Time of the seminar: 15:30

Abstract: According to which Law, ideal and promise, has our humanity constituted in and for its thinking an economy and a logic of sacrifice which pervades and orients each of its determinations – ontological, ethical,
theological, anthropological and political? In which sense, has the operation of sacrifice instituted itself as an
inalienable signifier in the history of the truth of Being and for the essence of the human being? And in
which manner are we to comprehend, question and ultimately deconstruct, the meaning of this sacrificial
modality, economy and logic, always and already at work in what we call thinking?
From these preliminary questions – which will also allow us to define historically, sociologically,
anthropologically, philosophically and theologically the idea and the experience of sacrifice, its concealed
presuppositions and its manifest breadth, in what we call thinking – our reflection will deploy the essential
alliance between the operation of sacrifice and the central ontological, ethical and theological determinations
of our philosophical tradition: donation, gift and event, duty and obligation, temporality and history, law
and love, truth and justice, recognition, forgiveness and reconciliation, the Self and the Other, revelation
and judgment, etc.
Indeed, we will examine and explicate our directing hypothesis and seek to verify it throughout the history
of philosophy from Plato’s Phaedrus and Timaeus, throughout Modernity and German Idealism, as well as
in contemporary thought, from Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Husserl and Heidegger to Levinas, Derrida and
Patocka. In parallel with our interpretation of how and why an economy and logic of sacrifice work through
and within the history of philosophy, we will also deploy another history of sacrifice which, through a
comparative interpretation of our three monotheisms – Judaism, Christianity, Islam –, will be seen to
contain powerful sacrificial signifiers capable of opening to wholly other orientations and significations
than those ensured and assured by and through the history of philosophy.
Through this double reading, philosophical and theological, of the question of sacrifice, we will seek to
expound a critical re-evaluation and thus a deconstruction of the operativity of sacrifice and thereby open the
possibility of re-thinking how, where, why and towards which end can the aporia of sacrifice, its incessant
and reiterated impossibilisation, can engage a novel address of the singularity of human existence.
In this sense, we shall firstly explicate in which manner our thinking is inalienably ordered by an economy
and a logic of sacrifice which always and already reveals meaning and signification through a determinate
negation of difference and alterity, and thus, uncovers and discovers truth by, at the same time, forsaking
the singularity of that which remains unrepresentable and irreducible. In this sense, confronted to the
question “what is called thinking?”, we shall, firstly, indicate in which manner that which calls to thinking is
always animated and awoken by a certain sacrificial operation which forecloses the irreplaceable singularity
of the human. And secondly, we shall address the possibility of confronting that which remains unthinkably
singular, unsacrificed and irreducible to any economy or logic of sacrifice, and which also carries forth the
oblique opening to another thinking for singularity in history and thereby a logic of singularity for that which
we shall name the spectrality of human existence.