Styles of Piety: Practicing Philosophy after the Death of God

Notes

Notes Introduction S. Clark Buckner and Matthew Statler 1. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), 181. 2. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 21. 3. Nietzsche, Science, 232. 4. All biblical quotations in this volume are taken from the King James Version of the Bible. Violations Alphonso Lingis 1. Georges Bataille, Œvres Complètes , vol. 6 (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1973), 295. Fatherhood and the Promise of Ethics Kelly Oliver 1. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1967), 36. 2. The word piety is an early form of pity. The English word piety comes from the old French piete. The popular form in France was pité, ‘‘pity.’’ The word pity can mean compassion, to be sorry for, to grieve or regret, to feel remorse for one’s own wrongdoing, to repent; in modern use, it implies contempt for someone inferior to oneself. 271 3. Paul Ricœur, The Conflict of Interpretations, trans. Robert Sweeney, ed. Don Idhe (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 49. 4. Ibid., 485. 5. Ibid., 491. 6. Ibid., 480. 7. John Brenkman, Straight Male Modern (New York: Routledge Press, 1993), 45, points out that Ricœur assumes that contracts take place between equals. 8. My thanks to Lisa Walsh, who pointed out that, whereas in the United States, the mother identifies the father at the hospital for the birth certificate record, in France, the father has the legal right to ‘‘recognize’’ (reconnaı̂tre) the child as his or not (the mother’s recognition of the father has no legal hold). 9. Although I cannot develop issues around child custody laws here, I present a more detailed analysis of child custody laws in this same context in Kelly Oliver, Family Values: Subjects between Nature and Culture (New York: Routledge Press, 1997). 10. Ricœur, Conflict, 480. 11. Ibid., 471. 12. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 254. Hereafter cited in text. 13. In Oliver, Values, I diagnose the attempts of both Ricœur and Levinas to cover over the contingent and chance aspects of paternity as a fear of what I call an ‘‘abject father.’’ 14. Levinas, Totality, 263. 15. Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 75–76. 16. Some of his contemporaries have criticized Levinas for sacrificing the feminine for the masculine subject’s ascent into the ethical relationship through paternity. See Catherine Chalier, Figures du féminin: Lecture d’Emmanuel Levinas (Paris: La Nuit surveillée, 1982); Luce Irigaray, ‘‘The Fecundity of the Caress,’’ in An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian Gill (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993), and ‘‘Questions to Emmanuel Levinas,’’ The Irigaray Reader, ed. Margaret Whitford (Cambridge , Mass.: Basil Blackwell, 1991). 17. Derrida, Gift, 7. Emphasis added. 18. Ibid., 11. 19. Ibid., 20. 20. In ‘‘When the Gods Are Born,’’ the last section of Luce Irigaray, Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. Gillian Gill (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), Irigaray argues that Christ’s suffering on the cross and his bleeding side are masculine appropriations of the mother’s suffering and the blood of childbirth through which she gives life. 272 Notes to Pages 37–49 21. Irigaray makes this argument in ‘‘Belief Itself,’’ in Luce Irigaray, Sexes and Genealogies, trans. Gillian Gill (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). 22. Derrida, Gift, 51. 23. Ibid., 61. 24. Responsibility is a matter of response. In both German (Verantwortung ) and French (responsabilité), responsibility comes from respond (antworten, répondre) and has a stronger sense of ‘‘answer’’ than in English, where respond and answer are different words. The Latin respond⬍mac⬎ere means ‘‘to answer ’’ and, in the legal sense, ‘‘to answer one’s name or be present before the law.’’ 25. Derrida, Gift, 61. 26. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 288. 27. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961), 50–51. Emphasis added. 28. Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1954), 31. 29. One of Diacritic’s reviewers made the interesting comment that, if fatherhood is defined in terms of exogamic rather than...