Derrida's Reading Research Articles

Beyond the politics of positionality: deconstruction and feminism

The article commences with a discussion of Derrida's alleged anti-feminist position. We argue that, given his distinction between ‘reactive’ and ‘maverick’ feminism, this is an over-simplification. A correlation is drawn between the latter form of feminism and deconstruction by showing that both maintain a relation to the ‘beyond’ of the established logocentric system. The second section of the article deals with the placing of woman in Derrida's Spurs. It is shown that Derrida affirms Nietzsche's idea of the ‘Dionysiac woman’ who is, like the maverick feminist, not totally determined within the phallogocentric system. Woman, in Derrida's reading, becomes that which is not fully determinable. We conclude that this undecidability, rather than hindering its political activity, helps feminism in dealing with the diversities within the movement.

Hardly A/The Last Word

Looking back on the series of exchanges published here, I think that in some ways we have achieved the goals we set at the beginning. While we have indeed settled some disagreements and overcome some misconceptions, this is not the most interesting aspect of these discussions. The more important thing is that we have been able to talk about the very substantial and interesting disagreements which continue to separate us-in particular issues concerning what it is to read deconstructively and one appropriately reads a deconstructive text. I think that we have at least come to a clearer understanding of the nature of those disagreements, which center around what I have come to call the how do you get there from here?' question. If one takes this question seriously, then one will tend to understand the task of reading (the reading Derrida undertakes and the undertaking of reading Derrida) in certain ways. If one is not oriented in terms of something like this question, then one will tend to conceive of the task of reading very differently. When I proposed these exchanges, I also had some very specific issues in mind. 1. I was concerned to defend the of my work in Strategies of Deconstruction against charges of bad faith and lack of raised by Lawlor and Kates. 2. In view of the fact that neither Len nor Josh found even one of my criticisms of Derrida to be justified, I wanted to pursue discussion of some of the specific issues my book raised. 3. Since both Lawlor and Kates, each in his own way, argued that my entire way of reading Derrida was fatally flawed, I wanted to investigate our different approaches to the texts in question and our different conceptions of the tasks of reading. With respect to these issues, I must say that I am pleased at well Strategies has stood up to their intense criticism. If I were to reissue Strategies today, I would certainly make some changes, but it would remain substantially the same book. The exchanges with Len Lawlor have, I think, been productive in casting light on the differences of approach and background assumptions that separate us. However, I don't think that the discussion of my first two issues have been similarly productive. To summarize: Len questioned the integrity of Strategies of Deconstruction in his review. I responded to these charges in some detail both in my initial response to his review and again in my SPEP paper. Other commitments kept Len from responding to my original response prior to SPEP, and HE did not discuss my defense of the of my work either in his SPEP paper, in the oral discussion following the SPEP papers, or in his letter of March 21, 1995. His SPEP paper suggests that he still maintains the charge when he writes that [Evans] still does not, or perhaps cannot or will not, recognize the most basic issue that animates Speech and Phenomena (cf. p. 186 above). In his review Len made it clear that he does not think that any of my criticisms of Derrida's work on Husserl hold any water. I argued in my SPEP paper that when he discussed specific examples with the aim of showing that I was in error, he got the Derrida wrong. Len has not responded to this argument. Indeed, I gather from his references to Strategies in his SPEP paper that counter argument on such issues is simply not called for, since according to him Strategies never attains the level from which something worthy of counter argument might be said. When I accepted HansDieter Gondek's characterization of the criticisms in Strategies as for the most past ad-hocrefutations, I attributed this character of the book to its rather restricted project: that of reading Derrida's readings of Husserl. Len, in contrast, interprets this to mean that Strategies pursues merely minutiae, a characterization that disqualifies everything I write as being inconsequential. I shall argue that this is simply wrong. My position is that if all, most, many, some, or even just one or two of my criticisms of Derrida's reading of Husserl (and Aristotle, and Saussure) are correct, then one has to reconsider the philosophical significance of Derrida's work at those points. …

Responsibility and Death

The crypto- or mysto-genealogy of responsibility is woven with the double and inextricably intertwined thread of the gift and of death: in short of the gift of death. Derrida, The Gift of Death Responsibility, like many words in Emmanuel Levinas's work, lends itself to being too easily read. It is, for Levinas, a profoundly enigmatic concept. This concept-again, like many in Levinas's work-possesses a genealogy and calls for being read accordingly. It possesses a genealogy that turns back upon itself, calls an initial reading into question, thereby calling for a reading that necessarily, yet impossibly, thinks together two otherwise contradictory moments. I would suggest that the genealogy of responsibility be read alongside the genealogy of death. Derrida's The Gift of Death will initially provide the framework for this reading. Despite the fact that the part of The Gift of Death that I am considering is overtly a reading of Jan Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, it is also, I would suggest, a supplement to Derrida's other readings of the work of Levinas. The Gift of Death begins with a reading of one of the Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History of the Czech philosopher Jan Patocka: Is Technological Civilization Decadent, and Why? The reading traces a genealogy of responsibility: demonic or orgiastic mystery, Platonic mystery, Christian mystery. Each conversion from one mystery to the next conserves something of what is interrupted. This logic of conservative rupture, Derrida suggests, resembles the economy of a sacrifice and sometimes reminds one of the economy of sublation [releve] or Aufhebung. In order to describe this double conversion, turns to incorporation (pfiveleni) and repression (potlaceni): Platonic mystery incorporates demonic or orgiastic mystery and Christian mystery represses Platonic mystery. This vocabulary indicates-if, as Derrida asks, meant to give these words the meanings that they possess in psychoanalytic discourse-that in the conversion from one mystery to another the first is not destroyed, but kept inside unconsciously, after effecting a topical displacement and a hierarchical subordination.1 This language also suggests-again, if these words were meant to be given the meanings that they possess in psychoanalytic discourse-that conversion amounts to a process of mourning, to keeping within oneself that whose death must be endured (DM 18/GD 9). Even if these words were not meant to have these meanings, nothing prevents one, Derrida suggests, from experimenting with a psychoanalytic reading, or at least a hermeneutics that takes psychoanalytic concepts corresponding to these words into account. This is especially true given that Derrida's reading concentrates on (or mystery), which cannot remain immune to the psychoanalytic ideas of incorporation and repression. At various moments in genealogy Derrida draws attention to structures in the work of Heidegger and Levinas that are to structures in the work of Patocka. In what follows I will not only remain attentive to the analogies mentioned by Derrida, but also suggest others. It is important to point out, however, that I am not suggesting that one can reconcile the work of Patocka with the work of either Heidegger or Levinas. When Derrida suggests that a structure in Patocka's work is analogous to a structure in Heidegger's work, he prefaces his remark by writing: wanting to neglect the essential differences (DM 23/GD 15). When I suggest that Derrida's reading of Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History is a supplement to Derrida's other readings of the work of Levinas, or when I suggest that there are certain structures in the work of Patockaa and Levinas, I (like Derrida) do it without wanting to neglect the essential differences. What is at stake in the genealogy of the conversion from one secrecy (or mystery) to another is the gift of death. …

The Future-To-Come

As something fateful, Being itself is inherently eschatological. Martin Heidegger, Early Greek Thinking, p. 18. In historiam, it is fall of thought into philosophy which gets under way. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, p. 27. . . there where a certain determined concept of comes to an end, precisely there historicity of begins. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 74. In a footnote to his introduction to Edmund Husserl's Origin of Geometry Derrida asks a question about character of history: is history, what is origin, about which we can say that we must understand them sometimes in one sense, sometimes in another? (p. 69). This division of into two quite different senses is, as Derrida's reading of Husserl makes clear, integral to Husserl's denunciation of historicism and question of truth. Later in his introduction Derrida demonstrates that these two senses of are revealed, in phenomenological project, to be unified in a radical sense. For both rely upon a prior delimitation of what Derrida will investigate under name of Husserl's division between a factical/empirical (which would be a vehicle for some ahistorical reason) and an ideal (which would be nothing other than Reason's own movement) is already effect of a certain decision or determination of character of historicity. What Husserl's inquiry into sense of uncovers is a historicity which would be radically anterior to these two senses-and would indeed be their prior condition. According to this reading, phenomenology would be an up of philosophy and all its other divisions (history/History; Being/sense; facticity/ideality). The phenomenological project is then, for Derrida, both a culmination and a radicalization of a Western metaphysics of presence. Phenomenology has as its task question of philosophy: how is it that philosophy as an inquiry into pure truth is possible? Insofar as Husserl is able to offer an answer, he works toward a historicity which is prior both to any factical historical event or any ideal teleology of meaning. But if idea of a more primordial origin, which would not be a merely factical or empirical origin, animates Husserl's inquiry, how does Derrida's work itself operate in relation to of truth? In this essay I want to argue that thought in two senses is not only a theme that Derrida finds in Husserlian phenomenology but is central to project of a deconstruction of Western Not only in his early work on Husserl, but throughout Derridean project, thought in a double sense is sustained-not just as one motif amongst others but as very possibility of deconstruction. Furthermore, I will argue, Derrida's understanding of philosophy as precludes, at same time that it enables, opening of philosophy which Derrida finds in Husserlian phenomenology. In fact, entire Derridean project of a deconstruction of Western metaphysics depends upon quite rigorously defined notions of philosophy, presence, truth, meaning and sense. By working through Derrida's reading of Husserl I hope to demonstrate positive limits of Derridean understanding of philosophy as an investigation into pure, or ideal, truth. What are two senses of which Derrida sees entailed by Husserlian radicalization of meaning? And why does this double sense tell us something about in general? I will begin with first sense: with a capital H or as in the History of Western metaphysics. This sense of can include both factical of world events as well as ideal philosophical of unfolding of truth; for both these senses depend upon, and must be set against historicity-a second sense of history that cannot be understood as either an empirical event or as an ideal teleology. …

Troubling Presence: Body, Sound and Space in Installation Art of the mid-1990s

Cet article examine l’art de l’installation au milieu des années quatre-vingt-dix. Il s’intéresse surtout aux projets de Maud Sulter, tout en discutant aussi des travaux de Sutapa Biswas, de Chila Kumari Burman, de Mona Hatoum, de Lubaina Himid, de Susan Hiller, de Cornelia Parker et de Tilda Swinton. L’idée directrice développe les inscriptions multiples dans l’art de l’installation de la présence et les implications complexes de la présence de l’artiste, des figures convoquées par ce dernier, ou même par les participants. L’intérêt ne consiste pas à simplement identifier la présence qui pourrait s’opposer simplement à l’absence, mais à considérer comment l’installation comme forme artistique remet en question et conteste la nature même de la présence. On demande souvent aux participants d’une installation d’entendre et d’écouter autant que de voir, de toucher, d’être touchés, de sentir et de se mouvoir dans des espaces et des temporalités différentes. Cette participation physique et sensorielle, de même que la capacité de l’installation à reconfigurer le temps et l’espace, ont été critiques dans le déploiement postcolonial de cette pratique, sensible aux identités instables et fluctuantes de la diaspora et aux questions d’histoire et de géographie. L’art de l’installation est aussi considéré à l’intérieur des débats actuels des théories culturelles, particulièrement aux glissements de la vision et de la visualité vers l’intérêt récent pour le corps et les sens. S’appuyant sur les écrits de Jacques Derrida, cet article conclut en proposant une nouvelle réflexion sur les rapports entre les sens, les croisements et les juxtapositions entre l’acte de voir et celui d’entendre.

Postmodernity and the ethics of care: Situating Bauman's social theory

This article is primarily concerned with Zygmunt Bauman's ‘adoption’ of Levinas's ethic of primordial responsibility, and his attempt to found a ‘sociological’ critique of postmodern ambivalence upon the erasure of the face and loss of moral proximity. I have argued that the reading of Levinas which Bauman presents in Modernity and the Holocaust and Postmodern Ethics is radically incompatible with the redemptive significance of the Levinasian commandment; and that consequently, his attempt to determine the cognitive and aesthetic forms involved in the adiaphorising trend of postmodern societies is unable to salvage the ethical relation ('my’ responsibility to ‘your’ difference, otherness) from its own comprehensive/totalising necessity. I have also suggested that Derrida's reading of Totality and Infinity (in ‘Violence and Metaphysics'), discloses a certain ‘provocation’ in Levinas's writing; one which gestures towards a conception of ‘the ethical’ as an unforeseen possibility deployed within the resources of social identity. Thus, the idea of ‘situating’ Bauman's thought refers to what I consider to be his ambiguous position with regard to the ‘reflective’ project of a critical theory (the pursuit of a ‘Postmetaphycsical’ conception of the law, difference and ethical judgement), and the transcendent necessity of the Levinasian commandment (the non‐coercive authority of the face). Ultimately, it is this ambiguity which structures Bauman's writing of the ‘postmodern condition’. For having described the overwhelming powers of cognitive and aesthetic ‘heteronomy’ in the postmodern world, his only recourse is to a ‘politics of distant consequences’ in which the absolute difference of the face would have its originary demand intensified and retransmitted. Such a programmatic demand, I have argued, is radically at odds with an ‘ethical’ reception of racial, sexual or cultural ‘otherness’.

Letter to Lawlor

June 14, 1995 Dear Len, I appreciate your attempt, your letter of March 21, 1995, to shift emphasis to positive philosophical contribution of Derrida's texts. And I appreciate fact that your approach is not simply to turn away from Husserl's text and Derrida's reading of it, since you find positive contribution arising out of reading. This is what Strategies of Deconstruction, whatever its flaws, was about-the way Derrida tries to reach certain conclusions on basis of his reading of Husserl. So I am happy to follow your suggestion that we try once again to approach Derrida's contribution via discussion of Husserl's account of retention, and that order to avoid getting bogged down a dispute about whether Husserl contradicts himself, we look at what you call Husserl's definition of retention. I have some difficulty with your line of thought here, so let me approach things step by step. As we all recognize, Husserl explicitly makes use of two different senses of According to one, retention is not perception; according to other, retention is perception. In Strategies I suggested that we can keep things clear by use of subscripts. Thus: 1. Retention is not perception,. 2. Retention is perception2. If we left out subscripts, these sentences would at least appear to contradict one another, and when he shifts from one to other Husserl is careful to write, Here, therefore, an entirely different concept of perception is question (Hue X, 41/43). Retention is perception one while it is not perception another sense. Thus, if there is something perplexing or confusing here, we have to find it qualified version, which its formulation, at least, no longer even borders on being contradictory, as you put it, since retention is not being characterized both as perception and non-perception, not, that is, same of perception, as your formulation suggests. The version without subscripts appears to be contradictory (as you insist), but may not be, while version with subscripts appears not to be contradictory (as I insist), but may turn out to be. In each case, further inquiry is required. Neither of us can rest his case at this point. The same issue appears later your letter, when after quoting my SPEP paper you write the wording (secondary memory `is not opposed, but is opposed' to retention) at least suggests something like a (203). But contradiction is not even suggested once one returns in one of `perception' and in another sense to what I wrote. It is only when qualification is left aside that things sound perplexing way you suggest. But perhaps I am missing crucial issue here, getting stuck on reading Husserl. There seems to be something like a philosophical principle about distinctions behind your approach: why does Husserl use same word? Since he uses same word, then, it seems, he himself sees some sort of relation between two uses (even though he distinguishes two senses). It seems to me that, general, different contexts of same word are not and cannot be irrelevant to one another; they cannot be completely separated from one another. (20243) There might be reason to be a bit skeptical here, since there can be a variety of reasons why same word might be used to express distinct senses. One might be historical background: earlier thought may have seen a relation we no longer feel required to acknowledge. Historical accident can play a role. On other hand, distinguished senses might indeed be intimately related to one another, perhaps intertwined some respects (and therefore entangled, contaminating one another?). While I am not sure about your principle stated with this universality, I suspect that it is generally true of important and subtle distinctions. …

Criticism and Dissent in the Middle Ages ed. by Rita Copeland

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER private reading might be as much ear-reading as eye-reading weakens her argument. I would not wish to make too much of this criticism, however, for the vast majority of Coleman's examples are unambiguous and taken en masse make an overwhelming case for the importance ofau­ rality in the late Middle Ages. This is a book that no one interested in the cultural context of late medieval poetry can afford to ignore. RICHARD FIRTH GREEN University of Western Ontario RITA COPELAND, ed. Criticism and Dissent in the Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp. xii, 332. $59.95. Here is a volume of excellence; a reviewer's first response might forgiv­ ably be jealousy of those invited to contribute. To an unusual extent these contributors share a common purpose-a desire to provide a mul­ tivocal account ofmedieval culture that breaks down period boundaries and shows the relevance to modern debates ofmedieval discourses oftex­ tuality and interpretation. Far from being monolithic, these discourses are "heterogeneous, conflicted and conflictually invested, even within their own established orders" (p. 1). So writes Rita Copeland in her in­ troduction, calling for a dismantling of "the binarism orthodoxy/dis­ sent" by means of a practice she calls, in quotes, "dissenting reading" (p. 5). Copeland then provides a sustained example of such reading: Prudentius's account ofthe martyrdom ofthe grammarian Cassian in re­ lation to William of Malmesbury's report of the death of Eriugena; and the focus of her reading is on the fault lines of cultural dislocation. Copeland's attention to violence yields place to Jody Enders's open­ ing essay, which argues uncompromisingly that the violence ofthe me­ dieval classroom stems from that ofmemory theory itself; torture is the ultimate mnemonic, over which are cast the fictions of beauty and cre­ ativity. Our own "hopeful belief" in nonviolence is just that, a neces­ sary social pretense. Enders's discourse serves to connect the classical, medieval, and modern as it ranges from Cicero to Artaud and Stanislavski; though I consider it finally unhistorical in its annihilation of the differences between medieval and modern classrooms and its disregard of educational change even within the last generation, it serves as a vigorous claim for the relevance of medieval practice. There 240 REVIEWS follows a superb essay by Marjorie Curry Woods, "Rape and the Pedagogical Rhetoric of Sexual Violence," which should be set reading for any student ofpsychoanalysisattempting to understand,say, Freud's gendered reading ofa male child's transition from child to adult. Woods explicates the use of three passages describing rape from authoritative works such as school texts in the later Middle Ages. What impresses this reader is her desire to understand, powerfully enacted in historicist close reading. Woods refuses to be reductive, reading Pamphilus as, in effect, an early picaresque novel in which-here Woods draws a paral­ lel with Carol Clover's work on horror movies-boys are forced to imag­ ine themselves as victims as well as the possessors ofpower. There is no elision of historical difference here as Woods insists: "This absolutely patriarchal tradition was neither simplistic nor psychologically crude, and while we may be repelled by its very success, it behooves us to un­ derstand what we can of its processes" (p. 74). After so strong a reading, Martin Irvine's essay on "Heloise and the Gendering ofthe Literate Subject" seems merely good and informative, especially on the manuscripts and the genre of the Senecan epistola. Though it begins by asserting that Heloise had to work with a literate subject that was encoded as masculine, it concludes that the correspon­ dence reveals this subject position to have been negotiable and provi­ sional. The essay might have done more to dramatize its problems with its own terms, but it remains a persuasive account of Heloise as dis­ senting writer. In the next essay, however, Michael Camille's "The Dissenting Image: A Postcard from Matthew Paris," the dissent is re­ ally Camille's-registered against Derrida's use of a postcard showing Matthew Paris's illustration of Socrates and Plato. Camille reads the image historically as the opposite of Derrida's reading (Derrida...

Response to Kates, "The Voice that Keeps Reading

Kates raises question reading: Strategies Deconstruction forces us to pose (again) question understanding or indeed reading work, or works-the labor-of deconstruction (Kates, Voice, 319). This means that we will have to do with the possibility reading this work, and possibility reading in this work [namely deconstruction]. As it turns out, it is latter possibility that seems to have priority, and this is thought to be source an intrinsic weakness Strategies-namely weakness its reading Speech and Phenomena. Of Evans' contribution to this topic is not wholly (ibid., 319). Here I am curious about of course. Why is of such a matter course that it is stated before anything substantive-critical or otherwise-has been said about Strategies? Is point that no contribution can be wholly controlled? This would seem to be a properly (if there is such a proper) deconstructive strategy to show, in attempt to give a controlled reading Speech and Phenomena, that reading is never wholly controlled, that Strategies actually shares lack control it wants to criticize in Speech and Phenomena with that work. This would be an important point, and it aims at what I take to be heart Strategies. Aside: Hans-Dieter Gondek, writing in Philosophische Rundschau, says that I for most part restrict myself to ad-hoc-refutations (Gondek, 176). This is a description I would by and large accept. As I note, Strategies is not book I set out to write, but precisely series flaws I claim to have found seemed to me to force me to concentrate on them, or at least to pass through them on way to more substantive issues (more on this later). Thus ad hoc character book. I think that this means that a large part task critic Strategies has to be to show that individual refutations aimed at Speech and Phenomena fail, are not controlled. I think that one real virtues Kates' review is that it takes on this task, focusing on a series individual claims made in Strategies. If this is point of course, then it, equally of course, presupposes cogency (even within inevitable lack being wholly controlled) Derrida's deconstructive labors. But this would not be a vicious presupposition, since reading demonstrating lack control in Strategies would itself be a support that presupposition. There is another dimension of course. Who is addressee? Who could read of in what should be proper manner, namely as a matter course? Who else but convinced Derridean? Who else would assume from outset that any book that sets out to criticize Derrida in terms the basic protocols philosophy (Kates, Voice, 318-this claim fails to do justice to Strategies, as I will suggest below) can be confidently assumed to be out control before discussion even begins? Anyone else will fail to take of in stride, preferring to wait and see. Which is what I will have to do here. But it turns out that there is more to claim. The problem seems to be that while Evans talks a lot about reading, in a book so engaged in question Derrida's reading, Evans never asks what in general reading is, what its protocols or ethics in fact are, or how reading is understood by Derrida himself. Instead, Evans assumes that we and he, reader and Derrida, all know what reading is that it is simply what Evans designates again and again under heading `critical reading' (e.g., xv, xvi-a standard reading apparently so self-evident as to bear no explicit defense or even definition. (Ibid., 319) This is source a lack control that exceeds lack a deconstructionist would expect in any text (including a deconstructionist text). It also raises a series questions. …

Distorting Phenomenology

Recently, in the correspondence which functions as the pretext for this session, Claude Evans accepts Hans-Dieter Gondek's characterization of the criticisms in Strategies of Deconstruction as hoc refutations. I also agree with this characterization, although I did not stress this in my Diacritics review of Evans's book. Given its ad hoc character, Strategies of Deconstruction contains only an aggregate of almost random arguments; it pursues merely minutiae. That Evans's correspondence with me pays attention only to my review's first and third sections-the first section concerns specific arguments on the role of language in Husserl, while the third contains arguments concerning Husserlian innertime consciousness; the second and fourth take up Derrida's more basic concerns in Speech and Phenomena and in deconstruction in general that Evans's correspondence focuses only on these specific arguments is further evidence that he still does not, or perhaps cannot or will not, recognize the most basic issue that animates Speech and Phenomena. In Strategies of Deconstruction, therefore, Evans, quite simply, fails to recognize what lies most on the surface of Speech and Phenomena. Moreover, he fails to take into account other texts, written by Derrida and other contemporaneous French philosophers, that could help one identify the issue. It is clear that, once having identified the issue, one can then attend with greater depth to the minute details. One then can one eliminate the ad hoc character of the discussion and, perhaps for the first time, genuinely engage the philosophical issues. So, what I would like to do today is first lay out the basic issue: the issue of passage or transition.' In other words, what Speech and Phenomena most basically concerns is the problem of mediation. Correlative to the basic issue, and perhaps this is all too obvious, is Derrida's attempt, like that of Deleuze for example, to reconceive the notion of difference. After explicating these two related issues-transition and difference-I would like to turn to the issue of language in Husserl, one of the issues upon which Evans so relentlessly focuses his microscopic powers. It is my contention that without understanding the issue of transition, it is impossible to understand Derrida's charge of logocentrism Husserl. Unless one has understood the basic issue that animates Derrida's reading of Husserl, it is impossible to defend philosophy from the charges Derrida levels in Speech and Phenomena; it is even impossible to do what Evans claims to be doing in Strategies of Deconstruction: defend Husserl's text against reading that distorts them (SD 179). We now have Derrida's first book on Husserl, his Memoire, his Le probleme de la genese dans la philsophie de Husserl. In the early Fifties, the time when Derrida was writing this book, the genetic issue was dominating the French appropriations of Husserl. Merleau-Ponty, Jean Hyppolite, Jean Cavailles, and Tran-Duc-Thao all turned to Husserl (among others) in order to understand genesis. Arising in this environment, Le probl*me de la genese is chronological study of the then available Husserl texts; in these texts, it examines, in particular, Husserl's descriptions of transitions or passages (cf. especially, p. 197). While Derrida's Memoire immediately provides the clue as to how to read Speech and Phenomena, it is, nevertheless, unfair to introduce it into this discussion because Evans did not have access to it when he was writing Strategies of Deconstruction. Yet, there is another text that was available to Evans that can provide just as much of clue to Derrida's project in the Sixties. This text is `Genesis and Structure' and Phenomenology collected in Writing and Difference. In Genesis and Structure, Derrida briefly reproduces his analyses from Le probleme de la genese, going from Husserl's earliest writings to his latest. Here, for Derrida, the issue is one of a wild genesis (une genese sauvage) which became more and more pervasive and seemed to accommodate itself less and less to phenomenological apriorism and to transcendental idealism (ED 232/157). …

Comme or the Last Word

An Afterword to the Evans/Kates/Lawlor Debate and Correspondence July, 1996 Joshua Kates At the end of these encounters it is customary to take stock of the situation, to give an account of where things have ended up. Recently the protocol for this has become more complicated. To be sure, it is still usual to summarize areas of agreement. disagreement, conclusions reached, etc. These valedictory gestures continue-in conformity with a version of philosophy in which its own limits and project are not in question. Another approach recently has also taken hold. At the end of interchanges where genuine communication seems doubtful, it has become common to raise the problem of discussion or dialogue itself. A discussion having failed to take place, one interrogates the conditions ofthe interchange as such. And precisely because philosophy's assumptions (about the possibility of dialogue, debate, consensus) are here in doubt, this style of afterword tends to focus on the problem of reading: have the discussants read one another, have they read the texts upon which each purports to comment, what in general can be expected from such reading. I think above all of Derrida's well-known afterword to his debate with Searle (Afterword: Toward an Ethic of Discussion), but such instances could be multiplied. Neither alternative appears suitable here, however. Certainly, it would be difficult to simply summarize what conclusions have been reached. Though everyone involved has proceeded in good faith, though Professor Evans initiated our correspondence precisely in order to find areas of agreement or minimally reach consensus on our differences, no one reading what is collected here would think this has been achieved. It is as if the parties from the first have moved in courses skewed to one another. More narrowly, I fear I have always found Professor Evans' reading of Derrida unconvincing, and even his interpretation of Husserl sometimes hasty. In general, Professor Evans prefers doctrines to questions. He multiplies citations in the hope of constructing the edifice of an author's thought. He sometimes fails, however, to suffciently scrutinize any single brick. In my most recent paper appearing here, The Problem of Bedeuten in Derrida and Husserl, I tried as best as I could to untangle and clarify one small yet decisive piece of this edifice. Though Professor Evans recognized the point at issue (and this I appreciate), he has simply multiplied his citations further. On my view, he continues not to recognize all the interpretive problems these pose-particularly those that concern Derrida. I will come to Professor Lawlor in a moment. Though a superficial interpretation would put us in agreement, here too I think there are differences that do not allow for consensus. In turn, the latter alternative is also not available. To question the possibility of our discussion, to focus on the protocols at issue-well, this is precisely where I began. From the initial review of Professor Evans' book, these questions, and perhaps these alone, have been the ones that interested me. All along I have wished to make reading a theme or what I would also call the pragmatic dimension of philosophical discourse. And this starting point, anticipating the limits of dialogue, may in part have accounted for these limits as well. If our discussion has been skewed, no common ground available, in part this may be because from the first these protocols have been in question. Such questions, then, are what make final agreement even between Professor Lawlor and myself impossible. In his essay published here, Distorting Phenomenology, Professor Lawlor claims that though Derrida's reading may be a distortion, this is legitimated by the philosophical problems that Derrida manages to raise. Surely, there is some irony in Lawlor's statement. Yet his essay has gone to great trouble to anchor Derrida's early work in the existing discourse of French philosophy at that time. …

Response to Lawlor, "Navigating a Passage

admits passing that Derrida is often, and concerning most crucial matters Husserl's thought, (Lawlor, Navigating, 3). do try to acknowledge what can be acknowledged. Do really admit, even in passing, that Derrida is correct about the most crucial matters Husserl's thought? The more interesting question would be whether admit that Derrida is correct at crucial junctures of his deconstruction. And when one looks at list of admissions, degree to which and sense which admit that Derrida is correct would require serious qualification a number of cases. even admits that Speech and Phenomena contains some arguments. Derrida argues, for instance, that Husserl's notion of absolute consciousness, being temporal, implies that there is no pre-expressive stratum of sense [126] (ibid., 4). don't get this. Absolute consciousness generally is not temporal for Husserl (as note at Strategies, 104). Derrida's own discussion does not really thematize notion of absolute consciousness. It is discussed a footnote (Derrida, SP, 84/94), but it is not systematically introduced at all. Yet, when one comes to conclusions of his book, one finds that he provides no reminder for his readers that these admissions have been made. He never reminds his readers of arguments' soundness; he never reminds his readers of how often Derrida says something true. Instead, conclusion leaves impression that Evans believes that and SP particular amount to nothing more than a executed parody of classical philosophical rigor [172-73]. The omission of such a reminder, an omission that moreover contradicts Evans's explicit intention to remain open to Derridean challenge [xviii], makes integrity of this book (ibid.; references are to Strategies of Deconstruction). Let's move backwards. never assert that deconstruction general is good, bad, or indifferent. Quite opposite, am explicitly open to possibility that other deconstructive texts do a better job than find Speech and Phenomena and Of Grammatology doing. also never assert-nor, think, do leave an impression-that Speech and Phenomena is a poorly executed parody of classical philosophical rigor. do make something of a big deal of considering Scanlon's (itself thoroughly tongue-in-cheek) suggestion that Speech and Phenomena is sophisticated parody. If critical results of my book stand, then think that my leaning over backward to consider possibility that Speech and Phenomena is a parody is sort of funny. One can reject that condition, of course. As for charge that never remind my readers of all sound arguments Derrida presents, first place, don't accept all of those arguments Lawlor mentions, as a look at Strategies will show. In second place, when summed up results of my study of Speech and Phenomena Conclusion, concentrated, with complete justice think, on Derrida's attempt at a radical of Husserl's phenomenology. Assuming, once again, that my criticisms of Derrida's readings, interpretations, and arguments, are cogent, news is what goes wrong, news is again and again (always assuming that am right) that Derrida's reading/argument/interpretation, when read carefully, fails to live up to its own standards and thus fails to establish its results. would find it difficult to imagine a reader who, at end of Strategies, thinks I don't know yet if Evans is right his claims, since haven't yet gone back to Husserl's and Derrida's texts to check out his claims, but even if he is right claims he makes reading of SP, can already assert that this is a book of questionable integrity. But think that it is what Lawlor is saying challenging integrity of my book. Defending Husserl first tries to defend Husserl against Derrida's charge of logocentrism (Lawlor, Navigating, 4). …

'The Light of God's Law': Violence and Metaphysics in the '50s Widescreen Biblical Epic

AbstractThe essay offers a reading of two episodes from widescreen biblical epics of the 1950s: Henry Koster's CinemaScope The Robe (Twentieth Century Fox, 1952), the story of the Roman centurion who played dice for Jesus' robe at the foot of the cross, and Cecil B. De Mille's VistaVision The Ten Commandments (Paramount, 1957). Widescreen technology was developed in response to a catastrophic postwar slump in cinema attendance. In this respect, it was extremely successful: by 1960, De Mille's film was top of Variety magazine's all-time grossing list. More important, however, is the fact that it transformed the very nature of the cinema image. This article reassesses the historical and theoretical significance of the '50s biblical epic, and argues not only that the metaphysics of presence it inscribed within the Hollywood frame has not been adequately theorised, but also that its transcendental values anticipate the challenge to poststructuralist thinking that has been gathering momentum in Jacques Derrida's readings of Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas.

The other voice: ethics and expression in Emmanuel Levinas

Emmanuel Levinas's Totality and Infinity (1961) is explicitly con cerned with the suppression of the voice of the Other by the synoptic totalizations of the voice of western philosophy. Levinas contests this emergence of Being and the systems of totality it indicates with the irruption of the face of the other, which signifies through contact and sensibility the presence of infinity within the human situation. Derrida's reading of this fundamental testing of western ontology rests on the accusation that western philosophy already has a term for this: empiricism. That is, Derrida exposes an alien voice within Levinas's exposure of the voice alienated from ontological formulations. In the later Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (1974) Levinas implic itly recognizes the truth of Derrida's demonstration of a residual con ceptualism, and shifts from the thematization of infinite exteriority given by the Other, alterity and the face-to-face relation, to the search for a signifyingness that will breach the noema's identificational closure, that is, to the direct and exposed gesture of saying. Both the limit terms of Totality and Infinity and the response they produced in Derrida have become the starting-point of Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence: the testimony that is irreducible to a thematizing knowledge. What saves this saying from becoming in its turn another theme is that, in addition to its acting in the text, it acts upon and as HISTORY OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES Vol. 10 No. 3 © 1997 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi) [0952-6951(199708)10:3] the text. The vocabulary, form of composition and mode of address of Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence strain against their inherited limits. And the work this obliges the reader to undergo is, of course, an ethical necessity, given the work's message.

Technology of the archaic: wish images and phantasmagoria in Wagner

How can Wagner simultaneously herald modernism, express the quintessence of romanticism and evoke primeval experience? This question is illuminated by the constellation of advanced production and desire that Walter Benjamin finds in the process of commodity manufacture, dwelling on the tendency for new technologies to create repetitive conformity while recognising their capacity to trigger unfulfilled prospects in older forms of knowledge. When, however, Adorno frames the dilemma posed by Wagner he finds mythic deception, not a release of archaic subjectivity. These two currents in modernity cannot be easily segregated, but reading Adorno's Wagner through Benjamin's appraisal of modernity facilitates a more sanguine interpretation of Wagner's evocation of ur-forms through advanced compositional technology. The rigidity of Adorno's interpretation is further softened by Jacques Derrida's reading of Karl Marx's distinction between use-value and exchange-value, while, on a broader front, Derrida's attention to the reader also suggests that commodity production need not dominate reception strategies. Indeed, Adorno, in an essay on film first published in 1966, acknowledges that intention and effect frequently do not coincide.

Impassable passages: Derrida, aporia, and the question of politics

Impassable Passages: Derrida, Aporia, and the Question of Politics François Debrix Richard Beardsworth, Derrida & the Political New York: Routledge, 1996, 174 pp. The impact of Jacques Derrida’s thought on contemporary politics has often been treated as an accidental, at best marginal, phenomenon. Unlike other French thinkers representative of what is generally understood as the postmodern moment (Foucault, Deleuze, or Baudrillard for instance), Derrida has arguably had more success with literature and philosophy scholars and students than with those whose recognized task is to think the political. Richard Beardsworth’s tour de force in Derrida & the Political is to highlight the political stakes present in Derrida’s works without, however, detracting from the spirit of Derridean thought. Beardsworth starts by offering a concise and accurate explanation of one of the most frequently used, yet often inaccurately presented, Derridean concepts, the notion of deconstruction. In Chapter One, Beardsworth turns to some of Derrida’s earlier works like Writing and Difference or Of Grammatology to explain that deconstruction is the product of, as he puts it, a “negotiation.” Deconstruction emerges as the result of an unsatisfied negotiation “between philosophy and what in France is called the Sciences Humaines, which is both characteristic of a certain style of philosophizing and carries with it and develops a clear set of intellectual, disciplinary and institutional stakes” (4). The difficulty of accessing philosophical notions “from outside philosophy” (the dilemma of the human sciences), or, conversely, the inability of “dominating the ‘empiricity’ of the human sciences” by means of philosophical categories (the problem of philosophy confronted with domains traditionally thought through the disciplinarity of the human sciences), creates a “displacement” between these two discourses. Beardsworth thus places deconstruction in an epistemological and historic context, and argues that the displacement (an always already present décalage) between philosophy and the discursive practices of the human sciences is the point where the work of Derridean deconstruction takes place. The “method” of deconstruction is offered by Derrida as the result of an impossibility to reconcile, decide, or close. Yet, it does not seek to reconcile or close either. The impossibility (or impassability) of decision is a theme which recurs throughout Derrida & the Political. It later returns under the form of aporia, a figure which is at the core of Beardsworth’s reading of Derrida in this volume. Practically, deconstruction operates from within the text, in the discontinuities and ruptures of discourse which re-mark the original displacement (a displacement that the metaphysical opposition between the transcendental and the empirical seeks to normalize) between philosophy and the human sciences. Working through Derrida’s early deconstruction of Saussure’s analyses of language and writing, Beardsworth suggests that deconstruction is a mode of philosophical and/or literary discursive analysis which accounts for textual “contradictions and exclusions from within” an author’s scholarly or theoretical endeavor, “and not from the imposition of an external set of criteria” which seek to reappropriate the meanings of the text from outside (10–11). Otherwise, Beardsworth continues, “the violence inherent to metaphysics” would be repeated. Once again, such a metaphysical violence is one that maintains the two discourses of philosophy and the human sciences at an insuperable distance from one another. By imposing/affirming such a violence (the violence of separation), metaphysical discourse obliterates the very rules and principles contained within the text itself, including its own potential violence. Thus understood, deconstruction is an eminently liberal and democratic practice, one that approaches textuality from the very rules of formation that it contains, and not from an external model of thought. Building upon this preliminary exposition of the “method of deconstruction” (I put it between quotation marks because, as Beardsworth mentions, Derrida finds this appellation problematic. As Beardsworth notes, “Derrida is careful to avoid this term because it carries connotations of a procedural form of judgment” [4]), Beardsworth then embarks on a subtle analysis of the political within Derrida’s work (this actually starts in the last section of Chapter 1 on “Law, Judgment, and Singularity” but continues more clearly in Chapter 2). Unlike previous studies on Derrida and politics, Beardsworth’s reading avoids the temptation of simply applying Derridean theoretical insights to concrete political events, phenomena or...

Questions of Proximity: “Woman's Place” in Derrick and Irigaray

This article reconsiders the issue of Luce Irigaray's proximity to Jacques Derrida on the question of woman. I use Derrida's reading of Nietzsche in Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles (1979) and Irigaray's reading of Heidegger in L'Oubli de l'air (1983) to argue that reading them as supplements to one another is more accurate and more productive for feminism than separating one from the other. I conclude by laying out the benefits for feminism that such a reading would offer.

The origins and crisis of continental philosophy

When contemporary continental philosophy dismisses, with the discourse of post-modernism, the role of origin, teleology, foundation, etc., it is forsaking its own style of thinking and as a consequence is no longer able to discern crises of lived-meaning or to engage in the transformation of historical life. I address this crisis by characterizing continental philosophy as a particular style of thinking, generative thinking. I then examine the meaning and origins of philosophical thinking by drawing, for strategic reasons, on Jacques Derrida's essay “Cogito et histoire de la folie.” For not only has the very question of “origins” come under fire through various post-modern readings of Derrida, but Derrida's own point of critique concerning Western Metaphysics depends upon a specific understanding of origin that I call origin-originating. In the final section of this paper. I interpret the crisis within continental philosophy as a forgetting the “point” of origin-originating within the generative structure of experience.

Apocalypse Theory and the Ends of the World, and: Postmodern Apocalypse: Theory and Cultural Practice at the End (review)

Reviewed by: Apocalypse Theory and the Ends of the World, and: Postmodern Apocalypse: Theory and Cultural Practice at the End James Berger Malcolm Bull, ed. Apocalypse Theory and the Ends of the World. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995. 297pp. Richard Dellamora, ed. Postmodern Apocalypse: Theory and Cultural Practice at the End. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1995. xiii + 296pp. The arbitrary chronometer approaches its second millennial turn, but to what end? We have already been and will for the next four years continue to be greeted by messages in many genres beginning, “As the millennium approaches,” and we may increasingly choose to respond as if so many Jehovah’s Witnesses were outside and refuse to answer the door. But such refusal will thereby avoid questions that continue to [End Page 925] have significance in an age characterized both by actual catastrophes and by representations of catastrophe. These questions concern not so much if and when the world will actually end (though military, economic, and ecological risks make this question relevant as well), as why, through what historical determinants and contingencies, has a fascination with violent and revelatory endings emerged so often and with such power? The two books under review, both edited by distinguished scholars, together provide a thorough and sophisticated introduction to the current state of theorizing on apocalyptic thinking. Malcolm Bull, author of Seeking a Sanctuary: Seventh-Day Adventism and the American Dream, has brought together essays by many of the best known writers on apocalyptic topics: Norman Cohn, Frank Kermode, Bernard McGinn, Marjorie Reeves, and Edward Said, among others. The picture that emerges shows not only the extraordinary persistence and variety of apocalyptic thinking and desire in European culture but also its close though shifting connections with political power. It is a mistake, most of these writers argue, to regard apocalypticism as merely marginal; belief in an imminent, or immanent, end to the world “as we know it” is, rather, central not only to medieval but also, in less obvious forms, to post-Enlightenment political ideologies. Most of the contributors cover ground that is familiar to those who have read their books. Even to these readers, however, and especially to new readers, these essays are useful summaries of the most important research in the field. Of special interest, of course, to readers of this journal are the essays on more recent apocalyptic thinking by Kermode, Said, Elinor Shaffer, Krishan Kumar, and Christopher Norris. Shaffer’s essay on romantic apocalypse makes the familiar point that political apocalypse becomes internalized as poetic apocalypse but goes on to make a more perceptive point that in much romantic poetry (particularly Wordsworth) the apocalypse becomes identified as an irretrievable moment not in the future but in the past—that the apocalyptic imagination becomes (though she does not use the term) postapocalyptic. Frank Kermode’s essay shows, unfortunately, how little his thinking has developed since his enormously important book The Sense of an Ending. For Kermode, apocalyptic thinking still boils down essentially to the “existential” anxiety each person feels regarding his own death. In an era marked by genocides and the legitimate fears of destructive and dehumanizing technologies, such an emphasis [End Page 926] on the individual relation to death is surely inadequate to confront the apocalyptic impulses of modernity and the postmodern. Christopher Norris provides an insightful and much needed beginning to an analysis of the apocalyptic rhetorics used by poststructuralist theorists, with particular attention to Derrida. Norris is right to stress the “double gesture” implicit in Derrida’s apocalyptic language: that it is impossible simply to eradicate (apocalyptically) inherited humanist terminologies; and yet that language works (apocalyptically) so as to shatter its intentions and misdirect its messages. It would be helpful, however, if Norris would also discuss Derrida’s writings on ghosts and specters, in which historical “apocalypses” (especially the Holocaust) enter his texts in more or less disguised forms. The volume ends with Edward Said’s eloquent presentation of Theodor Adorno’s writings on Beethoven’s late compositions and on the trope of “lateness” in general as a “coming after and surviving beyond what is generally acceptable”—that is, as a style appropriate to catastrophe. As with Norris’s reading of Derrida...

To Compare: A Gesture Toward Other

This paper is a section of the research dissertation “Comparative Architecture: An Architectural Discourse as Criticising/Building Twofold Strategies” which tries to explore the complex interaction relationship between the two entities of comparison and architecture. Through reading Derrida's, Trinh's and Laotzu's discourses, we seek the traces of comparative operation within their texts so as to suggest the comparison as an effective strategy against monocentric power and also for the revival of the poetic imagination.