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Allergologies Versus Homeopathies

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Abstract

This paper is a reconstruction of Levinas’ reading of Hegel and his understanding of violence (of the enemy and the war). Combining Franz Rosenzweig’s reflections which concern the sick philosopher and Hegel’s state, as well as Derrida’s interpretation of the different attributes of violence, our aim is also to give full evidence of Derrida’s critical reading of Levinas. The first part illustrates the various classifications of the figures of violence from the different periods of Hegel’s life and the traces that these figures have left in Levinas’ texts beginning with ‘Liberté et commandement’ in 1953. In the second part we discuss Hegel’s well-known analogy from his Rechtsphilosophie on sovereignty and the organism—that is to say the parallel reading of some paragraphs of Naturphilosophie too—and the relation between totality and violence, in Levinas’ ‘ontology as allergy’ and in Derrida’s autoimmunology.

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Notes

  1. Allergy was first spoken of in Vienna, in German. Der Wiener Kinderarzt, Clemens Freiherr von Pirquet, published a text about allergy in the journal Müncher Medizinische Wochenschrift in 1906. The Greek root of this word is, of course, made up. Through an analogy with the word en-érgeia (internal bodily force), von Pirquet makes the word all-érgeia, ‘als Ausdruck von Reaktionen auf körperfremde Stoffe.

  2. Paragraphs 91, 92 and 93 directly inspired Levinas. In them he could find the concepts of the same, the other, the third and infinity.

  3. In question is Kant’s text ‘Über den Gemeinspruch’ (1793) in which he speaks of his ‘proposal for an international state’ and at the same time of the ‘impracticability’ of such a project.

  4. See also Hegel (1942), p. 180.

  5. The notion of hypochondria is present in Hegel’s system since his 1803/1804 lectures in Jena (Hegel 1931, pp. 200–203). See also Rosenzweig (1962a, pp. 101–102).

  6. Its creator, Samuel Friedrich Christian Hahnemann, a contemporary of Hegel, arrived in Berlin in January 1831, only a month after Hegel’s death. Hahnemann’s students are spread across Europe taking care of Cholera victims, a disease which arrived in Western Europe from India through Russia.

  7. ‘Secret poison’ is a secret for Hegel, and he cites Gibbon: ‘This long peace, and the uniform government of the Romans, introduced a slow and secret poison into the vitals of the empire [geheimes Gift in die Lebenskräfte des Reichs]. The minds of men were gradually reduced to the same level, the fire of genius was extinguished, and even the military spirit evaporated…’ (Hegel 1975, pp. 101–102). Derrida mentions this fragment in his book Glas (1974, p. 117).

  8. Hegel already writes about violence and power [Gewalt] of magic over the organism or power [Macht] of the foreign over the organism in his 1818/1819 lectures (Hegel 1982, § 295, pp. 144–145).

  9. This is one of the formulations from Hegel’s Lectures (Hegel 2002a, pp. 185–186).

  10. See the chapter ‘Prozess der Gattung’ in Hegel (2002b, pp. 196–197).

  11. La philosophie est atteinte, depuis son enfance, d’une horreur de l’Autre qui demeure Autre, d’une insurmontable allergie’ (Levinas 2001, p. 263).

  12. ‘The relation with the other, or conversation, is a non-allergic relation, an ethical relation’; ‘encounter the other without allergy, that is, in justice’ (Levinas 2001, pp. 51, 303).

  13. ‘The immune substances… in the manner of magic bullets, seek out the enemy’, Paul Ehrlich (see Silverstein 1989).

  14. The concept of Paul Ehrlich (see Silverstein 1989, p. 160).

  15. The police does not destroy the police, just as the immune system does not destroy the immune system. When they receive the wrong information from monitoring cells, the so-called killer cells do not kill themselves; rather they attack other living, healthy cells, of the same living organism. In question is a mix-up of levels, a mix-up of murder with suicide, changes and conflicts with identity, and, of course, complete limitation of the concept of survival (Derrida 1998, p. 80).

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Bojanić, P. Allergologies Versus Homeopathies. Law Critique 21, 1–16 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-009-9063-0

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