Search results for ""Author Anne O'Byrne""

We regard genocidal violence as worse than other sorts of violence—perhaps the worst there is. But what does this say about what we value about the genos on which nations are said to be founded? This is an urgent question for democracies. We value the mode of being in time that anchors us in the past and in the future, that is, among those who have been and those who might yet be. If the genos is a group constituted by this generational time, the demos was invented as the anti-genos, with no criterion of inheritance and instead only occurring according to the interruption of revolutionary time. Insofar as the demos persists, we experience it as a sort of genos, for example, the democratic nation state. As a result, democracies are caught is a bind, disavowing genos-thinking while cherishing the temporal forms of genos-life; they abhor genocidal violence but perpetuate and disguise it. This is the genocide paradox. O’Byrne traces the problem through our commitment to existential categories from Aristotle to the life taxonomies of Linneaus and Darwin, through anthropologies of kinship that tether us to the social world, the shortfalls of ethical theory, into the history of democratic theory and the defensive tactics used by real existing democracies when it came to defining genocide for the U.N. Genocide Convention. She argues that, although models of democracy all make room for contestation, they fail to grasp its generational structure or acknowledge the generational content of our lives. They cultivate ignorance of the contingency and precarity of the relations that create and sustain us. The danger of doing so is immense. It leaves us unprepared for confronting democracy’s deficits and its struggle to entertain multiple temporalities. In addition, it leaves us unprepared for understanding the relation between demos and violence, and the ability of good enough citizens to tolerate the slow-burning destruction of marginalized peoples. What will it take to envision an anti-genocidal democracy?

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We regard genocidal violence as worse than other sorts of violence—perhaps the worst there is. But what does this say about what we value about the genos on which nations are said to be founded? This is an urgent question for democracies. We value the mode of being in time that anchors us in the past and in the future, that is, among those who have been and those who might yet be. If the genos is a group constituted by this generational time, the demos was invented as the anti-genos, with no criterion of inheritance and instead only occurring according to the interruption of revolutionary time. Insofar as the demos persists, we experience it as a sort of genos, for example, the democratic nation state. As a result, democracies are caught is a bind, disavowing genos-thinking while cherishing the temporal forms of genos-life; they abhor genocidal violence but perpetuate and disguise it. This is the genocide paradox. O’Byrne traces the problem through our commitment to existential categories from Aristotle to the life taxonomies of Linneaus and Darwin, through anthropologies of kinship that tether us to the social world, the shortfalls of ethical theory, into the history of democratic theory and the defensive tactics used by real existing democracies when it came to defining genocide for the U.N. Genocide Convention. She argues that, although models of democracy all make room for contestation, they fail to grasp its generational structure or acknowledge the generational content of our lives. They cultivate ignorance of the contingency and precarity of the relations that create and sustain us. The danger of doing so is immense. It leaves us unprepared for confronting democracy’s deficits and its struggle to entertain multiple temporalities. In addition, it leaves us unprepared for understanding the relation between demos and violence, and the ability of good enough citizens to tolerate the slow-burning destruction of marginalized peoples. What will it take to envision an anti-genocidal democracy?

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Philosophers are accustomed to thinking about human existence as finite and deathbound. Anne O'Byrne focuses instead on birth as a way to make sense of being alive. Building on the work of Heidegger, Dilthey, Arendt, and Nancy, O'Byrne discusses how the world becomes ours and how meaning emerges from our relations to generations past and to come. Themes such as creation, time, inheritance, birth and action, embodiment, biological determinism, and cloning anchor this sensitive and powerful analysis. O'Byrne's thinking advances and deepens important discussions at the intersections of feminism, continental philosophy, philosophy of religion, and social and political thought.

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When Jean-Luc Nancy first encountered the work of Jacques Derrida in the 1960s, he knew he was hearing something new, a voice genuinely of its time. Thinking with and against each other over the course of their long friendship, the two thinkers reshaped the European intellectual landscape. Nancy’s writings on Derrida, collected in this volume, reflect on the elements of their shared concerns with politics, the arts, religion, the fate of deconstruction, and the future of sense. Rather than studies, commentaries, or interpretations of Derrida’s thought, they are responses to his presence—not exactly a presence to self, but a presence in the world.

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When Jean-Luc Nancy first encountered the work of Jacques Derrida in the 1960s, he knew he was hearing something new, a voice genuinely of its time. Thinking with and against each other over the course of their long friendship, the two thinkers reshaped the European intellectual landscape. Nancy’s writings on Derrida, collected in this volume, reflect on the elements of their shared concerns with politics, the arts, religion, the fate of deconstruction, and the future of sense. Rather than studies, commentaries, or interpretations of Derrida’s thought, they are responses to his presence—not exactly a presence to self, but a presence in the world.

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In this outstanding new collection, philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy takes up his perennial themes—community, embodiment, being-with, literature, politics, sense, and meaning—as part of a deep and mature appreciation of the fact that we are richly, joyfully, and thoroughly sexual beings. In a concise but extremely important essay, “The ‘There Is’ of the Sexual Relation,” Nancy responds to Lacan’s dictum that “there is no sexual relation” and makes a radical argument for the central place of the sexual relation as our originary mode of being with one another. “The Birth of Breasts” is a beautiful reflection on human anatomy and the image and reality of the breast that draws on literature and poetry from Sappho to Beckett. In “Strange Foreign Bodies,” Nancy revisits the philosophical territory of the relation between mind or spirit and body but reminds us that bodies are at once familiar to us and also irredeemably strange. “The Body of Pleasure” explores the body as the site of essentially finite pleasure, “finite because it reaches the end, the limit where the body tends to lose all form, becomes matter, an impenetrable mass. But this end also forms the touch of the outside and with it the joy of the world.” Finally, “The Sexual Relation—and Then” builds on the insight into the central place of the sexual relation by considering specifically the generative possibilities of sex and the fact that we all came to be as the product of sexual relations. Nancy’s Corpus, published in English in 2008, was the philosopher’s most sustained consideration of embodiment to date. Now, in Corpus II, he carries that work in new directions which constantly remind us that human bodies are sexed and sexual bodies.

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This book, by one of the most innovative and challenging contemporary thinkers, consists of an extensive essay from which the book takes its title and five shorter essays that are internally related to “Being Singular Plural.” One of the strongest strands in Nancy’s philosophy is his attempt to rethink community and the very idea of the social in a way that does not ground these ideas in some individual subject or subjectivity. The fundamental argument of the book is that being is always “being with,” that “I” is not prior to “we,” that existence is essentially co-existence. Nancy thinks of this “being-with” not as a comfortable enclosure in a pre-existing group, but as a mutual abandonment and exposure to each other, one that would preserve the “I” and its freedom in a mode of imagining community as neither a “society of spectacle” nor via some form of authenticity. The five shorter essays impressively translate the philosophical insight of “Being Singular Plural” into sophisticated discussions of national sovereignty, war and technology, identity politics, the Gulf War, and the tragic plight of Sarajevo. The essay “Eulogy for the Mêlée,” in particular, is a brilliant discussion of identity and hybridism that resonates with many contemporary social concerns. As Nancy moves through the exposition of his central concern, being-with, he engages a number of other important issues, including current notions of the “other” and “self” that are relevant to psychoanalytic, political, and multicultural concepts. He also offers astonishingly original reinterpretations of major philosophical positions, such as Nietzsche’s doctrine of “eternal recurrence,” Descartes’s “cogito,” and the nature of language and meaning.

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What does it mean to be nude? What does the nude do? In a series of constantly surprising reflections, Jean-Luc Nancy and Federico Ferrari encounter the nude as an opportunity for thinking in a way that is stripped bare of all received meanings and preconceived forms. In the course of engagements with twenty-six separate images, the authors show how the nudes produced by painters and photographers expose this bareness of thought and leave us naked on the verge of a sense that is always nascent, always fleeting, on the surface of the skin, on the surface of the image. While the nude is a symbol of truth in philosophy and art alike, what the nude definitively and uniquely reveals is unclear. In Being Nude: The Skin of Images, the authors argue that the nude is always presented as both vulnerable in its exposure and shy of conceptualization, giving a sense of the ultimate ineffability of the meaning of being. Although the nude represents the revealed nature of truth, nude figures hold a part of themselves back, keeping in reserve the reality of their history, parts of their present selves, and also their future possibilities for change, development, and demise. Skin is itself a type of clothing, and stripping away exterior layers of fabric does not necessarily lead to grasping the truth. In this way, the difference between being clothed and being nude is diminished. The images that inspire the authors to contemplate the nudity of being show many ways in which one can and cannot be nude, and many ways of being in relation to oneself and to others, clothed and unclothed.

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What does it mean to be nude? What does the nude do? In a series of constantly surprising reflections, Jean-Luc Nancy and Federico Ferrari encounter the nude as an opportunity for thinking in a way that is stripped bare of all received meanings and preconceived forms. In the course of engagements with twenty-six separate images, the authors show how the nudes produced by painters and photographers expose this bareness of thought and leave us naked on the verge of a sense that is always nascent, always fleeting, on the surface of the skin, on the surface of the image. While the nude is a symbol of truth in philosophy and art alike, what the nude definitively and uniquely reveals is unclear. In Being Nude: The Skin of Images, the authors argue that the nude is always presented as both vulnerable in its exposure and shy of conceptualization, giving a sense of the ultimate ineffability of the meaning of being. Although the nude represents the revealed nature of truth, nude figures hold a part of themselves back, keeping in reserve the reality of their history, parts of their present selves, and also their future possibilities for change, development, and demise. Skin is itself a type of clothing, and stripping away exterior layers of fabric does not necessarily lead to grasping the truth. In this way, the difference between being clothed and being nude is diminished. The images that inspire the authors to contemplate the nudity of being show many ways in which one can and cannot be nude, and many ways of being in relation to oneself and to others, clothed and unclothed.

Read more less

This book, by one of the most innovative and challenging contemporary thinkers, consists of an extensive essay from which the book takes its title and five shorter essays that are internally related to “Being Singular Plural.” One of the strongest strands in Nancy’s philosophy is his attempt to rethink community and the very idea of the social in a way that does not ground these ideas in some individual subject or subjectivity. The fundamental argument of the book is that being is always “being with,” that “I” is not prior to “we,” that existence is essentially co-existence. Nancy thinks of this “being-with” not as a comfortable enclosure in a pre-existing group, but as a mutual abandonment and exposure to each other, one that would preserve the “I” and its freedom in a mode of imagining community as neither a “society of spectacle” nor via some form of authenticity. The five shorter essays impressively translate the philosophical insight of “Being Singular Plural” into sophisticated discussions of national sovereignty, war and technology, identity politics, the Gulf War, and the tragic plight of Sarajevo. The essay “Eulogy for the Mêlée,” in particular, is a brilliant discussion of identity and hybridism that resonates with many contemporary social concerns. As Nancy moves through the exposition of his central concern, being-with, he engages a number of other important issues, including current notions of the “other” and “self” that are relevant to psychoanalytic, political, and multicultural concepts. He also offers astonishingly original reinterpretations of major philosophical positions, such as Nietzsche’s doctrine of “eternal recurrence,” Descartes’s “cogito,” and the nature of language and meaning.

Read more less