Leonard Lawlor

Professional Bio

Areas of Specialization

• Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Continental Philosophy

Recent Courses

Graduate Seminars

• Bergson’s Creative Evolution and The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (Spring 2018)
• Deconstruction: Theory and Practice, including Given Time, The Gift of Death, and the Death Penalty Lectures (Spring 2019)
• What is Philosophy, including Merleau-Ponty’s In Praise of Philosophy, Deleuze and Guattari’s What is Philosophy, and Agamben’s What is Philosophy (Spring 2020)

Recent Publications

• Author of From Violence to Speaking Out (Edinburgh University Press, 2016)

• Author of Early Twentieth Century Continental Philosophy (Indiana University Press, 2011)

• Co-Editor of Between Philosophy and Non-Philosophy: Essays in Honor of Hugh J. Silverman (SUNY Press, 2016).

• Co-editor of A Companion to Derrida (Wiley Blackwell, 2014)

• Co-editor of The Cambridge Foucault Lexicon (Cambridge University Press, 2014)

Articles

• “‘Sacrifice a Cock to Asclepius’: The Reception of Socrates in Foucault’s Final Writings,” in Brill Companion to the Reception of Socrates, ed., Christopher Moore, (Leiden: Brill, 2019), pp. 928-949.
• “Power and Intensity: Difference and Repetition, Chapters Four and Five,” in Deleuze and Guattari Studies 13.3 (2019): 445-453.
• “The Most Difficult Task: On the Idea of an Impure, Pure Non-Violence (in Derrida),” in Studia Phaenomenologica (special issue on the phenomenology of violence), volume 19/2019: 11-20.
• “Machine à Contingence”: Bergson’s Theory of Freedom in L’évolution du problème de la liberté,” in Lo Sguardo, N. 26, 2018 (I), special issue on Bergson: “Bergson Dal Vito”: 47-64.
• “Violence and Reactions,” in The Southern Journal of Philosophy, Volume 56, Issue 3 (September 2018) (Symposium on the Thought of Leonard Lawlor): 403-413.
• “Difference and Dependency, Violence and Sublimation: Two Questions for Kelly Oliver,” in Philosophy Today, Volume 62, Issue 2 (spring 2018): 607-617.
• "Vulnerability and Violence: On the Poverty of the Remainder (or Beyond Kant)," Taylor and Francis Online, (2018)

• “Three Ways of Speaking: Deleuze’s Way, or Death and Flight,” in Deleuze Studies, special issue, Deleuze, Ethics and Dramatization, Volume 10, Number 1 (February 2016), edited by Leonard Lawlor and Aline Wiame: 70-84.

•  “La passion noire,” in special issue on Derrida, Les Cahiers Philosophiques de Strasbourg, 1 (2016): 127-135.

•  “Auto-Affection,” for Derrida: Key Concepts, ed., Claire Colebrook (London: Routledge, 2014), pp. 130138.

•  “Only Die Micrologically! A Note on Drama and Ethics in Deleuze,” in Divinatio: Studia Culturologica Series 38 (autumn-winter 2013-2014): 85-90.

•  “No more Insults for Friendship!”, for the “Decade After Derrida” issue of the Oxford Literary Review 36.2 (2014): 240-244.

•  Is it Happening? Or the Implications of Immanence,” in Research in Phenomenology, volume 44, issue 3 (2014): 347-361.

•  “Nascency and Memory: Reflections on Véronique Fóti’s Tracing Expression in Merleau-Ponty,” in Chiasmi International, volume 16 (2013), pp. 293-306.

•  “Apokalyptisches Denken: Versuch über die Erfahrung des Ereignisses,” German translation by Hans-Dieter Gondek of “Apocalyptic Thinking: An Essay on the Experience of the Event,” in Kraft der Dinge, ed., Iris Därmann (München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2014), pp. 139-158.

•  “L’immanence est complète”: L’Heritage de la pensée de Jean Hyppolite,” in Jean Hyppolite. Entre Structure et existence, ed., Giuseppe Bianco (Paris : Editions Rue D’Ulm, 2013), pp. 143-156.

•  “The Flipside of Violence, or Beyond the Thought of Good Enough,” in Phaenex: Journal of Existential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture, Volume 8, Number 2 (2013): 80-104. Also, in A Blackwell Companion to Derrida, pp. 565-581.

•  “Deleuze and Hearing-Oneself-Speak,” for The Continuing Impact of Husserl’s “Ideen”, edited by Thomas Nenon and Lester Embree, “Contributions to Phenomenology” Series, Volume 66 (Dordrecht: Springer Press, 2013), pp. 451-466

•  “Heidegger and Deleuze,” co-authored with Andrea Janae Sholtz (50%), for The Bloomsbury Companion to Heidegger, edited by François Raffoul and Eric S. Nelson (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), pp. 417-424. Turkish translation in preparation.

•  “Heidegger and Foucault,” for The Bloomsbury Companion to Heidegger, edited by François Raffoul and Eric S. Nelson (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), pp. 409-416.

•  “What Happened? What is going to Happen? An Essay on the Experience of the Event,” in The Ends of History: Questioning the Stakes of Historical Reason, edited by Amy Swiffen and Joshua Nichols (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2013), pp. 179-195.

•  “Anachronism and Powerlessness: An Essay on Postmodernism,” in The Science, Politics, and Ontology of Life-Philosophy, edited by Scott Campbell and Paul Bruno (Continuum Press, 2013), pp. 141-155.

Forthcoming Publications

Books

• Translation of Renaud Barbaras’ Introduction à la phénoménologie de la vie, delivered to Indiana University Press in April 2019.

Articles

•  Interview on Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, Études phénoménologues – Phenomenological Studies, forthcoming in 2020.
• “The Noumenon Closest to the Phenomenon: The Other in Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition,” in a volume edited by Vincente Munoz-Reja and Zach Joachim for the Routledge Research in Phenomenology series.
• “The Categorical Imperative and not being Unworthy of the Event: Ethics in Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition,” in The Vocation of Philosophy: On the Theory and Practice of Philosophical Cognition, eds., Brady Bowman and Birgit Sandkaulen.
• “Bergson on the True Intellect: The Tripartite Concept of Virtuality,” in Interpreting Bergson, edited by Alex Lefebvre, Cambridge University Press, 2018.
• “God Needs Us: On the Ideal Genesis of Matter in Bergson’s Creative Evolution (and The Two Sources of Morality and Religion),” for On Nietzsche, Bergson, Dewey, and Darwinism, ed. Antoine Daratos, 2019.
• “An Immense Power: Three Phenomenological Insights supporting Derridean Deconstruction,” in Oxford Handbook to the History of Phenomenology, edited by Dan Zahavi.
•  “The Dualism of Truth and Freedom: The Origin of Foucault’s Neo-Kantianism in the Introduction to Kant’s Anthropology and its end in Foucault Final Lecture Courses, with a Speculation about Deleuze,” in Festschrift for Dimitri Ginez, ed., Emil Lensky (Königshausen and Neumann Verlag).
•  “How not to Think: an Extension of Deconstructionist Methodology,” in The Cambridge Companion to Philosophical Methodology, eds., Guiseppina D’Oro and Soren Overgaard.

• “Immanence”; “Power”; and “Responsibility,” in M. Bunz, B.M. Kaiser, K. Thiele (eds.) Symptoms of the Planetary Condition: A Critical Vocabulary, Meson Press 2016.

•  “Power and Intensity: Difference and Repetition, Chapters Four and Five,” in Deleuze Studies, special issue, edited by Henry Somers-Hall.

•  “The Origin of Parrēsia in Foucault’s Thinking: Truth and Freedom in The History of Madness,” (co-authored with Daniel J. Palumbo) in Understanding Foucault, Understanding Modernism, ed., David Scott (Bloomsbury Press).

•  “’Let Others be Ends in Themselves’: The Convergence between Foucault’s Parrēsia and Derrida’s Teleiopoesis,” for Between Foucault and Derrida, eds., Vernon Cisney, Nicolae Morar, and Yubraj Aryal (Edinburgh University Press, 2016).

•  “The Space-in-Between: The Frame and Excess in the Thought of Hugh J. Silverman,” in Between Philosophy and Non-Philosophy (The SUNY Press, 2016).

•  “Speaking out for Others: Philosophical Activity in Deleuze and Foucault (and Heidegger),” co-authored with Andrea Janae Sholtz (25%), for Between Deleuze and Foucault, edited by Daniel W. Smith, Thomas Nail, and Nicolae Morar (Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming 2016).

•  “Violence and Animality: On Absolute Freedom in Foucault,” in Foucault and Animals, edited by Dinesh Wadiwel and Matthew Chrulew (Brill Press, forthcoming 2016).

Translations

• “Politeness” by Henri Bergson, for a 2016 special issue of The Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy.

Upcoming Talks

• Scholar Session on the Works of Michael Naas, the Annual Meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, October 2019, Duquesne University.
• “The Ultimate Meaning of Counter-Actualization: On the Ethics of the Univocity of Being in Logic of Sense,” at the International Deleuze Congress, London, England, July 1-9, 2019.

Current Projects

• Book on Deleuze concerning his three books at the end of the Sixties (Difference and Repetition, Spinoza: Expressionism in Philosophy, and Logic of Sense).

Leonard Lawlor podcast (with Prof. Bikas K. Chakrabartiand Prof. Sudipta Maiti) on "Murmurs before Arrival": https://syntalk.wordpress.com/episodes/turn-five/tmba/

Leonard Lawlor discusses his work on the Digital Dialogue