I’m spending the next month writing a draft of the first chapter of my PhD, which broadly construed, is going to deal with issues of politics, ontology, subjectivity, and relationality within four of Kierkegaard’s works I find to be fundamental to my understanding of his work. Along with Kierkegaard, there will likely also be short sub-sections dealing with Marx, Hegel, and Zizek within this chapter.
One of the conceptual issues I’ve moved towards is relationality, and in the context of Kierkegaard, the relationship between internal self-relation, and external socio-political relation between self-relational subjects. I feel like I’m moving towards a steady argument within Kierkegaard’s texts, but would like to at least consider some recent work in European philosophy that deals with relationality, and am not so sure where to look. One figure who has been recommended is Nancy, but even there I’m not quite sure where to start, as I don’t have time to read his corpus anytime soon.
So, I come to you, whoever you are, to ask for recommendations on philosophers with interesting theories of relationality. All recommendations are highly appreciated.
Derrida is of course an obvious figure of interest, since he’s written about Kierkegaard and related subjects. But if you know Zizek well enough to relate to him, isn’t that enough of ‘recent work in European philosophy that deals with relationality’?
Or maybe the work of Simon Critchley might be of interest if you feel that you don’t want to confront the huge production of either Derrida or Nancy? I saw in another post that you weren’t interested in either a deconstructionist or a hegelian reading, som maybe a combination of readings of/against Zizek and Critchley might be an idea?
Good advice. I still don’t want to spend too much time interacting with deconstruction, but have realized the importance for my project of interacting with Hegel, so that’s still something I’m hoping to work out.
Critchley makes use of Freud’s selves in On Humour. Personally I reckon Foucault’s late stuff is just what you want here. But having trouble giving you a specific reference. Maybe worth taking a look at Hermeneutics of the Subject. I’ll have a think.
Riceour is an obvious one here. Oneself as Another makes the case that I Think Therefore I Am is false, I am involves another.
Also, though theological, I believe Adam slaps together Bonhoeffer with Nancy in his dissertation I haven’t seen. Might be useful to ask him about this.
Whitehead. Obviously.
Thanks to everyone for the advice!
I think for now I’m decide to constrain the discussion (in the current chapter at least) to interacting with Levinas and Nancy, just to keep it ‘french’ at this point. Although I’ll consider much of this soon as well!