Arthur Willemse (A.A.)
Since 2019 I teach in the Foundations and Methods of Law-group of the Maastricht Law Faculty. My book on Agamben and Derrida, The Motif of the Messianic, appeared in 2017. It was reviewed in Political Theology (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1462317X.2019.1676952), Reviews in Religion & Theology (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/rirt.13761) and The Heythrop Journal (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/heyj.13763?af=R).
My research is structured along two lines: (1) the significance of the other for concepts of law, justice, and judgement in contemporary European philosophy (mainly in Benjamin, Levinas, Derrida, Rose, and Agamben); (2) the ways in which the law attains existential and ontological significance in modern European literature (mainly Gogol, Dostojevski, Kafka, and Krásznahorkai. Currently, I am setting up a new line of research on Democracy and Nihilism.
I teach and coordinate the UHasselt courses in Legal Philosophy and Logics. I also co-coordinate (with Agustín Parise) the MaRBLe-course Law in Historical Fiction. As a tutor I teach on various courses within the European Law School.
My main academic expertise is in contemporary European philosophy, legal philosophy, political and philosophical theology, and literature.
I studied Law and Philosophy at the Radboud University Nijmege, before writing my doctoral thesis at the University of Sussex. At Sussex, I worked as a Philosophy tutor from 2011 to 2016.
