Truth and Singularity

THE PART OF THE SUBJECT At the origin of these essays, an increasing weariness produced by all those attempts to oppose what came to be known as Foucault's 'post structuralism' to phenomenology - as if the two were incompatible and as if one could only proceed with thought after having chosen sides. And an equal reluctance to join those who pretended they could carryon as they had before since, quite obviously, there were no sides to choose, 'Foucault' being but the latest example of a relativism that one could easily ignore since it had, like all relativism, already refuted itself by daring to speak. And, finally, behind that weariness and that reluctance, a suspicion that what these two reactions to 'Foucault' had in common was a refusal to go 'toward the things themselves' and thus a refusal to approach the texts that we refer to by that proper name as we would approach other phenomena: not as the body-object of a thought that we would have to locate as coming either 'before' or 'after' phenomenology, but as a series of statements that appear to us in a certain way and whose appearing reveals to us something about our own, finite being.

Résumé
The aim of these essays is to disentangle us from the opposition between universalism and relativism in which so many of the debates in recent contemporary philosophy have been caught.

Contenu
Introduction: the Part of the Subject.- I. Truth and Finitude.- 1. Heidegger's Cave. Being and Time on Disappearing Existentials.- 2. From Foucault to Heidegger. A One-Way Ticket?.- 3. Meaning and Validity. Habermas on Heidegger and Foucault.- 4. Raw Being and Violent Discourse. Foucault, Merleau-Ponty and the (Dis-)order of Things.- II. A Silence Which Escapes Intersubjectivity.- 5. Dis-possessed. How to Remain Silent'after'Levinas.- 6. Uneuropean Desires. Toward a Provincialism without Romanticism.- 7. The Untouchable. Merleau-Ponty's Last Subject.- 8. A Western Problem? Merleau-Ponty on Intersubjectivity.- III. The Loneliness of a Subject Unable to Disappear.- 9. No Privacy? Levinas's Intrigue of the Infinite.- 10. Can Only a 'Yes' Save Us Now? Anti-Racism's First Word in Derrida and Levinas.- 11. The Gaze of the Big Other. Levinas and Sartre on Racism.- 12. Losing Face. Richard Rorty's Last Words.- Conclusion: Still Otherwise? Between Foucault and Levinas.- Acknowledgements.