Derrida's Reading Research Articles

Justice's Last Word: Derrida's Post-Scriptum to Force of Law

This article considers Derrida's reading of Walter Benjamin's ‘Critique of Violence’ in ‘Force of Law’ with particular reference to the claims Derrida makes in his controversial ‘Post-Scriptum’. The article focuses in particular on Derrida's claim – a claim situated within the context of a discourse on the ‘final solution’ – that the ‘Critique of Violence’ is too Heideggerian. This claim is explored in the article mainly through reading Heidegger's ‘Anaximander's Saying’ with the purpose of showing some affinities between his and Benjamin's notions of justice and also with respect to the importance both thinkers bestow on the purity of the name. Particular attention is paid to the notion of ‘divine violence’ and its ‘complicity’ with the ‘worst’ also in relation to the questions of the witness and the animal in Benjamin and Heidegger. The article insists on the importance of the theme of the singular witness in the thinking of justice and divine violence and opens up possible avenues for exploring Derrida's relation to Benjamin.

Sovereignty as its Own Question: Derrida's Rogues

This paper attempts to provide, through a reading of Derrida's Rogues, an account of the political phenomenon where regimes of sovereignty are resisted in the name of the very values — freedom, democracy and human rights, for example — they purport to stand for. To Derrida, sovereignty must simultaneously conform to a logic of both self-identity and of unconditionality. However, the unconditionality that makes sovereignty possible will always threaten and exceed it, something that other accounts like Agamben's try implicitly to deny. In the end, for Derrida, our present political challenge is to recognize, and even affirm, the way the unconditionality of sovereignty is turned against itself. Sovereignty, then, is most effectively dealt with not by imagining a world in which it will no longer occur, nor by simple opposition, but by committing to the very logic of sovereignty itself.

Decrypting ‘the Christian Thinking of the Flesh, Tacitly, the Caress, in a Word, the Christian Body’ in Le Toucher—Jean-Luc Nancy

This article responds to the question of the ‘implicit and presupposed theological turn of phenomenology’ by providing a close reading of Jacques Derrida’s Le Toucher—Jean-Luc Nancy (2000 French/2005 English translation), particularly concerning what Derrida alludes to as ‘the Christian thinking of the flesh’ in the French phenomenological tradition post-Husserl. In reading Derrida’s own text, the article identifies and then performs a ‘cryptonomy’ of references to the ‘Christian body,’ and of the ‘return of religion.’ The article also focuses on the more recent writings of Jean-Luc Nancy, especially Corpus (2000 French), concerning the body and its relationship to the concept of corporality (Leiblichkeit) from Husserl’s Ideas II.

“Donner À Lire”: Unreadable Narratives

“Donner À Lire”: Unreadable Narratives

When was 9/11? Philosophy and the terror of futurity

This article offers a close reading of Derrida's response to the events of 11 September 2001, in the interview he conducted immediately afterwards with Giovanna Borradori in the text Philosophy in a Time of Terror (2003). I argue that this text is significantly different from previous philosophical responses to horrific political events (such as those by Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno and Hannah Arendt) insofar as it invites us to contest radically the assumption that philosophy's role is to envision and to realize the `good'. Instead, Derrida's response provokes us to acknowledge that philosophy's role was only ever to criticize itself, that this is the absolute limit of what philosophy can or should do, and that this work is both genuinely risky and crucially important, because in undertaking a critique of itself philosophy intervenes for democracy, without rules or guarantees, in the very determinations that are the material of political life.

Psyche: Inventions of the Other, Volume II (review)

Reviewed by: Psyche: Inventions of the Other, Volume II Tarek R. Dika Jacques Derrida. Psyche: Inventions of the Other, Volume II. Ed. Peggy Kamuf, and Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2008. x + 352 pages. This second of two volumes re-traces some of Derrida’s most celebrated late essays and interventions on a wide variety of issues, ranging from negative theology to Heideggerian phenomenology, architecture, literature, and politics, maintaining throughout that remarkable depth and subtlety that has characterized Derrida’s mode and manner ever since the early days of what has come to be called “deconstruction” shook the European and American philosophical scene. Like its precursor, this volume brings together a number of previously translated essays as well as a few new or revised translations, [End Page 1194] namely, “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials,” “Geschlecht I: Sexual Difference, Ontological Difference,” “Heidegger’s Hand (Geschlecht II),” and “Interpretations at War: Kant, the Jew, the German.” Taken together, the two essays on Heidegger form a meticulously argued and dense meditation on the overall structure of the basic conceptual arrangements and commitments made throughout Heidegger’s oeuvre. The first essay (“Geschlecht I”), focusing primarily on Sein und Zeit (1927) and the Marburg lecture course given shortly thereafter (Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Logik im Ausgang von Leibniz; Gesamtausgabe 26), addresses problems surrounding what Heidegger understood as the ontological “neutralization” and/or “neutrality” of the term Dasein prior to every ethical, anthropological, biological, or metaphysical predetermination “so as to keep nothing but a relation to itself, a bare relation to the Being of its being ” or “the naked trait of this relation to self” (11). The essay is devoted to re-examining the logic and possibility of a “neutrality” (or, perhaps, “minimalism”) that seeks to describe what is “proper” to the essence or Being of Dasein prior to the factual concretions and determinations into which it is “thrown,” determinations which, despite their not belonging to the essence of Dasein as such, nevertheless are not merely negative, external, or accidental predicates that come to characterize or determine it from the outside, as it were. On the contrary, factual concretion or empirical determination belongs fundamentally to Dasein as one of its essential possibilities, and there neither is nor can be Dasein without the possibility and actuality of such concretion (and the “dispersion,” “multiplication,” or “dissemination” such a possibility necessitates). One might say that factual concretion belongs essentially to Dasein (as a possibility that is always already actual) without being essential or defining it essentially. There is much to be said, Derrida remarks, about the difficulties this logic of the “without” engenders. If Dasein, despite the factual or ontic concretions and categories that are its essential possibilities without characterizing or defining it essentially, is a fundamentally “neutral” being (i.e., has this “neutrality” as an existential structure), this requires that our proper phenomenological description “neutralize” those concretions so as to gain access to, precisely, the propriety concealed by those very determinations. (One can appreciate, I hope, how incredibly delicate this logic really is.) It is here that the question regarding the “sexlessness” (Geschlechtslosigkeit) of Dasein arises: Heidegger, Derrida notes, seems to be especially concerned with determining this “neutrality” as, first and foremost, one that is fundamentally “neuter” or, perhaps, “indifferent” as regards sexuality or the binarity that constitutes sexual difference; Dasein is not reducible to human being, consciousness (or unconsciousness), the ego, the subject, the individual, or even the animal rationale—these are precisely the sort of predeterminations that are to be neutralized by a proper phenomenologico-ontological investigation. It seems, then, that there should be no uneasiness regarding its irreducibility to sexual binarity; it would seem to carry no special problem as regards Dasein, its neutrality, and the phenomenological procedure that neutralizes such predeterminations. Nevertheless, [End Page 1195] as Derrida reads the Marburg lectures—where Heidegger “more patiently qualified, explained, and evaluated” the term Dasein—he notices that, amongst the factual concretions that Heidegger seems most concerned to neutralize, sexual difference “holds a privilege and seems to belong in the first place . . . to that ‘factual concretion’ that the analytic of Dasein should begin by neutralizing” (12–13). Hence there is a kind of precipitation or acceleration...

Pulsations of Respect, or Winged Impossibility: Literature with Deconstruction

This tribute to Jacques Derrida takes in the sweep of his orchestration of literature with philosophy, as two “counterposed moments” of his interrogation of the working of language and thought. Focusing especially on his reading of Mallarmé, which distills the philosophical resonance of discourse that identifies itself as literary, and on Specters of Marx , which displays the political resonance of deconstruction, Sussman also turns to Derrida's reading of Blanchot as a figure who resumes the tension between the literary and the philosophical but who “inscribes life, in all its impossible conditions.”

Spectral Gatherings: Derrida, Celan, and the Covenant of the Word

Taking as its point of departure Derrida's essay “Shibboleth: For Paul Celan,” this article is concerned with the relation between the poetic discourse of several Celan lyrics and the problematic of circumcision—as religious operation, wound, inscription, linguistic structure—foregrounded in Derrida's reading, and thus on the relation between the event of Celan's lyric, the critical language with which Derrida and other readers engage it, and the discourse of Jewish identity. Also crucial is the relation to Kafka, since the lyric principally under investigation here, Celan's “Einem, der vor der Tür stand,” alludes to Kafka's parable “Before the Law.”

At the same time

The essay on Husserl's phenomenology of touch in Derrida's recent On Touching-Jean-Luc Nancy represents his only substantial re-engagement with Husserlian phenomenology to be published following the series of texts dating from the period marked by his Memoire of 1955 through to the essay 'Form and Meaning' included in Margins (1972). The essay, devoted to some key sections of Husserl's Ideas II, appears to break new ground in Derrida's readings of Husserl, but in fact demonstrates a profound continuity with his earlier readings. In fact, I argue that this continuity is in a part an effect of Derrida's ongoing commitment to the 'methodology' of deconstruction. I show how this commitment leads Derrida to conflate three separate distinctions within Husserl's discussion, a conflation that obliges Derrida to misread the letter of Husserl's text, and which, in turn, blinds him to a certain radical potentiality within Husserl's phenomenology of sensibility.

Untread and Untried: Nietzsche Reads Derridemocracy

Exploiting puns that reveal suggestive conceptual connections, this article incorporates a reading of Derrida on literature and democracy in a Derridean reading of Nietzsche, that antidemocrat, who offers a link by which to explore some of Derrida's more concealed utterances on the related subjects of futurity, political formations, the will to fiction, and acts of promising. Focusing on Beyond Good and Evil , riding the motif of testing , the question is taken up of a new species of philosopher, “the coming philosophers,” and the problem of the feminine in Nietzsche, which should be grafted onto it, as an opening onto the “to come.”

The critical turn in feminist bioethics: The case of heart transplantation

Given previously successful interventions that already have shaken up the convention, it is puzzling that the feminist critique of bioethics should be slow to embrace the exciting new developments that have emerged in philosophy and critical cultural studies over the last fifteen years or so. Both in the arenas of poststructuralism and postmodernism and in the powerful revival of phenomenological thought, in which the stress on embodiment is highly appropriate to bioethics, there is much that might augment the adequacy of our approach. Many of these resources have been developed productively by feminist thinkers to reflect not simply the differential lived experience of women, but also to mobilize a specifically feminist slant to theory itself. The encouragement to read Derrida, Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, or Deleuze results not in a turn back to the masculinist masters, but to a fuller appreciation of just how distinctive a feminist reworking can be. The most exciting feminist theorists are less concerned with an “authentic” representation of an existing oeuvre than in showing how it can be extended, distorted if necessary, and applied to areas far beyond its originally intended scope. In turning to the problem of heart transplantation, I hope to demonstrate such a move at work in a specific material context.

THE SERMON ON MOUNT MORIAH: FAITH AND THE SECRET IN THE GIFT OF DEATH

This essay is an investigation of three attempts to think faith. I find my starting place in Jacques Derrida's The Gift of Death,1 one of the most important treatments of Christianity in Derrida's later thought, which was increasingly insistent in its engagement with religious questions up until his death in 2004. This reading of The Gift of Death will focus particularly on the question of secrecy and its relationship with faith, leading necessarily to an account of Derrida's reading of two of his primary references in this text: the second essay of Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals2 and Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling.3 Rather than simply rendering a judgment on Derrida's reading, I will endeavor to read these texts together, extending (or expanding upon) Derrida's reading while questioning some of the positive formulations he makes in his own name – all the while remaining attentive to the gambles involved in thinking faith.

Différantial Atopologies, Mathematical and Ethico-Political: Light, Space, and Alterity in Derrida

Taking as its point of departure the question of light vis-à-vis the question of being in Derrida's work, this article discusses Derrida's radical conceptions of khoral (a)spatiality and alterity, by linking his first book on Edmund Husserl's “The Origin of Geometry” and his early critique of Emmanuel Levinas to his exploration of the ethico-political problematics, in part, again, via Levinas, in his latest works. The article also considers Derrida's reading of Kafka in “Before the Law,” decisive for his analysis of the problematics in question and for our understanding of the relationships between “geometry and democracy.” These relationships, the article argues, are an essential concern of much of Derrida's work and of our culture, from the pre-Socratics on.

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.

To Do Justice to "Rousseau," Irreducibly

The essay reviews features of Derrida's reading of Rousseau in De la grammatologie. It asks in what sense Derrida does justice to "Rousseau." It is a matter cutting away, of découpage, to reach what is "irreducibly proper," which consists, Derrida demonstrates, in a blind spot. A blindness to the paradoxical "logic" of supplementarity insists across Rousseau's oeuvre no less than through his "life." How can a blind spot be what is most proper? At once it belongs and does not belong to the author's signed work; le supplément is properly intended by his discourse, but in order to become legible this intention has to deviate through a point it cannot intend. This necessary deviation is a condition both of possibility of proper meaning and of its impossibility as proper. To do justice by undoing a text around its blind spot is to respond to this articulation of possibility with impossibility. The essay concludes by taking up Derrida's phrase "The Age of 'Rousseau'" to ask after "The Age of 'Derrida'" now unfolding in the blind spot of its history.

Inheriting Enlightenment, or Keeping Faith with Reason in Derrida

This essay addresses Derrida's relation to the eighteenth century by examining the legacy and future of the Enlightenment as the renewed effort to think religion in deconstruction. By focusing on Derrida's reading of faith and reason as both heterogeneous and inseparable, the essay elaborates how Derrida seeks to understand the combat of religions today in the spirit of Enlightenment without relying solely on the notion of practice of critique as demystification. Such a deconstructive rethinking of a critique of religion also requires Derrida to question the notion of responsibility characterized in the Enlightenment as an ethics and politics of public discourse or communicability.

Deconstruction Revisited

Throughout the early 1990s, theoretical works in management studies citing the influence of the philosophy of Jacques Derrida were finding publication in some of the major North American academic business journals. But just as this sort of theoretical work began to appear more regularly, it quickly disappeared. This article proposes that business academics need to read Derrida primarily as an ethical theorist. By going deeper into his work, researchers must give up on the tendency to take from Derrida's philosophy something that Derrida claimed cannot exist: a deconstructive methodology. Instead, researchers will find a new and vital philosophical approach that brings questions of ethics and responsibility to the forefront of management thought. To illustrate the theoretical potential in revisiting Derrida, this article engages in a critical analysis of stakeholder theory and transaction cost economics to see what new insights the philosophy of Derrida might yield for management researchers who give deconstruction a second chance.

Pasajes: el pensamiento como puesta-en-camino Freud, Heidegger, Derrida

This article carries out a parallel reading of Derrida’s 1968 lecture “La Differance”, Heidegger’s Unterwegs zur Sprache , and the Freudian concept of Umweg , which is already formulated in the Traumdeutung . Derridian differance inherits a double affiliation: on the one hand, to the Freudian concepts of delay and differing which are characteristic of the psychic apparatus - it is this value of Umweg or diverted path that Freud employs to indicate the relations existing between the reality principle and the pleasure principle; on the other hand, to the Heideggerian concepts of the destining and destiny of Being. In this crossroads we find the keys to understanding the whole reach of the movement of destination in Derrida, as well as the possibility of a thought of Being in differance .

Untimely Agitations: Derrida, Klein and Hardt & Negri on the Idea of Anti‐Capitalism

The article is an attempt to interrogate the idea of anti‐capitalist politics in the light Rosa Luxemberg's notion of radical autonomism. My argument is that Luxemberg's hesitation before the Leninist demand for the strategic appropriation of political difference, gestures towards an idea of “the untimely” which is revived in the work of Naomi Klein and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. The essence of this idea is that the media‐techno‐scientific organization of capitalism has given rise to unexpected forms of resistance and communication, and that these provide the basis of a new anti‐capitalist politics. In the concluding section of the paper I will present the difference between Klein and Hardt and Negri's versions of anti‐capitalism through a reading of Derrida's Spectres of Marx. I will suggest that if we take the “untimeliness of the untimely” seriously, then it is Klein's gesture of welcome to the different forms of political activism that arise from the global organization of capital, which is closer to the spirit of Luxemberg's anti‐Leninism.

Classics and the Uses of Reception (review)

Reviewed by: Classics and the Uses of Reception Philip Hardie Classics and the Uses of Reception. Edited by Charles Martindale and Richard F. Thomas. Pp. xiii + 335. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. Hb. £60, pb. £19.99. This, the first in a new series devoted to 'Classical Receptions', presents a varied array of approaches and topics within the ever-expanding industry of reception studies as practised in Classics departments in Britain and North America. The two editors are well known for their contributions in the field: Charles Martindale both for a series of invaluable single-authored and edited volumes on what used to be called the 'influence' of classical authors on later European literatures, and, after his turn to theory, for Redeeming the Text (1993), a radical and [End Page 240] widely influential manifesto that proclaimed the necessity of reception theory for an understanding of how ancient (or any) texts are read: Rezeptionsgeschichte is not something separate from our reading of the ancient texts, or, in what has become something of a mantra, 'meaning is always realized at the point of reception'. Richard Thomas has used reception history rather differently, in the polemical and essentializing project of Virgil and the Augustan Reception (2001), a learned and fascinating study arguing that a monolithic pro-Augustan (and for Thomas false) reading of the Aeneid is the result of something like a conspiracy on the part of the major players in the history of the poem's reception. The dominant voice of the volume is very much Bristol, the institution of eight of the twenty-three contributors (and home to the very active Institute of Greece, Rome, and the Classical Tradition), with Cambridge as the second most important presence (counting both current and former staff and students). Most of the contributors were trained as classicists, and there is an implicit question as to the importance of classical reception studies for non-classicists. Do others take us seriously? Does anyone else really care? Classicists' own enthusiasm for reception studies clearly has something to do with the struggle for survival in an alarmingly presentist world. In his 'Introduction' Martindale bluntly exposes another aspect of the classicist's anxiety when he proposes: 'The principle [for the successful practiceof classical reception studies] needs to be this: research on, say, the Victorians must be credible to Victorianists as well as classicists.' Encouragingly, a number of recent reception projects have teams made up of both classicists and non-classicists, although Martindale's dream of a time when 'classics could again have a leading role among the humanities' is perhaps unlikely to be realized. Martindale views 'credibility' above all in terms of a willingness to theorize reception; at least as important is a competent familiarity with the scholarship on the later period. Some of the best essays in the volume wear their theory lightly, illuminating aspects of the history of reception while remaining fully alert to the dialectical and negotiable processes of what is involved in writing that history. After an Introduction in which Martindale revisits the issues of his 1993 book in the light of developments in the intervening decade, followed by a 'Provocation' by William Batstone (a personal reflection on some of the main theorists invoked by the kind of reception studies exemplified here), the body of the volume is divided into two sections, 'Reception in theory' and 'Studies in reception'. In the first section Kenneth Haynes offers a technical intervention in the hermeneutics of [End Page 241] Gadamer and Habermas. Derrida has been important for the exorcism of older positivisms from studies of 'influence'; Miriam Leonard uses Derrida's reading of (Hegel's reading of) Sophocles' Antigone to raise awareness of the historical conditioning of influential approaches to the understanding of the classical past, as exemplified in Nicole Loraux's exposure of the occluded politics in the late great Jean-Pierre Vernant's historical anthropology of ancient Greece. Leonard's aim overlaps with that of James Porter (in the second section), who reveals how ideas going back to the Enlightenment condition the cultural theory of Foucault, a figure as influential in Classics as in other disciplines. Katie Fleming contemplates the politics involved in what was both an embarrassment and...