From Violence to Speaking Out

Apocalypse and Expression in Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze

Leonard Lawlor

• Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN:
  9781474418263
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophical Metaphysics

Drawing on a career-long exploration of 1960s French philosophy, Leonard Lawlor seeks a solution to 'the problem of the worst violence'. The worst violence is the reaction of total apocalypse without remainder; it is the reaction of complete negation and death; it is nihilism. Lawlor argues that it is not just transcendental violence that must be minimised: all violence must itself be reduced to its lowest level. He offers new ways of speaking to best achieve the least violence, which he creatively appropriates from Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze and Guattari as 'speaking-freely', 'speaking-distantly' and 'speaking-in-tongues'.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Incitements
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction: From Violence to Speaking Out
• Part I: On Transcendental Violence
• 1 A New Possibility of Life: The Experience of Powerlessness as a Solution to the Problem of the Worst Violence
• 2 What Happened? What Is Going to Happen? An Essay on the Experience of the Event
• 3 Is it Happening? Or, the Implications of Immanence
• 4 The Flipside of Violence, or Beyond the Thought of Good Enough
• 5 Auto-Affection and Becoming: Following the Rats
• 6 The Origin of Parrēsia in Foucault’s Thinking: Truth and Freedom in The History of Madness
• 7 Speaking Out for Others: Philosophy’s Activity in Deleuze and Foucault (and Heidegger)
• 8 “The Dream of an Unusable Friendship”: The Temptation of Evil and the Chance for Love in Derrida’s Politics of Friendship
• 9 Three Ways of Speaking, or “Let Others be Free”: On Foucault’s “Speaking-Freely”;Derrida’s “Speaking-Distantly”; and Deleuze’s “Speaking in Tongues”
• Conclusion: Speaking Out Against Violence
• Bibliography
• Index