scholar in Strasbourg, France, has published on Ellul and edited some of his work. The authors divide their book into two main sections: the first, reviewing Ellul's theological works; and the second, his sociological works. They borrow from Ellul the image of train tracks, "separate but parallel, moving toward the same goal," to describe the relationship between theology and sociology in his body of work (p. 2). The two disciplines have different frameworks and methodologies, but the authors argue that examining both in a "dialectical" way is necessary to understanding the heart of Ellul's thought. *In the first five chapters, the authors review what they consider to be Ellul's most important theological works. Chapter 1 reviews the book Presence in the Modern World, published originally in French in 1948; in English in 1951. That book introduces the main concerns of Ellul's project: a critical analysis of society and an approach to Christian engagement with society through the category of "presence." Cautious, for theological reasons, about creating explicit ethical systems, Ellul instead gives readers a general commentary on how to "live in the world, but not of the world"--a world marked by an idolatrous concern for efficiency, quantification, and bureaucratic control. Chapter 2 does a good job summarizing the book Violence: Reflections from a Christian Perspective, first published in 1969. Critiquing both uncritical acceptance of violence and traditional just-war theory, Ellul outlines instead his own defense of Christian nonviolence. In chapter 3, the authors review Ellul's masterful work The Meaning of the City. This book is an extended meditation on the theme of the city in the Bible as both a symbol of human sin and hubris, and a symbol of hope. Jerusalem, in particular, becomes a sign of God's willingness to meet humanity on our own terrain. *Chapter 4 deals with the book that Ellul considered to be his greatest theological work, Hope in Time of Abandonment. The book puts forward the thesis that, while God "perhaps ... still speaks to the heart of [an individual]," he no longer speaks or is present at the level of society's institutions or its history (p. 47). In the context of God's marked absence, Christians are called to a peculiar practice of hope marked by perseverance, prayer, and a disciplined, fearless realism. Chapter 5 explores Ellul's commentary on the book of Revelation published in English as Apocalypse: The Book of Revelation in 1978. The book follows some sort of personal religious transformation for Ellul, and in it, he boldly proclaims his hope for universal salvation. Against interpretations of Revelation that see the book as a promise that evil people will be judged and defeated, he sees in it instead a promise that God will be victorious over evil powers--the spiritual systems and sociological forces that rule our lives. *Chapter 6 ends the theological section of the book. Unlike the chapters before and after, this chapter does not look at a single book but instead looks at Ellul's theological ethics. The authors admit that, while Ellul wrote both theology and biblical commentaries, none of these were his specialty. "It is most correct," they argue, "to view Ellul as a theological ethicist (rather) than a theologian" (p. 70). His theological ethics are marked by a refusal (most explicitly in his book The Ethics of Freedom) to set up any kind of moral system, universal solutions, or rules for Christians. He writes, "We can only put the problems as clearly as possible and then, having given the believer all the weapons that theology and piety can offer, say to him: ‘Now it is up to you'" (p. 69). Van Vleet and Rollison do not explore the historical or theological circumstances that led Ellul to such a unique approach to Christian ethics. If I were to hazard a guess, it seems that this particular approach was influenced by Kierkegaard's existentialism and Barth's theology of revelation. Such an atypical vision for Christian ethics, to my mind, deserves more contextual explanation than Van Vleet and Rollison afford it. *The next six chapters deal with Ellul's sociological writings, in particular, on the topics of technology, politics, and communications. Chapter 7 deals with the book The Technological Society, arguably his most famous work. Van Vleet and Rollison argue that in this book Ellul does for twentieth-century technology what Karl Marx did for nineteenth-century capitalism--namely, identify the key systemic forces that shape our lives. While much of The Technological Society deals with Ellul's analysis of "technique" as an all-encompassing cultural phenomenon, a more intriguing dimension of his analysis is his application of "the sacred" as a sociological concept to our relationship with technology. Humans cannot live without the sacred and, in our supposedly post-religious world, we have transferred religious feelings and behaviors onto technology itself. Chapter eight deals with one particular facet of the technological society, mass media. Ellul's book Propaganda: The Formation of Man's Attitudes was first published in 1965 and looks at how the powers-that-be use mass media to fashion public opinion and manipulate human behavior. After analyzing the social and psychological effects of mass media and propaganda, Ellul suggests that it is imperative for human beings to "wake up" to this reality as the first and most important step in resisting it. *In chapter 9, the authors review the book The Political Illusion, also published in 1965. In that book, Ellul condemns the expansion of the state, the increased politicization of everyday life, and society's self-defeating political illusions. Once again, he counsels a kind of existentialist resistance, encouraging individuals to "question clichés" and (implicitly) suggesting the impossibility of any kind of collective, systemic reform. Chapter 10 builds on this political critique with a review of the book Autopsy of Revolution. In Autopsy, Ellul questions the continued hope among some for a revolution that will solve our political and economic problems. Tracing the history of the concept of revolution from before and after 1789, he specifically critiques the Marxist conception of revolution as no longer viable, particularly pointing out how modern hopes for revolution tend to "absorb all the religious emotions" that have nowhere else to go in a secular society. In chapter 11, Ellul's critical analysis of both technology and politics is brought together in the book The New Demons. Once again drawing upon the concept of "the sacred," Ellul argues that our collective religious inclinations have not disappeared but have focused themselves instead on science, technology, and politics. While none of these things are bad in themselves, they have become idols in need of spiritual dethroning. The final chapter in this volume deals with the book The Humiliation of the Word. That book begins with a discussion about the different functions of both hearing and seeing in human perception. An ideal society would balance hearing and seeing, the word and image, but, in our society, the image dominates. Cataloguing the negative effects of this imbalance, Ellul urges us to revive an appreciation for the word. The word, he argues, brings qualities of discussion, paradox, and mystery--qualities we desperately need as individuals and as a society. *Overall Jacques Ellul: A Companion to His Major Works fulfills its promise of providing short, readable summaries of Ellul's most important works. Van Vleet and Rollison are to be commended for their discerning choice of eleven books that represent well both the sociological and theological dimensions of his corpus. Furthermore, they competently identify and trace core themes that appear book after book so that readers gain an impression of Ellul's overall thought and how his discrete ideas form parts of a coherent whole. The only book that seemed conspicuously absent from the volume is the book Anarchy and Christianity (although it is referenced on occasion). This seemed a regrettable omission given the importance of Ellul's anarchism for both his faith and his politics. *When introducing a major thinker and their body of thought, the choice of framework is critical. In this volume, Van Vleet and Rollison chose to present Ellul's work as a collection of sociological and theological writings, with each book contextualized (for the most part) in reference to his other writings. For some readers, this might make an excellent choice, but others may find it unsatisfying for their purposes. For example, I came to the book as someone widely read in political theology, strategic nonviolence, and the appropriate technology tradition (Schumacher, Illich, and others). With every chapter I was left with an unsatisfied desire to understand Ellul in reference to these larger traditions. How do Ellul's thoughts on violence connect to other Christian reflections on violence (Niebuhr, Yoder, etc.) or broader conceptions of strategic nonviolence (Gandhi, Sharp, Chenoweth, etc.)? How does his critique of the technological society compare and contrast to Ivan Illich's vision in Tools for Conviviality or E. F. Schumacher's work on appropriate technology? *On the whole, I found this book to be an accessible, useful introduction to the work of Jacques Ellul. That being said, an introductory chapter situating Ellul's thoughts within the larger intellectual traditions would have been helpful. *Reviewed by Isaiah Ritzmann, Community Educator, The Working Centre in Kitchener, ON N2G 1V6.

Abstract Wing Tek Lum’s 2012 poetry collection The Nanjing Massacre raises vital questions about trauma. How do we know when a traumatic event begins? What cognitive options are open to victims of trauma? What are the ethical implications of our theories of trauma? I thus situate this volume between Bessel van der Kolk’s and Jacques Lacan’s theories of trauma because these poems challenge their key assumptions. Lum turns to poetry to think through how trauma begins and ends, the degree to which healing the gap between body and mind is part of the “cure” or part of the disease, and how much cognitive stretching is possible in trauma’s wake.

Written as a last, long posthumous letter to Jacques Derrida, the essay turns to the philosopher's last and, for the living, most important lesson – on ‘learning to live.’ In particular, it addresses – as constitutive of his unique ‘heterodidactics’ – two discrete communications on the subject. The first, in Spectres de Marx (1993), declares the lesson to be at once impossible and necessary, that is, ‘ethics itself’; in the second, the last interview ‘Je suis en guerre contre moi-même’ published just before his death in 2004, Derrida confesses to ‘have remained uneducable’ on the subject. The essay reflects on the performative significance of this contradiction in the context of Derrida's intimacy with death, his taste for mourning, and his practice of writing as an experience of dying and resurrection.

This article addresses the thorny issue of the psychologist or psychotherapist's values or ethical orientation. The suggestion is made that certain aspects of Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytical theory provide the resources to overcome the obstacle of arbitrariness or relativism faced by psychotherapists who unavoidably have to take an ethical stance — implicitly if not explicitly — in relation to clients' or analysands' lives and decisions. The dilemma faced by the psychotherapist is recontructed and specific aspects of the poststructuralist psychoanalytical theory of Lacan are addressed. These include the function of the subject's position in the symbolic register (in contrast to the imaginary register of the ego), the role of the unconscious as the ‘discourse of the Other’, of narrative and of repressed signifiers as ethical ‘anchoring points’. Crucially, however, the implications of the register of the ‘real’ for the ethics of the psychoanalyst as psychotherapist are added. These, offer invaluable means of overcoming the dilemma of ethical relativism faced by psychotherapists.

AbstractThis article studies a series of provocative references to Spinoza by Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben. For both contemporary philosophers, the context is discussions of eating, a subject matter that turns out to involve such central issues as subjectivity, nature, ethics, and teleology. Each situates Spinoza in a counter-history of philosophy and suggests that Spinoza constitutes an important resource for contemporary reflections. Through an analysis of the three philosophers' texts about eating, nutrition, and being metabolized, I argue that Spinoza's nonteleological, nonhumanistic conception of nature remains a radical possibility, even in the face of contemporary attempts to think outside the canonical discourses of transcendental subjectivity, technological reason, and teleological ethics. Spinoza's position is, in the end, more uncompromising than that of Derrida or Agamben.

Phenomenology was originally a philosophical movement Edmund Husserl (1859-1838), influential to the sociologist Alfred Schutz (years 1899-1959), then developed by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckman, Sarte, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida. Phenomenology is a part of science that has a relationship with philosophy, such as ontology, epistomology, logic and ethics. Phenomenology is not idealism, formalism, realism, positivism, but existentialism closer. Phenomenology examines human existence. Phenomenology tries to reveal subjective meanings. Researchers try to remember, understand seriously, and want to go to something beautiful and good, that's intentionality. As a science and method, phenomenology seeks meaning, positions the individual as the giver of meaning, which then results in action based on experience. Edmund Husserl and Alfred Schutz put individuals as creators, philosophical, while Peter L Berger and Thomas Luckman in "social construction" tended to find a balance between structure (society) and individuals. The phenomenological development of the social world was carried out by Alfred Schutz. The fundamental meaning of forming social is done by Sartre. Foucault looks for the origin of the meaning of social institutions in the form of prisons as a center of solitude. Whereas Jacques Derrida is more focused on examining the phenomenology of language, refining the social meaning of "deconstruction". Since then, classical phenomenology has focused on epistemology, logic, ontology and ethics. Then contemporary phenomenology seeks to dismantle various aspects behind social life, including education.

This article considers the ways in which a series of artworks by French artist Jean-Baptiste Greuze focus on the father’s ethical education of his male children, reading these as a close visualization of the pedagogical theories of Rousseau. Through paintings that contemplate family life, religious sentiment, filial piety, obedience versus disobedience, illness, and death, Greuze’s images of male youth coalesce with the ethics promoted in Rousseau’s novel Emile—stressing in particular the compassion and good conscience that a boy should develop under the guidance of his father to become a man of virtue. In so doing, the artist responds to some of the key historic issues and social beliefs affecting male youth during his era: the necessity of apprenticed boys to leave home; an idealization of country living and farming as the best occupation for the adult male; and an overwhelming concern, widespread during this heightened period of warfare and unrest preceding the French Revolution, that young men go astray when they become soldiers.

Are human rights negotiable? Jacques Derrida argued that it is necessary to negotiate the nonnegotiable to save the nonnegotiable. This paper defends this claim while arguing for what Calvin Schrag called an ethics of the fitting response and finding such a response in Amartya Sen’s realization-focused comparative approach to justice. For Derrida, the aporetic character of urgency produces decisions which must be made outside the institutional limits of decision theory. That calls for a deconstruction of the axiomatics of rights in institutional settings. It also makes urgent the need for a deinstitutionalized ethics undeceived by the challenge of making judgments in aporias. Using Ted Honderich’s humanism as counterfoil, the argument moves through Derrida’s concept of "contradictory coherence" to Schrag’s transverse rationality, which thinks with deconstruction in order to think against its negative outcomes. The paper ends by suggesting that Schrag's communicative praxeology forges an ethics compatible with Sen’s threshold conditions to determine rights through freedoms.

Abstract This paper examines Hannah Arendt’s contribution to recent debate concerning the urgency of Martin Heidegger’s original ethics. To this end, I turn to Arendt’s existential interpretation of birth as this takes shape in her discourse on the miracle. Though recent commentators have criticized Arendt’s emphasis on the miracle, I argue that she deepens a conversation about birth that Dennis Schmidt, following Jacques Derrida, has set in motion in his efforts to contribute to a more original ethics. Whereas Schmidt prioritizes the helplessness of the newborn, Arendt’s interpretation of the miracle suggests that birth reminds us not simply of our responsibility to help the helpless, but also of our responsibility to prepare the world for the incalculable possibilities of the newcomer. In this, I argue that Arendt brings into focus the ground of our responsibility to make space in the world for what cannot be reduced and decided on in advance by calculative procedure, thereby opening new paths to thinking the task of original ethics.

In ‘Le Noir et l'or de Dresde’ ( Europes, 2005), Jacques Réda's quixotic project is to excavate a Dresden that is no more. Fully aware of this paradoxical aim as he walks through its martyred cityscape ‘vers la Dresde du XVIIIe siècle en sachant qu'elle n'existait plus’, he reflects on images present and past: sun-drenched spires remembered from eighteenth-century paintings that stand as witness to what no longer exists, the brutal bombings by American and British forces during the Second World War, and the commercialized aftermath of German reunification. As Réda moves beyond assessing tragedy through a historical lens, his poetic prose commemorates trauma by accentuating chromatic, lexical and aural textures and intensities in order to open avenues towards shared subjectivity. He establishes an ethical and aesthetic trajectory that responds creatively to war's destruction, and concludes by reframing the city's heraldic colours, black and gold, within sunset's unifying transit across a poetically reconstructed skyline

“To be or not to be?” – in a sense that has always been the question of ethics, of the life worth living, and philosophy would be the search for the answer to that question. In this essay I would like to propose an alternative formulation and interpret it, rather grotesquely (Shakespeare I'm not), as the following: “To ontologize the ethical or not to ontologize the ethical: that is the question of politics.” Ultimately, I would like to suggest that this is a question that must but cannot be answered, or at least answered by philosophy, by a philosophy that retains the ideal of an “answer” that conforms to the form of knowledge. The vehicle for this exposition will be several texts by Jacques Derrida (primarily “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority'” and Specters of Marx). My hope is that this discussion will ultimately justify (or at least excuse) my grotesque paraphrase of Hamlet as well as my rather pretentious subtitle.

One has never experienced the initial words of “The Ends of Man” spoken so seriously as at the recent colloquium held in Rio de Janeiro, between August 16-18, 2004. The international colloquium “Towards a Reflection on Deconstruction: Issues of Politics, Ethics and Aesthetics” opened with a lecture by Jacques Derrida entitled “Forgiveness, Truth, Reconciliation: What Gender?” It seems to echo incessantly the sentence of the philosopher who claimed in his own Margins of Philosophy: “every and any philosophical colloquium necessarily has a political sense.”

Rather than a general theory of gratitude, the paper focuses on gratitude as a human dynamic in appreciative recognition of others. The phenomenology of Emmanuel Levinas’ face-to-face ethics is discussed as the subject’s call to responsibility for an Other. Following Jacques Derrida’s criticism of how this responsibility binds the subject into a hostage position regarding the Other, Paul Ricoeur repairs the working value of Levinas’ ethics by loosening the face-to-face obligation of the Other into one of reconnaissance, or thankful recognition. Without losing the face-to-face dynamic, the expression of reconnaissance is then investigated through J. L. Austin’s theory of performatives where gratitude is expressed as a speech act, or with the help of Judith Butler, where performativity is an activity expressing a reconnaissance between people over time. Three examples are given at the end.

In order to illuminate the very complex relationship between ethics and politics in the thought of Jacques Derrida, this paper stages the (dis)encounter between Hegel's and Derrida's notion of forgiveness. It will be shown how for these two authors forgiveness is closely related both with certain ‘impossibility’, and with the disclosure of a condition for rethinking the ethico-political realm. Both Hegel and Derrida seem to suggest that forgiveness opens up a realm in which something must remain ‘absolute’, that is to say, ‘intact, inaccessible to law, to politics, even to morals’. And, for both, it seems to be precisely there, where something arrives at the verge of politics, that a thinking (and a re-thinking) of the ‘political’ becomes possible. The paper explores what kind of impossibility is staged in each case, and how can each one bring into light the risks and limits, but also the scope and significance of the other.

Given the remarkable consistency in Jacques Derrida's work over several decades, it is not hard to draw a line from “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority’” to his last seminars, on pardon and forgiveness. The aporias of forgiveness are analogous to those of the gift and of justice he had analyzed in detail in previous decades, as Derrida states in “To Forgive: The Unforgivable and the Imprescriptible” — to that extent his last seminars and lectures were part of the same deconstructive project on the possibility of justice. At the same time, Derrida postulates that forgiveness is an experience outside or heterogeneous to the rule of law. In considering this juncture in Derrida's work, this paper will juxtapose the logic and history of amnesty with Derrida's analysis of pardon: the latter pivots on a monotheistic heritage, a Biblical-Koranic sense that is demarcated from the former concept, that of amnesty between an ethics of forgiveness and the politics of forgetting.