The Third Mountain: A Meditation on Chaos and Order

Thinking is a way of being that isalways in danger of clinging to merelyconceptual distinctions. The oppositionbetween Chaos and Order bounds all modesof Western thought, and this means that italways manages to impose Order at some level orother: for example, the kind of Order thatdivides Chaos from Order, or my project fromyour project, or silence from speech. This wayof thinking is not necessarily regrettable,but it is or can become an impediment. Thispaper interprets the relation between Chaos andOrder in Western thought, using the work ofSartre, Hegel, Nietzsche, Derrida, Heidegger,and Wittgenstein as its principal examples. Italso speculates on the possibility of a way ofbeing that does not reject dualism, but doesnot cling to it either.     

Ethics,Justice, and Suffering in the Thought of Levinas: The Problem of the Passage

Emmanuel Levinas is the philosopherof suffering as such: a suffering withoutregard for its causes and justifications thatis manifested to the I in its encounter,``beyond being', with the face of the Other. ``Ethics as first philosophy', however,subsequently passes over to justice in Levinas'thought, and this means that it passes througha violence that is very much in being. The movement from ethics to justice revealswhat this essay calls ``the problem of thepassage'. Using the thought of Levinas as itspoint of departure, the essay attempts touncover this problem in all of its profundity. A characteristic of all thinking in the Westernphilosophical tradition, the passage fromA to B is best understood as a mode ofthinking that clings to the passage assuch – in the form of ``A B' – as itsown special way of persisting in being. At thesame time, however, this means that ethicscannot support or comfort justice withoutdevouring itself, which is to say the self that both ethics and justice seem torequire.     

The Poetry of Negligence

Poetry and legal rhetoric are both forms of what the ancient Greeks called poēsis: the art of the word. Tradition nonetheless assigns poetry to the realm of art and beauty, and legal rhetoric to the different realm of law and truth. The late William Matthews' poem ``Negligence' transgresses the boundaries that we have erected between art and law, and beauty and truth. The poem presents a well-crafted piece of legal rhetoric in the form of art. This essay draws out the implications of Matthews' transgression, and suggests that in the end poetry and law have a lot in common: both are forms of manipulation by means of words. The essay develops this connection in order to join with Emmanuel Levinas in calling for a ``breakup in the omnipotence of the logos.' This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.