Search results for ""author elisabeth weber""

For Jacques Derrida, the notions and experiences of “community,” “living,” and “together” never ceased to harbor radical, in fact infinite interrogations. The often anguished question of how to “live together” moved Derrida throughout his oeuvre, animating his sustained reflections on hospitality, friendship, responsibility, justice, forgiveness, and mourning, as well as his interventions as an outspoken critic of South Africa’s apartheid, the Israel/Palestine conflict, the bloody civil war in his native Algeria, human rights abuses, French immigration laws, the death penalty, and the “war on terror.” “Live together,” Derrida wrote, “one must . . . one cannot not ‘live together,’ even if one does not know how or with whom.” In this volume, the paradoxes, impossibilities, and singular chances that haunt the necessity of “living together”are evoked in Derrida’s essay “Avowing—The Impossible: ‘Returns,’ Repentance, and Reconciliation,” around which the collection is gathered. Written by scholars in literary criticism, philosophy, legal studies, religious studies, Middle Eastern studies, and sociology working in North America, Europe, and the Middle East, the essays in this volume tackle issues such as the responsibilities and fragility of democracy; the pitfalls of decreed reconciliation; the re-legitimization of torture in the “war on terror”; the connections between Orientalism, Semitism, and anti-Semitism; the delocalizing dynamics of globalization; crimes against humanity; nationalism; and politics as the art not of the possible but of the impossible. The volume includes analyses of current controversies and struggles. Here, Derrida is here read in and with regard to areas of intense political conflict—in particular, those that oppose Israelis and Palestinians, Hindus and Muslims, victims and perpetrators of South African apartheid, Turks and Armenians. The necessity of an infinitely patient reflection goes hand in hand with the obligation of justice as that which must not wait. It is in the spirit of such urgency, of a responsibility that cannot be postponed, that the essays in this volume engage with Derrida’s thinking on “living together.”

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In the wake of the Dreyfus affair and the Shoah, many French intellectuals have maintained rich and complex relationships with Judaism, beyond as well as within the religious dimension. Whether they approach it via history, philosophy, biblical studies or sociology, or following a personal itinerary, many contemporary intellectuals are deeply involved in Jewish culture. Interviewed at length by Elisabeth Weber, this volume presents the meditations of seven well-known French thinkers on the special relations of their own intellectual pursuit to Judaism. As memory or as the place of “circumfession” (in Jacques Derrida's words), as the symbol of the “unrepresentable” (Jean-François Lyotard) or as the witness, according to Emmanuel Levinas, to a “biblical humanity,” Judaism is continually engaged in renewing and displacing contemporary thought. The volume includes interviews with: Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Jacques Derrida, Rita Thalmann, Emmanuel Levinas, Léon Poliakov, Jean-François Lyotard, and Luc Rosenzweig.

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This collection of essays is the first book to take up the urgent issue of torture from the array of approaches offered by the arts and humanities. In the post-9/11 era, where we are once again compelled to entertain debates about the legality of torture, this volume speaks about the practice in an effort to challenge the surprisingly widespread acceptance of state-sanctioned torture among Americans, including academics and the media–entertainment complex. Speaking about Torture also claims that the concepts and techniques practiced in the humanities have a special contribution to make to this debate, going beyond what is usually deemed a matter of policy for experts in government and the social sciences. It contends that the way one speaks about torture—including that one speaks about it—is key to comprehending, legislating, and eradicating torture. That is, we cannot discuss torture without taking into account the assaults on truth, memory, subjectivity, and language that the humanities theorize and that the experience of torture perpetuates. Such accounts are crucial to framing the silencing and demonizing that accompany the practice and representation of torture. Written by scholars in literary analysis, philosophy, history, film and media studies, musicology, and art history working in the United States, Europe, and the Middle East, the essays in this volume speak from a conviction that torture does not work to elicit truth, secure justice, or maintain security. They engage in various ways with the limits that torture imposes on language, on subjects and community, and on governmental officials, while also confronting the complicity of artists and humanists in torture through their silence, forms of silencing, and classic means of representation. Acknowledging this history is central to the volume’s advocacy of speaking about torture through the forms of witness offered and summoned by the humanities.

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