Empedocles: European Journal for the Philosophy of Communication - Volume 9, Issue 1, 2018

McKeon was a pragmatist who developed a heuristic that outlined the philosophical roots behind the tensions created by the paradox of pluralism. This heuristic was based on the four main schools of ancient Greek philosophy and allowed McKeon to map out how different philosophical perspectives create different understandings of foundational concepts such as freedom, history and motion. This paper applies that heuristic to the concept of communication and demonstrates how different philosophical approaches create tension over the definition of communication. Scholars can use this application to both better approach McKeon’s pragmatism as well as gain insight into the philosophical foundations of our own perspectives of communication.

In an age of postmodern suspicion of master narratives, the egalitarianism and universality inherent in a normative system of rights defended by liberalism is countered by disbelief in the idealized conceptions of a ‘public subject’, divorced from the particularity of both individual and historical communal narratives, as well as an impartial collective good. Simultaneously, the excessive fragmentation of opposed and contradictory aspirations of counterpublics, privileged by a communitarian approach, runs the risk of giving priority to individual rights over social well-being. This article explores the liberal and communitarian approaches to rights, inquiring into whether freedom or equality offer the best criteria of judgement to preserve the space of cultural plurality within the public sphere. While Habermasian discourse ethics subordinates the particularistic to the general will, the communitarian perspective on justice, represented by Paul Piccone and Charles Taylor, argues that the law is not universal in scope and cannot be separated from particularistic conceptions of the ‘good life’. The article ultimately claims that freedom is the criterion that allows cultural pluralities to both stand on their own, resisting assimilation within any master discourse, and establish dialogue among themselves. In this perspective, the public sphere promotes complex modes of interaction, among modernity’s differentiated spheres. This view of the public sphere is in tune with Jencks’ description of postmodernism as preserving the ‘fragmental holism’ (1996: 478) of plural lifeworlds.

Offering a pointed response to the perennial question of being, those sympathetic to the philosophical posture of antinatalism proclaim the suffering of the world does not ultimately justify bringing life into it, consequently advancing a moral stance towards procreation. As this particular topic of conversation is unlikely to curry favor with a majority of interlocutors, the antinatalist-as-rhetor faces a seemingly Sisyphean task in issuing a harsh alternative to the more pervasive narrative espousing birth as an occasion for celebration. Cautious to dismiss antinatalism as simply a profane social discourse, I first consider its communicative import as type of tragic rhetoric which identifies birth as a phenomenological disaster that warrants more critical appraisal. Additionally, I examine the utility of embracing a performative writing style to explore this topic insofar as it adds rhetorical dimension to the attempt at communicating the horrors of existence.

This article charts Derrida’s performances in front of the camera and argues that several different film retellings of his 1982 imprisonment in Prague articulate the connections between spectrality and Law. If spectrality disrupts the binary of presence and absence, then we must not only show how there is a ghostly presence within the context of film viewing, but also how being photographed is a matter of embracing blindness and a postal logic. The Prague imprisonment was an intriguing event in Derrida’s life because it seemed to go hand-in-hand with revoking his self-imposed ban on his public image, beginning with his first television interview on Antenne 2. Why does Derrida replay this scene, re-enact it, indefinitely? How does the recurring trope of blindness in his writings relate to both the imprisonment and the experience of being photographed? The television and film retellings in Ghost Dance (McMullen, 1983), D’ailleurs, Derrida (Fathy, 1999), and, finally, Derrida (Dick and Ziering Kofman, 2002) could be a way of changing the ghosts that haunt that scene: from fear and anguish in the first television version to openness towards the other in D’ailleurs, Derrida, where the place and time of the event are not named.

In In Praise of Theatre, an interview with Alain Badiou held by Nicolas Truong, Badiou answers questions about his ideas on the value and purpose of theatre. He explains that he takes ‘real theatre’ to be theatre that consists of performances that aim at making the members of the audience to reflect critically on what they have just heard or seen and, more importantly, the possibilities that were only implied by the performance. Contrary to disciplines such as philosophy, politics and literature, Badiou argues, theatre is uniquely suited for this purpose, because it takes place in a ‘here and now’ that is shared by performers and audience, which places the audience in a position to ‘grasp the relation between immanence and transcendence from the view of the idea’. In addition, it uses an indirect mode of representation, instead of a direct mode of teaching. While accepting Badiou’s claim that theatre performances form a valuable means to question social conventions by communicating and transforming subjectivity, in this article I will argue that Badiou’s enthusiasm about the possibilities of theatre lead him to exaggerate its uniqueness in relation to philosophy, politics and literature. That is to say, he stretches the differences between these disciplines too far by portraying them as opposites or even rivals. In what follows, I will show for each of the comparisons that Badiou makes between theatre and these other disciplines, that they are founded on a misunderstanding of theatre’s unique position when it comes to transforming subjectivity through communication.

Nicholas Jacobs’s introduction to and translation of Johann Peter Hebel’s story, The Glass Jew, a humorous example of inclusiveness and communicative conflict-resolution.

Teorie del Cinema: Il Dibattito Contemporaneo, Adriano D’Aloia and Ruggero Eugeni (eds) (2017) Milano: Raffaello Cortina Editore, 408 pp., ISBN: 9788860309587, p/bk, €35.00

Bodies in Suspense: Time and Affect in Cinema, Alanna Thain (2017) Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 328 pp., ISBN: 978-0-8166-9295-8, p/bk, $30.00; ISBN: 978-0-8166-9293-4, h/bk, $120.00