Monthly Archives: October 2020

Mat Messerschmidt: The Nietzschean Body and “Incorporation”

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Mat Messerschmidt

PhD Candidate, Committee on Social Thought

The Nietzschean Body and “Incorporation”

with a response by David Kretz,

PhD Student in the Committee on Social Thought & Germanic Studies

In this chapter I examine Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche, observing how Heidegger’s sense of Nietzsche’s philosophy as a “detheologization” of Christian thought depends on the notion that both Protestant Christianity and Nietzsche participate in the continual advancement of a subjectivist metaphysics, a process that culminates in the Nietzschean “body,” the last Western “subject.” Through a critique of Heidegger’s understanding of “incorporation [Einverleibung]” in Nietzsche’s work, I argue that the Nietzschean detheologization that takes place in his notion of the body in fact does not make Nietzsche an unwilling participant in some Christian metaphysics, as Heidegger believes; rather, the Christian legacy in Nietzsche’s body is an emphasis on a human finitude that has more resonances in Heidegger’s own thought than Heidegger would care to admit.

Tuesday, October 13, 12:30 PM

Virtual Meeting via Zoom

To RSVP and receive a Zoom link, please contact Rebekah Rosenfeld at rrosenfeld@uchicago.edu.

The paper may be accessed here. Note: The workshop will be discussing pgs. 19-43.

The Workshop on the Philosophy of Religions is committed to being a fully accessible and inclusive workshop.  Please contact Workshop Coordinators Tyler Neenan (tjneenan@uchicago.edu) or Rebekah Rosenfeld (rrosenfeld@uchicago.edu) in order to make any arrangements necessary to facilitate your participation in workshop events.

Michael Naas : Grace and the Machine：Jacques Derrida’s Perjury and Pardon I (Seminar of 1997-1998)

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Michael Naas

Professor of Philosophy at DePaul University

Grace and the Machine：Jacques Derrida’s Perjury and Pardon I (Seminar of 1997-1998)

Tuesday, October 20th 6:00 PM CDT

“This paper focuses on the first volume of Derrida’s seminar Perjury and Pardon (1997- 1998), where Derrida returns, more than a quarter of a century after “Signature Event Context,” to questions of contingency and the speech act and, especially, the possibility of a speech act in writing. After demonstrating that what Derrida means in this seminar by “perjury” (parjure) is not just a lying under oath but a much more general “breach of faith,” I argue that every successful performative is haunted by just such a breach of faith and that writing turns out to be the paradigm for understanding this breach. I go on to show how this displacement of “acts of perjury” from speech to writing, this move to a “speech act” in writing, to what Derrida here often calls an oeuvre, ends up challenging many of the assumptions of speech act theory as articulated by John Austin and those (such as John Searle) who followed him. For such a work or “act” in writing would have to be, for example, essentially detached or detachable from its context, severed right from the start from anything like the intention or the living presence of the author or actor of the act, in a word, severed from the life that would have supposedly produced it. Hence the emphasis here on the “machine,” and thus the question of whether the text or the oeuvre as machine can “produce” something like a speech act and whether this can lead—beyond life—to a sort of grace.”

Hosted by the Religion, Literature, and Visual Culture Club and the Philosophy of Religions Workshop at the University of Chicago. To RSVP and receive a Zoom link, please email Ryan Bingham at ryansbingham@uchicago.edu.

The Workshop on the Philosophy of Religions is committed to being a fully accessible and inclusive workshop.  Please contact Workshop Coordinators Rebekah Rosenfeld (rrosenfeld@uchicago.edu) or Tyler Neenan (tjneenan@uchicago.edu) in order to make any arrangements necessary to facilitate your participation in workshop events.