What affinity one should draw between a philosopher's life and their philosophy? Heidegger excludes biography from the framework of philosophy, whereas Nietzsche identifies it as its innermost core. Derrida appears to align with Nietzsche, treating the philosopher's biography as a subject of discussion that is no less legitimate than his philosophy. Yet what about Derrida himself? Does his stance entail a performative dimension? In his early writing, Derrida's life remains outside of his philosophy. Yet the unveiling of the vicissitudes of his biography in his late writing enables tracking down the biographical source of his immense corpus. Although his biography is not explicitly addressed in his early writing, it serves as its concealed origin, first and foremost of one of its key concepts-the supplement: About a year before Derrida's birth on 15 July 1930, his mother gave birth to an older brother who died prematurely at three months of age. Derrida's arrival into the world was thus marked by his indelible role as a replacement, a supplement to the dead brother. This constitutive experience should be understood as Derrida's symptom, one that determined the trajectory not only of his life, but also of his writing.

Contrary to Levinas, the event of hospitality does not take place in the face of the other, but rather, in the work of art. Art should therefore not be viewed as provoking pleasure, but rather, as an event of hospitality of radical alterity possessing the power to shake the foundation of its viewers. This is what endows art with an ethical dimension, articulated in re-inscribing aesthetics as “aesth-ethics.” Rilke’s poem “Archaic Torso of Apollo” is as a perfect example of this claim. The statue is teeming with life and sexuality, from which a gaze bursts out, shaking the viewer’s existence by calling him to change his life. As Althusser’s analysis of interpellation shows, the subject is constituted from a call coming from the outside. However, in Rilke’s case, the call does not originate from the Big Other, regulating the order, but from radical alterity residing outside the order.

In a quest after the essence of memory, a crucial distinction is made between the notions of memory and remembrance, following Plato's distinction between mneme (memory) and hypomnesis (archive). The article's main argument is that memory has to do with the technical aspect of life, while remembrance has to do with what we live for. This is because the unwilled event of remembrance, which un-joins time, is always remembrance of one thing alone, i.e. the Thing. The notion of the Thing-addressed both by Heidegger and Freud-is analyzed in its psychoanalytic, theological and historical sense, as located in un-archiveable time, and as appearing in a spectral, violent fashion in our daily lives. Discussion is accompanied with examples taken from Proust's novel In Search of Lost Time and Francois Ozon's film "Frantz."

Most rare are those works of art that, in a simple visual gesture, succeed in formulating a dilemma that occupies culture as a whole. Such is the artwork of Joseph Beuys entitled Fat Chair. The work—viewed mainly from a phenomenological perspective—is comprised of two elements holding a tension: a chair on the one hand, and a lump of fat placed on top of it on the other. The tension between these elements, so the article argues, manifests the tension between two types of violence: following Benjamin, these are termed “the violence of the Father” and “the violence of the Other” (or in Hebrew, “the Violence of ha-Rav”). The violence of the Father refers mainly to the violence of culture: the violence of the concept and the category from the side of the object, and the violence of the law/name of the Father from the side of the subject. The violence of the Other, transgressing distinctions between good and evil and subject and object, is the violence of the pre-cultural and the primordial, before law and language. This primal violence cannot appear in its full presence, either in culture in general or in art in particular; it can only appear as a leftover and a spectre. Beuys' artwork manifests this aporetic appearance in a paradigmatic manner, and in this sense, it could serve as a paradigm for the possibility of hospitality in art. In fact, the article opens the way for an argument of a larger scale, according to which art, and not the social sphere—as Levinas maintains—should be viewed as the sphere of the hospitality of the entirely Other. The study of such hospitality in art should therefore be termed “Aesth-ethics.”

Paul Celan was undoubtedly the greatest post-World War II German-writing poet, and Anselm Kiefer one of the greatest living German artists. These two giants can be seen to meet through a series of artworks that Kiefer dedicates to the depiction of Celan's Todesfugue (Fugue of Death). Bringing together the verbal and the visual, the color of gold symbolizes life, while ashes symbolize exile and death. In a melancholic gesture of thought, Germany claims ownership of the gold and by extension over Origin. In this way, the Jews are reduced to ashes. Behind this traumatic encounter between gold and ashes, that appears in both Celan's and Kiefer's work, there looms a no less traumatic encounter between fire and spirit: the German soul is metaphorically identified with the inflaming and illuminating element of fire, while the Jewish soul is aligned with the element of spirit, or ether. The values of gold and ashes on the one hand, and of fire and spirit on the other, are intrinsically connected; and following Heidegger and Derrida, it can be said that the identification of the German soul with fire is precisely what gives it the claim of sovereignty over gold, and ultimately over Origin. This is also the source of Germany's philosophical justification for expelling the Jews to exile and death. The Judeo-German differend, with all its horrific violence, so this article argues, is locked within this quadrangle chest of gold, ashes, fire and spirit.

Terror is no doubt a violent tool serving political ends of some sort. Nevertheless, terror has a phenomenality of its own. This discussion attempts at striping terror from its political ends while purposing to view it as a phenomenological event manifesting nothing but sheer violence. Following the thought of Benjamin and Derrida, the discussion looks at terror as a phenomenological event manifesting the spectral return of primordial violence. The eruption of the violence of terror is thus thought as a constant reminder of the illegal and violent foundation that founds sovereign law.