This lecture is part of the monthly CCEP Lecture Series hosted by the Center for Contemporary European Philosophy at Radboud Universiteit.
Abstract
The conference addresses the problem of the critic of violence in Derrida and Levinas’s work and in particular in Derrida’s essay « Violence and Metaphysics » and in Levinas’ Totality and Infinity.
It unfolds two main arguments. The first one is that the problem of violence in Levinas entails focusing on the subjet’s structures and not on its relation to the Other. The second is that a critic of violence entails understanding the relation between language, silence and thought.
Speaker
Aïcha Liviana Messina is Professor of Philosophy at Universidad Diego Portales. She studied literature and philosophy in Paris and in Strasbourg. Her work focuses on the relationship between language and violence, and on the political implications of critique. She has written on the experience of modeling in art in Poser me va si bien (POL, 2005); and on the question of love in Marx’s early writings in her book-length essay Amour/Argent. Le livre blanc des manuscrits de 1844 (Le portique/La phocide, 2009). She has published a monograph on Levinas’s political thought, L’anarchie de la paix. Levinas et la philosophie politique (CNRS, 2018) and a monograph on Blanchot titled The Writing of Innocence. Blanchot and the Deconstruction of Christianity (SUNY, 2022). She as also writing books related to current political events such as Feminismo y revolución. Crónica de una inquietud, followed by: Fragmentos de una paz insólita. Santiago, Octubre 2019 (Metales Pesados, 2020) and Una falla en la lógica del universo (Metales Pesados 2020, co-writted with Constanza Michelson).
