Philosophy

I work primarily in 19th-, 20th-, and 21st-century Continental philosophy, employing the methodologies of hermeneutics, phenomenology, and deconstruction. Interdisciplinarity also informs my research, which seeks to bridge the disciplines of philosophy, comparative literature, and comparative religion, especially Judaism, Buddhism, and Christianity.

My dissertation The Disappearance of the Text: Writing, Ethics, and Exteriority explores the interrelated problems of writing and alterity. Drawing on Socrates’s critique of writing in the Phaedrus as well as the ethical projects of Maurice Blanchot, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques Derrida, I examine the challenges of writing the catastrophic events of the 20th century, namely the Shoah and Stalinism, by mapping the ethical structures that arise and intensify from such discursive practices. I argue that Blanchot’s phenomenology of language problematizes the various registers of translation (across languages, cultures, and time periods), and that translation exposes a particular ethical dimension of language. In order to better articulate Blanchot’s project, I examine the work of three poets who not only attempt to write the disasters of the 20th century but who also engage with Continental philosophy itself: Wisława Szymborska, Paul Celan, and Edmond Jabès. This project charts the interstices among ontological hermeneutics, phenomenology, and the deconstructive understanding of language, poetics, and ethics.

The dissertation contributes to an expanded understanding of the role of hermeneutics and phenomenology in the field of translation studies as well as opens up the ethical dimension of existential hermeneutics. Three chapters have been revised into conference papers and articles. In 2014 Zeta Books published “The Role of Negative Hermeneutics in Translating Wisława Szymborska” as a chapter in Hermeneutics and Translation Studies. It was presented at the Hermeneutics and Translation Studies Conference at the Cologne University of Applied Sciences. I presented “Edmond Jabès and the Errant Word” as part of a panel I organized for the Derrida Today conference at UC-Irvine. “The Passion of Passivity: Blanchot, Bartleby, and the Ethics of Writing” was presented at SPEP. My dissertation research feeds into my current book project The Work of Literature: Maurice Blanchot and the Phenomenology of Writing, which traces the role of phenomenology throughout Blanchot’s philosophy and fiction.

In 2013 Duquesne UP published my co-edited volume of comparative essays entitled Levinas and Asian Thought. It includes my essay “Facing (‘and Yet Not Facing’) East: Reorienting Levinas toward the Buddhist No-Self,” which puts the decentered, other-oriented Levinasian subject in dialog with the no-self of the kōan literature of Zen Buddhism and the ethical project of Nishida Kitarō. This work grew out of panels I organized and papers I presented at conferences for the North American Levinas Society and the North Texas Philosophical Association.

The journal Between the Species published my essay “Extreme Humanism: Heidegger, Buber, and the Threshold of Language” in 2010. It examines the nature of language in the delineation between human beings and animals. Since then I have worked on a phenomenological analysis of the animal “voice” that takes into account theories of posthumanism and trans-corporeality. Finally, this research and my extensive background as a musician and composer have led me to another book project on phenomenology and music.