1. Responding Justly to ‘the Friend’
- Author
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Joseph Cohen and Raphael Zagury-Orly
- Abstract
The essay “Heidegger’s Ear. Philopolemology (Geschlecht IV)”, although omitted in the English language edition of the Politics of Friendship, figures as the last chapter in its original French edition (Paris, Galilée, 1994). In this text, Jacques Derrida analyses Heidegger’s interpretation of Heraclitus, most particularly the meaning of the Heraclitean polemos, through which the former proposes an entirely novel reading of the “als Hören der Stimme des Freundes, den jedes Dasein bei sich trägt” in Sein und Zeit (§ 34, p. 163). In our contribution, we will develop a succinct explication of Derrida’s text and mark how it deploys, in relation to the general hypothesis of the Politics of Friendship, a resounding deconstructive critique of Heidegger’s ontological-philosophical project as a whole as well as offer a renewed approach of the intricate relation between the political and friendship. We will also develop how and why this relation intervenes and affects the hyperbolical and “indeconstructible” idea of justice which Derrida, in the same years as the Politics of Friendship, is explicating and deploying in other key texts, such as Force of Law (Paris, Galilée, 1994).
- Published
- 2021
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