On the Death Giving
War and Sacrifice in Patočka and Derrida
Lecture series held at Institute for Human Science on June 1 and 2, 2022.
Series Abstract: Despite the effort not to repeat the mistakes and atrocities of the previous generations, the twenty-first century continues to be a century of wars and suffering. In these lectures, David Dusenbury and James Dodd will reflect on Patočka’s and Derrida’s phenomenological analysis of self-sacrifice as a form of resistance in extreme situations of oppression (war or repression of authoritarian/totalitarian regimes).
Library of the Institute of the Human Sciences, Vienna, AT.
Lecture: War and the Fate of Europe in Patočka’s Heretical Essays
by David Dusenbury
The presentation addresses the question of the European wars and peace-making processes of the 20th century against the background of the work of Czech philosopher Jan Patočka. In the last of his Heretical Essays, Patočka asks, what was “that awesome will which for years drove millions of humans into a fiery furnace”? He is referring to the First World War, a driving force which led, nightmarishly, to a Second World War – and ultimately, to what he calls “the definitive collapse of Europe.” Patočka in the mid 1970’s suggests that Europe fails to address the dialectic of „the night“ and „the day“; the rational account on the limits of reason which does not exhaust the depth of human existence.
2. Lecture: Philosophy, Sacrifice, and War: Problems and Ambigities
by James Dodd
The presentation seeks to explore the limits of a philosophical approach to the twin problems of war and sacrifice. Is something like a true “philosophy of war”—understood as a coherent system of ideas, or a clearly articulated theoretical posture adequate to fully addressing the enduring challenges of war on a properly philosophical register—at all possible? In turn, can philosophy offer a cogent analysis of the phenomenon of sacrifice, one that captures both its paradoxical character and spiritual resonance? The suggestion will be that where the two seem to fundamentally merge—when war calls for sacrifice, and sacrifice calls for war, each seeming to provide the meaning for the other—we trip on the limits of philosophy in a way that the very sense of its vocation becomes clear.
