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The essay situates and dissects Derrida’s two catalytic interventions into Heidegger’s thought on time and history—the seminar Heidegger: The Question of Being & History (1964-5) and the essay Ousi...

Aristotle’s question of friendship coalesces around the figure of the friend. The friend forces the question of a determinate ‘who’ into the fray, while sustaining the question ‘what’: what it is to be a friend, that is, what traits, conditions and practices are required to discover and sustain friendship in the friend. Derrida’s reading locates the measuring up of the who of the friend against the what of friendship in the Aristotelian word tis. Signifying both ‘who’ and ‘what’, tis opens a differential that destabilises friendship. Identifying the tremor of this destabilisation with nothing less than the task of deconstruction, Derrida indicts Aristotle for failing to follow the deconstructive gesture he has himself set into motion. Yet Derrida does not undertake the labour either: unlike ‘Ousia and Grammē’ which complete the deconstructive gesture on time on behalf of Aristotle, the Politics of Friendship supresses the thematic, or rather relegates it to the margins, where its force remains undiminished. The present essay thematises the who–what differential, aiming to establish it on an equal footing with the logic of the supplement. Recovering the who–what differential as a key articulation of différance opens new terrains of analysis and affinities of thought.

Introducing the collective volume Derrida’s Politics of Friendship: Amity and Enmity, this chapter sets the stage for the rich and manifold contributions that comprise the undertaking. ‘Welcome Friends’ begins by unfolding and contextualising the emergence of Derrida’s text, from the seminar room to its publication in 1994. This is followed by an outline of the structure of Politics of Friendship along with a discussion of its key notions, namely those notions that are decisive and specific to Derrida’s treatment of friendship: aimance, teleopoiesis and the perhaps. In turn, the introduction offers a sustained account of the reception and influence of Derrida’s text, within various fields and discourses, from deconstruction itself, to classics, feminism and political theory, with a particular emphasis on Carl Schmitt scholarship. The chapter closes by summarising the contribution of the collection and showcasing their relation to the themes and the reception of Politics of Friendship.

This chapter, authored by Georgios Tsagdis, explores the ramifications of potentially digitizing consciousness, thereby preserving memory and subjectivity on the distinctive technological ground which enables and facilitates the utopia named San Junipero, the title of the fourth episode of the third season. This essay re-signifies the Freudian analysis of the reality principle - which establishes an economy of desire and pleasure in the face of death - through Baudrillard's exposition of the articulation of the historical contingency that we call reality. It aims, therefore, to examine the significance of the place and function of death in our understanding and experience of the familiar reality of our human destiny, vis-à-vis a reality that promises to be without death, if not without pain and suffering. Accordingly, this chapter adopts the Platonic project of philosophy as a 'study of death'- as exigent in the post-simulated world as at the dawn of occidental thought.

This chapter explores the normative functions of grammars of crisis that impose restrictive diagnoses of the present, alongside the potentialities that grammatical categories hold for envisioning alternative chronotopes. The chapter is structured around parts of speech—verb/noun/adjective, tense and aspect, number, modality, and voice—that alternate between theoretical expositions and examples that showcase the potential but also the discontents of these grammatical categories in relation to crisis. What happens when crisis and critique haunt each other in the adjective ‘critical’? How can the present of crisis introduce temporal difference or queer temporalities? Can a critical grammar rethink the entanglement of the singular and plural? How does modality turn the grammar of crisis into the crisis of grammar? Can the middle voice offer an alternative to binary distinctions in crisis-rhetoric between active and passive subjects, perpetrators, and victims? We argue that a thinking-through of grammatical categories could help articulate alternative accounts of agency, subjectivity, and responsibility, antagonizing the neoliberal governmentality of crisis, even when they are implicated in its structures. Acknowledging that not all elements of crisis can be understood through the conceptual construct of grammar, the grammatical categories explored here are interrupted by fictional interjections by (invented) characters—“Grammar’s ghosts”—that seek different ways of articulating the crises they have lived or helped to create.

The essay thematises the question of care in conditions of total power – not merely extra muros, in the everyday life of the Third Reich, but in its most radical articulation, the concentration camp. Drawing inspiration from Todorov’s work, the essay engages with Levinas, Agamben, Derrida and Nancy, to investigate Heidegger’s determination of Da-sein’s horizon through a solitary confrontation with death. Drawing extensively on primary testimonies, the essay shows that when the enclosure of the camp became the Da of existence, care assumed a radical significance as the link between the death of another and the death of oneself. In the face of an apparatus of total power and its attempt to individuate and isolate death, the sharing of death in the figure of care remained one’s most inalienable act of resistance and the last means to hold on to death as something that could be truly one’s own. Esej tematizuje pitanje brige u uslovima totalne moći – ne samo extra muros, u svakodnev-nom životu Trećeg Rajha, već u njenoj najradikalnijoj artikulaciji, koncentracionom logoru. Crpeći inspiraciju iz Todorovljevog dela, esej se bavi Levinasom, Agambenom, Deridom i Nansijem, kako bi propitao Hajdegorovo određenje Da-sein-ovog horizonta kroz samotno suočavanje sa smrću. Opsežno se oslanjajući na primarna svedočanstva, esej pokazuje da je, kada je Da egzisistencije postalo ograda logora, briga poprimila radikalan značaj kao veza iz-među smrti drugog i smrti samog sebe. Suočeni s aparatom totalne moći i njegovim poku-šajem da individualizuje i izoluje smrt, deljenje smrti u liku brige ostalo je neotuđivi čin ot-pora i poslednje sredstvo za zadržavanje smrti kao nečega što bi uistinu moglo biti nečije vlastito.

mian men idean theriou poikilou kai polykephalou1At the heart of the Platonic Republic, amidst the most examined of philosophic spaces, a purloined letter gazes back unconcealed into the inspecting stare; most efficaciously, under the eyes of centuries of interpretation, the letter operates unnoticed. It relates the whole psycho-political project of the Republic to a figure, which overwhelms the project itself, a figure barely contained under the guise of metaphor. This figure shows itself in the simplicity of something "outlined (like a sign) and memorable (like an image or a tale),"2 which sets discourse in motion. It re-joins the worn-out allegories of the sun (508b-9c), the divided line (509d-13e), the cave (514a-20a), and the closing Myth of Er (614a-21d), which already attest, within the space of the text, a forlorn inner purity and pure interiority of what in the name of logos constitutes itself as knowledge.The hyperbolic figure, which articulates and measures the Republic, is that of the therion, a living thing, a certain kind of zoe, which in the Greek of Plato refers on the one hand to both tame animal and wild beast, while designating on the other, all that is monstrous: Typhon, Hydra, the Satyrs. In turn, therion as monstrosity, appears both as a prodigious, threatening creature, yet also as monstrum, teras, as sign of excessive signification,3 a sign, which doesn't show itself-in the case of tyranny, the capital monstrosity in the Republic, even a tell-tale symptom of a disease that hides itself in order to take effect. The monster hides and manifests itself, announces its secret, while concealing the violence of its conspicuous presence. It operates in the city and in the soul, as it operates across the dialogue and the text that constitute the Republic.Thus, the figure of the therion, beast and monster at once, inscribes itself as a purloined letter, articulating a literary metaphor and a literal metamorphosis, the one as much as the other, the one because of the other. This letter amounts to an open invitation to unfold the theriological figurations in order to examine anew what is truly inceptive at the beginning of political thought. The first insight of this unfolding recognizes in the therion the infinitesimal affinity of beast and monster as well as their infinite non-coincidence. The commerce of the figurations of beast and monster in the figure of the therion is originary and irreducible.4 Ultimately, the thread that joins these theriological instances in the Platonic corpus will have to be followed through, transforming received notions of metaphor and catalyzing a metamorphosis of the history of Platonic thought in order to assess the occidental fate of the polis.The first to follow upon this path is Aristotle, who will reiterate the Platonic dichotomy of a tamed people (demos) and a monstrous mob (ochlos) into a double origin of the political: the "organization of the human community in accordance with the telos of the reasonable being" on the one hand and on the other "as a remedy for the sheer fact of social division."5 This dichotomy, never singular in its refractions, reiterates itself up until and beyond Agamben's opposition of zoe and bios, in an intricate history, the unraveling of which must wait at present. Still, in order to make meaningful what must here remain allusive, namely the perennial return of bio-politics to zoo-politics, to which the Coda of the text returns, the zoe of polis must be traced in the manifold figurations of the Platonic figure of the therion. Revolving around the Republic, the present essay undertakes this examination of Platonic psycho-political theriology.Theriology is necessarily psycho-political: the grand homology of psyche and polis is no less than the structural force articulating the Republic. The first recipient of this homology is once more Aristotle. His valuation of the political over the personal good is founded upon the identity (tauton) of the supreme human good in both. …