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Words Fail offers a numbers of formulations concerning representation which are never developed into a sustained argument. The book also fails to account reliably for the thought of the three thinkers the author proposes to address. In particular, despite claiming to draw on the work of Jacques Derrida, Dickinson speaks quite remarkably of “true presence” and “pure presentation.”

This article retrieves Freud’s Paul as a forgotten predecessor and untapped critic of the “return to Paul” in contemporary political theology and continental philosophy. Given that Sigmund Freud published Moses and Monotheism in 1939 having barely escaped from Vienna, the text’s reception has justly been dominated by the question of Freud’s identification with Moses and the relationship between psychoanalysis and Judaism. However, I argue that this narrow focus has obscured the more fundamental problem of the connection between religion and Freud’s enigmatic notion of “historical truth,” which he works out not through Moses but through Saint Paul. To do so, I first show how Freud’s genealogy of monotheism is modeled on the pathogenesis of hysterical symptoms. I then trace how Freud deepens his investigation into the etiology of symptom-formation until he arrives at the notion of historical truth and the archaic heritage that transmits it. Lastly, I demonstrate that Freud presents himself less as a Pauline figure than he does Paul as a proto-analyst. Through this staging, I contend that Freud parochializes the claims of Christianity as symptomatic of a more archaic historical truth that psychoanalysis alone is able to access. Freud’s Paul demonstrates that it is not a question of whether but how ostensibly modern secular discourses inherit the theological traditions in which they are imbedded. Reading Freud as a philosopher of religion ultimately offers an indictment of any philosophy or emancipatory politics naively modeled on theological universalism.

This introductory essay discusses how the trope of “religious violence” is operative in contemporary discussions concerning the so-called “return of religion” and the “post-secular constellation.” The author argues that the development of a genuine phenomenology of “religious violence” calls on us to critically reconsider the modern discourses that all too unambiguously tie religion and violence together. In a first part, the paper fleshes out the fault lines of a secularist modernity spinning out of control. In a second part, it demonstrates how the “liberal imaginary” revolves around individualist conceptions of freedom and sovereignty that, on their part, become parasitic upon imaginations of disorder, otherness and (especially religious) violence. In a third part, the author demonstrates how these insights call for developing a transformed phenomenological framework in order to give a more sensible account of “religious violence.” Finally, in presenting the articles gathered in this “special issue” ofContinental Philosophy Review, some pathways into such a sensibilized phenomenology of “religious violence” are outlined.

In this paper I present an account of Husserl’s approach to the phenomenological reconstruction of consciousness’s immemorial past, a problem, I suggest, that is quite pertinent for defenders of Lockean psychological continuity views of personal identity. To begin, I sketch the background of the problem facing the very project of a genetic phenomenology, within which the reconstructive analysis is situated. While the young Husserl took genetic matters to be irrelevant to the main task of phenomenology, he would later come to see their importance and, indeed, centrality as the precursor and subsoil for the rationality of consciousness. I then argue that there is a close connection between reconstruction and genetic phenomenology, such that reconstruction is a necessary component of the program of genetic phenomenology, and I set out Husserl’s argument that compels one to enter into reconstructive territory. With that impetus, I schematically lay out the main contours one finds in Husserl’s practice of reconstructive techniques. We find him taking two distinct approaches, that of the individual viewed egologically (through the abstract lens of a single individual’s consciousness) and as embedded in interpersonal relations. Husserl occasionally calls these the approach “from within” and “from without,” respectively. Ultimately, the two approaches are not only complementary, but require one another. In closing, I argue that these considerations lead to a blurring of lines between the genetic and generative phenomenological registers, which challenges the prevalent view that there is a sharp demarcation of the two.

This paper explains the nature and origin of what I am calling Transgressive Realism, a middle path between realism and anti-realism which tries to combine their strengths while avoiding their weaknesses. Kierkegaard created the position by merging Hegel’s insistence that we must have some kind of contact with anything we can call real (thus rejecting noumena), with Kant’s belief that reality fundamentally exceeds our understanding; human reason should not be the criterion of the real. The result is the idea that our most vivid encounters with reality come in experiences that shatter our categories, the way God’s commandment to kill Isaac irreconcilably clashes with the best understanding of ethics we are capable of. I explain the genesis of this idea, and then show it at work in Heidegger and Levinas’ thought. Understanding this position illuminates important aspects of the history of continental philosophy and offers a new perspective on realism.

Greater recognition of the work and influence of John Wild on the development of what we now call Continental Philosophy is well-deserved and long overdue. It is perhaps not too much to say that there would have been no Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy without him. His pioneering contributions to the field and the movement are much greater than a tally of his articles or a list of friends and former students might suggest. The North American reception of the first generation of European existentialists and phenomenologists was decisively shaped by many of Wild’s early formulations of their problems and projects. And on a personal note, I am happy to declare how deeply affected I was by his seminars on Aristotle, Heidegger, and phenomenology at Northwestern, and by the mentoring I received from him there in less formal settings. The Northwestern Philosophy Department was a good place to be in the 1960s. I begin with an anecdote. A long time ago, at what I believe was the first Lexington Conference on ‘‘Phenomenology Pure and Applied,’’ Wild gave a paper, ‘‘Husserl’s Life-World and the Lived Body.’’ In arranging for commentators, Erwin Straus and his co-convener, Dick Griffith, were pleased to discover that a former student of Wild’s was teaching nearby. Though it undoubtedly seemed like a good idea at the time, inviting him turned out to be something of an embarrassment. The student, it seems, had studied with Wild during his realist period, and having remained a realist himself, he spent about 15 minutes unintentionally demonstrating how far the John Wild of 1963 had moved away from his earlier Aristotelianism. When asked about the event a bit later, Wild assumed a posture very familiar to those who knew him. Lowering his head about 45 degrees and shaking it repeatedly from side to side, he quipped in a raspy voice, ‘‘It’s my old students coming back to haunt me.’’

Most readers believe that it is difficult, verging on the impossible, to extract concrete prescriptions from the ethics of Emmanuel Levinas. Although this view is largely correct, Levinas’ philosophy can, with some assistance, generate specific duties on the part of legal actors. In this paper, I argue that the fundamental premises of Levinas’ theory of justice can be used to construct a prohibition against capital punishment. After analyzing Levinas’ concepts of justice, responsibility, and interruption, I turn toward his scattered remarks on legal institutions, arguing that they enable a sense of interruption specific to the legal domain. It is here that we find the conceptual resources most important to my Levinasian abolition. I argue that the interruption of legal justice by responsibility implies what I call the “principle of revisability.” The principle of revisability states a necessary condition of just legal institutions: To be just, legal institutions must ensure the possibility of revising any and all of their rules, principles, and judgments. From this, the argument against capital punishment easily follows. Execution is a legal act, perhaps the only legal act, that cannot be undone. An application of the principle of revisability to this fact leads to the conclusion that legal institutions cannot justly impose capital punishment. After defending these points at length, I conclude with some observations on the consequences of the principle of revisability for law more generally.

Punctuated by paeans to ‘‘the coruscating potency of reason’’ and the ‘‘dissociative virulence of…non-dialectical negativity,’’ Ray Brassier’s Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction is a work of philosophy committed to the ‘‘labor of disenchantment initiated by Galileo in the physical realm, continued by Darwin in the biological sphere, and currently being extended by cognitive science to the domain of mind’’ (xi, 45, 40). The defacement of the ‘‘book of the world’’ accomplished during the Enlightenment beckons ‘‘an invigorating vector of intellectual discovery, rather than a calamitous diminishment’’ (xi). This is because ‘‘[t]hinking has interests that do not coincide with those of living; indeed, they can and have been pitted against the latter’’ (xi). Pursuing these interests, Brassier develops a concept of the ‘‘will to know’’ congruent with a ‘‘will to nothingness’’ impervious to the countervailing force of the ‘‘will to live.’’ It is not the least of the ironies of Nihil Unbound that a work committed to marshalling the rigorous stringency of reason against the affective finesse of interpretation often produces claims that connect with the gut as much as the mind. Committed though he is to the notion that words are categorically weak objects for philosophical thought, Brassier nonetheless gets a lot of mileage out of them. ‘‘Philosophy,’’ he writes, ‘‘should be more than a sop to the pathetic twinge of human self-esteem’’ (xi). The alternative on offer is a signal challenge to contemporary philosophy, as difficult to paraphrase as it is to ignore. The polemical core of Brassier’s project is a philosophical rehabilitation of science against the reductive and derisive attitudes toward scientific rationality that he sees prevalent in the ‘‘dominant’’ quarters of continental philosophy: phenomenology and critical theory. Anticipating hostility from these schools, the former of which is the chief culprit, Brassier has produced a work that alternates between constructive argument and preemptive, sometimes premature, refutation. His philosophical case is more focused than its combative

The return to religion in contemporary continental philosophy is characterized by a profound sense of intellectual humility. A significant influence within this discussion is Heidegger’s anthropology of finitude in Being and Time and his later critiques of onto-theology. These critiques, however, were informed by Heidegger’s earlier phenomenology of the lived experience of religious humility performed alongside his reading of Martin Luther’s theology. This article shows that for Luther and Heidegger, religious humility is foremost an affection structured according to the enactment of one’s dissimilitude from God and resulting existential tribulation. During a seminal period in his development, Heidegger’s phenomenology of humility changed from an Eckhartian conception of detachment culminating in the unio mystica to a Lutheran conception of humiliation and Anfechtung. Heidegger’s break from a mystical phenomenology of humility parallels Luther’s own break from that tradition, and anticipates contemporary developments in the continental philosophy of religion.

Though the title suggests a phenomenological account of art and, in fact, has some important and insightful things to say about art, this work focuses primarily on the ontological status of ‘‘fictional beings’’ and the question of ‘‘representation’’ in art and in experience more generally. Paskow makes a case for a ‘‘realist’’ aesthetic. The first part of the book, which provides examples from literature and painting, culminates in a discussion of why fictional beings can be important to us. The second part of the book is almost exclusively devoted to a consideration of painting. It illustrates how a realist aesthetic can be brought to bear on painting and develops this aesthetic in relation to this particular art form. Throughout Paskow is concerned not only with what we should take art to be, but why it should matter to us. This work is genuinely ‘‘phenomenological’’ in the sense that it attends directly to our experience of the work of art, especially the painting. Unlike much American current literature in continental philosophy, it is not primarily a commentary on the texts of continental philosophers who have addressed the topic at hand. In fact, for good or ill, Paskow ignores the twentieth century phenomenological literature on art and painting—Geiger, Heidegger, Ingarden, Dufrenne, Merleau-Ponty, among others. The body of literature that he does explicitly take up (Chapter I) is contemporary analytic aesthetics: especially Walton and Yanal, but also Carroll, Boruah, and Rosebury, among others. However varied, complex, and insightful the work of these philosophers is, Paskow takes them all to be committed to some sort of representationalism. On his account, they are all committed to an orientation characterized by a subject-object split and thus end up quarreling over subjectivistic and objectivistic accounts of art. Paskow’s realism is not an objectivism. He finds his orientation in the Heidegger of Being and Time, the Heidegger of phenomenological ontology. Chapters II and III draw on Being and Time for an account of how we might have a non-instrumental relation to things and ‘‘why and

The paper discusses Heidegger’s early notion of the “movedness of life” (Lebensbewegtheit) and its intimate connection with Aristotle’s concept of movement (kinesis). Heidegger’s aim in the period of Being and Time was to “overcome” the Greek ideal of being as ousia – constant and complete presence and availability – by showing that the background for all meaningful presence is Dasein, the ecstatically temporal context of human being. Life as the event of finitude is characterized by an essential lack and incompleteness, and the living present therefore gains meaning only in relation to a horizon of un-presence and un-availability. Whereas the “theological” culmination of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics finds the supreme fulfillment of human life in the semi-divine self-immanence and self-sufficiency of the bios theoretikos, a radical Heideggerian interpretation of kinesis may permit us to find in Aristotle the fundamental structures of mortal living as self-transcendent movement.

In spite of rhetorical disavowals, the Analytic/Continental Split has hardened and widened in recent years, and continues to be the dominant trait of American philosophy. It is also a crippling trait: philosophers on either side who do good work are doing it in spite of the traditions to which they have been assigned. The Split has previously been interpreted in terms of a contrast between Analytical rigor and Continental relevance; but this view, I argue, misses the point entirely. Seeing it rather as a split between those (Analysts) who seek a timeless version of truth by reducing their topics and methods to a set of invariant structures, and those (Continentals) who view everything as radically temporal, points the way to a rejuvenated American philosophy. Such philosophy takes us not merely beyond the Analytic/ Continental Split, but beyond Analytic and Continental philosophy altogether.

This essay argues that with respect to trends in Euro-American philosophy there has been a growing disparity between practices on the Continent and North America with respect to technoscience studies. Whereas in, particularly northern European circles, a new canon of topics and authors has risen to prominence with respect to science and technology studies, this same interest is virtually lacking in the institutional programs of North American continental circles. Reasons for the lack of interest in science and technology in North American continentalism are explored. The disparities between Europe and North America include temporal dimensions in which science and technology is read anachronistically in continental circles in North America; canonical dimensions in which different authors are read; and contextual dimensions regarding where technoscience studies occur. There are, however, problem sets such as 'realism and relativism,' 'relations of humans and non-humans,' and roles of 'textuality' which could be seen as overlapping interest areas. The essay attempts to locate and introduce the issues and authors of this 'other' continentally interesting philosophy and recommends that Euro-American philosophers in North America begin to catch up with the newer trends.