Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy
Journal Data
| Type | JOURNAL |
|---|---|
| Publisher | University Library System, University of Pittsburgh (US) |
| ISSN | 2155-1162 |
| Wikidata | Q50815593 |
| OpenAlex | S2764742177 |
| MAG | 2764742177 |
| Website | http://jffp.pitt.edu |
| Total publications | 549 |
| Coverage period | 1989 - 2026 |
| Country | US |
| Language | EN |
| Access | Open Access |
| Indexing | DOAJ indexed |
| Cited by | 384 |
| Impact factor | 0.132 |
| h-index | 6 |
| i10-index | 2 |
This journal is dedicated to French and Francophone philosophy. While certain French philosophers are foundational to contemporary social theory and critical anthropology, this journal's primary focus is philosophy itself, not social theory or its ethnographic application. It is a cognate humanities venue with regular but not central anthropological intersection
African history and culture studies · Caribbean and African Literature and Culture · Classical Philosophy and Thought · Critical Theory and Philosophy · Diverse Scientific and Economic Studies · Foucault, Power, and Ethics · French Historical and Cultural Studies · French Literature and Criticism · French Urban and Social Studies · Hannah Arendt's Political Philosophy
The Significance of Nostalgia for Mediology: A Brief Meditation on the Connection
Discussions on nostalgia are relatively infrequent, especially in the field of philosophy. Perhaps, the main obstacle is in its ambiguity that was already mentioned: “The ambiguity is evident in nostalgia’s characteristically bittersweet quality, its proclivity for combining regret with longing, a vivid sense of missing with an equally vivid sense of what is missed." However, some rare attempts can be found in medicine (Hofer), classical (Kant, J…
Intelligibility and Its Limits: Arendt, Améry, and Levinas on Atrocity and Suffering
Paradigmatic perspectives on evil suggest that the presence of evil threatens the sense or intelligibility of the world by defeating our normative expectations. In this paper, I turn to Arendt, Améry, and Levinas to explore distinctive ways in which the relationship between evil and intelligibility can be understood. I argue that while Arendt’s account of radical evil problematically assumes that perpetrators evade (moral) comprehension, Arendt’s…
Expanding the Discussion of Foucault in Brazil
Response to Huffer and McCall on Foucault in Brazil
Foucault in Brazil: The Security State and the Conduct of the Intellectual
Why Brazil?That is, why did Foucault make several trips to Brazil over the span of some ten years?After all, he had not published scholarly work related to Brazilian history or culture, nor was his work especially focused on the Western hemisphere or issues that would lead a scholar to turn their interests to Brazil, issues such as slavery or imperialism.Although it does not definitively answer the question (indeed, this question may be impossibl…
Ellipses, of Derrida and Glissant
How to contain, to simultaneously host and hold (con-tinere) two thinkers––two irreducible figures of thought––with their two unexchangeable physical bodies? What will emerge out of it, and what will have already emerged out of it, by virtue of this sheer juxtaposition of the two, a parataxis itself initiated by a certain historical contingency, namely their contemporality or contemporariness, their having-found-themselves-together as mortal bein…
On the Mediterranean’s Shores: Derridean Hyperbolic Hospitality and Its Limits
The Mediterranean Sea has always been a site of crossings, encounters and becomings. Since the early 2010s, however, migrants coming primarily from Africa and West Asia now cross the water knowing that they are voyaging between life and death, and increasingly, they see that they test the limits of the hospitality that those on the northern shores of the Mediterranean are willing to extend. The Mediterranean becomes what Édouard Glissant refers t…
Revisiting La production de l’espace: Lefebvre’s Engagement with Late Marx
While the relationship between Marx and Lefebvre is generally recognised, it has not been sufficiently researched hitherto. His Lefebvre's engagement with Marx's Critique of Political Economy (CPE), with a few exceptions, has received little attention within academia. Yet a wide range of supposed aspects of Lefebvre’s Marxism have been broadly highlighted; Rob Shields identified him as close to the “Latin American Left,” Andy Merrifield as “bond[…
Turn by Turn: Im-possibility and Democracy ‘to Come’ in Derrida’s Rogues
It seemed as if the time for Derrida’s reflections on sovereignty, democracy and the morality behind the belief that “force ‘trumps’ law” especially as it unfolded in Rogues: Two Essays on Reason had come and passed. Delivered as two lectures in the summer of 2002, in the interval between the aftermath of 9/11 and the impending invasion of Iraq by the United States and its allies in 2003, Rogues claims for its theme, as Derrida announces in the f…
Open Boat Blues: Glissant and Caribbean Diaspora
How does the musical genre of the blues complicate diaspora narratives that inadvertently privilege Eurocentric aesthetic models of diasporic experience? How might we find formal evidence of the blues in Martinican poet-philosopher Edouard Glissant’s work on migration? And in what ways does Glissant lend a Caribbean inflection to this blues-based diasporic thinking? In what follows, I attempt to “creolize” diaspora theory by reading Glissant’s Po…
Of These One and All I Weave the Song of Myself’: Walt Whitman’s Lyric Subject in Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation
Poetics of Relation presents a powerful account of Relation. “Relation is an open totality evolving upon itself” whose elements “don’t blend” nor “lose themselves” in relation; instead, “each element can keep its... essential quality, even as it accustoms itself to the essential qualities and differences of others.” In its most absolute formulation, Relation enables “a relational practice affirming the multiplicity and diversity of components." T…
Thinking the Impossible Survivance and Arrivance of the ‘Speaking Commodity’: Conjuring the Specters of Chris Hani, Slavery, and Blackness in Derrida’s Specters of Marx
To begin to think the thought of Jacques Derrida as in/of Africa and the African(a) diaspora demands an attentiveness to the impossible survivance and arrivance of enslaved Africans (“speaking commodities”) in the Americas. The invocation of the concept of survivance is meant to signify and articulate the feel of being natally interdicted from the capacity to claim coherent space-time coordinates because of trans-Atlantic slavery and its afterliv…
Foucault in Brazil: Silence, Speech, and the Fascism in Our Heads
Response to Marcelo Hoffman's Foucault in Brazil
‘Gave Me Back No Words: Celan, Derrida, and a Poetic Relationship to Language
In 1958, Paul Celan gave a short speech now known as the Bremen Lecture in which the Romanian poet casts his relationship with language in a particular non-proprietary light that this essay will reflect on with the help of Jacques Derrida
Short Performances of Syntax: Return and Impossibility in Glissant’s Creolization
Whence does the speaking subject of language return? Return is the mark and trajectory of filiation. It transitively entails a prior departure and a place from which one had left—derivatively, on terms not of their own. The detour of language—its rupta via, its broken way—is inaugurated by an impossibility inherited in a primordial scene of usurpation. Dispossession here retroactively marks an originary scene of possession: The subject is inducte…
A Merleau-Pontian Critique of Sartrean Philosophy of Negation
The phenomenological ontologies of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty have often been discussed in comparison to one another. Often, a Merleau-Pontian critique of Sartre, based on subjectivity, has been given. In doing so, both Sartre’s and Merleau-Ponty’s views on freedom, facticity, the body, and the Other has been discussed in great detail. Despite all of this, however, not much emphasis has been given to their understanding of negativity in its relatio…
Le dépassement réalisé d’une différence: Tentation informatique et pensée poétique chez Glissant
De l’information du poème” qui clôt la partie “Éléments” dans Poétique de la Relation, représente pour le lectorat habitué à l'écriture glissantienne un chapitre assez surprenant voire confondant tant au niveau de l’approche du sujet traité que de sa mise en forme rhétorique, car c’est autour de l’opposition entre poésie et informatique que démarre son propos. Tout d’abord, on a l’impression que Glissant s'écarte des riches lieux-communs qui ryth…
Glissant and the Politics of Coordination
This is an ironic moment for Edouard Glissant’s growing community of readers. So many are discovering Glissant’s work for the first time, myself included, in part because a fervent commitment to a politics of recognition now dominates in many corners of the humanities. This is ironic largely because while the choice to engage with Glissant might be motivated by an all too generalized logic of recognition, to read Glissant is to learn about how th…
What World is This? On Judith Butler's Ethico-Politics of Breath and Touch: Review Essay
This review essay presents a detailed engagement with Judith Butler’s most recent monograph, What World Is This? A Pandemic Phenomenology. The essay situates this work within Butler’s recent work on ethics and its relation to politics, centering on notions such as precariousness, grievability and relationality. More specifically, this essay engages with Butler’s reflections on the pandemic, in which they dwell on touching and breathing as probes …
Merleau-Ponty and Derrida on Husserl’s Origin of Geometry
A number of claims made by Derrida concerning Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of Husserl will be carefully considered and evaluated here. First, Derrida’s claim that Merleau-Ponty’s mis-interprets Husserl’s letter to Lévy-Bruhl will be challenged. Secondly, Derrida’s claim that his criticism of Husserl’s phenomenology can be applied just as well to Merleau-Ponty’s will be challenged. Thirdly, it is a careful consideration of textual evidence that …
The Gift of Mourning
This paper explores the relationship of mourning and the gift in the work of Jacques Derrida. I argue that mourning is not a Derridean gift, but mourning does open us to the gift. Reading the works of Aristotle, Cicero, and Kierkegaard on friendship and love to the dead in the wake of Derrida’s Politics of Friendship makes this relation among mourning and the gift apparent for he presents mourning as the opening to a democracy to-come whose logic…
Where is the Place for Black Atlantic Literature and Authorship
In the wake of Black Atlantic terror, enslavement, colonialism and violence, is there a place for literature? Where is there a place for the author? In other words, to rethink poet Muriel Rukeyser’s question, where is there a place for Black Atlantic literature and authorship? Proposing Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic as the window through which to answer these questions, this essay focuses on the place for/of literature and authorship as Gilroy…
The Seduction of Metaphors
Nietzsche’s metaphor of seduction suggests that language catches philosophers in the trap of metaphysics. Nietzsche uses the poetic powers of language to fight against this metaphysical language. However, his use of the metaphor of truth as a woman seems to seduce him back in metaphysics. Metaphors become seductive because of their rhetorical and performative power. One must therefore be wary of the seduction of metaphors when attempting at reval…
Conflict of Interpretations on Ricoeur’s Contributions to the Philosophy of Technology
Recent literature regarding how Ricoeur’s work relates to the philosophy of technology appears prima facie to be contradictory. In one established interpretation, Ricoeur’s contributions are merely indirect as he did not engage with the empirical turn of the discipline in the 1980s and maintained a suspicious view of technology based on a profound concern with the distinction between persons and things. In this view, Ricoeur’s work does not add a…
Testing Anthropocentrism: Lacan and the Animal Imago
In an effort to complicate the human subject, this article considers the critical insights of psychoanalytic thinker Jacques Lacan, focusing in particular on his essay, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I As Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience” (1949). ‘The Mirror Stage’ explains how we break from nature, differentiate ourselves from the animal and graduate from primordial subsistence as psychically folded into the first lig…
The Phenomenology of Pain and Pleasure: Henry and Levinas
While Henry and Levinas are often juxtaposed, little attention has been given to their shared views on pain and pleasure. Both phenomenologists converge on the argument that an adequate account of pain and pleasure requires a critical confrontation with the theory of intentionality. This raises further questions. What roles do interiority and exteriority play in pain and pleasure? Should they be conceived as different tonalities of one essence or…
Jean-Luc Marion, The Crossing of the Visible
Against African Communalism
Communalism and its cognates continue to exercise a vise grip on the African intellectual imaginary. Whether the discussion is in ethics or social philosophy, in metaphysics or even, on occasion, epistemology, the play of communalism, a concept expounded in the next section, is so strong that it is difficult to escape its ubiquity. In spite of this, there is little serious analysis of the concept and its implications in the contemporary context. …
Gabriel Marcel's Body-as-a-Subject: A Preeminently Postmodern Notion
New Forms of Revolt
Popular uprisings, indignant youth, toppled dictators, oligarchic presidents dismissed, hopes dashed, liberties crushed in prisons, fixed trials, and bloodbaths. How are we to read these images? Could revolt, or what is called “riot” on the Web, be waking humanity from its dream of hyperconnectedness? Or could it just be a trick played on us so that the culture of spectacle can last longer? But what “revolt” are we talking about? Is it even possi…
Did Foucault do Ethics? The "Ethical Turn," Neoliberalism, and the Problem of Truth
This paper argues against a common misunderstanding of Foucault's work. Even after the release of his lectures at the Collège de France, which ran throughout the 1970s until his death in 1984, he is still often taken to have made an "ethical" turn toward the end of his life. As opposed to his genealogies of power published in the 1970s, which are relentlessly suspicious of claims of individual agency, his final monographs focus on the ethical sel…
Foucault and Social Measure
Time and Crisis: Questions for Psychoanalysis and Race
In the triumvirate of personalities and motives—from Wright and Baldwin to Coates—we encounter the essential elements of the “crisis” that configures black passage in the New World. These lines of kinship, both consanguineous and ineffable, travelling from father to son, from uncle to nephew, from one generation to the next, lend us a figurative rhythm that grasps the notion of the processional—the traversal of time and space that remains fundame…
Creolizing Collective Memory: Refusing the Settler Memory of the Reconstruction Era
The collective memory of the Reconstruction era in US history is a good example of Jane Anna Gordon's notion of 'creolization' at work. I argue that this is an era that could do with even further creolizing by refusing the influence of settler memory. Settler memory refers to the capacity both to know and disavow the history and contemporary implications of genocidal violence toward Indigenous people and the accompanying land dispossession that s…
Narrative Ethics and Vulnerability: Kristeva and Ricoeur on Interdependence
The character and extent of disabilities, especially cognitive disability, have posed significance problems for existing moral theories. Certain philosophers have even questioned the moral personhood of people with disabilities and have argued that people with profound cognitive impairments should not be granted the same moral status as those who are cognitively able-bodied. This paper proposes an alternative understanding of moral personhood as …
Pain as Yardstick: Jean Améry
One of the best known and most widely accepted premises regarding the experience of pain and suffering is its singular, private nature. Pain’s violence isolates us from everything else, embedding us completely within our own suffering so that there is nothing else but pain: no world or objects, no relationship with other people, no past or anticipation of the future. An utter withdrawal. But pain’s isolating force is dual: it affects not only tho…
Is There a Flesh Without Body
This paper was originally presented at a colloquium on Michel Henry’s book Incarnation at the Institut Catholique Paris. Michel Henry’s response to the present study can be found in “À Emmanuel Falque,” in Phénoménologie et christianisme chez Michel Henry, ed. Ph. Capelle (Paris: Cerf, 2004): 168-182. This response was reprinted recently in Michel Henry, La Phénoménologie de la vie, vol. 5 (Paris: PUF, 2015
Bergson before Bergsonism: Traversing "Bergson's Failing" in Susanne K. Langer's Philosophy of Art
How did the philosophy of Henri Bergson look before Gilles Deleuze's Bergsonism? This article provides a situated answer to that question by performing a close reading of Susanne K. Langer's early engagement with Bergson in her monograph Feeling and Form from 1953. Both Bergson and Langer argue against polemical philosophizing. Such polemical modes of doing philosophy distort insight into the thought of the philosophers in question and in philoso…
The Case for Incomprehension
I argue that Glissant conceived of opacity first and foremost in his poetry and in his readings of earlier writers, from Mallarmé to Saint-John Perse to William Faulkner, whose moments of complication or incomprehensibility he found productive. By examining the literary valence of this concept of Caribbean philosophy, I claim that opacity not only protects the subject from the invasive grasp of (neo)colonial thought but also, more affirmatively, …
So Much the Worse for the Whites: Dialectics of the Haitian Revolution
This article sets out from an analysis of the pioneering work of Susan Buck-Morss to rethink, not only Hegel and Haiti, but broader questions surrounding dialectics and the universal brought to light by the Haitian Revolution. Reading through the lens of C.L.R. James’ The Black Jacobins, I seek to correct a series of ironic silences in her account, re-centering the importance of Toussaint’s successor, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, and underlining the …
From Life to Existence: A Reconsideration of the Question of Intentionality in Michel Henry’s Ethics
Michel Henry has renewed our understanding of life as immanent affectivity: life cannot be reduced to what can be made visible; it is – as immanent and as affectivity – radically invisible. However, if life (la vie) is radically immanent, the living (le vivant) has nonetheless to relate to the world: it has to exist. But, since existence requires and includes intentional components, human reality – being both living and existing – implies that im…
Totality and Infinity, Alterity, and Relation: From Levinas to Glissant
Totality and Infinity, the title of a well-known work by Emmanuel Levinas, takes up a word which readers of Poetic Intention and of many other texts of Édouard Glissant’s will easily recognize: a term sometimes used in a sense that is clearly positive, sometimes in a sense that is not quite as positive, such as when, for instance, he compares “totalizing Reason” to the “Montaigne’s tolerant relativism.” In his final collection of essays, Traité d…
Acting Through Inaction: The Distinction Between Leisure and Reverie in Jacques Rancière’s Conception of Emancipation
The classical distinction between leisure and work is often used to define features of the emancipated life. In Aristotle leisure is defined as time devoted to purposeful activity, and distinguished from the labour time expended merely to produce life’s necessities. In critical theory, this classical distinction has been adapted to provide an image of emancipated life, as purposively driven, fulfilling and meaningful activity. Aspects of this ada…
Recognizability, Perception and the Distribution of the Sensible: Rancière, Honneth and Butler
This paper explores the relation between perception, invizibilization and recognizability in the work of Rancière, Honneth and Butler. Recognizability is the term employed here to indicate the perceptual process that necessarily occurs prior to a normative or ethical act of recognition and that provides the conditions that make recognition possible. The notion of recognizability points to the fact that perception is not merely a disinterested sur…
The Persistence of Utopia: Plasticity and Difference from Roland Barthes to Catherine Malabou
The theorizing of utopia is a persistent theme throughout several generations of the French continental tradition, and alongside the process theory of Alfred North Whitehead to a large degree recuperates the concept of utopia from its supposed dismissal by Marx and his intellectual descendants. Most recently, attention to the notion of plasticity, popularized (relatively speaking) by Catherine Malabou, extends speculation on utopian possibility. …
A Phenomenology of Home: Jean Améry on Homesickness
As the contemporary nation state order continues to produce genocide and destruction, and thereby refugees, and as the national and international landscape continues to see the existence of refugees as a political problem, Jean Améry’s 1966 essay “How Much Home Does a Person Need?” takes on a curious urgency. I say ‘curious’ because his own conclusions about the essay’s aims and accomplishments appear uncertain and oftentimes unclear (note how Am…
The Concept in Life and the Life of the Concept: Canguilhem’s Final Reckoning with Bergson
Foucault famously divided the history of twentieth-century French philosophy between a “philosophy of experience” and a “philosophy of the concept,” placing Bergson in the former camp and his teacher Canguilhem in the latter. This division has shaped the Anglophone reception of Canguilhem as primarily a historian and philosopher of biology. Canguilhem, however, was also a philosopher of life and a careful reader of Bergson. The recently-begun pub…
Alain Badiou’s Suturing of the Law to the Event and the State of Exception
This article questions whether we can posit a more radical desuturing of the law from the event: Can radical shifts in law produce events? Can the law itself be an event, thereby conditioning the very nature of the event itself, creating a new subjectivity and a new time? I would like to argue that the law can do so. How? Badiou begins “The Three Negations” by discussing the work of the German jurist Carl Schmitt (TN 1877). I would like to argue …
Frantz Fanon: Philosophy, Praxis, and the Occult Zone
In 2011, Achille Mbembe asserted that “the human has consistently taken on the form of waste within the peculiar trajectory race and capitalism espoused in South Africa.” He added that the end of apartheid had shifted rather than undone the lines of exclusion and dispute. Since the massacre on the platinum mines in 2012 it has become widely accepted that the state is resorting to repressive measures to enforce these lines and contain the dispute …
Toward a Sexual Difference Theory of Creolization
In lieu of an abstract, here is the opening paragraph from the essay:Throughout his work, Édouard Glissant rigorously describes the process of creolization in the Caribbean and beyond. His later work in particular considers creolization through the planetary terms of Relation, “exploded like a network inscribed within the sufficient totality of the world.” As his philosophical importance rightfully grows, many note the dual risk of overgeneraliza…
Irigaray’s Alternative Buddhist Practices of the Self
In lieu of an abstract, here is the opening paragraph of the essay:Luce Irigaray’s critics charge that her attempt to carve out a space for nature and the feminine self through an engagement with Buddhism smacks of Orientalism. Associating Buddhism with a philosophy of nature can lead to feminizing and exoticizing the non-Western other. Because she relies more on lessons learned from yogic teachers than Buddhist texts or scholarship, her work see…
La vie philosophique en France
Vue de France
Entre "intrigue" et "métaphor: La poétique de P. Ricoeur devant la spécificité du poème
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Collected Writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Vol. I
Bibliographie partielle de oeuvres de philosophie en langue française pour l'annee 1989
The Creativity of Translation and its Universality in the Hermeneutic Process
De la légitimité
Vue de France
Vue d'Amérique
Mark C. Taylor, Tears
Croisade contre la différence: "Le Règne De La "Terreur Linquistique
Bibliographie
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, De la justice de la Révolution et dans l'Eglise
Joan Borrell, L'artiste-roi: Essais Sur Les Représentations
Selected Bibliography of Ricoeur's English Works
Jean-Jacques Wunenburger, La raison contradictoire
Andre Lalande, Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philosophie
David Kolb, Postmodern Sophistications: Philosophy, Architecture, and Tradition
Jean-Joseph Goux, The Feminist Challenge to Totems and Icons: Less Art and More Matter
Le langage de la transcendence
Objectivité scientifique et réductionnisme chez Jacques Monod
David Sprintzen, Faut-il parler d'une philosophie d'Albert Camus
Marivaux, le masque, l'habit et l'être
Interview avec Paul Ricoeur
Ambiguite des process staliniens: Interpretation de la pensée de Merleau-Ponty