Deconstructive Thinking Research Articles

Ethical Community as More than Human: Food Animals and Aporetic Decision

Jacques Derrida made many provocative suggestions about our relationships with other animals in the few years before he passed away in 2004. A question that he did not pursue very far is one that I would want to ask him forever: What is your final position on vegetarianism? One of Derrida’s enduring legacies is his assertion of the ethical imperative that we explore “eating well” or “determining the best, most respectful, most grateful and also most giving way of relating to the other and of relating the other to the self” (1995: 281-82). The urgent context of this imperative is the factory farm, which as Derrida argued, is the site of an unprecedented assertion of human biopower over other animals, and which buttresses a particularly imperious form of human subjectivity in theprocess.1 However, to the disappointment of theorists from David Wood to Paola Cavalieri, Derrida refrained from endorsing vegetarianism as a means of eating well. His reticence is no doubt due to his wariness of ethical programs which as Cary Wolfe has argued “reduce[] ethics to the very antithesis of ethics by reducing the aporia of judgment in which the possibility of justice resides to the mechanical unfolding of a positivist calculation” (2003: 69). While it is crucial to keep such reductions in mind, I posit that Derrida was overhasty in his rejection of vegetarianism. I take as my central provocationMatthew Calarco’s conclusion that Derrida’s reticence to embrace vegetarianism is not what matters most. As he puts it,Derrida is not our pastor or physician, he should not serve as our guide to eatingwell. If Derrida is hesitant to openly declare that, for those who live incontemporary western, urban societies, vegetarianism is generally a morerespectful way of relating to animals than meat eating is, then we should proceedwithout him. (2004: 197). Instead, Calarco argues for continuing Derrida’s work in the mode of countersignature—following Derrida according to the spirit of his work and not its letter, which often implies a certain not-following. In Calarco’s words, to approach Derrida’s work in countersignaure is “to think through the disjunction of deconstruction and vegetarianism in order to bring deconstructive thinking to bear on the undisclosed anthropocentric and carnophallogocentric limits of the dominant discourses in animal ethics and vegetarianism” (ibid.).2 In other words, if vegetarianism seems too ethically reductive sometimes, there is no need to throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater, as Derrida perhaps did in this particular instance. I say this is with all due respect of the fact that he so rarely did throw the baby out with the bathwater. Instead, maybe we can think vegetarianism otherwise, in ways that would hold more water—with Derrida, with ourselves and with other people who aim to be as thoughtful as possible about ethics.

Derrida's Worldly Responsibility: The Opening between “Faith” and the “Sacred”

AbstractThis article will theorize how Derrida's deconstruction signifies a fundamental ontological alterity. We will examine the use of both the tropes of “sacred” and “faith” as tropes to express this possibility. We will articulate how deconstruction, as a development of phenomenology, provides a theoretical nexus where the alterity of things and persons may be thought. We will arrive at the paradoxical formulation of “ontological alterity” as a key moment in deconstructive thinking. Essentially we will argue that deconstruction offers the resources to think the relation between other person and things in the world as motivated by a firm radicalization of Heideggerean worldliness and Levinasian alterity.

This Auto-bio-graphical Animal That I Am

Summary This article is a critical response to Etienne Terblanche's article entitled “That ‘Incredible Unanimal/Mankind’: Jacques Derrida, E.E. Cummings and a Grasshopper” (2004), in which he argues that Jacques Derrida's deconstructive writing, unlike that of his modernist counterpart, E.E. Cummings, fails as a “de-scriptive” strategy and therefore cannot “render an adequate and dynamic description of an actual animal”. I accept Terblanche's critique of the kind of postmodernist thinking that remains lost in the funhouse of language, but I shall argue that deconstructive thinking does not fit this profile. Rather, by means of an alternative logic nicknamed, inter alia, “the plural logic of the aporia”, Derrida persistently strove to escape the stagnant locking of horns that is the inevitable effect of artificially formed binary oppositions (such as modernism and postmodernism). Were Terblanche to read Derrida without the prejudices that associate his work with an unbridled postmodern “textualism”, he would find much to support and enrich his own thinking concerning this difficult, but critically important, mode of thinking. I propose, therefore, to challenge his adversarial stance towards Derrida's style of de-scription by showing that it is based on a crucial misunderstanding of both Derrida's ontological commitments and the precise subject of his de-scriptive essay; namely “this auto-bio-graphical animal that I am”. Once these misunderstandings are remedied, I believe that Terblanche could quite easily grant that Derrida's essay, as much as Cummings's poem, conforms to the de-scriptive necessity of a sensitive isomorphism between textual style and actual subject.

Derrida Goes to Nursery School: Deconstructing Young Children's Stories

In many ways, an engagement between Derrida and teacher research seems an unlikely affair. However, this article attempts to illustrate some of the benefits of a liaison between the two. Using data generated from practice in a nursery classroom, the article details some of the advantages when practices of deconstruction are incorporated into practitioner research. It exemplifies how deconstructive thinking can be put to work in confronting young boys' dependency on ‘superhero’ play. Additionally, the article demonstrates how deconstructive thinking seeks to dismantle habitual ways of thinking in order to create a space for thinking differently.

Deconstructions: a user's guide

Deconstructions: A User's Guide is a new and unusual kind of book. At once a reference work and a series of inventive essays opening up new directions for deconstruction, it is intended as an authoritative and indispensable guide. With a helpful introduction and specially commissioned essays by leading figures in the field, Deconstructions offers lucid and compelling accounts of deconstruction in relation to a wide range of topics and discourses. Subjects range from the obvious (feminism, technology, postcolonialism) to the less so (drugs, film, weaving). Backed up by an unusually detailed index, this User's Guide demonstrates the innumerable and altering contexts in which deconstructive thinking and practice are at work, both within and beyond the academy, both within and beyond what is called 'the West'.

Double-Consciousness/Double Bind: Theoretical Issues in Twentieth Century Black Literature

Double-Consciousness/Double Bind: Theoretical Issues in Twentieth Century Black Literature. Sandra Adell. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994. This book commands the attention of all those interested in the intersection between African American literature and contemporary critical theory. Its significance lies in two different directions. First, it takes seriously the existence of a body of theoretical writing about literature by women and men of the African diaspora since Arma Julia Cooper's 1892 discussion of the reason why Uncle Tom's Cabin is so much greater than all other literary portrayals of African Americans in A Voice From the South. That is, Adell's account, unlike any other work I know by a theorist, takes seriously the work done by Cooper, Du Bois, Senghor, and Cesaire, as well as in more recent times Maya Angelou, Joanne Braxton, Filomina Steady, and Carole Boyce-Davis as work in theory, not merely occasional essays of no theoretical interest. It is clear that Adell admires greatly the work of literary theorists in the past, not because she sees this work coming together in a single to which she will now contribute a culminating position, but rather because she takes seriously the work that previous thinkers have done in articulating the intersection between historical methods of reading works of literature and African diaspora literatures. Second, this is one of only two books yet published in African American literary studies from an accurately argued, orthodoxly deconstructionist critical position--the other being Ronald Judy's considerably less penetrable (Dis)forming the American Canon. (1) It is significant that both of these books extend great attention to positioning themselves against the well known work of Henry Louis Gates, which, though often referred to as deconstructionist, has been eclectic and limited in its commitment to the implications of deconstructive thinking. And while other African Americanists have been broadly influenced by poststructuralist argument and terminology, only Adell and Judy have presented their work as suggesting the lost-term implications of deconstruction to African American literary studies. Adell is a committed deconstructionist reader who, arguing to African Americans from a particular philosophical perspective, addresses what she takes to be this perspective's implications for the future of literary theory and feminism. One of the key arguments Adell makes with regard to the history of theoretical writing about literature is that black literary criticism and theory, like literary criticism and theory in general, relies on the Western philosophical tradition (3). She contends, citing a litany of famous and not so famous arguments, that the many critics who have accused each other of being too engaged with Western philosophy persistently suppress a simple fact: inasmuch as the notions of literature and criticism arise within the Euro-American academy, and indeed, inasmuch as the culture in which literature is part of the legacy of European intellectual domination, there is no way that literary theory could emerge from anything except some framework already present in Western thought. In this context she is insistent on tracing Du Bois' notion of double consciousness to its roots in Hegelian idealism, Senghor's negritude to a poor reading of Heideggerian authenticity, and the claims of the Black aesthetic in writers like Joyce Joyce or Norman Harris to an analysis of culture rooted in Western anthropology and linguistics. Adell does not trace these positions to Western ideas in order to trump these previous writers with a now adequately anti-Eurocentric theory; rather, she does so because she would like to see an end to the finger-pointing so that future theory can take what it needs from the West without embarrassment. Until this happens, theory that claims authentic blackness produces two problematic consequences: first, it always insists on an ideological program for further writing; and second, it circumvents the critique of Western theory from the inside which is present in deconstruction. …