Derrida's Project Research Articles

Circumcision anxiety

The article reflects on Derrida's project as partly characterised by the effort to invent a language capable of responding to a post-war situation of aporia whose double-bind he seems to have felt most acutely refracted in his always anxious identifications and denials regarding his own situation as a post-war ‘Jew’. The article examines the intersections between the ‘Jewish’ element of his autobiography and his philosophical practice and argues with critics who have sought to ‘play up’ or ‘play down’ the significance of this relation in his work. The article further considers the emphasis Derrida places on his private life and looks at a number of instances where Derrida implies that what seems least important (marginal or trivial) in his writing may be the site of his most ‘global’ claims. Finally, the article argues that Derrida, like Freud, suffered from a condition that I diagnose as ‘circumcision anxiety’, which, unlike castration anxiety, concerns the relationship with the sibling rather than the father and fears not abandonment so much as the consequences of election or love.

Who Follows Whom? Derrida, Animals and Women

In ‘L'Animal que donc je suis’, Derrida analyzes the paradoxical use of discourses on shame and original sin to justify the human domination of other animals. In the absence of any absolute criterion for distinguishing between humans and other animals, human faultiness becomes a sign of our exclusive capacity for self-consciousness, freedom and awareness of mortality. While Derrida's argument is compelling, he neglects to explore the connection between the human domination of animals and the male domination of women. Throughout ‘L'Animal’, Derrida equivocates between ‘man’ and ‘humanity,’ and between the biblical figures of Ish and Adam. In so doing, he repeats a gesture that he himself has insightfully criticized in other philosophers, such as Levinas. By articulating the distinctions that Derrida elides, I suggest a way of reading Genesis which avoids this difficulty, but also continues Derrida's project.

Indefinite Play and ‘The Name of Man’

This paper is an attempt to take up the prompt in Derrida's work concerning the necessity for a deconstruction of anthropocentrism. Working through an example from Hegel's Philosophy of Right concerning animality, the paper takes up Derrida's project and connects it to the larger concern of what happens to the philosophical once it is no longer premised on the animal's exclusion but has to acknowledge the inclusion of an already present thus recalcitrant animality.

Democracy's Promise and the Politics of Worldliness in the Age of Terror

In his article, "Democracy's Promise and the Politics of Worldliness in the Age of Terror," Henry A. Giroux draws attention to how the crisis in US-American democracy has been heralded and exacerbated by the nation's increasing skepticism -- or even overt hostility -- toward the educational system. Part of such a challenge means that educators, artists, students, and others need to rethink and affirm the important presupposition that higher education is integral to fostering the imperatives of an inclusive democracy and that the crisis of higher education must be understood as part of the wider crisis of politics, power, and culture. In an effort to rescue the possibility of political engagement and to emphasize the civic role of academia, Giroux examines the work of two major public intellectuals: Jacques Derrida and Edward Said. Giroux then connects Derrida's project of addressing the promise of democracy to Said's notion of worldliness. Focusing on Said's linkage of worldliness and wakefulness, Giroux argues that at the heart of opposing the new authoritarianism is making pedagogy and education central to the political tasks of reclaiming public space, rekindling the importance of public connectedness, and infusing civic life with the importance of a democratic worldly vision.

A Transcendental Sense of Death? Derrida and the Philosophy of Language

As a new century opens, one advantage of standing on its cusp is that the considerable intellectual achievements of the previous one can be approached in a new way. Today, sufficient distance from the projects of the twentieth century is emerging such that views of this work cease to be so deeply dependent on which sides of various divides discussants happen to be on (analytic or continental, formalist or historicist, marxian or democratic, to name but a few). A far greater solidarity of concerns, methods, and questions, of a sort already customary when treating earlier eras, has now begun to become apparent amongst what once were taken to be opposed movements now. At the same time, no one of us is yet so removed from these divisions and programs (some of us, of course, virtually not at all), with the result that the new shuffling of the deck now made possible—the new filiations seen and the new limitations discovered where previously only open vistas beckoned—cannot help but change our understanding of our own projects, working methodology, and present intellectual commitments. This essay undertakes this style of rearrangement, then—or, if one must, revisionism—with regard to the field of what might generally be called post-philosophy (to what was sometimes meant simply by "theory" at certain periods in the Anglo-American academy), and it does so, in particular, with regard to the work of Jacques Derrida. Derrida has long been seen as a sort of radical, linguistic skeptic, one [End Page 1009] who denies all secure grounds including, at some stage, even the very grounds for such skepticism and denial. This essay argues, however, that the status of truth in his work is quite different, especially when it comes to his relationship with the philosophy of language. Derrida's work depends on taking positions in the philosophy of language—of affirming or holding them as true—of a far deeper and more controversial sort than is recognized almost anywhere today. The ultimate aim of such a demonstration is not, however, to suggest that Derrida's project is therefore invalid, his initiative an uninteresting or even dispensable one. A central goal of this essay, running parallel to the aim just mentioned is, in fact, to make clear, on this same basis, precisely how certain signature moments of Derrida's thinking function: to offer new and more precise renderings of developments long taken to be definitive of his project as a whole. Moreover, even if Derrida's stance were somehow to be brought into question here, it would not be in a manner any different from almost all those initiatives that today most characterize twentieth-century thought. For the question that forms the ultimate horizon of this paper, put most simply, is whether post-philosophy—that departure or transformation in respect to reason and truth, characteristic of so much work of the preceding century—truly exists in the manner currently imagined, as an ongoing enterprise of its own, with an autonomous living future. Are any of those endeavors by which the twentieth century remains marked from the beginning to the end, whether they be that of Heidegger or Adorno, Wittgenstein or Deleuze (to take some provocative pairings) in fact able to do without quite definite commitments in the fields of traditional philosophy, and thus without that truth whose ultimate authority and even possibility they are commonly thought to question? Are not their projects, even as they seek to exceed or transform truth or reason, only able to go forward if they are right about these matters foundational for their own thought?1 If the answer to these queries is yes, it raises the possibility that post-philosophy, or theory, does not exist, at least in the fashion usually assumed—not because there is no need for it, because philosophy somewhere has been established as a successful achieved science, but for the precisely opposite reason: because philosophy, too, has never...

Situating Derrida: Between Kierkegaard and Hegel

This essay presents an interpretation of Derrida's project, and has two main goals. First, I argue that Derrida's work is best approached through concepts of questioning, metaphysics, complication, trembling, and insecurity. Second, using these concepts I situate Derrida's work historically. In literature, there are four main interpretations of Derrida's project: literary (Rorty, Habermas), Kantian (Gasche), Nietzschean (Behler), and Kierkegaardian (Caputo). I find myself in greatest agreement with last, and argue that Derrida's anti-system is an articulated aporetics.1 course there are other historical reference points for situating Derrida, most obvious being Heidegger. In course of my argument, I will discuss Derrida's proximity to Heidegger, but these references will lead back past Heidegger to Hegel. Thus, at most general level of interpretation, at which this essay will deal, I argue that because Derrida pursues a more persistent and consistent aporetics than Kierkegaard, we find Derrida's project situated between Kierkegaard and Hegel. My point in suggesting that Derrida's work can best be conceived as a Kierkegaardian meditation on Hegel is not in any way to dismiss Derrida as in some way out of date. On contrary, I believe that Derrida provides an original and profound metaphilosophical position, one which offers a third possible response to philosophical questions. In addition to traditional attempts to provide answers (whether of a straightforward or transcendental kind) to philosophical and Wittgensteinian attempts to dissolve philosophical questions, deconstruction provides a completely new approach, that of complicating philosophical questioning. Questions Without Answers One of most disconcerting aspects of Derrida's texts is that although they are rife with questions and problems, mentioned and discussed as such, no answers or solutions are offered. One comes across the question of text, the question of writing, the question of language, the problem of metaphor, the question of machine, the question of margin, the question of ontological subordination, the question of history, to name just a few. If one expects answers to these questions, then one becomes bewildered and frustrated. To expect an to these is naive, and naive is one of Derrida's key pejorative terms. Derrida says in The Pit and Pyramid with regard to which cannot be used to clarify question of (signification of the) relationship between signs and truth: Formulated this way, would be stated naively, presupposing or anticipating an answer. Here we are reaching a limit (p. 81) Derrida does not mean that presuppose a specific answer; rather, they presuppose that there is some answer, any at all. Derrida never answers multitude of and problems he addresses because he believes that they cannot be answered. This is an elementary point, perhaps too elementary to be mentioned. it is absolutely crucial, so citations are in order. Only occasionally, but nevertheless distinctly, Derrida says that he is posing can't be answered. In 'Genesis and Structure' and Phenomenology, he says: The question of possibility of transcendental reduction cannot expect an answer (p. 167). At beginning of Of an Apocalyptic Tone Newly Adopted in Philosophy, he says: But I must forewarn you right now: (hi)stories or enigmas of translation I hear spoken of, that I intend to speak about, and that I shall get myself entangled in for reasons more serious than my incompetence, they are, I believe, without solution or exit (p. 25). Each of these claims refers only to under discussion in particular essay at that point, but point is generally true. Travel length and breadth of Derrida's philosophical work and one never finds that questions and problematics named and discussed as such are answered or solved (by, say, propounding of theories), no doubt because Derrida believes that they cannot be solved or answered. …

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). …

Formal Contamination

The following discussion will employ the concept of in articulating Derrida's general argument for contamination, which is said to result from the workings of differance. That the general motif of is important to Derrida's account has been suggested previously, most forcefully in Henry Staten's study Wittgenstein and Derrida, where in tracing the employment of the concept from Aristotle through Kant and Husserl, he notes: In all its manifestations, is the transphenomenal boundary of the phenomenon by virtue of which the phenomenon becomes accessible to knowledge. It is the common element in thing, thought, and word that makes them able to line up with each other in truth. Thus is, as Derrida says, the of presence, of the accessibility to the knower of the known. is the a priori, the necessary predetermination or bounding of the of a possible cognition, whether as predetermining the experiencing through the of the experienced (realism), or the experienced through the of the experiencing (transcendental idealism), or both together (as is perhaps the case in Husserl's phenomenology). From the deconstructive point of view what matters is not where the is ultimately located, but the of or form-ingeneral, and the relation between the concept of and that of an object-in-general.2 Moreover, as he goes on to point out, what characterizes philosophical thought as such is its affirmation of self-identity deployed through the principle of contradiction, which amounts to an orchestrated ' fighting against the flux,' looking for a necessary boundary against formlessness.3 In reference to the employment of the principle in Aristotle's Metaphysics,4 and the tradition generally, he suggests: Here the principle of contradiction invades the inmost recesses of thought, becomes the origin and wellspring which thought cannot get behind or under or beyond, because it seems that it is the generative principle out of which any thought comes into being. is the horismos, or boundary of definition, that makes an object be what it is and not anything or everything else, the bulwark that holds it together against the indefinite, and, correlatively, the guarantee of the unity and self-identity of thought.5 Within this context, Staten understands Derrida's project to consist in the sustained attempt to draw attention to the role of the outside within the hermetically characterized concept of maintained by the tradition. The notion of a constitutive outside is the deconstructive alternative to the fundamental philosophical concept of or essence-that is, of unity and self-identity as the most general and inviolable boundaries . . . of being and knowledge. As the admission of the not-itself into the citadel of the as-such, this notion appears to open the way to the flux.6 In support of this interest in the concept of form, Staten appropriately refers to Derrida's early essay Form and Meaning: A Note on the Phenomenology of Language, as an important resource. There, in passages also cited by Staten, we read: Whether it is a question of [Husserl] determining eidos in opposition to Platonism, or (Form) (in the problematic of formal logic and ontology) or morphe (in the problematic of its transcendental constitution and in its relation with hyle) in opposition to Aristotle, the force, vigilance, and efficacy of the critique remain intrametaphysical .... As soon as we utilize the concept of form-even if to criticize an other concept of form-we inevitably have recourse to the self-evidence of a kernel of meaning.... Moreover, it does not suffice to say that form has a meaning for us, a center of self-evidence, or that its essence as such is given for us: in truth, this concept cannot be, and never could be, dissociated from the concept of appearing, of meaning, of self-evidence, of essence. Only a is self-evident, only a has or is an essence, only a presents itself as such. …

Being in Mime: Heidegger and Derrida on the Ontology of Literary Language

purpose of this essay is, to a degree, a polemical one. It is to situate the question of the nature of literature as formulated by Jacques Derrida within Martin Heidegger's problematically similar readings of poetry. One of the more peculiar aspects of this project is that, despite the gathering momentum of deconstruction, its necessity or even its possibility seem to have passed unnoticed. This disregard is nevertheless contemporary with broad recognition of the importance of in Derrida's project of deconstruction. Manfred Frank, for example, has recently analyzed the affiliations between Heidegger's critique of modern metaphysics as essentially a metaphysics of the subject with similar arguments in post-structuralist texts.' Indeed, it is usually in relation to the question of man and the human subject that and Derrida have been brought together. massive collection of papers from the Cerisy 1980 conference on Derrida, for instance (Les fins de l'homme)2, concerns particularly Derrida's The Ends of Man (1968)3 with its questioning of Heidegger's notion of Dasein in relation to the meaning and status of humanism. It has been unusual, however, for to be discussed in relation to specific questions of textuality prominent in Derrida's work. Rodolphe Gasche's two essays, Du trait non adequat: la notion de rapport chez Heidegger (1981)4 and Joining the Text: From to Derrida5 (1983) are practically alone in following