CR: The New Centennial Review

Let's talk about theatre and truth, Chile 2025

2025-03-25T22:38:34-04:00

This paper analyzes the problematization of theatre and truthtelling in Chile in the last decade. Informed by the fourth Feminist Wave (2018), the Social Upheaval (2019), and the COVID-19 Pandemic, theatre is giving testimony to its rules of exclusion, violence, fears, and precarity. Parrhesia (Foucault 1983) no longer refers to the disclosure of a truth that will defy political power as a reality that exceeds the artistic device but to the aesthetic mechanisms that reproduce the power structures within theatrical practices.

Près

2024-12-20T15:04:22-05:00

The thirtieth anniversary of the Rwandan genocide was commemorated in April 2024, recalling the tragic events that led to the extermination of an estimated 700,000 to 1,000,000 people over approximately 100 days. This essay reflects on the complexities of understanding and articulating the “truth” of genocide, suggesting that the pursuit of genocide inherently seeks to destroy its own truth, complicating efforts to document and comprehend these atrocities. The essay discusses the challenges survivors face in recounting their experiences, noting how trauma distorts memory and how cultural taboos inhibit open discussions about suffering. The author also addresses the role of silence and secrecy, particularly among perpetrators, which further obscures the truth of the genocide. Additionally, the ineffability of the experience itself creates barriers to understanding for those outside the event, resulting in a persistent gap in comprehension between survivors and outsiders. In attempting to grasp the magnitude of the genocide, the essay posits that while survivors can share fragments of truth, the ultimate experience of the dead remains untranslatable, leaving an irreducible void in the narrative. Ultimately, the pursuit of truth in the context of genocide emerges as a complex task marked by both proximity and distance, thwarting the possibility of any comprehensive understanding.

Glyphs and the Afterlives of Theory

2024-10-15T12:35:53-04:00

Truth and Meaning

2024-12-03T12:54:12-05:00

After observing Hannah Arendt’s suspicion of life philosophy, this article examines her investment in a multifaceted notion of life and the related distinction between truth and meaning. The Human Condition introduces the difference between biological life processes and what she calls “non-biological life” and argues that an exclusively biological conceptualization of life has oriented thinking about human nature since the beginnings of philosophy. The Life of the Mind continues her mission to demarcate a political realm that decisively takes up the mind’s nonbiological life through her original analyses of literary and philosophical history. This article explores how Arendt’s initiative inherits life philosophy’s interest in the limits of philosophy, appealing to the spontaneity and freedom associated with will and judgment in order to generate and sustain meaning for individual as well as communal life.

Working Toward Truth

2025-03-09T21:12:15-04:00

This article examines the relationship between the notion of truth and the performative dimension of university work in an era characterized by historical revisionism and a relative value of truth in political discourse both in the U.S. and abroad. It begins with a consideration of Derrida’s discussion of truth in the context of the university and in relation to the politics of forgiveness. It then turns to two cases of historical narration that have been met with powerful instances of revisionism: in the first instance Peter Kornbluh’s account of ongoing historical obfuscation of the U.S-backed overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile in the context of the 50^th anniversary of the coup, in the second, Nikole Hannah-Jones's The 1619 Project. The article contends that these projects, produced at the borders of the university, exemplify different aspects of Derrida's views on the relationship between university work and the truth, including the possibility of a performative demand for accountability to the past that acknowledges the fundamentally finite nature of truth.

Truth as a Missed Encounter with the Secret: Henry Corbin’s Interpretation of Iranian Philosophy

2025-01-30T18:57:20-05:00

This paper explores how Truth, in Iranian philosophy, unfolds as a missed encounter with the secret, drawing on Henry Corbin’s interpretation of visionary hermeneutics. Rather than something fully attainable, Truth reveals itself only in glimpses, always withdrawing even as it calls for engagement. Through the lens of ta’wil (visionary hermeneutics) and kashf al-mahjūb (unveiling of the hidden), Iranian philosophy presents truth as an ongoing event—something encountered through relation rather than possessed as knowledge. Corbin, inspired by Heidegger yet moving beyond him, saw in Iranian thought a vision of Being shaped by Mundus Imaginalis and active imagination, where truth manifests through theophanic light (tajalli). This paper argues that the encounter with Truth remains suspended, never fully arriving, yet never absent—a dynamic interplay of revealing and concealing that sustains the search itself. By bringing Corbin’s insights into dialogue with Lacan’s concept of the missed encounter, this study sheds light on how Iranian philosophy holds truth as something that can only be approached, never fully grasped—a presence that is always just beyond reach.

Truth and Memory

2025-03-17T13:30:03-04:00

This article propose an analysis on the games of the truth and the falsehood through which the status of pueblo originario in Mexico City is constituted as an experience that “can and must be thought.” My hypothesis is that, in this game of truth, the use of the past, the construction of the narrative and memory of the “origin of the nation,” plays a key role. If an existence is historically constituted as an experience that “can and must be thought,” what are the games of truth that are presented to establish the truthfulness of ethnopolitical identity as in the case of the pueblo originario? What mechanisms or instances make it possible to distinguish between the “true” or “false” enunciations of existence?

What Comes

2025-01-09T14:43:28-05:00

Throughout its history, Philosophy has given itself the role of preparing human beings to learn how to die. For Philosophy—whose main focus has been “the subject”—properly speaking, only human beings or mortals have the capability of dying. Derrida’s thought, this paper argues, has not been simply subject-centered but constitutes openness to “what comes”—an unidentifiable and unpredictable alterity.

The Right to Have Rights or the Vanishing of the Human

2025-01-31T14:13:56-05:00

The article offers an interpretation of Werner Hamacher’s reading of Hannah Arendt’s thesis on the existence of a “right to have rights.” Taking into account in particular his essay “On the Right to Have Rights. Human Rights, Marx and Arendt” (2014), but also his celebrated article on Benjamin, “Afformative, Strike” (1991), this paper aims to highlight Hamacher’s political thought, a dimension of his work that has received little attention among scholars. At the same time, the article seeks to show the affinity that Hamacher’s argument shares with that of Etienne Balibar who refers to this “right to have rights” as “Arendt’s theorem.” Through this confrontation, the paper argues that in Hamacher’s works it is possible to observe a certain encounter between Marxism and deconstruction, similar to the way both of these theoretical traditions inform Balibar’s own reading of the right to have rights. This is especially noticeable in relation to a common concern with thinking a politics of human rights that necessarily demands a deconstruction of the human as a founding institution.