Derrida's Critique Research Articles

The Last Straw

Here are four ways to start an article. One is to take a keyword and look it up in a dictionary. By engaging its meaning, especially its denotative meaning, the critic can pinpoint a moment and a nexus within a system. Scrutinizing its connotations, its changes over time, or its multiple, if not contradictory meanings, the critic can begin to destabilize that point, not necessarily to deconstruct it, as things would have been said in the seventies, but to problematize it. Thus, to paraphrase Lacan, language is structured like a language, which one might understand (following Derrida's critique of structuralism in Structure, Sign, and Play), as meaning that language is unstructured like a language. It is a system that has its quirks, its differences, its nexuses, loci, or points de capiton that shift, shake, rattle, and roll, and despite the best sewing or suturing in the world, unravel. Another way to start an article is with reference to a specific problematic.' Define the contours of a specific situation and begin to see what happens next. Conversely, one could start an article with a global hypothesis and see the necessary matters that may be deduced logically from it; then, engaging possible antitheses, one might construct a more complicated synthesis that reconfirms and surpasses the initial paragraph. And, to be ultra-chic and postmodern, one might start an article by doing a web-based search, using a search engine like Google, which gives more hits than one could ever have imagined. I have reached four approaches, and that is not enough, for another way to start an article, especially in current academic climes, is with an autobiographical reference. The article then becomes a metonymy of the author, suitable in a postmodern, destabilized world that has abandoned identity politics and absolute hierarchic truths. And yet none of these is the way this article has started, forestalling its subject, thereby not starting the article. For at one point I had started this article each of these ways, yet each was, for the moment or for the strategy, unsatisfactory. Strangely, the autobiographical one was the least unsatisfactory, because it gave me an insight that no other did: it moved me from the unproblematic to the problematic. And this, I thought, was the most

The Desert in the Desert: Faith and the Aporias of Law and Knowledge in Derrida and The Sayings of the Desert Fathers

In this article I consider The Sayings of the Desert Fathers in light of deconstructive ethical theory. Jacques Derrida's critique of law in favor of undecidability, the uncertainty of chora or the “desert in the desert,” and limitless responsibility helps us understand this perplexing work; wandering in the desert of the Sayings, the reader does not find the law guaranteeing salvation but, rather, is left searching in each particular instance for “discernment” and “charity,” for “what your soul wills in following God's will.” Amid a contradictory collection of narratives and advice, the Sayings leaves the reader to find in his or her particular life the lack or desire that prompts him or her to approach the other in repentance and yet in hope. The Sayings points to this sort of faith as much as to deconstructive questioning—both of which take place in this “desert in the desert”—as constitutive of right relations with the other.

The Literary Field of Twentieth-Century China (review)

Reviewed by: The Literary Field of Twentieth-Century China Pietro Giordan (bio) Michel Hockx , editor. The Literary Field of Twentieth-Century China. Richmond, UK: Curzon Press, 1999. vii, 252 pp. Hardcover $40.00, ISBN 0-7007-1073-6. This volume edited by Michel Hockx is a collection of nine essays presented at a workshop of the International Institute for Asian Studies held in Leiden, the Netherlands, in January 1996. Overall, it is both readable and interesting. Apart from Raoul David Findensein and Marja Kaikkonen, whose chapters are slightly longer than the others, the remaining contributors managed to preserve the "paper spirit." The theoretical frame of reference indicated by the title, the notion of the literary field, is taken from the late French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Some of the contributions either do not fit or fit rather loosely in such a framework; probably it would have been better if the editor had chosen a less technical focus. Nevertheless, this collection is interesting for two main reasons. First, it is a genuine attempt at assessing theory through literature and not vice versa; second, it also includes contributions that are obviously not in tune with Bourdieu's theory (especially the essay by Wendy Larson). The second aspect is particularly commendable if one considers the fact that very often today many such volumes are edited with an almost religious zeal and addressed to the already converted. The major strong point of this collection is that it aims at (re)evaluating Bourdieu's theory within a political and cultural context that is extremely remote from that [End Page 403] used by Bourdieu himself to construct his sociological aesthetics. On the other hand, it should be pointed out that some of the contributors who question or interrogate Bourdieu's theory in its own context seem to rely exclusively on English scholarship on the work of Bourdieu. The first essay, "An Act of Violence: Translation of Western Fiction in the Late Qing and Early Republican Period," by Wang-chi Wong, analyzes the rise of translation in the late Qing period and focuses on how different "translator-reformers" developed various strategies to persuade their readers of the need for and the legitimacy of introducing Western works in a very conservative environment. Wong makes some interesting remarks on the relation between translation and readership. The choice of a given expressive medium (wenyan or baihua) was made on the basis of some assumptions on the part of the translator about the actual reader of the translated text. Such assumptions (substantially unflattering, indeed) had a huge impact on the nature and extent of the actual "act of violence" mentioned in the title. This point is obviously a crucial one that opens up several interesting issues. The theoretical frame of reference within which Wong finally decides to justify the strategic aims of the Qing translators is based on Derrida's critique of Western metaphysics and its myth of the original text. This is obviously a legitimate and interesting hypothesis and deserves further discussion. The second essay, "More than Butterflies," by Denise Gimpel, deals with the early years of the journal Xiaoshuo yuebao (Fiction monthly). Gimpel argues that the Xiaosho yuebao, even before the May Fourth period, was already far more political in nature than Mao Dun and other leading May Fourth figures could have imagined. Basing the theoretical framework of this essay very loosely on Bourdieu's notion of literary field, Gimpel states that that Bourdieu is not a lone voice in the wilderness (Lowenthal and Trotter are quoted as instances of literary historians who develop theories similar to Bourdieu's). Some of Gimpel's views are quite debatable. For instance, it is quite puzzling to read that pre-May Fourth writers who published in Xiaoshuo yuebao "may have no ideological stance" or that no ideological stance was required "since they wrote within a framework of general consensus" (p. 53). Elsewhere, Gimpel seems to oscillate between a quest for psychological insights and the desire to be able to recreate the exact historical context for any literary history. But here, one may think of Chen Xiaomei's Occidentalism rather than Bourdieu's notion of literary field. Also, Gimpel is quite selective in her...

Saying ?Yes? to Africa: Jacques Derrida'sSpecters of Marx

may be traced to Derrida's orientation to Marxism as a uniquely theorist of Sephardic, Maghrebian, and Judaic experience. Unless the reader of Specters of Marx is willing to entertain this possibility, especially by suspending the agendas of race politics as they are defined in the (but also Judeo-African) diaspora in the US, France, and elsewhere, the edge of Derrida's critique of the latent metaphysics operative within Marxist theory will be blunted, when not altogether misunderstood. In a broader sense, deconstruction may be compatible with political and cultural agendas that are more commonly acknowledged as traditional African concerns, including the European stigmatization of illiteracy, the iconoclasticism of Judeo-Muslim hermeneutics, and the orality-aurality of

Empire and Utopia: A Psychoanalytic Critique of Totality

Post-11 September Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Empire (2000) has found mass popularity. In this article I discuss the text's relationship to postmodern capitalism, attempt to understand its appeal after the attacks on New York and Washington, and consider its political message. To this end, the first part of the paper aims to situate Empire against the background of the global economy and the 11 September attacks. Beyond this formal critique of Hardt and Negri's book, the second part of the article undertakes a psychoanalytic critique of the text itself. The role of this section is to show how the formal situation ofEmpire is written into the fabric of the book. The conclusion of the article assesses Hardt and Negri's political position in relation to Derrida's critique of globalization in Specters of Marx (1994).

Public Space and Democracy. Edited by Marcel Hénaff and Tracy B. Strong. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. 256p. $49.95 cloth, $19.95 paper.

Until recently space was a highly suspect concept in political theory. The linguistic turn that has dominated the discipline for the past 20 years has multiple roots. Derrida's critique of pure presence, Foucault's discourse analysis, and Habermas's communicative action, in different ways, contributed to an emphasis on language over place. Recent work in geography and cultural studies, however, has begun to reserve this trend.

Language, philosophy and the risk of failure: rereading the debate between Searle and Derrida

In this paper I return to one of the central points of contention in the renowned debate between John Searle and Jacques Derrida with the aim of rethinking the role of success and the place of failure in communication. What is the philosophical significance of Austin's decision to exclude from his investigation (in How to Do Things with Words) certain utterances that cannot qualify as successful? Examining the conflicting ways in which Searle and Derrida understand and respond to Austin, I try to flesh out Derrida's call to grant failure (or the “negative”) the important place it deserves in our understanding of speech. Yet, whereas for Derrida, the call to recognize failure as an “internal and positive condition” ultimately leads to a structural – albeit a deconstructive – critique of language's conditions of possibility, I focus instead on the implications which this insight may have for our understanding of the actuality of language. Consequently, I argue that while Derrida's critique subverts the hegemony of success, it ironically remains, like Searle, distant from and external to the actual reverberation of spoken language.

Bodies of Responsibility: Merleau-Ponty and Derrida

Richard Rorty's essay Deconstruction and Circumvention divides Jacques Derrida's career into two phases. first is Derrida's so-called phase. For Rorty this period is a kind of misstart, a failure to see that any attempt to overcome metaphysics will always be bound to offer an explanation of the other side of metaphysics which is itself metaphysical, i.e., it will offer conditions for the possibility of sense and meaning that are themselves beyond sense and meaning.' Rorty writes, tries, like Heidegger, to have it both ways: to eff the ineffable by decreeing that a word [like differance or trace] which he puts into is not the sort of thing which can be put into circulation (CIS, 124). However, Rorty also holds that there is a significant transformation in Derrida's middle period. After Post Card , Rorty explains, Derrida essentially gives up being an author of philosophy in favor of becoming a creative scribbler on philosophy. That is, sensing the futility of overcoming metaphysics metaphysically, Derrida drops the serious philosophical talk in favor of play. He develops a style rather than a method. This Derrida, argues Rorty, should be admired as a creative force rather than as someone capable of, or even interested in, furthering the ends of social justice, for such ends, asserts Rorty, require arguments, and require that the participants share a common vocabulary from which to argue. Since Derrida is privately self-actualizing through his own new metaphorics, he should not be held accountable for solving the social ills of culture. Those kinds of debates simply fall outside the scope of his project. But the decade following Rorty's initial analysis has witnessed the emergence of another Derrida, one who considers his ethical work very serious. Take, for example, Derrida's reply when posed the following question in a 1997 interview for Die Zeit: Question: The ethical of your theory was always, if perhaps a little too hidden, recognizable. But why for some time now has justice occupied the premier place of your texts'? Derrida : That which you are calling an underlying plan was always readable. Since the beginning. But to know what is readable one must read. (DZ, 8)2 Such disagreement between Rorty's reading of Derrida and Derrida's own understanding of his project stems from the very different nominalist frameworks the two authors use to approach their concerns about ethics and social justice. Rorty's pragmatic nominalism is fundamentally confident that language more or less adequately serves in getting things that are useful and just accomplished. His future is open and optimistic because the limits of justice are creative limits. maximum gain in social justice is a function of marshaling the creative forces to address the specific problem at hand, i.e., to build a better mouse trap. In contrast, Derrida's deconstructive approach is more skeptical. future is not open. It is mostly the unconscious repetition of the past, thus the possibility of a future cannot be asserted willy nilly, but can only be faced by laying the conceptual framework of the past bare. On this account Derrida's critique bears more than a little resemblance to early Heideggerian hermeneutics. So while Rorty thinks that if Derrida wants to influence social concerns he needs to provide an ethical position that is both less allusive than his previous work and more explicit in its ability to address practical social concerns, Derrida, for his part, thinks Rorty misses the point. Concepts like arguments and shared vocabulary, which are the keys to Rorty's approach to social justice, beg the important question of the grounds from which they may be deployed. Without laying their conceptual basis bare such notions may at the very least prove to be aporetic, and at worst may promote injustice in the name of justice. Thus when Derrida makes assertions about social justice, they are by design not the kind of practical solutions to specific problems Rorty craves. …

Without Negative Theology: Deconstruction and the Politics of Negative Theology

This article explores Derrida's reading of negative theology and, in particular, his dramatic claim that there would be no politics ‘without’ negative theology. It begins by summarising the general thrust of Derrida's critique of negative theology. It then focuses upon the complex history of the term ‘without’ in Derrida's texts on Pseudo‐Dionysius, Angelus Silesius and others. Finally, the article places this reading of negative theology in the context of the so‐called ‘political turn’ in Derrida's texts in recent years. The concept of the ‘without’, it argues, belongs with, and helps to clarify, comparatively more famous Derridaean political themes like the decision, the impossible and religion without religion. In conclusion, the article argues that a better understanding of Derrida's claim that there would be no politics ‘without’ negative theology might also lead to a better understanding of the politics of deconstruction.

(Re)Turning Derrida to Heidegger: Being-with-Others as Primordial Politics

For decades two questions have dogged Derrida and his account of deconstruction: What is his relation to Heidegger? And, is deconstruction political? While Derrida has always acknowledged his debt to Heidegger, and claimed that deconstruction is political in nature, these two issues have been treated separately. However, I think they are related. Locating Derrida's critique of modern subjectivity within Heidegger's notion of being-with-others makes explicit the political implications of deconstruction. I argue that Heidegger's analysis of Dasein's fall into the "they" provides the philosophical (con)text in which to situate Derrida's deconstruction of the self-presence and autonomy that grounds the political agency of the modern subject. While Heidegger's analysis of the "they" seeks to recover authentic identity, Derrida's critique of logocentrism asks us to recall our inescapable responsibility to others. In politicizing Heidegger's ontology of Dasein, I contend that Derrida seeks to replace the desire for authenticity with the call for justice.

In Praise of Presence

. . perception is unconsciousness. Merleau-Ponty (VAI 189)1 . . ego can really in its experiences without being conscious of them. Andrd de Muralt (IP 300)2 [It is a] philosophical error... to think that visible is an objective presence (or an idea of this presence). Merleau-Ponty (VAI 258) Jacques Derrida's Speech and Phenomena fundamentally constitutes a critique of Husserl's theory of signs. More specifically, it critiques Husserl's of principles, principle of non-signification, according to which the self presence of living or pure presence can occur only where signification can not occur, only where there is an absence or uselessness of (SP 60). Contrary to this, Derrida denies possibility of pure presence altogether and in Speech and Phenomena he sets out to prove that thesis of temporality that Husserl advances in The Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness in fact fails to support latter's philosophy of presence, and that it instead supports Derrida's own thesis that at heart of self we find signs (the trace), signs which forever keep self from itself, signs that introduce a radical alterity at heart of self. In this essay I will analyze and critique Derrida's critique of Husserl's notion of pure presence. I will show that Husserl's theory of temporality in The Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness does support a philosophy of pure presence, but that Husserl's notion of presence is not, as Derrida would have it, one which reject[s] `after-event' of becoming conscious of an `unconscious content' which is structure of temporality implied throughout Freud's texts. I will argue that Husserl's notion of presence is transcendental, hyletic, and unconscious. I will not, however, argue against notion of dissemination which I do consider to be phenomenologically significant. Instead I will argue that dissemination, characterized by a lack of stable meaning, non-origin, and departure from rules of logic, is constituted by relation of transcendental presence to mundane. The Central Issue In The Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness, Husserl maintains that an analysis of experience reveals a constant presence, a now. The now presents us with differing content: content that fills now, impression, passes and gives way to new content. As it does, primal impression is not lost but is retained (ITC 161). Using example of hearing a melody Husserl describes how each tone heard in now sinks off into retentive consciousness as next tone takes its place in now. Consciousness, embracing both now and retention, anticipates next tone (protention). In this fashion consciousness perceives whole succession of tones as a unified melody. In other words, according to Husserl, an analysis of experience reveals that form of consciousness consists of a flow, of a series of nows or impressions which run off into retentions or primary remembrance. Retention, a non-now, and now form a continuity or a unity since they are both moments of flow of experience. In Husserl's words, the unity of consciousness which encompasses present and past is a phenomenological datum (ITC 36). Because of retention (and protention) we are able to live through present, according to Husserl. While Husserl's analysis seems to reflect experience, Derrida maintains that continuity between now and not-now, between now and retention, destroys any possibility of a primordial pure presence. In Derrida's words: As soon as we admit this continuity of now and not-now, perception and nonperception, in zone of primordiality common to primordial impression and primordial retention, we admit other into self-identity of Augenblick; nonpresence and nonevidence are admitted into blink of instant. …

The (Im) Possibility of Democratic Justice and the “Gift” of the Majority

This article conceptually explores the problem of democratic justice in the form of legislated equal rights for minority citizen groups. Following Derrida's critique of Western logic and thought, at issue is the (im)possibility of justice for under- and nonrepresented constituencies. Derrida's socioethical treatment of justice, law, hospitality, and community suggests that the majority bestows a gift (ostensible sociopolitical empowerment); however, the ruse of this gift is that the giver affirms an economy of narcissism and reifies the hegemony and power of the majority. This article concludes by speculating on the possibility of justice and equality informed by an affirmative postmodern framework. A cultural politics of difference, contingent universalities, undecidability, dialogical pedagogy, border crossings, and constitutive thought would underscore this transformative and deconstructive agenda.

"The Past Is No Longer Out-of-Date":

In Michel Serres's philosophy, the "problem of time," Bruno Latour claims, not without a sense of exasperation, "is the greatest source of incomprehension." 2 Latour's statement, made in the poststructuralist 1990s and contextualized in the French intellectual tradition, invites a twofold comparative (re)thinking. On the one hand, his pinpointing, in superlatives, of Serres's "problem of time" as both the origin and the condition of understandability calls attention to a critical resonance between Serres's insight into the hitherto philosophical concept of linear time as "the most immediate and simplest esthetic projection of ordered structure" 3 and Jacques Derrida's critique of "the vulgar concept of time, from Aristotle to Hegel," as constitutive of Western metaphysical tradition privileging "the domination of presence." 4 On the other hand, his complaint about the [End Page 235] "incomprehension" of Serres's notion of time, which results--as does the entirety of Serres's thinking, according to Latour--from its being "so totally un-French, that is to say un-German, in [its] philosophical tradition," 5 implies what Maria L. Assad calls "a new philosophy of time," 6 one that is free from the much vexed "aporia" 7 at the core of "the whole of philosophical discourse on time since [Aristotle], up to and including Derrida," 8 a distinctly Serresian philosophy described by Latour as "the Enlightenment, without the Critique." 9

What Gives (with Derrida)?

This article is a close reading of Jacques Derrida's critique of Marcel Mauss's classic, The Gift, and its revision through Charles Baudelaire's `The Counterfeit Coin'. Derrida's rejection of any exchange/reciprocity relation in the gift as an immoral binding of free subjects strangely accommodates the current ideological crisis of the gift in welfare societies. Moreover, Derrida's textual substitution of Baudelaire for Mauss repeats the counterfeit practice on which his own aporia of the gift is based.

BECKETT'S TRILOGY AND THE LIMITS OF SELF-DECONSTRUCTION

Ever since the seminal works of Hugh Kenner (1962), Ruby Cohn (1964), and other critics of the first generation, we have known about the richness in philosophical topics of Beckett's works and the manifold philosophical readings his texts purportedly lend themselves to. Among those, Beckett's association with existentialist thought has been perhaps the most persistent of all (see Esslin 1965, 4-10). In any case, criticism has tended to mirror the various twists, turns and crises of literary and philosophical theories of the past decades, responding to texts which problematize the most basic concepts on which literary studies have been grounded and render them inoperative (Fitch 1992, 126). It comes as no surprise, then, that ten years ago at the conference marking his 80th birthday, a new Beckett appeared once again, thinkable only in the most recent terms (Butler 1990, X). was discovered as a poet of the poststructuralist age, as a deconstructionist avant la lettre (Butler 1990, X). Since then, his writings have been reread in the light of theories claiming textuality to supersede the subject,1 and a number of studies specifically on and Jacques Derrida's deconstruction have been published over the last years.2 Since Derrida has actually acknowledged his close affinity to Beckett's writings, nebulously finding him too close to write about (Derrida 1992, 60-62), this association seems to have somewhat ironically been granted authorization from the highest level. In short, linking to Deconstruction or Poststructuralism is not new. Well into the 1990s, moreover, Deconstruction seems on the wane, and as Steven Connor has suggested, its critical value to studies may legitimately be questioned. With its ever recurrent denunciation of presence and logocentricity (Connor 1992, 121), deconstruction has indeed tended to reproduce the same critical yield in spite of its proclaimed focus on the non-stability of textual meaning. Yet independent of the possible long-term critical sterility of Deconstruction, the affinity remains. It is between Beckett's insistence on the impossibility of a true self, in particular as formulated in his trilogy Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (Beckett 1979), and Derrida's critique of the notion of self-presence of the subject (e.g., Derrida 1973; 1976). This affinity, however, needs revision. I suggest exploring it in both ways, for not only does Beckett's trilogy anticipate Derrida's

Logics of Failed Revolt: French Theory after May '68 (review)

REVIEWS rative or a poem affects in the end the fate ofme critical interpretation as well. It all comes down to a new "prosopopoeia": do critics put things straight in tiieir reading, or do they rather, as in Kleist's lawless world, expose a "performative that does not perform"? For his part, it seems that Miller has very little to worry about. Unlike semiotics for instance, the deconstructive reading ofMiller has not turned, at least for the time being, into a marginalized technique ofdie speech acts. Roland Barthes was one semiotician who managed to foresee the danger ofan operational reading that was inclined to leave out die good habit of creative reading. Convincing at almost every level ofme "linguistic moment," Miller imagines his "topographical" inquiry to be doing the work performed by personification: to show that underneatii any narrative, there is a "voice" that calls the reader to restore its "otherness." To mention other examples from Topographies, the ontological and epistemological implications ofNietzsche's style in Thus Spoke Zarathustra prove how linguistic tropes point toward a foray into a textual or "fabricated" reality rather than an "objective" one. In another essay, answering critics who feel discomfort with Derrida's vast rhetorical "topography," and who resent die "invasion" of discourses alien to literature as a loss of the "realistic" ground necessary to validate fiction, Miller responds by pointing out how intentional misreadings might produce ideological monsters. Another space doomed to misreadings appears in Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, the object ofan insightful Spitzerian analysis. The way Southern ideology disrupts the life ofthe characters is itselfa sign ofthe mistaken mapping oftheir lives within a misread space. By the time a string of unfortunate prejudices has contaminated the space within and without the characters, the solution of"overpassing to love" is the only one left. But this is an important step: it gives the characters a good chance to "figure out" a different topos, and gives the readers a story that is the personification ofa more human history. Miller implies that this would make a good figure to describe the mission of literary theory in general: to set free the dead weight ofmaterial reality within die realm of language and tell us, as Ovid would say, "ofbodies changed to different forms." Topographies performs such magic brilliantly. Florin Berindeanu University ofGeorgia PETER STARR. Logics ofFailed Revolt: French Theory after May '68. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995. 268 pp. When die reader gets past its somewhat daunting prose, Peter Starr's excellent new book offers a lucid and original analysis that is mostly convincing and always engaging. Primarily written for those interested in French theory and ready to appreciate its rhetorical style, this is no introductory text. The arguments oíLogics are complex and nuanced, its language dense and theory-laden. But Starr's book shines as a wide-ranging synthesis ofcomparative literature and theory: he brings together a rich array oftexts from history, philosophy, psychology, and even medicine (an array not always common witii "theory"), making them speak neither simply with Voli 21 (1997): 166 THE COMPAKATIST nor simply against one other. And he does so witii originality, competence, and wit. Logics is indeed interdisciplinary work at its best, deploying an impressive body of scholarship and placing theory in its historical context. Following a succinct overview, Starr's study is divided into three parts: "Revolution as Repetition," "Politics as Tragic Impasse," and "Conjuring the Impasse." In the first part, he lays out the historical and theoretical groundwork of"the logic of failed revolt" (22) or what he earlier describes as "a series of commonplace 'explanations' for a failure ofrevolutionary action" (2). According to Starr, in such a logic or logics diere emerge "three broad genetic scenarios": the logic of"specular doubling," mat of"structural repetition," and finally "various 'logics ofrecuperation '" (2-3). The slippage between Starr's use of singular and plural forms of logic(s) betrays a familiar play ofsignifiers; Starr is no doubt trying to draw on all the meanings of"logic(s)." But he draws especially on French theory's term logos for word, discourse, reason, and so on—meanings which inform, for instance, Derrida's critique of logocentrism. Indeed such a semiotic...

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. …

Faithful Reading: Poststructuralism and the Sacred

AbstractIn its subversive interrogations of universal values, objective criteria for meaning, canonicity and other hallmarks which distinguish the Literary, poststructuralism appears to confront all that is "sacred" in the privileged texts of Western culture. Particularly in biblical criticism, insofar as the sanctity of the text and the inviolability of its truth claims are held to be unquestionable, poststructuralism is often denounced as anathema, or at least inappropriate, to exegesis. It is argued that if determinate meaning is inaccessible through language, and universal truth a chimera, then according to poststructuralist tenets the Bible is, like all literature, "Just another text." This paper entertains another possibility: that poststructuralism in fact places the Bible in a position of singular significance. If claims for the "sacredness" of certain texts are precisely where poststructuralist critics direct their efforts, then biblical texts, whose claims for sacredness are more insistent and dogmatic than most, should provide poststructuralism's most contentious (and therefore most important) field of operation. Interrogating the sacred, far from being an iconoclastic pursuit, is an inevitable consequence of the reception of sacred texts-indeed, of language-in culture. By way of illustrating this point, I offer a reading of the Garden of Eden story (Gen. 2:4b-3:24) which incorporates insights offered by Jacques Derrida's critique of logocentrism. What poststructuralism demands, in the final analysis, is not the abandonment of meaning but its reconfiguration: notions of faithful reading and respect for the text which embrace difference, ambiguity and an understanding of the sacred as the site not of uncontestable command, but of enquiry and interpretation.

Cervantes's Numancia : A Speech Act Consideration

CERVANTES'S NUMANCIA: A SPEECH ACT CONSIDERATION CHARLES ORIEL Washington University, St. Louis "Speech act theory is dead." This, at least, has been the common wisdom , ever since the deconstructionist critique of many of its underlying assumptions , led by Jacques Derrida and others. While recognizing the validity of many of the criticisms aimed at speech act theory (as originally conceived ), one must acknowledge in the same breath that it has led in many cases to fruitful speculation concerning the nature and function of discursive acts in a variety ofliterary works. Since its inception with J.L. Austin's 77ow to Do Things with Words, speech act theory has had a varied and somewhat skeptical reception in the field of literary studies. Stanley Fish, for example, concludes his well-known speech act analysis of Shakespeare's Coriolanus with the admonition that the theory is limited in its uses; Shakespeare's play, he tells us, happens to be a "speech-act play," that is, it appears to be self-consciously concerned with the functionality of speech acts and, therefore, the theory "fits" it: "This fit between the play and the theory accounts for whatever illumination the present analysis has been able to provide, and it is also the reason why we should be wary of concluding from the analysis that we are in possession of a new interpretive key" ("How To" 245). Among the first appearances of speech act theory in the field ofHispanic literary studies is Things Done With Words: Speech Acts in Hispanic Drama , a collection ofessays edited by Elias L. Rivers (1986).1 This collection has been followed by several studies that, ifnot directly inspired by it, have shown the wide-spread influence of several of Austin's (and John Searle's) concepts. Catherine Larson, for example, has successfully utilized speech 705 106BCom, Vol. 47, No. 1 (Summer 1995) act formulations to contextualize discussions of Lope's La dama boba, Rojas Zorrilla's Entre bobos anda eljuego, and Ruiz de Alarcón's La verdad sospechosa, in the first three chapters of her excellent Language and the Comedia? Stanley Fish's warning, it would seem, has not been taken completely to heart. In her introductory essay to Rivers's collection, Inés Azar agrees with Fish's desire to avoid making speech act formulations into a general theory of literature, but nevertheless objects to his all-out restrictions : [Speech act theory] can be used ... to analyze sincerity and lying, duplicity, misunderstanding, responsibility, authority, and power manipulations in any given discourse. It can also be applied to some specific literary questions, such as the reliability ofnarrative voices or the characterization of courtly love, for instance, as a code or system of speech acts. The theory is obviously fitted to the study ofdialogue and more specifically to the analysis of drama, since dramatic action is constituted by linguistic events and the fate of dramatic characters depends significantly on their linguistic behavior. ("Self 12) Jacques Derrida's critique of Austin's theory (and of Searle's after him), is too detailed, nuanced, and lengthy to reiterate in this essay.3 I will grossly generalize—and, admittedly, oversimplify—for my immediate purposes by saying that this critique is aimed at the theory's apparently essentialist and logocentric nature. A metaphysics (the concepts of unified subjectivity and consequent accountability) appears to be at the very heart of Austin's system , allowing for the articulation of a kind of speech act 'ethics.' This ethics is neatly encapsulated by the following well-known and oft-repeated phrase from How to Do Things with Words: "Accuracy and morality alike are on the side of the plain saying that our word is our bond" (10). Poststructuralist thought, of course, radically contests this ethics by questioning the viability of the very concept of subjectivity: in other words, if there is no such thing as a stable, (self-)consistent, and unified subject, how can accountability , as such, exist? Of the different types of speech acts envisioned by Austin and Searle, it is the commissive4—the promise—that best appears to manifest what I am here calling "speech act ethics": identity, unified subjectivity, and essential self-presence. A promise necessarily involves...

NATIONALISM AND ÉCRITURE

In referring to Jacques Derrida's critique of Western phonocentrism, this paper argues that phonocentrism is not simply a Western phenomenon but is linked to the emergence of the modern nation-state. In this context, this paper examines the question of nationalism and éŽcriture in Japan, discussing the historical confrontation between Chinese characters (kanji) and phonetic signs (kana), the work of the contemporary Japanese linguist Motoki Tokieda, among other issues.