Derrida's Attempt Research Articles

Power as Gift

The article addresses the question of whether Derrida in his political theology can be considered an “unfaithful” reader of Schmitt. While Derrida does not quote Schmitt’s Political Theology, some of his assertions are reminiscent of Schmitt’s disciplinary use of political theology. Indeed, Schmitt’s account of the relationship between exception, decision, and sovereignty was abundantly discussed in Derrida’s last seminar, The Beast and the Sovereign. Derrida attempts in this seminar to deconstruct the sovereignty of the nation-state and its onto-theologico-political foundation. The question I raise in this article is whether, in previous years, Derrida himself had not implicitly made a different political theology that, considering the negative theological path, develops an alternative idea of power. The hypothesis explored is that this alternative paradigm is derived from one of the names of the impossible: the gift.

By the Way

No one who reads Derrida closely could accuse him of “technophobia.” More than any other contemporary thinker, on the contrary, he has shown the limit of attempts to protect thinking and even being itself from technē. Yet, Derrida nevertheless insists that “deconstruction” is neither a “technique” nor the technology of thinking that modern philosophy calls “method.” What allows Derrida to exclude “technique” and “method” when he himself shows, in relation to Heidegger above all, that a certain technicity and methodicity always remain irreducible? After outlining its stakes (§I), this article seeks to raise this question by reconstructing Derrida’s engagement with Heidegger concerning the questions of technology (§II) and of method (§III) before turning to the techno-methodicity that Derrida attempts to dissociate from deconstruction in turn (§IV).

Toward an Exergue on the Future of Différance

In Of Grammatology, Derrida discusses Leroi-Gourhan in relating différance to memory, the ‘program’, and the history of life. In Technics and Time, 1, Stiegler argues that Derrida failed to draw all the philosophical implications of linking différance to the questions of life and retention. Derrida returned to the life sciences in 1975, in a seminar not published in its entirety until 2019. There, Derrida attempts to deconstruct the geneticist François Jacob's account of the ‘logic of life’, but Derrida's analysis of different kinds of memory and programs seems confused, suggesting that the Derridean text remains haunted by the deficiencies of his earlier reading of Leroi-Gourhan. Later in the seminar, Derrida shows foresight concerning the problems arising from seeing the genetic molecule as akin to a computer program, despite Jacob making this link via Schrödinger and Wiener's discussions of negentropy. When Derrida turns to a reading of Freud and libidinal energy, however, he ‘assumes’ a reading of Laplanche but ignores the latter's critique of Freud's own preoccupations with the second law of thermodynamics. The limitations of Derrida's attempts to bring deconstruction together with scientific understanding expose the need for the kind of ‘organological’ and ‘neganthropological’ approach that Stiegler will ultimately pursue.

Das harte Geschlecht

This article suggests that the deconstruction of Heidegger’s reading of Hölderlin in the Letter on Humanism is a precondition for what Derrida attempts to do in his commentary of Heidegger’s reading of Trakl in Geschlecht III. This preliminary deconstruction, through a constellation of Hölderlinian motifs (“homeland”, “return home”, “Occident”, “Greece”, “Germany”), controls the topology of Geschlecht III and determines Derrida’s approach to the themes of “nationality” and “philosophical nationalism”.

Transgendering Nietzsche: Male Mothers and Phallic Women in Derrida's Spurs

Transgendering Nietzsche:Male Mothers and Phallic Women in Derrida's Spurs Willow Verkerk As Derrida himself notes, Nietzsche is a thinker who seems at once misogynistic and sympathetic (Derrida 1979, 57). Pursuing the sympathetic reading further, we may ask whether there is also an emancipatory character to Nietzsche's writings on woman. This is a contentious question; however, it is one that Derrida entertains by his proposal that Nietzsche's feminisms and anti-feminisms are connected or have a larger "congruence" (Derrida 1979, 57). Nietzsche's attack on feminism is done in defense of what he and Derrida conceive to be feminine power. In Spurs this is reflected in two threads: one in which woman as a position is opened up to those who are not cisgender women; the other in which cisgender women are disciplined into femininity as their ideal location for power. Derrida draws mostly on The Gay Science, but he is also interested in the preface to Beyond Good and Evil, where Nietzsche declares, "supposing truth is a woman—what then?" Derrida turns to the preface of Beyond in order to show that there is a close relationship between woman and truth and that Nietzsche is utilizing the concept of woman in itself (Weib an sich) in order to question the coherence of "Truth" and the presumptions of the philosopher "who believes in the truth that is woman, who believes in truth just as he believes in woman" (Derrida 1979, 53). After reading transgender thinkers like Susan Stryker and Kate Bornstein, as well as the work of Judith Butler, we might rewrite Derrida's statement and replace the word "woman" with "gender." Then it would read [End Page 99] like this: "the presumption of the philosopher who believes in the truth that is a gender, who believes in truth just as he believes in gender." In Spurs, Derrida, through Nietzsche, is demonstrating that truth is multiple and varied just as woman is so. He is pointing out that we, like the philosopher who fetishizes "Truth," fetishize "woman." Derrida's response, as is Nietzsche's, to the fetishization of woman is to both affirm and undermine it. In other words, neither philosopher entirely escapes from his own fetishizations of woman, but they do proliferate these fetishizations and thus lay the groundwork for others to exceed them. Nietzsche is a thinker open to diverse receptions because, as Derrida notices, Nietzsche's writings purposively yield multiple interpretations. Derrida thinks that Nietzsche's writing is a kind of pharmakon because it produces both heterogeneity and parody of the norm and in doing so allows for difference. In addition to Derrida's reading, the rethinking of femininity through transgender theory attests to the relevance of opening up woman to multiple positions. Still, the political potential of Derrida's reading of Nietzsche's woman must be considered alongside earlier critique voiced soon after Derrida's Spurs was translated into English by a number of feminists who found Derrida's attempt to philosophize as a woman, while concurrently critiquing feminism, highly suspicious. This essay will concentrate on three goals. First, I will discuss Derrida's reading of Nietzsche as a performative thinker and examine three feminist readings of the Nietzschean woman; next, I will speak about Derrida's analysis of Nietzsche's notion of woman and her relationship with power and truth; last, I will pursue a brief transgendered reception of the Nietzschean and Derridean woman by drawing on some of the interpretive tools found in transgender studies. Nietzsche as Stylist: Abducting Woman? In Spurs, Derrida states that while reading Nietzsche on woman "we shall bear witness to her abduction" (Derrida 1979, 41). This may mean that Derrida himself is abducting Nietzsche's concept of woman through rewriting her, more simply that Nietzsche is abducting woman through becoming feminine as a stylist and in doing so is rewriting woman. Then again, it may mean that we as readers are abducting woman: namely, during the reading of Spurs we inscribe more layers of meaning onto woman's form—veils upon the veils of Derrida on top of Nietzsche. This is one reason why Nietzsche writes that "woman is so...

Kant with Freud: Derrida’s Analysis of the Ancient Dream of Self-Punishment

During his 2000–2001 seminar on the death penalty, Jacques Derrida argues that Kant is the most ‘rigorous’ philosophical proponent of the death penalty and, thus, the thinker who poses the most serious objections to the kind of philosophical abolitionism that Derrida is trying to develop in his seminar. For Kant, the death penalty is the logical result of the fundamental principle of criminal law, namely, talionic law or the right of retaliation as a principle of pure, disinterested reason. In this paper, I demonstrate how Derrida attempts to undermine Kant’s defence of the death penalty by demonstrating both its internal contradictions (the tenuous distinction between poena forensis, that is, punishment by a court, and poena naturalis, natural punishment) and its strange affinities with the law of primitive peoples (as understood by Freud in Totem and Taboo). I argue that Derrida’s repeated returns throughout the seminar to Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals suggest that Kant’s seemingly rational defence of the death penalty is ultimately motivated by interests that belie the supposed disinterestedness of modern law and by a notion of natural justice that at once subtends and subverts all criminal law.

Rancière, Derrida, and Egalitarian Politics in Pseudo-Dionysius

Using the work of Jacques Rancière, I argue for an egalitarian reading of the political hierarchy in Pseudo-Dionysius. I first analyze various historical attempts to derive a political theory from Pseudo-Dionysius in the work of Juan Miguel Garrigues, René Roques, and Dominic O’Meara. I then turn to Jacques Derrida's attempt to distinguish deconstruction from negative theology, and consider especially the political effects of this strategy. I argue that Derrida's attempt to undermine Psuedo-Dionysius's system from within is unsuccessful, and suggest instead that Rancière provides the conceptual tools to identify an egalitarianism within Dionysian political theory

The Monstrous Crossroads of Kristeva’s Textual Practice

am a monster of crossroads, declares Julia Kristeva on more than one occasion in her work, (1) referring not only to complex intersections of her theoretical work, but also to her heterogeneous identity: a Bulgarian-born French linguist, literary theorist, psychoanalyst, cultural critic, and female intellectual determined to bring women's experience to structuralist and poststructuralist theories dominating (mostly male) Parisian intellectual scene of 1960s and 70s. Indeed, experience is guiding post of Kristeva's thought, and her own experience as scholar, critic, and analyst has played a significant role in transforming way we think about feminine writing, body, and desire. The aim of this paper is to explore Kristeva's contributions to theory of text, particularly in relation to textual practices of two contemporaries, Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida, both of whom have played an integral role in transforming critical responses to literary writing since 1960s. I will attempt to indicate a few significant points of convergence in their work in order to make Kristeva's concerns resonate more fully within a broader intellectual conversation, and to emphasize what she considers to be limits of cotemporary literary theory. To be sure, no simple assertion can be made concerning exact relationship between immensely complex writings of these three authors. On one hand, their approaches to reading and writing run parallel to one another, often sharing common terminology: text, difference, alterity, or otherness. Indeed, their central organizing motifs--for instance, Blanchot's worklessness and the neuter, Derrida's and or Kristeva's negativity and productivity--remain on very intimate terms with one another insofar as all three evoke that which is unthinkable, unknowable, or unspeakable, but without which no language or logic would be possible. On other hand, each author's work develops a singular language that can never be entirely translated into another, even when it constantly affirms necessity of precisely such translation. Their textual practices, to borrow Juliana de Nooy's formulation, mark the site of rupture-at-a-point-of-absolute-proximity (201). Generally speaking, Kristeva's textual practice may be regarded as an attempt to negotiate between Blanchot's exploration of reading/writing as a descent into silent, bottomless abyss of text, and Derrida's reading/writing as an endless movement across textual surface through deferral, dissemination, iterability, and supplementarity. Kristeva accomplishes this by placing emphasis on three problems which, in her view, have been somewhat marginalized in theory of text: (1) relationship between textual practice and experience of human body, particularly with respect to questions of suffering and desire; (2) textual practice as political-social engagement, whereby questions of exile, solitude, or estrangement on one hand, and affirmation of play on other, become explicitly linked to ethical concerns and their historical implementation; and (3) textual practice as practice of intertextuality, in terms of both relationality and difference. In each case, Kristeva's intention is to assume experience of crisis of meaning that permeates works of Blanchot and of Derrida, albeit in a manner that would, beyond necessary intensification of this crisis at intersection of sense and nonsense, enable both an individual and a cultural response to it--first and foremost at level of language. By same token, her textual practice is a deliberate attempt to negotiate between kind of anonymity or neutrality Blanchot tends to emphasize in his work and Derrida's attempt to bring radical dispersal of differance to every text, discourse, and meaning. THE TEXT AS PRODUCTIVITY Kristeva's complex and highly technical theory of text was charted out in a series of essays written between 1966 and 1973; many of them were originally published in Tel Quel, and some remain untranslated today. …

Invention of the Death Penalty: Abolitionism at its Limits

This essay seeks to account for Derrida's striking claims towards the end of The Death Penalty, Volume I concerning the survivability of the death penalty. Why will the death penalty live on, even beyond its end? How should we understand this claim? And what are the implications of the death penalty's survival for any attempt to continue Derrida's on-going efforts to deconstruct sovereignty in the name of what he often calls ‘the unconditional’? I suggest that the survivability of the death penalty is a crucial element in Derrida's attempt to articulate a different abolitionism, an abolitionism that has parted ways with all certainty concerning the death penalty's ‘end’.

The traumatic origins of representation

The debate regarding representation is haunted by the fact that it takes place within a context of general suspicion whereby everything, it is claimed, is always representation. Such is the hurdle that Foucault identifies and Derrida attempts to elucidate in his debate with Heidegger, in which he takes issue with Heidegger’s critique of the “age of representation.” Derrida’s deconstruction of Heidegger’s account of the history of representation leads to a reconstruction that privileges the motifs of dissemination, of envoi (sending or dispatching). In art too, Derrida confronts Heidegger, this time with the aim of re-thinking the relationship between the work and what lies outside and beyond it. By framing the Derrida/Heidegger debate within a consideration of the Lascaux cave drawings, and by examining the positions of Girard, Bataille and Blanchot in relation to the question of the origins of art, it will be possible to re-draw the boundaries of representation insofar as they lie at the intersection between philosophy and art.

Finitude and Violence: Žižek versus Derrida on Politics

In a recent article, Martin McQuillan has inaugurated a vigorous Derridean critique of a violent tone that has recently arisen in continental philosophy, exemplified by Slavoj Žižek's attempt to retrieve Robespierre's notion of Terror. This article sets out to complicate such critique, opening a new perspective on the Derrida- Žižek debate on the question of politics. In particular, it examines Derrida's and Žižek's respective approaches to difference and violence as differing responses to a shared problematic of constructing a consistent (immanent) politics within the horizon of a finite world. It proceeds by elaborating Žižek's critique of Derridean deconstruction, highlighting how Derrida's attempt to minimise violence via maximal openness to difference, within the horizon of the future-to-come, inadvertently reinscribes a minimal but problematic ontotheological trace which ironically circumscribes deconstructive openness to difference. The article goes on to examine how Žižek's alternative construal of a purified violence and (Hegelian) self-difference ends up repeating in somewhat different terms these same problematic features of Derrida's writings. The article concludes by arguing that each approach requires a theoretically-integrated ethos of 'becoming other' in which the unavoidable theoretical anticipation of difference (and the risk of invocation of the ontotheological) is ruptured by the actual encounter with difference.

Tongue-tied Democracy: The Bind of National Language in Tocqueville and Derrida

My paper examines Derrida's attempts to resist, on the one hand, what he thought of as the increasing international hegemony of American English as the technolanguage of communication, and, on the other hand, forms of linguistic nationalism, when using the resources of the French language to deploy the syntagma: démocratie à venir. It does this by investigating what happens when claims about democracy are made in such a way as to be singularly idiomatic – made from a cosmopolitan point of view that takes into account, rather than vitiates à la Kant, the singular poeticity of idioms. It contrasts Derrida's analysis of the relationship between the national, democracy and idiomaticity with Tocqueville's nationalistic claims; examining, in particular, the issue of how language supposedly binds people together, the role of singularity and generality in thinking about idioms, the divide between originary and techno-scientific idioms, and Derrida's practice of writing in plus d'une langue. It also outlines how, paradoxically, it is a form of idiomaticity and not linguistic instrumentality that disrupts the logic of appropriation, the logic inscribed in the neighbouring, though different, conceptual values of idion, proprius and le propre.

Revisiting Plato’s Pharmacy

In this essay, one of Derrida’s early texts, Plato’s pharmacy, is analysed in detail, more specifically in relation to its reflections on writing and its relation to law. This analysis takes place with reference to a number of Derrida’s other texts, in particular those on Freud. It is especially Freud’s texts on dream interpretation and on the dream-work which are of assistance in understanding the background to Derrida’s analysis of writing in Plato’s pharmacy. The essay shows the close relation between Derrida’s analysis of Plato’s texts and Freud’s study of the dream-work. The forces at work in dreams, it appears, are at play in all texts, which in turn explains Derrida’s contentions in relation to the pharmakon as providing the condition of possibility of Plato’s texts. The essay furthermore points to the continuity between this ‘early’ text of Derrida and his ‘later’, seemingly more politico-legal texts of the 1990s. A close reading of Plato’s pharmacy, with its investigation via ‘writing’ of the foundations of metaphysics, and thus also of the Western concept of law, is obligatory should one wish to comprehend how Derrida attempts to exceed the restricted economy of metaphysics through his analysis of concepts such as justice and hospitality.

Social Constructionism, Deconstructionism and Some Requirements of Discourse

Social constructionist metatheory allows that any coherent epistemology must be self-reflexive, but, while it denies that any assertion can be true, and that there are any independent realities to be referred to, it nevertheless treats discourse as having objective existence, and assumes that its own statements about discourse are true. Thus in asserting its own basic premise it contradicts it. Social constructionist metatheory borrows from deconstructionism and arrives at the same self-defeating scepticism. Derrida enlarges on Saussure's principle of the arbitrary relation between signifier and signified. Both linguists commence their accounts of the origin of language from a basis of epistemological idealism, thus undermining the stability of referential meaning. Derrida's attempt to reject the law of contradiction follows from his stress on the indeterminacy of meaning, and makes impossible the assertion of anything. His aphorism that there is nothing outside the text is revealed as his idiosyncratic version of classical idealism. Recognition of the possibility and necessity of objectivity in discourse is not, as some constructionists claim, author-itarian. It is essential for the effective criticism of social dogma.

Derrida's Defence of Paul de Man's Wartime Writings: A Deconstructionist Dilemma

Derrida's attempt at a defence of Paul de Man's wartime writings put him in a difficult position. Had he remained loyal to his usual deconstructionist practice of interpretation, he would have been unable to defend de Man in a politically effective way. Derrida therefore chose a hybrid form of interpretation that is neither purely deconstructionist nor easily classifiable in any other way. Faced with a case in which a purely deconstructionist reading would not have achieved his aim of minimising the political damage caused by the discovery of de Man's wartime writings, Derrida opted for an interpretive approach which allowed him to read into de Man's texts what he wanted to get out of them, ignoring what seems obvious to less biased readers.

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). …

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 trace of legal idealism in Derrida's grammatology

Against a background of Heidegger's project of tracing the other back through the history of metaphysics, Derrida attempts to think the other as outside of identity or presencing philosophy. The other is neither present nor absent. The other is differance with an 'a'. In his important essay 'Differance', Derrida suggests that whereas difference presupposes identity, differance with an 'a' is a 'middle voice' which precedes and sets up the opposition between identity and non-identity. The soft 'a' refers to the production of differences, and the 'differences between differences'. Derrida calls this preceding moment before metaphysics and before language 'the play of differ ences'.

The Rhetoric of Failure and Deconstruction

Unmasking Deconstruction: Skepticism in Disguise? In this essay I argue that in order to understand the consequences of Jacques Derrida's theory of language, it is essential to rethink the relationship of his philosophy to skepticism.1 strategic return to the question of in the context of Derrida's work requires immediate justification because the very term skepticism is bound to evoke a long series of misreadings not only of deconstruction but also of When deconstruction is perceived as the most extreme manifestation of postmodernity, the very appearance of the term skepticism implies a strong and often reductive value judgment about the impasse, deadlock, or exhaustion of postmodern thinking: postmodernism. . . [is] a continuation of the metaphysical skeptical tradition, reaching its dead end in deconstruction.2 In the aftermath of French poststructuralism, the problem of is persistently raised in both philosophical and literary studies in order to dramatize the paralyzing consequences of the postmodern critiques of reason and the subject.3 Although the charge of is usually dismissed as a misreading of Derrida's thought, the very frequency of this misreading and its persistent recurrence requires critical explanation. I argue that the repetition of in the reception of deconstruction inadvertently points to the crucial and frequently untheorized problem in Derrida's work: to the reinscription of as an ethical, rather than epistemological, problem facing modernity. focus on the critical revision of skepticism, I claim, allows us to move past the endless discussions of the impasse of postmodernity, the exhaustion of subjectivity, and the collapse of reason, and to articulate instead an alternative interpretation of poststructuralist discourse-an interpretation that would account for the crucial role of alterity in language. In order to articulate the stakes of the revision of skepticism, I will contrast two very different ways of broaching the problem of within deconstruction: the first path, followed by many of Derrida's critics, serves the purpose of dismissing the critical force of poststructuralism by assimilating it into the classical skeptical challenge that philosophy knows how to refute; the second path, initiated by Emmanuel Levinas's response to Derrida, implies just the reverse-that the ethical consequences of Derrida's critique of logocentrism and the philosophy of the subject are perhaps incomprehensible without a prior reappraisal of skepticism. Depending on the way it is articulated, the relation between deconstruction and can serve, therefore, two different purposes. In the first case, the problem of sets up the contrast between the traditional picture of language as a reliable means of representation at the disposal of the subject and the deconstructive view in which language relinquishes this representative function and thus leaves the subject without any relationship to the external world. In the second case, is invoked in order to articulate the difference between language understood within the parameters of the subject and language conceived as an exposure to the other. difference between these two ways of articulating the connection between deconstruction and is crucial for understanding Derrida's place within postmodern critiques of reason. In particular, the contrast between representation and exposure to the other allows us to clarify the consequences of Derrida's attempt to dissociate language from the metaphysics of the subject. Thus, what is at stake in raising the issue of is not only a matter of settling a controversy within the reception of deconstruction but also an inquiry into the implications and dilemmas of the postmodern critiques of rationality. One of the most powerful criticisms addressed to deconstruction in particular, and to the postmodern critiques of reason in general, is the Habermasian claim that postmodern thought is caught in the inevitable aporia of the totalizing critique of reason destroying its own foundation--or, what he calls, a performative contradiction: The totalizing self-critique of reason gets caught in a performative contradiction since subject centered reason can be convicted of being authoritarian in nature only by having recourse to its own tools. …

Openings: Derrida, Differance, and the Production of Justice

If you let differance have its way in ethics, you would stop writing, because you would have to write down the names of everyone, one by one, and say what happening to them.1 So says John Caputo who, apparently at least, has parted with Heidegger to keep company with Derrida, primarily because he believes Derrida has more ethical concern for others. Caputo argues, in fact, that the operation of differance which Derrida opens up for us not only a playing with language, not only a linguistic operation or production, but it an ethical operation, an ethical production. Differance for Caputo a linguistic response to an obligation and so the striving and maneuvering in language toward ethics and justice, the movement toward ethics and justice, not an arrival at them. For Caputo, then, the work of justice, which how he makes sense of Derrida's surprising and apparently contradictory claims that although justice isn't deconstructible, presumably because it doesn't exist, still deconstruction justice, Of course there are many to whom any claim by Derrida or anyone who keeps company with him that justice or ethics or even that it has much to do with justice or ethics would be not only surprising but downright offensive. Two extreme examples would be David Hirsch, arguing from what he terms not a postmodern but a postAuschwitz perspective, and Somer Brodribb, arguing from a feminist perspective. Hirsch, in a chapter remarkably titled and the SS Connection, refers to Derrida as a verbal puzzlemaker and suggests that he and his fellow deconstructionists, with all their talk of erasure and undecideability and ambiguity and obscurity, carried the self-deceptions and the moral ambiguities and duplicities of the Nazi occupation over into the post-war period and misled their readers by insisting that their nihilism was the result of rigorous philosophical deliberation instead of the residue of historical exhaustion and moral shame.3 The playing with and within language which has no less appeal for Brodribb. Deconstruction, she says, is a certain masturbation with the text, playing with the terms at hand.4 It useless for feminism, she argues, because it basically means never having to say you're wrong. Or a feminist. Deconstruction hopes to endlessly defer feminism.5 5 These brief quotations will suffice, I hope, to exemplify the severe differences that separate those who think good news for ethics from those who think nothing but bad news, and especially bad news for all those concerned with producing a more ethical and just world. The question continues to be debated: does help produce that more ethical and just world? One way to approach this important issue to ask: differance an ethical production? Can one offer arguments defending it as ethical? And when one does so, does one have to transgress against the tenets of and betray Derrida in order to do it? Does one have to turn in one's membership card in the club of when one performs the operation of differance as not only a linguistic but an ethical production and defends it as such? To begin to address these very significant questions, I shall first offer an interpretation of what I refer to as the operation of differance as it has been produced and initiated by Derrida. Then I hsall discuss two attempts to demonstrate that the operation of differance an ethical operation. The first by J. Hillis Miller in his The Ethics of Reading and the second the much more recent work by John Caputo. Neither of these, I will argue, does justice to the ways in which Derrida attempts to produce justice through the play of differance. I shall conclude by advancing my own interpretation of differance and of Derrida's work as an ethical production and of how they can both be defended as such. …