Fall 2011 Working Papers

All the working paper will be in the Commonwealth House, Gaines Center, upstairs seminar room. 

1. Arnold Farr (Philosophy): In Search of Radical Subjectivity: Re-reading Marcuse After Honneth

Thursdsay, October 6th, 6:30-8:00 or 8:30 pm

Click here to see paper

2. Akiko Takenaka (History): Postmemorial Conservatism: Mobilizing the Memories of the War 

Dead in Contemporary Japan.      

Thursday, Oct. 27th, 6:30-8:00 or 8:30 pm  

3. Jacqueline Couti (French-MCL): Colonial Democracy and Fin de Siècle: The Third Republic andWhite Creoles' Dissent in Martinique.

Thursday, Nov. 17th, 6:30-8:00 or 8:30 pm  

A discussion by two respondents: Jeremy Popkin (History) and Joe O'Neil (German) and a general discussion with all present will take place.

These discussions are always stimulating and we welcome your participation, so try to make it. Wine and light snacks.

"The Fundamental Paradox of a Phenomenology of Nature"

ABSTRACT

I argue that the fundamentally ambiguous relationship of humans and nature—that we inescapably count ourselves simultaneously as enclosed within an all-encompassing natural environment and as alienated or distinct from it—is not a mere confusion or linguistic equivocation but has its roots in our experience of nature. This Janus-faced experience of nature is founded on the constitutive slippage of reflection’s relation to itself, the lack of coincidence between the I that reflects and the self on which it reflects. This slippage reveals an excess or remainder of reflection, precisely what conditions reflection while avoiding thematization by reflection. This remainder, I argue, is the natural element within reflection that can only appear to it indirectly, as a resistance or withdrawal. Our experiences of the autonomy and aloofness of nature, in the encounter with wildness for example, or as revealed in certain works of art, are founded on this experience of the withdrawal of the grounds of reflection that both condition and elude it. Nature’s immemorial aspect, by which it reveals itself as a withdrawal that cannot be strictly presented, is therefore also the constitutive limit of any phenomenology of nature.

"Re-thinking Difference"

(abstract)

According to Heidegger, the difference between being and beings is the most essential difference of all. Not surprisingly it is a constant in his thinking from beginning to end. Yet in the course of his work, he re-thinks this difference fundamentally, recognizing its at times ambivalent sense and even insisting on the need to abandon various versions of it, particularly as he foregoes his early project of fundamental ontology. His re-thinking of the difference plays a crucial role in his attempt to differentiate the leading question (Leitfrage) of metaphysics from the basic question (Grundfrage) of his thinking, especially in his work from the mid-1930s on. Consideration of Heidegger’s re-thinking of the difference between being and beings thus provides a valuable perspective on his development, throughall its twists and turns. The aim of this paper is to examine particular apsects of that re-thinking with a viewto demonstrating some of its significance.

"The Birth of Arendt’s Social Realm and the Rise of the State of Modern Poverty" 

Abstract

In this paper I argue that in order to understand Arendt’s account of the rise of the social realm we must understand how the modern age is opened up by the event of modern poverty, both by a curious liberation of poverty as well as by the state which arises as a response to the appearance of modern poverty.  In short, it is the initial appearance of the modern poor as an ambiguous population and the corresponding formation of the nation-state as a security apparatus to address the problems posed by the appearance of the poor as the first mass phenomenon that will ultimately define the new metabolic society, the society committed to securing the life process above all else.