The Last Fortress Of Metaphysics

Examines the relationship of Derrida’s writings on architecture to his methodology of deconstruction and to deconstrutivism in architecture. Between 1984 and 1994 Jacques Derrida wrote and spoke a great deal about architecture both in his academic work and in connection with a number of particular building projects around the world. He engaged significantly with the work of architects such as Bernard Tschumi, Peter Eisenman, and Daniel Libeskind. Derrida conceived of architecture as an example of the kind of multidimensional writing that he had theorized in Of Grammatology, identifying a rich common ground between architecture and philosophy in relation to ideas about political community and the concept of dwelling. In this book, Francesco Vitale analyzes Derrida’s writings and demonstrates how Derrida’s work on this topic provides a richer understanding of his approach to deconstruction, highlighting the connections and differences between philosophical deconstruction and architectural deconstructivism. Francesco Vitale is Professor of Aesthetics at the University of Salerno, Italy. He is the author of Biodeconstruction: Jacques Derrida and the Life Sciences, also published by SUNY Press, and the author and editor of several books in Italian on Derrida and contemporary French philosophy. Mauro Senatore is a British Academy Fellow at Durham University in the United Kingdom and Adjunct Professor of Contemporary French Philosophy at the Instituto de Humanidades, Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago, Chile. He is the author of Germs of Death: The Problem of Genesis in Jacques Derrida, also published by SUNY Press.

Personalism seeks to understand the person in its richness, complexity, and unity, and, to achieve this goal, it has developed a rich and solid anthropology as well as an ethic of the person that is having repercussions in the philosophical and sociopolitical sphere. But what is the value of this philosophy? Does it offer a mere description of the reality of a phenomenological type, or does it penetrate to the bottom of what exists, offering its intelligible essence? Does it offer an ultimate explanation of the person, or is her vision subordinated to a deeper and more decisive one that would correspond to metaphysics? To answer these questions, the author, an international expert in personalist philosophy, first defines the various meanings in which the term metaphysics can be understood and, secondly, does a comparison between personalism, in particular, integral Personalism, and the metaphysics of being. The analysis concludes that personalism can be considered a first sectoral philosophy, that is, a philosophy that does not need other philosophical referents to establish itself as a philosophy thanks to its direct access to experience, where the person is found. This conclusion is based on the epistemology of integral experience and imposes a review of the traditional role of metaphysics and its connection with anthropology in general and Personalism in particular.

Looking afresh at the implications of Jacques Derrida’s thinking for architecture, this book simplifies his ideas in a clear, concise way. Derrida‘s treatment of key philosophical texts has been labelled as "deconstruction," a term that resonates with architecture. Although his main focus is language, his thinking has been applied by architectural theorists widely. As well as a review of Derrida’s interaction with architecture, this book is also a careful consideration of the implications of his thinking, particularly on the way architecture is practiced.

Architecture manifests as a space of concealment and unconcealment, lethe and alêtheia, enclosure and disclosure, where its making and agency are both hidden and revealed. With an urgency to amplify narratives that are overlooked, silenced and unacknowledged in and by architectural spaces, histories and theories, this book contends the need for a critical study of hiding in the context of architectural processes. It urges the understanding of inherent opportunities, power structures and covert strategies, whether socio-cultural, geo-political, environmental or economic, as they are related to their hidescapes – the constructed landscapes of our built environments participating in the architectures of hiding. Looking at and beyond the intentions and agency that architects possess, architectural spaces lend themselves as apparatuses for various forms of hiding and un(hiding). The examples explored in this book and the creative works presented in the interviews enclosed in the interludes of this publication cover a broad range of geographic and cultural contexts, discursively disclosing hidden aspects of architectural meaning. The book investigates the imaginative intrigue of concealing and revealing in design processes, along with moral responsibilities and ethical dilemmas inherent in crafting concealment through the making and reception of architecture.

The third volume in the University of California Humanities Research Institute Series, this book brings together prominent literary theorists and architects to offer a variety of perspectives on the relation between postmodernism and architecture. The contributors include such luminaries from the forefront of literary studies as J. Hillis Miller, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-Francois Lyotard; the architects Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry, and Robert Stern offer their perspectives on the critical role of architecture and contemporary culture. The high caliber of the discourse and the variety of approaches included will draw a scholarly audience from a wide range of disciplines.

In Anteaesthetics, Rizvana Bradley begins from the proposition that blackness cannot be represented in modernity's aesthetic regime, but is nevertheless foundational to every representation. Troubling the idea that the aesthetic is sheltered from the antiblack terror that lies just beyond its sanctuary, Bradley insists that blackness cannot make a home within the aesthetic, yet is held as its threshold and aporia. The book problematizes the phenomenological and ontological conceits that underwrite the visual, sensual, and abstract logics of modernity. Moving across multiple histories and geographies, artistic mediums and forms, from nineteenth-century painting and early cinema, to the contemporary text-based works, video installations, and digital art of Glenn Ligon, Mickalene Thomas, and Sondra Perry, Bradley inaugurates a new method for interpretation—an ante-formalism which demonstrates how black art engages in the recursive deconstruction of the aesthetic forms that remain foundational to modernity. Foregrounding the negativity of black art, Bradley shows how each of these artists disclose the racialized contours of the body, form, and medium, even interrogating the form that is the world itself. Drawing from black critical theory, Continental philosophy, film and media studies, art history, and black feminist thought, Bradley explores artistic practices that inhabit the negative underside of form. Ultimately, Anteaesthetics asks us to think philosophically with black art, and with the philosophical invention black art necessarily undertakes.

An innovative study of deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and genealogy, relating the ethical to the problematic of the text as a post or a sending in the work of Derrida, Lyotard, Lacan, Kristeva, and Foucault, and phrasing the ethical as the questions of how to read and write after.

This book is a detailed critical study of Libeskind’s Berlin Jewish Museum in its historical, architectural and philosophical context. Emphasizing how the Holocaust changed our perception of history, memory, witnessing and representation, it develops the notion of ‘memorial ethics’ to explore the Museum’s difference from more conventional post-World War Two commemorative sites. The main focus is on the Museum as an experience of the materiality of trauma which engages the visitor in a performative duty to remember. Arleen Ionescu builds on Levinas’s idea of ‘ethics as optics’ to show how Libeskind’s Museum becomes a testimony to the unpresentable Other. Ionescu also extends the Museum’s experiential dimension by proposing her own subjective walk through Libeskind’s space reimagined as a ‘literary museum’. Featuring reflections on texts by Beckett, Celan, Derrida, Kafka, Blanchot, Wiesel and Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger (Celan’s cousin), this virtual tour concludes with a brief account of Libeskind’s analogous ‘healing project’ for Ground Zero.