francesco tampoia

At a distance of more ten years from publication (2000 French/2005 English translation), with this essay I will re-read, comment and discuss, in different way and in form of anthological sketch, the Derridean volume ‘On Touching-Jean Luc Nancy’, focusing in particular on its ‘tangents and its metonymies’, its manifold entanglements with the  metaphysics of touch and bodily connections. Making use of the geometrical figure of the tangent, Derrida affirms that "[if] philosophy has touched the limit [my emphasis-J. D. ]. of the ontology of subjectivity, this is because philosophy has been led to this limit”. To touch is to touch a limit, a limit without depth or surface. How have we regarded touching in the past? The body?
My thesis, here, is that if Derridean reflection remains mostly anchored to Jean-Luc Nancy’s Corpus, it is inspired nevertheless by a different deconstructive gesture/s similar to different geometric tangents (the deconstructive practice is similar to the tracing of many tangents). Discussing in particular Nancy’s Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity, Derrida’essay ‘Deconstruction  of Christianity’ and devoting an entire section of the book to the sense of touch in the Gospels, Derrida gives us numerous and special considerations on deconstruction and the deconstruction of touch in Christianity, admitting as well the enormity of this task. A reflection on the Kas Saghafi, “Safe, Intact”: Derrida, Nancy, and the “Deconstruction of Christianity” will follow in an exemplary way.
Following a discussion of touch and the body in both animal and human spheres, in the closing section of the essay, I will comment on the Patrick Llored’s essay A Philosophy of Touching Between the Human and the Animal: The Animal Ethics of Jacques Derrida, recently published in A Companion to Derrida (2014). This study addresses highly topical questions such as: ‘What does it teach us about touch, but also about the body and the life of the animal? To what extent is it capable of renewing our knowledge [connaissance] of non-human life and of generating an animal ethics reconceived from top to bottom? If touching is coextensive with the living body, that implies not only that we place the haptical question at the centre of reflection on the animal, but also that we take into account the consequence that is most disruptive for us today (A Companion, p. 512). And conclude along with Patrick Llored that the question of touch promises to transform everything we have understood until now about animality.

In the 20th century among the greatest philosophers and literates there was an ample, ideal, wide ranging forum on the question of Europe to which, following a run already started by F. Nietzsche, M. Heidegger, E. Husserl, P. Valéry, Ortega y Gasset,  Nikolaj Berdjaev, and after the second world war G. Gadamer, J. Habermas, J. Derrida and others offered meaningful contributions. The questions were: What will be of the spirit of Europe? What will be of Europe? Europe: quo vadis?
    The aim of this paper is to articulate the meaningful stages of this historical forum through some essays of mentioned philosophers and literates. The first essay is the conference "Europa und die deutsche Philosophie”, delivered by Heidegger in Rome 1936 at the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut, the same year of the publication of Husserl’s Krisis. Thereafter, with the purpose of marking a clear discontinuity between the debate of the first half of the century and the second, I comment on Gadamer’s essay “Europa und die oikoumene”, published half a century after the conference of Heidegger, then the Gadamer’s essay "Das Erbe Europas”, 1989, in which Gadamer deduces on the existential condition of Europeans, today. At the end, I analyze Derrida’s pamphlet "L'autre cap suivi de la démocratie ajournie", English version “The Other Heading: Reflection on Today’s Europe”, that opens with the provocative and heretical Derridean gesture: To which concept, to what real individual, to what entity can we confer today the name of Europe?

Who is Jacques Derrida for us, today? Is it possible by now, with critical detachment, to be in touch with him again, to start from the beginning of his philosophizing in company with Plato, and from this vantage point to re-read Dissemination? What really stands between Plato and Derrida? In the first page  of Pharmacia Derrida writes: “We will take off here from the Phaedrus ... Only a blind or grossly insensitive reading, could indeed spread the rumour that Plato was simply condemning the writer’s activity”.1 Hence the question: Is the nexus writing/pharmakon, as Derrida says, profitable for thinking of something essentially ambivalent and irreducible, present and absent, something bearer of indefinitely deferred presence in the play of infinite real or imaginary substitutions?
Keeping in mind that, for Derrida, the history of metaphysics is the history of the thinking of Being as presence, the main enterprise of this essay orbits about the specifically problematic of writing, understood as τέχνη but also as a key locus both for Plato and for Derrida. In contrast with Heidegger radical critique of technology and his traditional opposition between techne and logos, technology here - and thinking of its function and value- regards the technical and the non-technical, the practical and the theoretical, and reveals it always as a “parasitical contamination”.
Through textual analysis and new perspectives, in what follows I will focus on some interesting unrolling, connected/disconnected threads. By discussing the readings of different scholars and philosophers such as the disputed classicist E. A. Havelock, the historians of ancient philosophy G. Reale and C. H. Kahn, first, I explore the nexus speech/writing, some ambiguities within Platonic corpus, and argue that historically Plato was a bi-medial philosopher and writer, an aspect taken for granted, but not sufficiently attended by scholarship.
In the second part -apparently independent of the first- I hold that the Derridean reading of ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’ discovers a special deconstruction at work within Plato’s dialogues. In the light of the manifold τέχνη, and of the hybrid Khôra, at the end the apparent ambiguity in Plato’s stance and Derrida’s φάρμακον invites us to identify Plato as the Father of deconstruction, like J. Derrida implicitly suggests, and Derrida as his son.

In this essay, my ambition is to show how the movements of never stable meanings that link biography and religion, the personal version of his life that Derrida gives us and his philosophical-theological reflection, especially on Judaic and Christian religious traditions, are interwoven in an inextricable whole to such an extent that they describe a kind of ineffable literary and philosophical notion of religion. Notwithstanding Derrida’s personal way of writing and thinking, I want to suggest that this notion of religion emerges through such recurrent topics as origin, promise, forgiveness, dissociation, the unconditional, the un-deconstructable and the possibility of the impossible.

After a discussion of the fundamental tropes of Rorty’s philosophy, in and beyond Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, and after describing an imaginary conversation between Rorty, Heidegger, Derrida, and Dewey, the paper- a sort of monography in a nutshell- aims to shed new light on the strategic figure of the ironist as developed by Rorty in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity.
Who really is the Rortyan ironist? A comparison between the ironist and the Platonic character of Callicles clearly shows that Rorty’s irony does not correspond to Socratic or Platonic irony. From a close reading of relevant texts three ideas emerge: first, one can take an ironic stance despite its ability to support divergent metaphysical premises –Callicles is ironic in tone but foundationalist in metaphysics- while Rorty’s pragmatist appears ironic in tone and anti-foundationalist in metaphysics. Second, Callicles is a sort of public ironist; he feels pathos for the demos and the Athenian popular assembly;  the Rorty’s ironist appears as a private ironist looking for a hypothetical and detached conversation. And third, from the theatrical and literary point of view, Rorty’s ironist lacks the Greek character, the Greek mask, and Greek comicality.

Taking issue with the fraught question of ‘democracy’ from the Greek myths and Prometheus’gifts until the present day, the paper pursues two main avenues of inquiry: first, it gathers some suggestions presented in the small book Democracy in What State?; second, pausing at the Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, it examines Alain Badiou’s hyper –translation of Plato’Republic. In the final section, it explores some connections/disconnections within the disputed issue of democracy into the net and onto the net, considering at length Derrida’s concept of ‘democracy to come’. Although the paper pursues seemingly various angles and sources, it must be regarded as a unified whole bringing into focus the theme of democracy yesterday, today, and tomorrow.
Research interest: Plato, Badiou, Democracy.

Letters exchanged by scientists are a crucial source by which to trace the process that accompanies their scientific evolution. In this paper-accomplished through a historical approach-I aim to throw new light on Leibniz's continuing interest in classical geometry and to stress the significance of his correspondence with the Italian mathematician Vitale Giordano.

Letters exchanged by scientists are a crucial source by which to trace the process that accompanies their scientific evolution. In this paper-accomplished through a historical approach-I aim to throw new light on Leibniz's continuing interest in classical geometry and to stress the significance of his correspondence with the Italian mathematician Vitale Giordano.

AbstractIn
Politics of Friendship
the
aporias
of friendship transposed to democracy indicate that if democracy is a promise of the universal inclusiveness of each singular one counting equally, and if its fraternal or national limitation naturalizes the ineluctable decision of inclusion and exclusion, then true friendship requires dis-proportion. For Derrida it demands a certain rupture in reciprocity and equality, as ell as the interruption of all fusion beteen the you and the me. In this ay democracy remains an un-fulfillable promise.

In hat follos, an imaginary voyage to !urope inspired by the so-called "yracuse-paradigm, by means of a close reading of Derrida#s
The Other Heading: Reflections on Today's !rope
, a sort of $untimely meditation$ a la %ietzsche, I critically argue that Derrida$s idea of !uropean identity, begotten by the
irr!ption
of the other, involves the radical other as a force that shos the limits of identity and of the self. &e-vieed, revisited and re-thought in the optic of the deconstructive standpoint,
The Other Heading
acquires a ne light focusing on the possible'impossible relation beteen the political and the ethical (the )ther *eading, i.e. democracy to come, !urope to come+. he deconstructive standpoint I use here falls ithin the ell non Derrida$s binary conception that undergird his ay of thining presence'absence, speech'riting, and so forth. /ey ords he philosopher and the tyrant0 the metaphor of navigation0 he )ther *eading and !uropean identity )dysseus and *amlet0 !urope and democracy to come.

Abstract: Europe, where are you going? In the age of globalization, the paper written in philosophical style aims chiefly at a ‘true cosmopolitan vision of Europe’. From the analysis on the current financial and economical crisis of European Union (Balibar, Habermas) it comes to a careful reading of Kantian For Perpetual Peace, and gathers Kantian interesting, still topical, suggestions on the matter.

... Erin O'Connell, Heraclitus and Derrida: Presocratic Deconstruction Reviewed by. FrancescoTampoia. Bookmark and Share. This journal is published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommerical 3.0 Unported license. ...

... Giorgio Agamben, The Time that Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans Reviewed by. Francesco Tampoia. Bookmark and Share. This journal is published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommerical 3.0 Unported license. ...

In this paper I argue that European Union can't help giving itself a kind, even if light post-modern constitutional frame. Among the different dynamics of integration inside the European Union, I'll focus on the conceptual alternatives that currently dominate the social science debate, which can be divided in the conceptual pairings neo-federalism and intergovernmental voluntarism. The first, the neo-federalism, refers to the dynamics that envisages the intentional establishment of a political order for all of Europe, oriented towards the fulfillment of shared values and standards (J. Habermas). The second, the intergovernmental voluntarism, analyzes functionalist dynamics driven by national and sectoral interests or contractual compromize, wherein progress is made through cooperative tactical moves that cumulatively fulfill emergent functional necessities. I conclude suggesting a kind of post-modern constitution-frame, grounded on European and cosmopolitan ethical perspectives. Among the models that are on offer it seems to me the one most likely to be well equipped to face the challenges of 21st.