Anne O'Byrne

SUNY: Stony Brook University, Philosophy, Faculty Member

Followers

Following

Co-authors

Public Views

From the book "Natality and Finitude" to "The Genocide Paradox: Democracy and Generational Time," my work has had to do with what it means for us to be political beings. How is political life shaped by the fact that we are mortal? That we all had to be born? That we exist in generational groups? That the world will persist even when we are gone? That the world might not persist when we are gone? Articles and book chapters investigate politics and embodiment ("The Politics of Intrusion," “Umbilicus”), gender ("The Excess of Justice"), labor ("Symbol, Exchange and Birth"), teaching ("Pedagogy without a Project"), and worldiness (“Amèry, Arendt and the Future of the World”). Much of it has dealt with the work of Heidegger, Arendt, Derrida, and Jean-Luc Nancy. Translations include several books of Nancy’s: "Being Singular Plural" (with Robert Richardson, Stanford, 2000), "Being Nude" (with Carlie Anglemire, Fordham, 2014) and "Corpus II" (Fordham, 2013), "Derrida, Supplements" (Fordham, 2023). "Subjects and Simulations" (Lexington, 2014), on the work of Jean Baudrillard and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, was edited with Hugh Silverman and "Logics of Genocide: The Structures of Violence and the Contemporary World" was edited with Martin Shuster.

less

Uploads

Papers by Anne O'Byrne

The Genocide Paradox

Fordham University Press eBooks, Mar 23, 2023

Umbilicus

Fordham University Press eBooks, Sep 1, 2015

Introduction to the Special Issue

Puncta, Dec 1, 2021

Download

The Genocide Paradox

The God Between

Re-treating Religion, 2022

Umbilicus: Toward a Hermeneutics of Generational Difference

Carnal Hermeneutics, 2020

Birth, Historicity and Finitude in Being and Time

Heidegger Circle Proceedings, 2005

The Ugly Psyche: Arendt and the Right to Opacity

Research in Phenomenology, 2020

Arendt was famously dismissive of the work of psychologists, claiming that they did nothing more ... more Arendt was famously dismissive of the work of psychologists, claiming that they did nothing more than reveal the pervasive ugliness and monotony of the psyche. If we want to know who people are, she argued, we should observe what they do and say rather than delving into the turmoil of their inner lives; if we want to understand humanity, we would be better off reading Oedipus Rex than hearing about someone’s Oedipus complex. The rejection has a certain coherence in the context of her understanding of public life as the realm of appearance and opinion, but examining it through the specific question of ugliness complicates that understanding. While beauty invites us to contemplate the world and admire it, ugliness repels our attention and sows the seed of a worry that the world might not want to be known. Working with Eichmann in Jerusalem, The Life of the Mind: Thinking, the Kant lectures and a striking Denktagebuch entry in which she reacts with revulsion to Matisse’s Heads of Jeann...

5. The Task of Knowledgeable Love: Arendt and Portmann in Search of Meaning

Artifacts of Thinking, 2020

Download

Even Now There Are Places Where a Thought Might Grow—

Puncta

The world is full of unattended nooks, places known to no one living, places hidden from all but ... more The world is full of unattended nooks, places known to no one living, places hidden from all but a few, places unheard-of, not quite remembered, yet to be discovered or rediscovered, places vastly remote and others close to where we are right now. That is to say, the world is riddled with contingency. It is a condition of worldliness, merely the case, neither here nor there. But among those sites are places haunted by suffering, even cruelty, and our not knowing them is a cause for concern. Contingency is at work here too—the claim that emanates from such a place may or may not be heard—but now our failure to hear it is a question for us. The very universality of contingency turns out to be trivial, and dwelling on it turns out to be a way of ignoring the suffering that it not permitted to register. Once such a place—of unjust imprisonment, of industrial dying, of disposal—presents itself to consciousness, our not having seen it before is shocking. How can we not have known? What el...