The article proposes a close reading of Jacques Derrida’s address to the Estates General of Psychoanalysis, held in Paris in July 2000. In celebrating the centenary of Freud’s Interpretation of ...Dreams, the representative international gathering of psychoanalysts took place under the umbrella of a “political metaphor” suggested by its historically significant title and dates. In Derrida’s address, the metaphor of revolution was far more than just a bright emblem of the meeting, expressing the organizers’ wish to emphasize the revolutionary character of Freud’s “invention” or to encourage the participants’ enthusiasm for solving the current crisis of their profession in the manner inspired by the Estates General in 1789. It is only in his late work, and particularly in this introductory lecture dealing with human cruelty and its recent historical mutations, that Derrida began to explore the deconstructive political potentialities of psychoanalysis. His hypothesis on the superiority of psychoanalysis over all other discourses in dealing with this highly political issue assumes that there is, although not yet fully recognized, or even strongly opposed, a politics inherent to Freud’s theory. Outlined in his later writings, Freud’s “progressive politics,” already engaged in a subversion of the principle of state sovereignty, as proved to be able to indicate a strategy of going “beyond the death drive,” calls for creating a new, revolutionary psychoanalysis beyond all principles. The article attempts to reveal that Derrida’s politically oriented reading of Freud’s legacy crucially depends on his unique position of “the friend of psychoanalysis.”
To grasp the true importance of ressentiment in Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morals, animals and beasts of pray, of which Nietzsche speaks throughout the book, should not fall out of the focus of our ...interpretation. It is what generally happens in the reception history: when ressetiment is discussed, there is not much room left for animals. Once we bring back animals into consideration and take much more seriously Nietzsche’s speculative naturalism, which has rarely been the case, the genealogy will appear in the light of a metaphysical quest for origins. In this radical, apparently metaphysical form of genealogy, ressentiment becomes a fundamental category. To reflect on the animality of human-animal is the task of genealogical thinking. If it turns out to be a business of metaphysics, it is because the difference between healthy and sick beast is the most fundamental difference that opens up the genealogical interrogation. This animal difference, animal detour from the animal, underlies all basic metaphysical differences. It is precisely there that ressentiment should be thought of, as it is neither fully personal nor it exclusively belongs to the horizon of human morality. It is neither fully included nor excluded from the morality. It is neither quite inside nor quite outside. It is swinging back and forth. Defined as a “repeated reliving” (Scheler), it refers to something neither fully alive nor dead. It seems to belong to what Derrida labels “undecidable”. Ressentiment marks that crucial point in the evolution of species when instincts and feelings enter into a twisting course, trace a bending curve (Verinnerlichung) that we recognize in the prefix “re-”- of ressentiment. It is that same process, “a flexion of physis, relation to itself of the Nature,” Derrida found in the genealogical explanation of arts in Kant.
In the “Vienna lecture”, the whole of the world’s history is at one moment depicted through the allegory of a wavy sea without borders. In The Idea of Phenomenology, the philosopher-storyteller is ...caught up in a heavy sea, but at the end, they finally manage to “drop the anchor on the shore of phenomenology”. With the break into the “mainland of absolute givenness” through phenomenological reduction, allegorical representation should lose its philosophical justification. However, metaphors which evoke allegories continue to proliferate even in the most rigorous phenomenological descriptions. Despite its inherent metaphoricity, so vivid that at the crucial points of Husserl’s analyses often reappears a mythical clash of land and sea, the phenomenological interpretation of the world seems nonetheless essentially non-allegorical.
Nietzsche uses this French word, which since his writing, and largely because of it, has entered the English language as an important term in psychology: a short definition is as follows: ..."deep-seated resentment, frustration, and hostility, accompanied by a sense of being powerless to express these feelings directly" (Merriam-Webster). ...the word ressentiment should be preserved in its natural (French) meaning. ...there is considerable overlapping between Nietzsche's and Schelers's understanding of the notion of ressentiment, of the phenomenon if/when it is related to a personal attitude. The interesting thing is that these German prepositions and adverbs are all compressed into a single unit RE, so that English language gives back to the French language its loanword from Latin. ...the prefix meaning "again" or "again and again" to indicate repetition was used repeatedly, again and again, in Scheler's definition of the word.
The article discusses Schmitt's assertion, presented in his major work ‘The Nomos of the Earth,’ that law is bound to the earth, which follows from the postulated unity of order (Ordnung) and ...localization (Ortung). Schmitt’s view on the terrestrial localization of order is considered in the light of the antithesis of land and sea, which was the topic of his previous book Land und Meer. This antithesis is of cardinal importance for the world-historical meditation of the jurist Schmitt, as it was built into the foundation of the first global international law in the age of the discovery of the ‘new world.’ However, the epoch-defining foundation turned out to be unstable because the sea element constantly threatened the terrestrial localization of the law. The antithesis has its metaphysical background, which Schmitt elucidates by resorting to myths, legends, and Greek elemental philosophy. The introduction of speculative and mythopoetic reflections into the rigid jurisprudential, concrete-order thinking is explained by Schmitt’s own phenomenological accounts of the difference between Land and Sea. It is Sea, intrinsically lacking any firm traits, that resists a precise, objective account and that can be concretely described only in mythopoetic terms. Following Schmitt’s elemental conceptions, particularly that of Sea as a space of de-location (Ent-Ortung), the excursus deals with the famous concentration camp (dis)located in the Adriatic Sea in the early days of ‘really existing socialism.’ It is concluded that the camp, at the time of its operation (beyond an exclusively terrestrial order), occupied a non-place (u-topos) and in fact did not exist at all, or certainly not on the island called Goli otok.
The article considers two customs traditionally followed by Muslims of Bosnia and Herzegovina during Eid Al-Aḍḥā (‘Festival of Sacrifice’ or Kurban Bayram). These are, first, giving a small amount of ...money, so-called bayramlık, to children as a reward or gift in return for handing out Qurbani meat to neighbors, and, second, giving the meat to non-Muslims. The topic will be explored in the light of Marcel Mauss’s seminal essay on the gift, since Qurbani appears as a gift that identifies, marks and renews the social bonds not only of close relatives, but also of friends and neighbors. In this context too, we will meet what Jacques Derrida calls the aporia of the gift. The slaughtering of Qurbani animal is a true gift, precisely because it is an impossible gift. It may be considered as a giftless giving: although the sacrifice is unthinkable without the slaughtered animal, it cannot be a gift to God. However, after the human act of sacrifice is performed, it is God Who makes the gift to men - because He commands that the victim’s meat must be shared. It is then to be understood not as a returned gift, but as an act of God’s hospitality, which gives to men the very possibility of gift giving. It is argued that the two Bosnian customs draw their ultimate meaning from the divine hospitality vividly experienced in the ritual of sacrifice.
Analizom preambule Daytonskog ustava može se uvidjeti kako je definiran suverenitet ustavotvorca. Tamo nalazimo najmanje pet ustavotvornih ”mi”, od kojih su tri uistinu ustavotvorni, jer se samo tri ...„konstitutivna naroda“ pokazuju kao kolektivni subjektiviteti koji su u stanju da konstituiraju pravno-politički poredak, a time i sebe same kao pravno-političke aktere. Nikada prije Bošnjaci, Hrvati i Srbi nisu bili uvedeni u neki ustav niti je zbog nekadašnjeg partijskog intervencionizma mogla biti ustanovljena ustavna demokracija. Uvođenjem tri naroda u Daytonski ustav srušen je pravno-politički poredak koji je počivao na iluziji o postojanju samo jednog naroda u Bosni i Hercegovini.
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