Symposium

Symposium is the semi-annual journal of the Canadian Society for Continental Philosophy. We publish articles, review essays, book reviews and philosophical interviews, in English and in French, that are of interest to the general membership of the Society. We invite contributions from scholars working within the traditions of Continental European philosophy, including phenomenology, existential philosophy, hermeneutics, structuralism, post-structuralism, critical theory, deconstruction, postmodernism and feminism. Articles in Symposium are peer-reviewed and indexed in The Philosopher's Index and The International Bibliography of the Social Sciences.

Full-text articles are available online from the University of Western Ontario and through subscribed institutions (via EBSCOhost^®). The journal's tables of contents and article abstracts are available online at the Philosophy Documentation Center.

Latest issue

ARTICLES

1. Valérie Daoust, Foucault et Taylor sur la vérité, la liberté et l’identité subjective

Cet article traite de la question de la relation entre la vérité, la liberté et l’identité dans la pensée de Michel Foucault. En considérant la critique de Foucault par Charles Taylor, dans son article « Foucault on Freedom and Truth », j'analyse les implications de l’hypothèse répressive sur la sexualité et la prétendue impossibilité d'une libération par la vérité. Le refus par Foucault de considérer l’identité homosexuelle comme une identité fixe relevant d’une connaissance de soi nous conduit à son projet d’existence esthétique. Cette vie créatrice, comme nous le verrons dans ses cours Le Gouvernement de soi et des autres, implique un certain rapport à soi qui nécessite néanmoins un rapport à l’autre. Au sein de ce rapport, ainsi que dans le vouloir-dire-vrai de la parrêsia, on trouve des conceptions de vérité et de liberté qui échapperaient à la critique taylorienne et qui s'ouvrent sur d'autres possibilités de pratiques de la liberté.

2. Alistair Welchman, Deleuze’s Post-Critical Metaphysics

Badiou claims Deleuze’s thinking is pre-critical metaphysics that cannot be understood in relation to Kant. I argue that Deleuze is indeed a metaphysical thinker, but precisely because he is a kind of Kantian. Badiou is right that Deleuze rejects the overwhelmingly epistemic problems of critical thought in its canonical sense, but he is wrong to claim that Deleuze completely rejects Kant. Instead, Deleuze is interested in developing a metaphysics that prolongs Kant’s conception of a productive synthesis irreducible to empirical causation. Where Badiou’s criticism might hold, however, is in the risk that Deleuze’s strategy runs of contaminating his new metaphysics with a new kind of transcendental idealism. This reading has recently been developed by Ray Brassier and I explore and evaluate it, concluding that in Difference and Repetition this accusation may be correct, but that by the time of Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze (now with Guattari) has the intellectual re-sources to resist it.

3. Lukas Soderstrom, Nietzsche as a Reader of Wilhelm Roux, or the Physiology of History

This paper explores one of the main sources of Nietzsche’s knowledge of physiology and considers its relevance for the philosophical study of history. Beginning in 1881, Nietzsche read Der Kampf der Theile im Organismus by Wilhelm Roux, which exposed him to a dysteleological account of organic development emphasising the excitative, assimilative and auto-regulative processes of the body. These processes mediate the effects of natural selection. His reading contributed to a physiological understanding of history that borrowed Roux’s description of physiological processes. This physiological description of history proceeded from the similarity between the body’s mediation of its milieu and history’s mediation of the past.

4. René Lemieux, Hume et Bergson, une pratique de la méthode chez Deleuze

Sous le thème de la « méthode », l’auteur se propose de formuler une éthique de la lecture à partir de Gilles Deleuze. L’analyse est fondée sur un dédoublement de la lecture : d’abord la lecture qu’a fait Deleuze de David Hume tel qu’exprimé dans Empirisme et subjectivité (1953) et celle de Henri Bergson dans Le bergsonisme (1966), ensuite par la lecture que l’auteur fait de ces deux livres de Deleuze. Par l’entremise de l’empirisme (Hume) et de l’intuition (Bergson), l’auteur conclut que la lecture que Deleuze a faite est performative en ce sens qu’elle fait ce qu’elle énonce. Une éthique de la lecture correspondante se voudra donc, de même, performative : elle dépassera le donné à travers le délire, s’ouvrira à l’inhumain et au surhumain à travers le virtuel.

5. Joseph Carew, The Threat of Givenness in Jean-Luc Marion

Absent within Jean-Luc Marion’s theory of selfhood is an account of psychosis that displaces standard phenomenological and psychoanalytic models. Working primarily with Book V of Being Given, my paper sketches the formal possibilities exhibited in a self who cannot manage the superabundance of the given and, swept away by an uncontrollable flood of givenness, thereby falls into a hysteria of self-experience and loses its ipseity. Then, contrasting psychosis with positive figures of the self, I explore the dynamic relationship between givenness and the gifted highlighted by the phenomenological diremption and effacement of selfhood displayed in both.

BOOK PANEL/TABLE RONDE

1. Graeme Nicholson, The War Has Taken Place

2. Tom Rockmore, Heidegger, National Socialism and “Imperialism”

3. Bernhard Radloff, Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Globalisation

COMPTES RENDUS/BOOK REVIEWS

1. Jeremy Proulx, Schelling’s Dialogical Freedom Essay

2. James Czank, Nietzsche’s Ethical Theory

3. Brent Vizeau, Briefings on Existence

4. Cathy Maloney, Emmanuel Levinas

5. Martin Otabé, Étude sur la phénoménologie de Heidegger

6. Dominic Desroches, Kierkegaard et Lequier

7. Daniel Skibra, Kant’s Transcendental Arguments

8. Charles P. Rodger, Lectures on Logic

9. Nikolas Kompridis, Critique and Disclosure

10. David Weinkauf, Rephrasing Heidegger

11. Robyn Lee, Kierkegaard’s Instant

12. Antonio Calcagno, Edith Stein (Edith Stein)

13. Aaron James Landry, The Domestication of Derrida

14. Anna Mudde, Speaking of Freedom

15. Kevin W. Gray, Sartre and Adorno

16. Michael Ziser, Onto-Ethologies

17. Catherine Carriere, Liberation as Affirmation

ÉTUDE CRITIQUE / REVIEW ESSAY