The Introduction sets out the key claims of the book, and provides an outline of its chapters. These claims are that the French tradition rejects understanding thinking and judging, that this leads to an ambivalent relationship with Hegel and a return to Kant, and that the French tradition develops a novel account of thinking, and a new model of sense.

Chapter 5 explores Derrida’s analysis of the problem of judgement through an extended analysis of Derrida’s analysis of presence and différance. It analyses three of Derrida’s readings of other philosophers: Plato, Hegel, and Husserl, with the aim of showing how in each case, Derrida believes that the priority of presence (and hence judgement) rests on a transcendental idea that exceeds the given. It argues that despite Derrida’s apparent hostility to the phenomenological tradition, his work is indebted to Sartre, and echoes Bergson’s analysis of resemblance.

The world and the globe are digital and inscriptive events. Before the advent of digital media in its narrow sense, conceptions of humanity presuppose a shared globe and horizon of sense; this presupposed harmony requires various technical systems that also threaten to produce an entropic dissolution. If globalism is the assumed common horizon of sense, hyperglobalism promises the destruction of communalism and the possibility of other worlds.

This chapter provides the framework for the book’s analysis of the ICTR’s archive. First it establishes, theoretically, the link between archives, and the formation of community, as the archive is presented as a site where the themes of law, knowledge and governance coalesce. Second, it looks at other scholarly work on international courts for insights on the interrelationship between law, knowledge and governance and argues that this work has, to date, wrongly treated courts as sites of ‘knowledge deficit’, and further that there is a need to understand how the inner workings of the court contribute to the formation of particular types of community. Finally, drawing on Foucault and Ann Stoler’s work, it shows how the archive can function as an analytical and methodological tool to examine the politics of knowledge production in international courts.

This chapter examines the dynamics of the notion of peregrinatio in Augustine’s thought, with particular attention given to its use in the Enarrationes in Psalmos. It uses Derrida’s reflections on metaphor to explore the rich regression of images in peregrinatio. Augustine uses the concept, literally denoting the status of a resident alien, to express the affective dynamics of a Christian living away from their home in the heavenly Jerusalem: their sense of misalignment in the world, but also their sense of joy in the very transience of their existence. For no one can be a peregrinus without having a home from which he has traveled, and to which he looks forward to returning. Derrida’s phrase the “destinerrancy of desire” perfectly captures this Augustinian notion.

In 1960 Hans-Georg Gadamer, then a sixty-year-old German philosophy professor at Heidelberg, published Truth and Method ( Wahrheit und Methode). Although he had authored many essays, articles, and reviews, to this point Gadamer had published only one other book, his habilitation on Plato in 1931: Plato’s Dialectical Ethics. As a title for this work on a theory of interpretation, he first proposed to his publisher, Mohr Siebeck, “Philosophical Hermeneutics.” The publisher responded that “hermeneutics” was too obscure a term. Gadamer then proposed “Truth and Method” for a work that found, over time, great resonance and made “hermeneutics” and Gadamer’s name commonplace in intellectual circles worldwide. Truth and Method has been translated into many languages, including Chinese and Japanese. It found and still finds a receptive readership, in part, because, as the title suggests, it addresses large and central philosophical issues in an attempt to find a way between or beyond objectivism and relativism, and scientism and irrationalism. He accomplishes this by developing an account of what he takes to be the universal hermeneutic experience of understanding. Understanding, for Gadamer, is itself always a matter of interpretation. Understanding is also always a matter of language.

Hermeneutics, critical theory, and deconstruction designate three intellectual orientations that have dominated debates in continental philosophy. All three exhibit the “linguistic turn.” The debate between Habermas and Gadamer brought Gadamer to prominence. Important for both is the Aristotelian distinction between the practical and the technical. Gadamer is more negatively critical of the Enlightenment than is Habermas. Both are concerned with the instrumentalization of reason in modernity. Yet Gadamer sees Habermas as too utopian. Habermas sees Gadamer as insensitive to the way dialogue is distorted by social forces and political power. This chapter concludes with a consideration of Gadamer in relation to Derrida and deconstruction. Both were profoundly influenced by Heidegger. Yet Gadamer emphasizes continuity, while Derrida emphasizes rupture and break. Gadamer shows us the achievement of understanding, while Derrida is preoccupied with the ways we misunderstand. Derrida and Gadamer serve as correctives of the other, just as Habermas and Gadamer serve as correctives of the other.

This chapter provides a biography of Gadamer and includes an overview of the philosophical work that Gadamer produced. It provides an account of his youth and education, his early career in Nazi Germany, and his career after World War II. He was named Rektor of Leipzig University in East Germany but gave up the position and came to West Germany, first to Frankfurt and then to Heidelberg. In 1960 he published Truth and Method, which slowly became recognized world-wide. He retired in 1968 and was very productive throughout his old age.

This chapter focuses on Rorty’s engagements with Heidegger, Derrida, and Foucault. It argues that, however much he enjoyed these encounters, Rorty’s philosophical views were largely unaffected by them. He tended to endorse what could be assimilated to his own Deweyan pragmatism and reject the rest. In this way, Rorty endorses Heidegger’s diagnosis of the history of European philosophy, while disavowing his criticism of modernity and his nostalgia for an authentic language of Being. He denounces Foucault’s supposed commitment to anarchism and revolution as incompatible with his preferred Deweyan social democratic politics. Only his writings on Derrida provide evidence of deepening understanding of and sympathy with a philosophical project irreducible to his own. Overall, Rorty refuses to accept any philosophical invention on the part of these thinkers. Derrida’s deconstructive argument in favor of an elusive quasi-metaphysics of difference, and Foucault’s genealogies of present institutions and ways of thinking are either ignored or denounced as residues of the tradition they seek to escape. Rorty characterizes each of them as essentially private thinkers, “ascetic priests” who aspire to stand apart from the herd and to be in touch with a reality more profound than the life they share with others.

This chapter explores Plato’s negotiation of friendship, and similar modern considerations, particularly those of Kant and Derrida. It suggests that Plato, far from advocating an abstracting position in opposition to Christian love, prepared the way for the gospel insofar as he tended to show that love and knowledge were inseparable, even at the highest level.

This chapter analyzes the relation between postmodernism and posthumanism. While postmodernism, as an aesthetic and philosophical practice, has lost some of its relevance in the academy, several of its underlying gestures, the primary being the interrogation of the humanist model of subjectivity, live on in various versions of posthumanism. The central concern here, first, will be to examine Derrida’s concept of the trace (in his essay “Differance”); the chapter then moves on to suggest that Derrida’s quintessentially postmodern reading of the subject— differentiated, displaced, and other to itself—finds new expression in various canonical versions of posthumanism (in Hayles, Haraway, and Braidotti). Ultimately, the chapter examines how Derrida’s model of the subject persists as a kind of haunting in posthumanist thought, how postmodernism operates as a prefiguring trace of posthumanism.

“Justice” is a big word. One response to such words is to defer to the common-sense wisdom that lies in running together a range of themes and do as good a job as possible of tracing the common concern. Thereby, we would make as much sense as possible of a big word. This approach is what we try to do here for justice. But this is an uphill struggle. The centrality of distributive or social justice to political philosophy is a historical anomaly. It is a challenge to integrate ideas about the global properly with considerations of social justice. To talk about the coloniality of the concept of social justice means to draw attention to the built-in disregard for the concerns of many people on this planet. So, as we make a case for the importance of social justice, we must also integrate ideas of the global in appropriate ways.

This Introduction outlines the theoretical, historical and technological contexts against which the exploration of the prosthetic imagination will unfold, in the chapters that follow. It develops an account of the relationship between mimesis and prosthesis, by teasing out a theoretical relationship with Auerbach’s Mimesis. It then demonstrates the ways in which the emerging prosthetic condition requires us to rethink the legacies of twentieth-century thought, and our conception of the historical function of the novel in imagining our lifeworlds.

This chapter explores the relation between the novel form and the emergence of postmodernism, postcolonialism, postfeminism and posthumanism in the second half of the twentieth century. It begins with an analysis of the relation between the prosthetic and the simulacral, under postmodern conditions, and with the technological revolution associated with the advent of computing. The novel, it suggests, from Orwell to Brooke-Rose, is involved in a difficult relationship with postmodernism, one which gives expression to its possibilities, while also seeking to resist its erosion of the materiality of our cultures and environments. It traces a strand of experimental realism in the postwar novel that is at odds with the terms in which we have conceived of postmodern fiction. It then goes on to read two of the novelists who are associated with the postmodern novel – Thomas Pynchon and Toni Morrison – to suggest that one can detect a persistent opposition in their work between the simulacrum and the prosthetic, one which helps us see past some of the contradictions that are the result of our existing accounts of postmodern politics and aesthetics.

Though the main figure of this chapter is the American theatre director and theorist Richard Schechner, it ranges widely in its attempt to understand the philosophical implications of the irrationalism that Nietzsche makes a central part of his vision of ancient Greece. Focusing on Dionysus and Oedipus in The Birth of Tragedy and beyond, it argues that the latter mythical hero represents the negative and harmful consequences of irrational, ecstatic knowledge and experience. After a detour through writings of Freud, Lévi-Strauss and Derrida on this subject, the chapter returns to Schechner and to his iconoclastic production Dionysus in 69. The version of Dionysus that emerged from this performative experience was connected to the contemporary discourse of the Dionysiac that expressed so many of the revolutionary and counter-cultural tendencies of the 1960s. In this way the chapter explores the way that Nietzsche’s Greeks underwrote some of the major symbolism of this significant cultural moment.