Gillian Rose on Broken Promises and Failed Attempts

"New ethics, which demands the overcoming of the subjectivity of the agent and denies the subjectivity of 'the Other', produces in this 'Other' the inflexible abstraction it sought to indict. Reason in modernity cannot be said to have broken the promise of universality - unless we have not kept it; for it is only we who can keep such a promise by working our abstract potentiality into the always difficult but enriched actuality of our relation to others and to ourselves. Whether disturbing or joyful, reason is full of surprises."

Gillian Rose, "Introduction", Judaism and Modernity: Philosophical Essays (New York: Verso Books, 2017), 9.

Gilian Rose on 'New Ethics'

"New ethics is waving at 'the Other' who is drowning and dragging his children under with him in his violent, dying gestures. New ethics cares for 'the Other'; but since it refuses any relation to law, it may be merciful, but equally, it may be merciless."

Gillian Rose, "Introduction", Judaism and Modernity: Philosophical Essays (New York: Verso Books, 2017), 6.

Gillian Rose on Exclusive Otherness

"For if exclusive and excluding reason was wrong, then exclusive otherness, unequivocally Other, will be equally so. Far from bringing to light what is difficult out of darkness and silence, difficulty is brought to certainty. Certainty does not empower, it subjugates - for only thinking which has the ability to tolerate uncertainty is powerful, that is, non-violent. This principled otherness sent out to reform the world will expand a violence equal to the violence it accuses (reason) - and with an exceedingly good conscience."

Gillian Rose, "Introduction", Judaism and Modernity: Philosophical Essays (New York: Verso Books, 2017), 4.

Grosz on the Possibility of a Post-Religious Ontology

"If religious terms have long characterized the global order and its significances - now increasingly occupied by possibilities for economic exploitation rather than meaning-production or the creation of incalculable, innumerable values - it is time to return to a history of immanent philosophies that see beauty and joy in the natural and cultural world, in the capacities of life to enhance and complicate itself and its worlds."

Elizabeth Grosz, The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics, and the Limits of Materialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 253.

Grosz on Spinoza's Concept of Human Self-Perception

"The human mind does not know the human body itself, nor does it know that it exists, except through ideas of affections by which the human body is affected."

Benedict Spinoza, Ethics, (IIP19).

"The mind knows the body through its ideas of the affections of the body. The mind cannot know the body directly; it is in no way the scene of knowledge production. All that it knows it comes to know, whether erroneously or correctly, through the ways in which the body is affected by other bodies that enable ideas to understand the body's capacities only as they operate and are subjected to encounters that transform it. The body is not a thing, even an extended thing, as Descartes defines it, because it is a process of encounters that change bodies and enable them to undergo new affects and new encounters. Likewise, the mind is not a thing, even a thinking thing, because ideas undergo encounters with other ideas, and particularly other ideas generated by the affections by which the body is affected. Each involves cohesive processes that center around a body, made of many capacities to act and be acted on."

Elizabeth Grosz, "Spinoza, Substance, and Attributes", The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics, and the Limits of Materialism "Spinoza, Substance, and Attributes" (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 67.

Elizabeth Grosz on Stoicism

"This idea of a nonexisting not-something is the object of ridicule in the writings of Alexander, Sextus Empiricus, and Galen. However, it is central not only to the materialism developed by the Stoics, but, as I will argue in the following chapters, for any kind of materialism that aims to function nonreductively. Every materialism requires a frame, a nonmaterial localization, a becoming-space and time, that cannot exist in the same way and with the same form as the objects or things that they frame. Every materialism, whether it is acknowledged openly or not, requires an incorporeal frame. The appeal of the Stoics, even today, lies in the audacity with which they develop the concept of the incorporeal as the subsisting condition of material existence."

"The divine, Zeus, may be understood as immanent and internal to the universe and all that composes it. It is not so much that the universe is composed of an active divine principle and a separate passive material principle: rather, active and passive, divine and material, are completely blended. Pneuma is not distinct from matter but rather matter is always already infused with pneuma."

Elizabeth Grosz, "The Stoics, Materialism, and the Incorporeal" The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics, and the Limits of Materialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 28-29.

Girard on the Apocalypse as the Incarnation

"When sacrifice disappears, all that remains is mimetic rivalry, and it escalates to extremes. In a way, the Passion leads to the hydrogen bomb: it will end up exploding the Powers and Principalities. The apocalypse is nothing but the incarnation of Christianity in history, which separates the mother from the child."

René Girard, "The Pope and the Emperor" in Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoît Chantre, trans. Mary Baker (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2010), p. 199.

Girard on Nationalism

"Nationalism is essentially mimetic: what it criticizes about others concerns it also, so it criticizes itself."

 René Girard, "France and Germany" in Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoît Chantre, trans. Mary Baker (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2010), p. 165.

Girard on the Struggle of our Internal Models

"In a world where we are each judged by our friends and loved ones, serene models no longer have any meaning. Mediation has been interiorized: the models are there, within reach. They invade me for an instant and I think I can dominate them, but then they escape and it is they who dominate me. I am always too far away from or too close to them. This is the implacable law of mimeticism."

René Girard, "Hölderin's Sorrow" in Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoît Chantre, trans. Mary Baker (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2010), p. 124.

Girard on the Imitation of Christ

"We in turn are thus required to experience the peril of the absence of God, the modern experience par excellence, because it is the time of sacrificial temptation, the possible regression to extremes, but it is also a redemptive experience. To imitate Christ is to refuse to impose oneself as a model and to always efface oneself before others. To imitate Christ is to do everything to avoid being imitated."

René Girard, "Hölderin's Sorrow" in Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoît Chantre, trans. Mary Baker (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2010), p. 122.

Girard on Levinas' Totality

"love does violence to totality, and shatters myth, but also the regulated system of exchange, everything that hides reciprocity. 'Escaping totality' thus means two things for me: either regressing into the chaos of undifferentiated violence or taking a leap into the harmonious community of 'others as others.' It means that each must stop being a simple link in the chain, a part of the whole, a soldier in an army. We can feel that Levinas was trying to go beyond the Same, beyond the ontology that makes individuals interchangeable, to find the Other. Going beyond the Same would require first a theory of the duel."

René Girard, "The Duel and the Sacred" in Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoît Chantre, trans. Mary Baker (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2010), p. 99.

Levinas on War and Peace

"Only beings capable of war can rise to peace... In war, beings refuse to belong to a totality, refuse community, refuse law.... They affirm themselves as transcending the totality, each identifying itself not by its place in the whole, but by its self."

Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), p. 222.

Girard on Nietzsche's "God is Dead"

"God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us?"

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1947), p. 181; Aphorism, 125.

"The first death of God does not lead to the restoration of the sacred and ritual order, but to a decomposition of meaning so radical and irremediable that an abyss opens beneath the feet of modern man.... The aphorism affirms the eternal return, but it reveals the engine of that return: the collective murder of arbitrary victims. It goes too far in the revelation and destroys its own foundations. Owing to the very fact that it bases the eternal return on collective murder, its true foundation, violence, which should remain hidden in order to be a foundation, is undermined and secretly sabotaged by the very thing that it believes is triumphing over: Christianity. Nietzsche's entire tragedy is to have seen but to have not wished to understand the undermining performed by the Bible. Violence no longer has any meaning. Yet Nietzsche tried to reinvest it with meaning by betting on Dionysus. In this there is terrible tragedy, a desire for the Absolute from which Nietzsche was not able to extricate himself."

René Girard, "The Duel and the Sacred" in Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoît Chantre, trans. Mary Baker (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2010), pp. 95-96.