No More Insults to Friendship

In 2007, I published a book that analyzed and extended Derrida’s final thinking about animal life. The book was based on lectures I presented at the 2006 Collegium Phaenomenologicum in Umbria, Italy, invited by Michael Naas. I am truly indebted to Michael for this invitation because writing those lectures and the book based on them opened up a new investigation for me, an investigation of violence and possible reactions to violence. The premisses that underlie the investigations I have pursued since 2007, and in which I am still engaged today and in which I will be engaged for some time, could be expressed by the phrase ‘auto-affection and becoming’. Here are the premisses in the most schematic form. First, if one wants to philosophise well, then one must not deviate from the phenomenological starting point: the epochē. The epochē suspends all belief in a world that exists independently of experience. It reduces all being ‘in itself’ to subjective experience, to ‘phenomena’, to ‘immanence’. Based in Descartes’s idea of methodical doubt, the reduction of all external things to immanence takes us back to the cogito, that is, it takes us back to thinking, which, since Plato, has been conceived as interior monologue. In a word, the epochē takes us back to auto-affection. As countless phenomenological and Bergsonian investigations have shown, interior monologue, like every kind of speaking, indeed, like every kind of auto-affection, and, even more, like every kind of experience, is conditioned by the movement of time. Moreover, the phenomenological and Bergsonian investigations have shown that temporalisation or duration, while maintaining a continuity, connexion, or contamination, always divides itself between what comes back from the past and what comes in from the future

Aesthetics · Affection · Art · Cogito ergo sum · Epistemology · Epoch (astronomy · Friendship · Immanence · Internal monologue · Linguistics · Literature · Narrative · Physics · Psychoanalysis · Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy · Philosophy · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism · Psychology · Violence, Religion, and Philosophy

• Auto-affection and Ethics

  Zeynep Direk•Angelaki•2024

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