Papers by Richard Kearney
Taylor & Francis eBooks, Feb 16, 2010
Fordham University Press eBooks, Aug 9, 2004
NARRATIVE AND THE ETHICS OF REMEMBRANCE Richard Kearney To tell or not to tell? That is the quest... more NARRATIVE AND THE ETHICS OF REMEMBRANCE Richard Kearney To tell or not to tell? That is the question I propose to explore in this essay. How much of the past should be remembered and recounted? How much forgotten and forgiven? How do we respect the summons of ...
DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals), Dec 1, 2011
Springer eBooks, 1995
Kant’s Copernican Revolution ushers in a modem view of being. The subjectivity of the subject bec... more Kant’s Copernican Revolution ushers in a modem view of being. The subjectivity of the subject becomes, in Kant’s words, the condition of the objectivity of the object. A consequence of this reversal is that the subjectivity of the transcendental imagination, as analysed in the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, is hailed as the common source of both our sensible and our intelligible knowledge of things. The ontological implications of this position are concisely stated in Kant’s bold maxim that “being is not a real predicate.” My opening chapter offers a critical reading of this Kantian thesis and explores its legacy in subsequent phenomenological interpretations by Brentano, Husserl, and, most especially, Heidegger.
Revue de métaphysique et de morale, 2006
En prenant pour objet le développement de sa réflexion sur cette question depuis le début de son ... more En prenant pour objet le développement de sa réflexion sur cette question depuis le début de son oeuvre philosophique jusqu'à sa dernière période, l'auteur tente de comprendre la manière dont Ricoeur rend compte de ce phénomène en examinant trois axes majeurs dans la confrontation au mal : la compréhension pratique du mal (phronesis-mimesis-praxis), l'élaboration d'une réponse au problème (catharsis-Durcharbeitung), le pardon. ABSTRACT.-This study examines the question of evil in the philosophy of Paul Ricoeur. In interpreting the development of his reflection on this question from the beginning of his philosophical production until his final period, the author attempts to comprehend the way in which Ricoeur accounts for this phenomenon in analyzing three major ways of approach to evil : a) practical understanding (phronesis-mimesis-praxis), b) working-through (catharsis-Durcharbeitung), and c) pardon.
Research in Phenomenology, 2009
Th is essay discusses the anatheist option of returning to God after the atheistic critique of th... more Th is essay discusses the anatheist option of returning to God after the atheistic critique of the traditional God of ontotheology. It begins by reviewing the contributions that Levinas and Derrida have made toward this position and the atheistic criticisms of Freud and Nietzsche. Th e work of Paul Ricoeur is then discussed, showing how the atheist critique is a necessary moment in the development of genuine faith that involves a renunciation of fear and dependency as well as a reaffi rmation of life and a return to existence. Kearney goes on to discuss how this return to God is possible, considering the ethical position that makes it possible, the reinterpretations of biblical traditions that it entails, the relationship between the anatheist philosopher and the theologian, and revival of God as an enabling God.
Fordham University Press eBooks, Nov 5, 2014
DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals), Nov 1, 2020
This is an edited, abridged, and revised version of a chapter written by Richard Kearney which wi... more This is an edited, abridged, and revised version of a chapter written by Richard Kearney which will appear in his forthcoming book Touch: Recovering Our Most Vital Sense to be published by Columbia University Press in 2021. The chapter in the book contains many extensions, footnotes, and references that do not appear in this paper. Many thanks to Professor Kearney for his permission to print a version of this chapter in the Journal of Applied Hermeneutics.
Fordham University Press eBooks, Mar 2, 2021
With Chapter 5’s hermeneutic of Kantian hospitality in mind, this chapter will analyze the post-K... more With Chapter 5’s hermeneutic of Kantian hospitality in mind, this chapter will analyze the post-Kantian shift to philosophies of hospitality—in particular, Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy of hospitality par excellence, but also briefly that of Hannah Arendt, who serves as a middle way between Kant and Levinas. This chapter will probe Levinas’s original account of who we are (exposed, vulnerable, for-others, hosts, hostages, substituting-for-the-other, infinitely responsible) in relation to what makes hospitality as first philosophy impossible—namely, that it is not (contra Kant) an act of the will or a decision we can make. I will end by turning to Arendt’s more explicitly political-practical-possible account of what I call “natal hospitality” as a continuation of, and response, to hospitality’s perceived impossibility.
Fordham University Press eBooks, Aug 9, 2004
Philosophy & Social Criticism, Apr 1, 1998
n o n fic t io n , re p o rta g e and te s tim o n y Maria Delaperrière
Fordham University Press eBooks, May 2, 2011
Richard KEARNEY, On Stories (Thinking in Action, editors Simon Critichley and Richard Kearney). L... more Richard KEARNEY, On Stories (Thinking in Action, editors Simon Critichley and Richard Kearney). London/New York, Routledge, 2001, XII-193 p.1 Richard KEARNEY, The God Who May Be. A Hermeneutics of Religion (Indiana Series in the Philosophy of Religion, general editor Merold Westphal). Bloomington (Ind.), Indiana University Press, 2001, IX172 p. Richard KEARNEY Strangers, Gods and Monsters. Interpreting Otherness, London/New York, Routledge, 2003, X-294 p.
An academic directory and search engine.
, in a letter to his brother Stanislaus on November 13, 1906, announces that he has just started ... more , in a letter to his brother Stanislaus on November 13, 1906, announces that he has just started a new 'short story'. It is called 'Ulysses'. He came up with the idea, he explains, because of a memory triggered by a recent mugging in a street in Rome. He had just been fired from his job at the Bank and drunk all his severance pay (which should have paid the rent and help provide for his one year 2 old son, Giorgio). On his way home Joyce was robbed and left lying in the gutter, destitute, despondent and bleeding. And it was at that very moment that he suddenly remembered something: being assaulted several years previously (June 22, 1904) in Dublin and rescued from the gutter by a man called Hunter, 'a cuckolded Jew' who dusted him down and took him home for a cup of cocoa. 'In true Samaritan fashion', as Joyce put it. This repetition of woundings triggered a lost memory where an immigrant Jew came to the rescue of a wounded Dubliner and planted a seed of caritas in his imagination. Several weeks after the Rome mugging, Joyce and Nora were given tickets to an opera whose librettist was called Blum. This second moment of happenstance, after his humiliating fall in a Roman side street, furnished the name of his paternal protagonist, Leopold Bloom. Thus was born the longest short story ever told. Ulysses. The tale of a father and a son traversing wounds on the way to healing. My subject is the writing cure. My questions are the following. How might literature help us 'work through' trauma? How far can narrative catharsis go and what are its limits? And finally: how might narrative healing differ in the case of little trauma (the existential wounds of birth, loss and death) and big trauma (war, torture, catastrophe)? My chosen example is Joyce's Ulysses-itself a story which rewrites two other stories, Shakespeare's Hamlet and Homer's Odyssey. All three are stories of fathers and sons. Stories of transgenerational trauma, which I will 3 suggest, are transmitted and somehow transfigured in the writing of the stories themselves. I In the opening of Joyce's Ulysses we are told by Haines that it's all about 'the father and the son idea. The son striving to be atoned with the father'. It doesn't take long for us to realize that the son is Stephen-Telemachus and the father Bloom-Ulysses. Their paths cross in the middle of the book as Stephen exits and Bloom enters the National Library in Dublin. It is a pivotal scene in which Stephen expounds his central theory of the father/son idea in Hamlet. His thesis is that Shakespeare wrote Hamlet the year his son, Hamnet, died and his own father, John Shakespeare, was dying. The play is about the transmission of mortal trauma between fathers and sons. In short, according to Stephen, Shakespeare wrote 'the book of himself' in order to avoid the madness of melancholy, in order to properly mourn his father and his son in a way that he was unable to do in life. The play itself thus serves as a symbolic 'working through' of an otherwise irresoluble crisis in which a father (King Hamlet) commands his son (Prince Hamlet) to do something impossible: that is, to remember what cannot be remembered! To tell something that cannot be told. A double injunction. An unbearable burden. An impossible story. The double bind of trauma. 'To speak is impossible, not to speak is impossible' (1). 'Remember me, remember me…' , says the ghostly father to his son, while at the same time adding: 'But that I am forbid To tell the secrets of my prison house I could a tale unfold whose lightest word Would harrow up thy soul…(Hamlet, act 1, sc 5) The ghost's unspeakable secrets-for which he is condemned to the latency of purgatory, those 'sulphurous and tormenting flames'-these very things are precisely what remain secret. The secret 'crimes committed in his days of nature' (youth) are, King Hamlet tells us, forbidden tales. In short, the things to be remembered cannot be told in the first place! We are concerned here, I suggest, with traumas. Unspeakable things which we do not possess but which 'possess us'-like specters. For traumas, as Cathy Caruth writes, describe 'overwhelming experiences of sudden, or catastrophic events, in which the response to the event occurs in the often delayed, and uncontrolled repetitive occurrence of hallucinations and other intrusive phenomena' (2). I think Hamlet perfectly qualifies. II 5 Now, if this reading of Ulysses sounds psychoanalytic it is because it is. Joyce himself admitted to being deeply interested in Jung and Freud when he was 'jung and easily freudened' (Finnegans Wake). And the story is well known of him bringing his daughter, Lucia, to visit Jung in Zurich only to be told by Jung that he would be as incurably psychotic as his daughter if he had not penned Ulysses. Writing his book of transgenerational trauma-of Ulysses and Telemachus, of King and Prince Hamlet, of Stephen and Bloom-was, it seemed, the 'writing cure' for Joyce's own trauma. The book of himself. And Joyce concedes the creative liaison between literature and life when he confesses: 'It is a brave man who would invent something that never happened'. What happens in Ulysses happened to Joyce. He was the manic magpie who, by his own admission, gleaned every word of his story from the stories of history, personal or collective. His fiction is haunted by what he called the 'nightmares of history', the mute 'mothers of memory' that cry out to be heard, spoken, written. Phantasmal hauntings torment the young Stephen with 'agenbite of inwit'. They revisit him obsessively, guiltily, ineluctably. Both Hamlet and Ulysses relate such ghostings of narrative memory (3). As for Freud, no such meeting took place; but I sometimes imagine Joyce reading Freud's seminal theory of trauma in Beyond the Pleasure Principlepublished in 1920 as Joyce was completing Ulysses (1922)-and wondering when he came to the fort/da scene if it did not confirm his own theory of catharsis in the Portrait? Recall how Freud witnessed his grandson Ernst's first spoken wordsgone/back again-while playing with a wooden cotton-reel which he made vanish under his curtained cot and then reappear again in imitation of his mother's coming
Philosophy Now, Mar 1, 1995
Fordham University Press eBooks, May 2, 2011
Uploads
Papers by Richard Kearney
The book asks the question – how can God happen again after the death of God? It answers it by proposing an ‘art of anatheism’ which attends to the recreation and return of the divine through certain forms of literature, painting, liturgy, music, and performance. Engaging students, scholars, and interested readers across a wide range of disciplines – philosophy, theology, aesthetics, literary criticism, poetics – the volume includes contributions from both practising artists and professional academics. As such it brings together examples from ancient religious wisdom traditions and cutting-edge contemporary cultural practices to suggest that the sacred is often most potent and persuasive when recreating the everyday world of our secular experience.
--
Kearney: This is a review essay by Richard Kearney celebrating the recent work of John D Caputo and responding to the companion review essay by Caputo on Kearney’s work in this issue of PSC. The author critically considers five volumes by Caputo and two recent volumes and a reader devoted to his philosophy. The essay covers most of the key issues in Caputo’s later published work including ‘weak theology’, ‘deconstruction’, ‘radical hermeneutics’, ‘hauntology’ and ‘the event of the impossible’.
I argue that the criticisms fail to hit their mark because they presuppose a broadly Derridean or post-modern position in order to make their argument, when it is just those presuppositions
that are in question.
1. Trauma, Tragedy, and Theater: a Conversation with Simon Critchley
Eric R. Severs, Simon Critchley, Ann Pellegrini,
Richard Kearney, and Kathleen Skerrett
"Are we losing our senses? In our increasingly virtual world, are we losing touch with the sense of touch itself? And if so, so what?"