Derrida's Reading Research Articles

The primacy of pity: reconceiving ethical experience and education in Rousseau

For Rousseau, there are only three things he does not reason away apart from reason itself: self-interest, the good and, at least until Emile, pity. This paper argues that it is Rousseau’s original formulation of pity in the Second Discourse that is able to provide the extra-rational conception of ethics that his political and educational philosophy lacks when limited to a reading of the Social Contract and Emile. This paper will also show how the reconceptualisation of these existential predicates is usefully aligned with a reading of Derrida’s conceptions of immunity and autoimmunity. By reconceiving Rousseau’s educational and political thinking in terms of the primacy of pity rather than reason, this paper will present a kind of philosophical prototype for beginning to rethink contemporary educational and political logic in terms of the primacy of pity more generally.

Philosophy in Denial: Derrida, the Undeniably Real, and the Death Penalty

This essay describes Derrida's later articulations of the logical; of the ‘undeniable’ and its constant denial. Against anti-realist readings of Derrida as some sort of textual idealist, I show how Derrida's thinking of the undeniable informs his deconstruction of the death penalty in the recently published 1999–2001 lecture courses, as well as the considerations of mortality and finitude that inform all of his writings.

Derrida and the Philosophy of Law and Justice

Readings of Derrida’s work on law and justice have tended to stress the distinction between them. This stress is complicated by Derrida’s own claim that it is not ‘a true distinction’. In this essay I argue that ordinary experiences of the inadequacy of existing laws do indeed imply a claim about what would be more just, but that this claim only makes sense insofar as one can appeal to another more adequate law (whether the projection of a new law or an existing ‘higher’ law). Exploring how Derrida negotiates a subtle path between classical Platonism and classical conventionalism about justice, the attempt is made to take seriously Derrida’s aim to affirm the idea of a ‘mystical’ foundation of the authority of laws by taking ‘the use of the word “mystical” in what I venture to call a rather Wittgensteinian direction’.

The Feigned Madness of Ulysses and Hamlet: A Derridean Reading of Cartesian Cogito

The Feigned Madness of Ulysses and Hamlet: A Derridean Reading of Cartesian Cogito

Writing as Reading itself: A Derridean Reading of Lost in the Funhouse

Lost in the Funhouse is like textbook illustration of Derrida’s views on language and writing. The book is both a guide for “how not to write” and “how not to define” writing, thus defying an ultimate center. Although the lack of a “proper” theme and heavy metafictional structure makes it “difficult to read”, it is a struggle to subvert the definitions of writing. The author deconstructs the conventional form and theme that is believed to be necessary for writing. In this respect, Barth operates through the narratives like Derrida moves through ideas in history, and ending up with the conclusion that interplay is what matters rather than a fixed meaning.

For A Time

An assessment of Michael Naas's Miracle and Machine, which is devoted to a careful reading of Derrida's essay "Faith and Knowledge". This article focuses on survival and its temporality.

Quoted Confessions: Augustine's Confessiones and Derrida's “Circonfession”

Abstract In his autobiographical text “Circonfession,” written in 1990, Jacques Derrida makes various references to Augustine's Confessiones. This article reveals broad similarities between the works of the church father and the father of deconstruction in Derrida's reading of the former's text. Imitating Augustinian motifs and techniques of confession, Derrida builds a bridge to a premodern epistemic and esthetics of subjectivity. Through the literary techniques of addressing and citation, Augustine and Derrida each formulate a confessional subject that constitutes itself only in interrelation to an alterity. The similarities are based on related assumptions in both authors’ theories of language and interpretation. The Augustinian question “why we confess to the omniscient God” (“Cur confitemur Deo scienti”) and his answer “to do truth” (“veritatem facere”) lead Derrida to a notion of confession in line with Augustine's, and he then ostentatiously distinguishes that notion from Rousseau's. The difference lies in the intention of the two confessions: plea for forgiveness versus apology.

How to Dance After Auschwitz? Ethics and Aesthetics of Representation in John Cranko's Song of My People—Forest People—Sea

John Cranko's only ballet for the Batsheva Dance Company in Israel, Ami-Yam, Ami-Ya'ar (Song of My People—Forest People—Sea, 1971) is described in a program note as “A Nation and Man Move in Parallel Cycles from Death to Regeneration.” It has remained unique in Cranko's choreographic corpus and in the Batsheva repertoire. Based on recently discovered film evidence, I reread Cranko's largely forgotten project and discuss its problematic and controversial reception in Israel and abroad, in light of Adorno's statement that “writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbarism.” I situate it as a landmark in tackling the Holocaust in dance in Israel as of 1971. I problematize the ethics and aesthetics of representation in Cranko's ballet on the grounds of Giorgio Agamben's discussion of testimony and in reference to Jacques Derrida's reading of Paul Celan.

Temporal Exile in the Time of Fiction: Reading Derrida Reading Blanchot’s The Instant of My Death

This essay asks whether or not Martin Hägglund’s reassessment of the Derridean project of deconstruction as a project defending diachronic temporality is amenable to thinking the peculiar temporalities of literature and fiction that Derrida, in “Demeure: Fiction and Testimony,” detects in Maurice Blanchot’s The Instant of My Death .

As If, As Such

“As If, As Such” reads Derrida’s understanding of the institution of literature as both the most interesting thing in the world and “perhaps” more interesting than the world in relation to his remark that the noema remains one of the most difficult and problematic concepts in Husserl’s phenomenological toolbox. By focusing on the noema as the objective side of consciousness and thus as what does not properly belong to consciousness, hence as the site of the tension between form and matter, the following essay also explains why Derrida claimed that the “as” was always the target of deconstruction. Ultimately, “As If, As Such” seeks to elaborate what Derrida called the “power of literature” as that which is at work in the possibility of life.

Derrida's Archive Fever: From Debt to Inheritance

This article reads Derrida's Archive Fever (1995) as a sustained reflection on the influence of psychoanalysis on deconstruction. It examines the text's deployment of two financial figures — debt and inheritance — as contrasting ways of coming to terms with the intellectual legacy of psychoanalysis. Derrida's reading of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi's Freud's Moses exposes the historian's reliance on a ‘classical’ concept of the archive as the depository of a self-identical past, a concept which underpins Yerushalmi's thesis of Freud's unpaid debt to Jewish culture. This conception gives rise to several aporias identified in Derrida's analysis of Yerushalmi's methodological procedure. A more positive and productive notion of inheritance characterizes Derrida's exploration of his own relationship to Freud, allowing him to move beyond the burden of a calculable indebtedness to the past towards an incalculable inheritance for the future. Deconstruction inherits from Freud's theoretical legacy (the ‘impression’ left by Freud on deconstruction), reaffirming and transforming psychoanalytic insights in its own account of our collective mal d'archive, our feverish desire both to preserve and destroy the archive.

Artaud-Immunity: Derrida and the Mômo

Derrida's public struggle with the spectre of Artaud began in the 1960s ‘La parole Soufflée’ and ‘The Theatre of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation’ and continued forcener le subjectile (1986) and Artaud le Moma (2002). The texts are read as attempts to break with the dominant critical/clinical readings of Artaud inaugurated by Jacques Rivière and as beginnings for a search to secure Artaud-immunity, protection for and against his words and works. It argues that Derrida's readings of Artaud systematically underestimate the power of his deliberate perversion of Platonism and his intimations of an affirmative metaphysics issuing from the replacement of the idea of the One by that of Chaos. The underestimation of the affirmative drive underwriting Artaud's work led Derrida to uncover a suicidal motif in Artaud-immunity that would eventually compromise his own understanding of auto-immunity.

Scholem, Derrida and the Literary Space

The essay examines Scholem's letter-confession on the Hebrew language addressed to Rosenzweig from two perspectives hitherto ignored in the ongoing interpretative consideration of this document: Scholem's repression of the literary space and his consequent exclusion of madness. The essay follows several threads in Derrida's own ‘internal’ reading of the letter, and leans on other Derridean writings such as The Monolingualism of the Other, Schibboleth: For Paul Celan and ‘Cogito and the History of Madness’ in order to suggest two distinct encounters between Derrida and Scholem: In the first encounter, Scholem reads Derrida and proves to be deconstructing his own notions of secular and profane Hebrew, while fighting in vain for his sanity by clinging to liturgical practices against the grain of an ongoing ‘actualization’, politicization or else fictionalization of the sacred language. In the second encounter, it is Derrida who reads Scholem. By transforming the particular conditions of possibility of Hebrew into general conditions of possibility of every language contaminated by a theological-political tension, Derrida contributes some important insights for contemporary Hebrew speakers.

Ricoeur, Literature and Imagination by Sophie Vlacos (review)

Reviewed by: Ricoeur, Literature and Imagination by Sophie Vlacos Brian O’Keeffe Sophie Vlacos, Ricoeur, Literature and Imagination New York: Bloomsbury, 2014, 232 pp. i In the preface to her book, Sophie Vlacos wonders why Ricoeur’s place within the order of the great literary theorists seems somehow in doubt. Certainly, few would dispute his renown as a philosopher. But in literary-theoretical contexts, Ricoeur often serves merely as a foil to more radical positions, as a person to whom reference is made when it proves necessary to acknowledge, en passant, something true about literature—to say why it is a precious stimulus to the imagination, and why literature’s own sense of imaginative possibility is valuable to re-envisioning the world itself. But then theory moves on, and affirmations of literature’s value become [End Page 364] harder to find in the midst of austere talk concerning its irresolvable ambiguity, such ambiguity apparently rendering all acts of reading wrong or “aberrant.” Theory brings us up short, confronts us with interpretive impasse, and proclaims that literature will ineluctably bring us to this, whatever are our desires as readers to read for the pleasures of an imaginative immersion in fictional worlds. Theory liked it this way, however. It liked the taxing rigor of interpretive reading doomed to a kind of failure. It preached, often in the teeth of stiff resistance to theory, the virtue of doing hard critical work at the coalface of texts that had become peculiarly forbidding to those who ventured to read them at all. This is a caricature. It caricatures literary studies during the age of High Theory, and it also presents a rather disobliging portrait of the interpretive approach of Paul de Man—my allusion to The Resistance to Theory will not, I trust, have gone unmissed. But that age has been declared over, and so perhaps one quick answer to Vlacos’s question about the place of Ricoeur in literary-theoretical contexts is that he simply had to wait it out. High Theory’s day is done, and we may now return to Ricoeur and affirm the value of reading literature: reading is an act of feeling, an imaginative feeling-into a fictional world; reading literature is good for our general cultivation, our Bildung; reading helps us make sense of the world and our place in it; literature is a creative activity, and it powerfully re-describes the world to us; it teaches readers to imagine themselves otherwise; it hones our sympathies and our empathies—these, the basic components of the specifically ethical imagination. One mentions ethics, and already there is another possible answer to Vlacos’s question, namely that Ricoeur had to wait for the “ethical turn” in literature and philosophy. In this respect, it is notable that Martha Nussbaum features prominently in Vlacos’s book: in the last section, which addresses Ricoeur in terms of the turn to ethics, and Nussbaum also provides the epigraph to Vlacos’s introduction. The quote, from Love’s Knowledge, is well-known: “After reading Derrida, and not Derrida alone, I feel a certain hunger for blood; for, that is, writing about literature that talks of human lives and choices as if they matter to us all” (1). We will get to Derrida, because literary theory’s debt to Derrida provides another explanation as to why Ricoeur’s hermeneutics met with such little enthusiasm during the age of theory. It is not quite that the wax-and-wane of theoretical prestige during that time can be reduced to Derrida versus Ricoeur, as if theory simply chose to put itself under the aegis of “Derrida,” and in so doing, Ricoeur was eclipsed. But their fortunes seem entwined, especially in the contexts of Anglo-American academia, where the importation of French theory, I think it is fair to say, did produce a certain “star-system.” But if, and reverting to Nussbaum’s criticism of theoretical anemia, the problem with theory was that it seemed oddly impersonal, and reduced literature to a similar impersonality, Vlacos evidently considers Ricoeur to be exempt from her charge. For he does speak about literature, [End Page 365] and does acknowledge that what matters is how...

Introduction

Introduction Dawne McCance This special Mosaic issue, the second of three conference proceedings issues, collects papers presented at the A matter of life death conference held at the University of Manitoba from October 1-4, 2014. Most of the papers have been revised, some lengthened, into publishable essay form and, as always, we are grateful to contributors for their cooperation and more than a little proud to print their fine work. The issue opens with Dr. Françoise Dastur’s conference Keynote Address, “Mourning as the Origin of Humanity.” Against still prevalent modes of thinking that elevate humans above animals, usually by focusing on something animals “lack,” Dastur, with particularly rich references to the Western philosophical tradition, approaches humans as “strange animals who bury their dead.” Although Dastur states that “There is indeed no experience of death as such,” other essays question whether Heidegger attributed such an experience to Dasein alone and, by so doing, reinstated the tradition’s man/animal binary. Ryan C.P. Fics, in “Our Sovereign Others: Phantasms, Heidegger, Animality,” examines the “presumption that human Dasein lives death as death,” and in the course of his essay considers the notions of “phantasm,” and “dying alive,” as these emerge from Derrida’s The Beast & the Sovereign seminars. “Sovereignty,” “phantasm,” and “death” are taken up as well in Gwynne Fulton’s “Phantasmatics: Sovereignty and the Image of Death in Derrida’s First Death Penalty Seminar.” And [End Page v] Kas Saghafi in “Dying Alive,” engaging Derrida’s second seminar on The Beast & the Sovereign, argues that “phantasm,” “dying alive,” and “survival” need to be thought in relation to, and with, each other. Again, “survival” is a title word in “Love, Life, Death, and Survival,” where Diane Enns, reading Derrida’s Learning to Live Finally alongside Gillian Rose’s memoir, Love’s Work, develops a poignant, poetic, and critical reflection on the death of a love. The importance of Derrida’s work for many presenters at the October conference is evident in this issue, as are the different ways in which writers draw insights from his treatments of life death. A remarkable example is Matthias Fritsch’s “Democracy, Climate Change, and Environmental Justice,” which draws from a number of Derrida’s texts to develop the argument that democracy should be rethought as a matter of “taking turns,” and that such rethinking can lead to an environmentally responsible politics. James Martell in “The Animal Mirrors: The Human/Animal Divide in Derrida and Deleuze,” by way of Derrida’s critique of Deleuze, proposes a way of moving the question of human-animal relations “beyond the traps of narcissism.” The remaining six essays offer striking and diverse contributions to this issue. Antonio Calcagno, in “Individuated Embodiment and Action: Interrogating Roberto Esposito’s Negative Self,” offers a well-informed, timely, and critical evaluation of Esposito’s biopolitics. Kara Wentworth takes readers into today’s abattoir in “Sensing Sentience and Managing Microbes: Lifedeath in the Slaughterhouse.” In “Adapting Venice: Intermedial Relations in Visconti, Sebald, and Kafka,” Russell J.A. Kilbourn takes us to Venice through Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice and Vertigo and W.G. Sebald’s first prose narrative, which adapts texts by Kafka. Dominique Hétu, in “Of Wonder and Encounter: Textures of Human and Nonhuman Relationality,” reads the novels Sous Béton and Room “as attempts to surpass the traditional and conventional life/death dichotomy by telling stories of trauma and near-death experiences through moments of wonder in meaningful encounters that bring to attention the vitality of the dead.” And last, but by no means least, are two compelling essays, Sung-Ae Lee’s “Lost in Liminal Space: Amnesiac and Incognizant Ghosts in Korean Drama” and Sarah Bezan’s “Necro-Eco: The Ecology of Death in Jim Crace’s Being Dead.” The issue reminds me of the wonder I experienced, as Mosaic Editor, at the range and quality of submissions we received from our conference Call for Papers. [End Page vi] Copyright © 2015 Mosaic

<b>Leituras pós-babélicas: uma proposta derridiana

Current essay discusses some contemporary conceptions of reading and discusses the possibility of a deconstruction of today's paradigms related to the logocentrism of most theories and practices of official reading. A Derridean perspective is employed while taking into account the proposals of supplementation and iteration. A theory of reading is initially described from the social, psychological and contextual theories. They are, as a rule, counterpoised as modern and post-modern theories of reading. Further, Jacques Derrida's reading proposal is provided, based on the problematization of Austin's pragmatics, and thenceforth, in a denial of the possibility of saturation of the reading contexts. There is the need to rethink the current concepts of reading according to the suspension of official contextual models to discuss the power relations involved in logophobia that pervades debates in the field.

The Gift of Nature in Mauss and Derrida

This essay proposes a reinterpretation of Marcel Mauss's famous The Gift with a focus on the question as to why gifts obligate recipients. Mauss argues that for the archaic cultures he studies, a donor is not separable from the thing given, so that the recipient also receives some of the donor's ‘spirit’ that wishes to return to its origin. In my reconstruction, I stress that the donor is not separable from her gift because it is understood to come from her tribe, its tradition and ancestors, as well as from its ‘native soil’ and natural elements, which are taken to be inassimilable by the recipient. I then examine Derrida's reading of Mauss in view of this unpossessable and the role of natural elements in it. In the face of Derrida's rejection of Mauss's foundationalist use of a cyclical nature, I conclude that for both authors nature may name not only a desire for the origin, but also a differential and open-ended force that turns and re-turns in all gifts.

The Invention of the Idiom: The Event of the Untranslatable

This article considers the notion of an event, of something happening to language, through a reading of Jacques Derrida's Monolingualism of the Other. In particular, the issues of language, translation and the untranslatable are linked to the three forms of madness that Derrida distinguishes. The paper, in turn, contends that there are only target languages, or again, that all languages are in fact target languages, languages-to-come, and that this experience (épreuve) of language is the only test worthy of the untranslatable. The madness of language is thus associated with the singularity of not only every language and every speaker, but also with the non-programmable character of language. The literature of Kafka and Celan, among others, is henceforth invoked as exemplary, and examined as both an intra-lingual and inter-lingual event. The overall aim is to disrupt the Globish of global communication and the nationalism of linguistic proprietorship.

Estéticas do animal-estar

Este ensaio é uma leitura do texto de Derrida O animal que logo sou (A seguir) e uma reflexão sobre os possíveis usos da expressão animal-estar para a descrição dos desafios contemporâneos da estética. Assim, ao investigar o desconforto subjetivo envolvido no gesto de ultrapassar a fronteira entre homem e animal, e de desterritorializar o pensamento, o estudo se debruça sobre os efeitos da anulação da distância estética e sobre a exacerbação do componente "sensível" da expressão geral "experiência sensível". Resultado da falha da domesticação da percepção, relacionado também à atualização das emoções e das reações do corpo, o animal-estar do leitor possibilita uma subversão da reflexividade especular redutora.

Adorno’s ends of philosophy and the future of critical theory

Adorno's ends of philosophy and the future of critical theory Darrow Schecter Critical Theory in the Twenty-First Century, Bloomsbury: London, 2013; vii + 218 pp.: 9781441105462, 20[pounds sterling] (pbk) Andrew Bowie Adorno and the Ends of Philosophy, Cambridge: Polity, 2013; ix + 206 pp.: 9780745671598, 18 [pounds sterling] (pbk) Darrow Schecter and Andrew Bowie discuss a similar question: what is the future of critical theory and philosophy? The former takes a more sociological perspective, while the latter's perspective is more philosophical. Schecter begins by highlighting the move from a linguistic towards a literary turn in recent critical thinking, as found, for example, in Jameson's readings of Marx, Adorno and Derrida. Against Nancy Fraser's much debated ethics of distribution versus Hegel/Honneth's ethics of recognition (Fraser & Flonneth 2003), the book argues, 'human emancipation has broader connotations than simply redistributive justice' (p. 18). This also means that critical-intellectual exchange is ideally conducted in the Hegelian realm of freedom. Excluded from this are highly structured institutions such as, for example, workplace, scientific laboratory and other settings in which a competence-based hierarchy is used rather than an assembly of equals (Diefenbach 2013). These ethical demands--freedom, no hierarchies, and an assembly of equals--carry connotations to modern civil societies that have been a product of the modern world linked to what Hegel once called Sittlichkeit or ethical life. What Hegel meant by this has been explained in a not-yet translated but most insightful text on 'Hegels System der Sittlichkeit' (Schmidt 2007). On that reading, the individual and subjective dimension of a Hegelian dialectic has not only been somewhat understated by Adorno, but has also given rise to 'largely academic theories of recognition' (p. 44). Nonetheless, the 'Hegel-Marx-Adorno' dialogue on what might be termed 'recognition-vs.-distribution' remains of great interest to contemporary critical theory. As a consequence of a possible outcome of such a dialogue, it remains somewhat insufficient simply to realise that theorists must be reflexive. Critical theory must reach beyond that and be reflective in a dialectical-critical way that includes contemporary conceptions of critique (Klikauer 2014a). This can achieve things that traditional theory could not and can never achieve. It can combine dialectical materialism after Marx with other prominent approaches to social research. Perhaps critical realism might be one of the closest, with certain versions of system theory being other likely candidates. Since there has been a lifetime of Luhmann-Habermas exchanges, perhaps a highly pluralist version of system theory can be taken somewhat more seriously by critical theorists than had been the case in the past. Unlike many more traditional theories--including system theory--critical theory remains committed to immanent critique and non-dogmatic objectivity. It is for this reason that critical theory has never and can never abandon the Enlightenment ideal of a rational society free of prejudice, obscurantism and the arbitrary exercise of power. Aligned to that is the fact that critical theory analyses how reason, obscurantism and the arbitrary exercise of power actually function in liberal-democratic and post-liberal-democratic societies, examining the underlying structure, namely capitalism itself. Hence critical theory continues to investigate the capitalism-society dialectic and current forms of populism and hegemony designed to undermine democracy. One of the key ideologies that undermine democracy is what Adorno calls 'identity thinking', e.g. identifying as real in society only that which harmonises and fits with dominant concepts. Hence, non-identity thinking can begin by pointing out the anthropological assumptions underlying the contemporary liberal-democratic conceptions of a mass-mediated unity designed to eclipse the inherent contradictions and pathologies found in capitalism and contemporary society. …