Photo of Dr. Jason Kemp Winfree
Department Chair

College

College of the Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences

Department

Department of Philosophy

Phone

209/664-6669

Email

jwinfree@csustan.edu

Location

Science 1 S103A

I think a philosophical life matters. It makes us deeper, not necessarily better. I mean by that that philosophy can cultivate our capacities to experience the world, enriching how we value, enjoy, suffer, understand ourselves, and relate to others. It is the mark of an intellectually and spiritually stunted society to think that everything has to be useful, and the mark of a truly one-dimensional culture to think that what is useful has to be economically profitable.

My primary philosophical interests concern the intersection of three mutually determining issues: normalization, exclusion, and excess. My research considers how processes of normalization structure and regulate our values, discourses, and knowledge. It also addresses how those processes require the exclusion of ways of being resistant to productive assimilation (i.e., ways of living, experiencing, thinking, desiring, creating, questioning, and valuing). Most importantly, though, I'm interested in how those same ways of being say something about the character of our existence that breaks with the kind of prosaic life sanctioned by the social order. In this way, my work brings together ontological and ethico-political considerations, as well as concerns pertaining to the scope and limits of critical theory. My approach is phenomenological, hermeneutical, and/or genealogical as warranted by the specific phenomena at issue.

I'm currently completing a book on the issue of community in the work of Georges Bataille. The book aims to clarify the terms, stakes, and critical limits of that issue as a point of interest in recent continental philosophy. Some paper titles from the last few years also give a sense of my interests: Wonder and the Elemental: Suffering Beyond Ethics (Comparative and Continental Philosophy, 2013), Sacred Violence and the Death of God: Bataille's Lucid Fanaticism (Philosophy Today, 2012), and No More Beautiful Days: Situating Agamben's Coming Community (Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy, 2011).

  • B.A., Hiram College (Religious Studies), June 1991
  • M.A., Vanderbilt University (Religion), December 1993
  • Ph.D., Vanderbilt University (Philosophy), August 2001

  1. 20th Century Continental Philosophy (esp. Phenomenology, Deconstruction, Existentialism, Heidegger, Derrida, Blanchot, Bataille, Nancy, Benjamin)
  2. 19th Century Continental Philosophy (esp. Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche)

  1. Philosophy of Literature
  2. Philosophy of Language
  3. Philosophy of Art
  4. Social and Political Thought (esp. Deconstruction, Frankfurt School, College of Sociology)

Edited Book

The Obsessions of Georges Bataille: Community and Communication, co-edited with Andrew J. Mitchell (SUNY Press, 2009)

Articles

  • “Nietzsche and Self-Overcoming of Historical Consciousness,” Research in Phenomenology, vol. 52 (2022), Issue 3, 331-351.
  • "Big Sur, Self-Knowledge, and Poesis in Miller and Kerouac," Journalof the Pacific Association of the Continental Tradition, Vol. 3, 2020
  • "On the Philosophical Determination of Literature," Humanities 2018, 7(2)
  • "National Unity and Potlach: Genealogical Observations Pertaining to North America's Accursed Share," Comparative and Continental Philosophy Vol. 9, 2017, Issue 3, 218-229.
  • "Language, Animality, Sovereignty: On the Conditions of Community after the End of History," reprinted in Contemporary Literary Criticism, Vol. 355, ed. Lawrence J. Trudeau, Cengage, 2014, pp. 66-75.
  • "Wonder and The Elemental: Suffering Beyond Ethics," Comparative and Continental Philosophy, Vol. 5, No. 1., May 2013, 9-18
  • "Sacred Violence and the Death of God: Bataille's Lucid Fanaticism," in Philosophy Today, vol. 56:2, May 2012.
  • "No More Beautiful Days: Situating Agamben's Coming Community," Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy, Fall 2011.
  • "Language, Animality, Sovereignty: On the Conditions of Community after the End of History," in theory@buffalo, Spring 2010.
  • "Solitude, Violation, Alterity: Juan Rulfo's Wastelands," SubStance, vol. 38, no. 2, 2009 (Issue 119).
  • "The Contestation of Community," in The Obsessions of Georges Bataille: Community and Communication (SUNY Press, 2009).
  • "Fragments of the Philosophy of History," Idealistic Studies, 2008.
  • "Genealogy, History, and the Work of Fiction," in Styles of Piety: Practicing Philosophy after the Death of God, ed. S. Clark Buckner and Matthew Statler (Fordham University Press, 2006)
  • "The Expiation of Authority: Towards a Genealogy of Community," Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy, vol. 10, no. 1, 2005.
  • "On the Lineage of Oblivion: Heidegger, Blanchot, and the Fragmentation of Truth," Research in Phenomenology, 2005
  • "Before the Subject: Rereading Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy," Journal of Nietzsche Studies, Spring 2003.
  • "Crossing the Line: Heidegger, Blanchot, and the Lineage of Nihilism," Heidegger Conference Proceedings, 2002
  • "Bearing the Writing of the Subject," Parallax 2002 (On Kant's Critique of Judgment)
  • "The Repetition of Eternal Return, or the Disastrous Step: From Deleuze to Blanchot," Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy, 2001.
  • "Concealing Difference: Derrida and Heidegger's Thinking of Becoming," Research in Phenomenology, 1999.

Translation

  • Jean-Luc Nancy, The Confronted Community, in The Obsessions of Georges Bataille
  • Marc F. Meurice, An Alteration of the Sense of His Blood, in The Obsessions of Georges Bataille

Book Reviews

  • "Caring for Indifference: A Review of Charles E. Scott's Living with Indifference," in Research Phenomenology, Vol. 38, No.1, 2008.

Book Project

  • Towards a Genealogy of Community, a treatmet of the issue of community in contemporary continental discourse with special attention to the way this issue exhibits different and conflicting lineages, problems, and conceptions of philosophy.

  • Introduction to Philosophy
  • Philosophical Inquiry
  • Honors Critical Thinking Seminar
  • Contemporary Moral Issues
  • Classics of Western Philosophy
  • Philosophical Reading and Analysis
  • Introduction to Continental Philosophy
  • Existentialism
  • Philosophy through Literature
  • Advanced Studies in the History of Philosophy (Seminars on Hegel, Nietzsche, Bataille, Levinas, Merleau-Ponty))
  • Philosophy of Language
  • Cognitive Phenomenology
  • Professional Ethics
  • Philosophy of Art
  • Contemporary Latin American Philosophy
  • Senior Seminar (Community, Interpretation of Nietzsche, Deconstruction, Greek Tragedy and Philosophy)
  • Contemporary Latin American Philosophy

  • Chair, Department of Philosophy and Modern Languages (June 2010-present)
  • Organizer of Philosophy Colloquia Series (June 2010-present)
  • CAHSS Budget and Plannin Committee (Fall 2016-Spring 2018)
  • University RSCA Policy Committee (Fall 2015-Spring 2017, chair, AY 16-17)
  • Chair of CAHSS Chairs Council (Fall 2013-Spring 2014)