The Rigor of a Certain Inhumanity

John Llewelyn

Description

Ethics and politics as they support the ecological

Focusing on the idea of universal suffrage, John Llewelyn accepts the challenge of Derrida's later thought to renew his focus on the ethical, political, and religious dimensions of what makes us uniquely human. Llewelyn builds this concern on issues of representation, language, meaning, and logic with reflections on the phenomenological figures who informed Derrida's concept of deconstruction. By entering into dialogue with these philosophical traditions, Llewelyn demonstrates the range and depth of his own original thinking. The Rigor of a Certain Inhumanity is a rich and passionate, playful and perceptive work of philosophical analysis.

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part 1. Phenomenology of Language
1. Ideologies
2. Worldviews
3. The Experience of Language
4. Phenomenology as Rigorous Science
5. Pure Grammar
6. Meanings and Translations
Re-introduction
Part 2. Table Talk
7. Approaches to Quasi-theology via Appresentation
8. Who Is My Neighbor?
9. Who or What or Whot
10. Ecosophy, Sophophily, and Philotheria
11. Barbarism, Humanism, and Democratic Ecology
12. Where to Cut: Boucherie and Delikatessen
13. Passover
14. The Rigor of a Certain Inhumanity
Notes
Index

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Épistémologie
• Philosophie de l'esprit
• Movements
• PHILOSOPHY
• Philosophie et théologie
• Phenomenology
• Continental

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 12 juillet 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253005861
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

THE RIGOR OF A CERTAIN INHUMANITY
Studies in Continental Thought
John Sallis, editor
Consulting Editors
Robert Bernasconi
J. N. Mohanty
Rudolph Bernet
Mary Rawlinson
John D. Caputo
Tom Rockmore
David Carr
Calvin O. Schrag
Edward S. Casey
Reiner Sch rmann
Hubert Dreyfus
Charles E. Scott
Don Ihde
Thomas Sheehan
David Farrell Krell
Robert Sokolowski
Lenore Langsdorf
Bruce W. Wilshire
Alphonso Lingis
David Wood
William L. McBride
THE RIGOR OF A CERTAIN INHUMANITY
TOWARD A WIDER SUFFRAGE
JOHN LLEWELYN
Indiana University Press
Bloomington Indianapolis
This book is a publication of
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
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2012 by John Llewelyn
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
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Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Llewelyn, John.
The rigor of a certain inhumanity : toward a wider suffrage / John Llewelyn.
p. cm. - (Studies in Continental thought)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-253-00326-3 (cloth : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-253-00579-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-0-253-00586-1 (electronic book) 1. Philosophical anthropology. 2. Phenomenology. 3. Derrida, Jacques. 4. L vinas, Emmanuel. I. Title.
BD450.L555 2012
128-dc23
2012005092
1 2 3 4 5 17 16 15 14 13 12
For David Wood
in friendship and admiration
it is perhaps more worthy of humanity to maintain . . . the rigor of a certain inhumanity.
-Jacques Derrida
They will get it straight one day at the Sorbonne. We shall return at twilight from the lecture Pleased that the irrational is rational.
-Wallace Stevens
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part One Phenomenology of Language
1 Ideologies
2 Worldviews
3 The Experience of Language
4 Phenomenology as Rigorous Science
5 Pure Grammar
6 Meanings and Translations
Re-introduction
Part Two Table Talk
7 Approaches to Quasi-theology via Appresentation
8 Who Is My Neighbor?
9 Who or What or Whot
10 Ecosophy, Sophophily, and Philotheria
11 Barbarism, Humanism, and Democratic Ecology
12 Where to Cut: Boucherie and Delikatessen
13 Passover
14 The Rigor of a Certain Inhumanity
Notes
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Chapters 1 and 2 are based on Representation in Language, in Ananta Sukla, ed., Art and Representation (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2001), pp. 29-59; chapter 3 on Close Reading, Distant Writing, and the Experience of Language, in Ananta Sukla, ed., Art and Experience (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2003), pp. 20-41; chapter 4 on the chapter in Welsh on Edmund Husserl in John Daniel and Walford L. Gealy, eds., Hanes Athroniaeth y Gorllewin (History of Western Philosophy) (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009); chapter 6 on Meanings Reserved, Re-served and Reduced, The Southern Journal of Philosophy XXXII, Spindel Conference 1993, Supp. vol., Derrida s Interpretation of Husserl, 1994, pp. 27-54; chapter 7 on Approaches to (Quasi-) Theology Via Appresentation, Research in Phenomenology 39, no. 2, Engaging the Religious (Leiden: Brill, 2009), pp. 224-247; chapter 8 on Am I Obsessed by Bobby? (Humanism of the Other Animal), in Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley, eds., Re-Reading Levinas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), pp. 234-245, adapted as chapter 3 of my The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience: A Chiasmic Reading of Responsibility in the Neighbourhood of Levinas, Heidegger and Others (London: Macmillan; New York, St. Martins Press, 1991); chapter 9 on Who or What or Whot, in J. Aaron Simmons and David Wood, eds., Kierkegaard and Levinas: Ethics, Politics, and Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), pp. 69-81; chapter 10 on Ecosophy, Sophophily and Philotheria, in Pierfrancesco Basile and Leemon B. McHenry, eds., Consciousness, Reality and Value: Philosophical Essays in Honour of T. L. S. Sprigge (Frankfurt am Main: Ontos, 2007), pp. 259-273; chapter 11 on Pursuing Levinas and Ferry toward a Newer and More Democratic Ecological Order, in Peter Atterton and Matthew Calarco, eds., Radicalizing Levinas (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010), pp. 95-111; chapter 12 on Where to Cut: Boucherie and Delikatessen, Research in Phenomenology 40, no. 2, The Non-human Animal (Leiden: Brill, 2010), pp. 161-187; chapter 13 on the French text of endnote 22 to chapter 13 of my Margins of Religion: Between Kierkegaard and Derrida (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009). I thank the editors and publishers for granting permission to adapt these items for publication here.
I am greatly indebted to Dee Mortensen, Angela Burton, Sarah Jacobi, Marvin Keenan, and Emma Young for their expertise in the editing of this book, to my brother Howard and my nephew Simon for rescuing me at times of crisis with the electronics, and to my wife Margaret, my brother David, and all other members of our families for their encouragement and cooperation. John Sallis and Fran ois Raffoul were sine quibus non .
THE RIGOR OF A CERTAIN INHUMANITY
Introduction
How wide is our usual conception of what we call universal suffrage? The aim of this book is to show that that usual conception is not wide enough and that it is not wide enough because it does not do justice to what the book s title and one of its epigraphs calls inhumanity. The envisaged widening of that common conception referred to in the book s subtitle is simultaneously a widening of our conceptions of the ethical and the political toward the ecological. The eco-logical. The envisaged progression starts in logic and the philosophy of logic-unless it is prevented from starting at all because philosophers have held too rigid a conception of logic s scope.
Because the widening of suffrage projected in this book culminates in chapters that owe not a little to the writings of Jacques Derrida, an apt way of illustrating the point I have just made about philosophers who have taken what I regard as a one-sided view of logic is to tell a short story that touches upon what some of those philosophers have said about him.
Among the philosophers just referred to I single out one who singled out me by sending a letter in which I was advised to steer clear of Derrida on the grounds that Derrida s claim to understanding any logic [her emphasis] was a sham. I was flattered to receive this letter, because its sender is an eminent logician, one after whom a certain logical formula has been named and one whose work I greatly admire. It so happens that Willard van Orman Quine was a colleague of hers at her university in the United States. He was a cosignatory of a letter to the University of Cambridge, England, signed by her, requesting that Derrida not be awarded the honorary degree some dons there wanted him to receive. It so happens too that an article by Quine, whose room was put at Derrida s disposal when he was a visiting professor in America, was co-translated into French by the latter for publication in a Continental philosophical periodical. Treating of the limits of logical theory, Quine s article complains that philosophers have been too lax in their understanding of what counts as logic. Is it possible that when my correspondent informed me that Derrida did not have an understanding of any logic, she was being a wee bit too strict, understanding by logic the traditional formal logic, modal logic, non-standard logic and, generally, modern symbolic logic such as that based on Russell and Whitehead s Principia Mathematica ? By that standard a considerable proportion of Sir Peter Strawson s Introduction to Logical Theory would not count as logic.
Logic is a word derived from the word logos. This Greek word means language or speech or word. What is said through the use of words falls under more or less abstract logic(s) of the sort studied by Quine and his colleague. But are not words entitled to a logic that treats of their use in the saying of them? And what about the relation between these logics, between the logic of what is said, propositional logic, and the logic of saying, the logic of proposing? What, in particular, about the relation between logics of the said ( propositions ) in which impossibility is standardly opposed to possibility, and, on the other hand, logics of the phenomenology of language in which possibility implies or presupposes impossibility? How this can happen will be considered in the partly retrospective survey of this book given in its final chapter. Suffice it to say on this other sense of impossibility in these introductory paragraphs that if it is to be possible for me to really forgive someone in saying I (hereby) forgive you, my forgiving must appear to me as being impossible in the sense that I cannot experience it as no more than an expression of my potentiality or power.
I (hereby) propose that we do not turn a key in a lock in a door that would close off a priori the second, third, and fourth of the spheres of language just listed from a study that would seek to give of them an account, a logos or a logic. For the study of the two adjacent fields I have marked out we could, of course, co-opt another word, perhaps the word rhetoric used by Aristotle, who supported this movement for a rigorous limitation of the term logic when at De Interpretatione 17a he wrote that nonpropo