Parrhesia: Issue 3, 2007

The latest edition of Parrhesia: A Journal of Critical Philosophy is available online.

This issue includes essays by Alain Badiou with Tzuchien Tho, Clare Blackburne and Marguerite La Caze, just to name a few contributors, as well as reviews.

Michel Foucault’s last works tell us that parrhesia is the act of fearlessly speaking the truth.To engage in parrhesia is never, however, a ‘neutral’ act. Parrhesia simultaneously incorporates aesthetic and ethical dimensions. The parrhesiast is someone whose fidelity to the truth becomes the pivot of a process of self-transformation.

The journal endeavours to feature work by leading figures in contemporary thought, along with scholarly articles, which are double blind peer-reviewed.

Parrhesia is affiliated with the Departments of English and Philosophy at the University of Melbourne, and with the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy.

Rorty Is Dead

‘Alas, I have come down with the same disease that killed Derrida.’

Considerable American philosopher Richard Rorty died on the 8th of June (of pancreatic cancer).

Jürgen Habermas provides a personal obituary, while Roger Scrutton is critical and the New York Times is biographical. (Arts and Letters Daily is listing other obituaries.)

Review Notices

Two recent NDPR reviews – Alan Schrift’s Twentieth Century French Philosophy and Jason Powell’s Jacques Derrida.

‘How To Read Derrida’ – Review Notice

Dolan Cummings has reviewed Penelope Deutscher’s How To Read Derrida and Peter Osbourne’s How To Read Marx (from a series published by Granta) for New Statesman.

[Cross-posted at Epideixis. Comments have been disabled here.]

Mill's - Gaston's 'Derrida And Disinterest'

"Sean Gaston's contribution to philosophical literature on the work of Jacques Derrida is to be welcomed for its serious engagement with Derrida's oeuvre and sensitive reading of his formulations of ethics and responsibility. Gaston develops an insightful and original interpretation of Derrida's work through the lens of 'disinterest' and considers the potential of this concept for contemporary ethics and politics. He highlights the eighteenth-century understanding of disinterest, in which it is seen not as the lack or absence of all interest, but as opposed to self-interest and therefore central to ethics. This understanding, Gaston contends, has been obscured through the association of disinterest with either 'private autonomy' or 'public hegemony' (vii). In returning to an ethical conception of disinterest and particularly its importance for Derrida and Levinas, Gaston elucidates Derrida's relation to Levinas, arguing that in his conception of a radical disinterest 'that founds and exceeds the interests of being', Levinas revives 'a disinterest that both redefines and reinhabits the traditional concepts of disinterest that flourished in the eighteenth century' (vii). Derrida, on the other hand, formulates a post-Nietzschean disinterest radicalized by différance, which prevents the return of the same and of identity in disinterest, effectively turning ethics toward the 'to come' (viii)." - NDPR.

Two Articles On Derrida

“Philosophy is a way of exercising the mind, of keeping it from becoming complacent. It urges us to think long and hard about things, to make ourselves uncomfortable, to question our very existence, and to work to improve ourselves, and the world, through rigorous examination. What I learned from Jacques Derrida was simply to examine everything in the most fundamental way.” – K.A. Dilday, another by Candida Clark.