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This essay reconstructs the philosophical debate between Jacques Derrida and Jürgen Habermas from their earliest exchanges to their final years. The essay concludes with the international conference,“Judéités: Questions pour Jacques Derrida,” which convened in Paris in December, 2000. The conference gave Derrida the opportunity to elaborate upon his conceptions of Judaism (or, “Judeity”) while it also served as an occasion for Habermas to modify his earlier and more negative verdicts concerning Derrida’s philosophy.  In retrospect one is tempted to think that the essay might have inaugurated a phase of intellectual collaboration, had this promise not been cut short by Derrida’s death in 2004. Habermas’s lecture merits attention, not only as a political and biographical document, but also as an interrogation of certain religious themes that came to the fore in Derrida’s later years. It also thematizes persistent philosophical questions that might be raised concerning the merits of these themes. As a partisan of “post-metaphysical thinking,” Habermas was especially concerned that Derrida’s appeals to Levinas and a quasi-revelatory “event” still obeyed the logic of metaphysics and had not escaped the aporias of his earlier, more “Heideggerian” phase.

This chapter looks at how Gao Xingjian, the 2000 Nobel Prize laureate in literature, has brought Zhuangzi’s spirit of absolute liberation and freedom to its highest level. Discussing his novel Soul Mountain and the poems “As Free as a Bird” and “Roaming Spirit and Metaphysical Thinking,” the chapter shows how Gao Xingjian’s self-exile and his persistent pursuit of the aesthetic spirit of literature embody Zhuangzi’s spirit of individual freedom and liberation. By successfully turning the meaning of “exile” from negative to positive, Gao Xingjian has recreated a natural space, or a Garden of Eden, in which he can transcend all kinds of restrictions and wander freely in the literary world. Therefore, Gao Xingjian’s fleeing and self-exile, closely associated with his literary works, represent the most compelling case of the interplay between literature and individual freedom at the end of the twentieth century.

Beginning with accolades written in honor of Frederick Du Vernet after his death in 1924, this chapter brings the story to a close, showing that while most church officials ignored his proclamations of radio mind, local and national newspapers focused on celebrating his role as a public intellectual who was a student of psychology. Examining the two posthumously-published collections of his writings, Spiritual Radio and Out of a Scribe’s Treasure: Brief Essays in Practical Religious Thinking, the chapter places his work in a broader context of Christian and metaphysical thinking. Considering the roles of his wife, Stella, and his daughter, Alice, in the story of radio mind, the chapter also dwells on the significance of embodiment, especially in terms of gender and race, for the Christian, metaphysical, and Indigenous spiritualities that shaped him. The chapter then offers a reflection on contemporary efforts to enact truth and reconciliation between Indigenous nations and Canada after a long history of church and state attempts to convert and dispossess Indigenous peoples. The chapter concludes that even today’s stories of the mind in the digital age must be situated in human bodies and communities that live and depend on the land.

This chapter scrutinizes conceptions of modality in relation to emotionality and aesthetics by addressing written forms of knowledge on the eight ecclesiastical modes in Syriac chant. It begins by presenting basic terms in existing discourses on the subject, then it examines a number of written sources (touching on issues relevant to orientalism and European musicology). The chapter develops a critical narrative on the concept of mode in three ways. First, it extracts from written tracts on the subject information that corresponds with the author’s ethnographic observation of living practice. Second, it dissects the concept of mode in Syriac music scholarship by tracking its sources and employment. Third, it brings to light the significance of perception and experience as they coincide in inherited knowledge in this aural tradition. In showing at once the presence and the absence of physical and metaphysical thinking in these writings, the chapter brings the notion of spirituality to the study of emotion and the aesthetic.