The language of difference
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God . . . and the Word became flesh . . . The Word became flesh, and as Aquinas says, 'he was written on our flesh'.172 All materiality is the result of the Word, and this Word assumed that materiality - yet did so remaining as the Word. If our cognition requires the Word, if we only know because of the Word, by looking to the Word, and so to beauty, then we must understand that it is this Word which has become flesh. This Word - as beauty -...
Language of the Stone
Celan completes Heidegger.89 Alain Badiou Ignoring Adorno's precept, that there could not be any poetry after Auschwitz, Celan moves to write in the shadow of the Holocaust.90 Indeed, Celan appears to write because of the Holocaust his language takes its shape in the light of this horror. Celan seeks refuge in language itself, and it is his particular understanding and use of language that affords some comparison with Heidegger. Paul Celan spoke of language in a particular manner, one which...
Ockham
Ockham comes to the question determined to remove even esse objectivum from these possible creatures.118 Ockham criticised the traditional identification of the ideas with the divine essence. This criticism was fuelled by his overall concern to eradicate all metaphysical community and so enforce his ontology of indistinction, with its impervious singularity. It was this move that facilitated Ockham's particular conception of omnipotence, but it can be correctly expressed in the reverse it was...
There is nothing inside the text6
Violently inscribing within the text that which attempted to Here we return to the non-being of Plotinus, which may be the nothing of nihilism. This nothing can be compared to the nothing outside the Derridian text. It is Derrida's hope that 'diff rance produces what it forbids, makes possible the very thing that it makes impossible'.8 We could not wish for a more 'modern' statement which encapsulates the dissolution of the something making the nothing generate as something. There are at least...
Language to say nothing
For Heidegger, Dasein is the 'space' within which Being becomes unconcealed truth, as aletheia 'the unconcealedness of what is present, its Being revealed, its showing itself'.67 The showing of what is present takes place in or as language. Heidegger does not, in a sense, think that something other than the showing is shown, because showing is but a saying, viz., the activity of language 'Dasein is essentially determined by the potentiality for discourse.'68 Indeed, the 'asking' of the...
Derridas Spinozistic Plotinianism
Derrida's position illuminates Spinoza's position.14 It is possible to argue that Derrida is a Plotinian disciple of Spinoza a discipleship which is here referred to as meontotheology . We can begin to see this Plotinian Spinozism when we read Derrida insisting that 'in order to exceed metaphysics it is necessary that a trace be inscribed within the text of metaphysics, a trace that continues to signal . . . in the direction of an entirely other text'.15 It is this inscription that may allow...
Notes Slm
1 This title refers back to the three critiques of Kant. 2 We have paid witness to this disappearing act in the preceding chapters. 8 In the Quodlibetal Questions Ockham denies that relation is a real thing, and that creation qua creation does not have a real relation with God see VI, q. 9 and VII, q. 1. 9 Or meta-structures, for example general types. 10 I have suggested elsewhere that Wittgenstein's advocacy of a purely descriptive philosophy was underwritten by an explanatory impulse, hence...
Nothing is outside the text
For both Plotinus and Heidegger, the Nothing is the impetus of our approach to what is most real in the world, although beyond essence and existence the One, or Being. This is also an important point in Derrida's analysis.1 In a certain way thought means nothing.2 Jacques Derrida This chapter does not offer a reading of any particular text of Derrida's. Instead it analyses the implications that can be discerned from what is deemed to be a central claim of Derrida's philosophy, namely that there...
Notes 1
5 Plotinus, Enneads, trans. S. Mackenna 1991 , III. 5, 2. and V. 8, 12 hereafter Enn. . 6 One is here reminded of the painting by Rubens entitled Saturn. 8 As Pegis 1942 says, 'The whole of being must be considered not only as being but also as non-being, for non-being is the mysterious co-principle of its interior intelligibility', p. 157. 9 See Part I, Chapters 2, 3, 4 and 5. 10 By employing such a phrase I am endeavouring to implicate the work of Levinas within this tradition. See Levinas...
Intuitive cognition to cognise nothing
Intuitive cognition did not originate with William of Ockham, although it did receive what can only be described as a revolutionary treatment at the hands of the inceptor. However, Duns Scotus had already given intuitive cognition an unprecedented importance and even before Scotus the doctrine of notitia intuitiva was inchoately present.1 The motives for developing the notion stemmed from the problems generated by the Franciscan belief in direct knowledge of individuals, a belief that became...
Duns Scotus and William of Ockham univocity of NonBeing
Duns Scotus102 was influenced by Henry of Ghent to such a degree that Gilson states that it is hardly possible to read Duns Scotus 'without having Ghent's writings at hand'.103 The other great influence on Scotus was that of Avicenna.104 From the latter Scotus inherited his notion of being,105 his definition of essence,106 and even of possibility with regard to these essences.107 From the former Scotus was to inherit the view that the infinity of God was a positive perfection, that matter was...