Derrida's Text Research Articles

Engram: Derrida's Reply to Stiegler

This article focuses on two indices from Geschlecht III session XIII: (1) an apparently insignificant reference to Stiegler and (2) the recourse to the concept of the engram as a trope of other grammatological figures that are more frequent in Derrida's work. By interweaving these indexes together, the article suggests that Derrida's text can be read as a noteworthy stage in his ongoing dialogue with Bernard Stiegler surrounding the question posed by human evolution to any accounts of the history of life. Along this path, the article inscribes Derrida's (en-)grammatological history of life within the line of thought that goes from Richard Semon's engram theory to Simona Ginsburg and Eva Jablonka's contemporary re-elaboration of this theory. In doing so, it argues that, although for Stiegler Derrida's grammatology aligns with biological reductionism, the latter may provide the theoretical framework for current evolutionary accounts of life as plasticity.

Sites of Sight: Derrida's Writings on the Spatial Arts

Sites of Sight:Derrida's Writings on the Spatial Arts Brian O'Keeffe (bio) Review of Jacques Derrida, Thinking Out of Sight: Writings on the Arts of the Visible, edited by Ginette Michaud, Joana Masó, and Javier Bassas, with new translations by Laurent Milesi, Chicago U of Chicago P, 2021. xiv + 321 pp. On first looking into Thinking Out of Sight, a volume that assembles the English translations of a number of Derrida's texts and interviews focusing on the visual and performing arts, the reader is dazzled into a renewed admiration of the intellectual range of the deep-brow'd Derrida. For he discusses painting, drawing, photography, film, and video art with keen insight and considerable verve. Still, it's dazzlement and admiration tinged with the disobliging thought that Derrida probably found it all too easy to visit deconstruction upon those artworks, and, sure enough, we find Derrida evoking, in "The Ghost Dance" and "Cinema and Its Ghosts," the hauntological motifs we find in Specters of Marx. In "The 'Undersides' of Painting, Writing, and Drawing," we revisit the question of the subjectile he first addressed in his text on Artaud ("Maddening the Subjectile"), and the essay "To Save the Phenomena," a discussion partly devoted to Salvatore Puglia's work Ashbox, recalls portions of his book Cinders. But there's (almost) no sense in which Derrida is cruising here, or offering us "boilerplate" deconstruction, since, in each text, he is intensely respectful of the artwork's singularity—if deconstructive motifs emerge in Derrida's discussions, it's because each artwork seems to elicit those same motifs. There is therefore (almost) nothing routine about Derrida's thoughts in regard to these works. There is, on the contrary, a sense that Derrida had been provoked, compelled and summoned to react in a way that is singularly his (and, as he observes moreover, it's not just the artworks that compelled him, it's the interviewers and publishers who asked Derrida to respond in these ways). Nonetheless, consider the first text, an interview titled "The Spatial Arts," conducted by Peter Brunette and David Wills. They ask Derrida about his competence in the fields of the visual and performing arts. Last time we looked, Derrida was a philosopher, not an art theorist. So when [End Page 347] Derrida wrote (or was bidden to write) on drawing or painting, was he just indulging in a bit of intellectual dilettantism, taking a break from the hard graft of proper philosophy? Except that what I dared call "proper philosophy" has always held the high ground. Atop its lofty summit it regards other disciplines (literary studies, architecture studies, studies of the visual arts, etc.) as subordinate to philosophy, or else it dignifies these various intellectual endeavors only if they cleave their discourses, theoretical or critical, to the discourse of philosophy. Derrida intervenes precisely here, and clearly regards writing about the visual and performing arts as a way of checking the privilege of philosophy to hold that presumptive high ground. And while such interventions may be occasional or punctual—solicited by a given exhibition, required by an interviewer, or compelled by whatever artwork Derrida was actually looking at—the import of those interventions is general. What is general is Derrida's desire to counter that philosophical privilege, to resist philosophy's putative hegemony. And that would perhaps be the central aim of "deconstruction." So when Brunette and Wills ask Derrida about his competence, Derrida's reply is this: "So, each time I approach a literary work, or a pictorial or architectural work, what interests me is the same deconstructive force with regard to philosophical hegemony" (5). Thus, "As a result, one can always find the same gesture on my part, even though each time I try to respect the singularity of the work. That gesture consists of finding, or in any case looking for, whatever in the work represents its force of resistance to philosophical authority" (5). But what is the nature of that philosophical authority, that philosophical hegemony? Let's recall Of Grammatology and the characterization of philosophy as logocentric philosophy. Derrida, in the essay "Thinking Out of Sight," usefully clarifies what that means: logocentrism is often deemed...

Justice, Law, and the Educative Power: Revisiting ‘Force of Law’

This paper examines Jacques Derrida's analysis of Walter Benjamin's ‘Critique of Violence’ in the context of their respective theories of the university. Whereas Derrida foregrounds the complex ways that the university and law are intertwined, Benjamin claims that the ‘educative power’ stands removed from the law by identifying the university with ‘divine violence’. ‘Force of Law’ not only questions the possibility of a neutral, pre-legal space that Benjamin's theory warrants, ‘Force of Law’ also draws attention to the laws structuring the colloquia that gave rise to Derrida's text. This paper claims that Derrida's analysis of justice, law, violence, and justesse is thus informed by a theory of the university, and that the ways in which Derrida's theory of law stands opposed to Benjamin's parallels the ways in which Derrida's theory of the university questions Benjamin's understanding of the ‘educative power’. This paper concludes by drawing attention to the demand posed by the absence of justice in the academy. Although the laws of the academy produce justesse in the present, this negatively affirms justice in the future, which cannot wait.

Following the animal-to-come

Jacques Derrida's The Animal That Therefore I Am (2008) presents a sustained reflection on a concept of ‘the animal’ that has underpinned the work of much of the philosophical tradition. Based on a series of lectures originally presented in 1997 Derrida's speculation on the question of the animal was thus written at a time when Derrida's thought was often turned to the motif of ‘to-come’ (see Derrida 1992; 1994) such that one may wonder at the apparent evasion, both in Derrida's text and in its subsequent review, of the chance to think the two themes together, in the guise of ‘the animal-to-come’. Picking up on Derrida's asides on the verb ‘to follow’, this discussion considers what it might mean to follow, ‘methodically’ perhaps, the thought of ‘the animal-to-come’? What problems might it help to bring into focus and what forces and lineages may yet bear upon its very thought? And where in our thinking goes the animal if it is to remain always to come?

J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello: From Anthropocentrism towards Biocentrism?

In this article, I argue that J. M. Coetzee’s multigeneric text, Elizabeth Costello (2003. London: Vintage Books), may be read as developing a voice for the new millennium. Coetzee can be seen to be approaching, through the figure of Elizabeth Costello, a new dimension in human/animal relations. This is one that refuses to subordinate animals to the power of human speech and writing. Moving equally away from anthropocentrism, and from notions of the ‘anthropological machine’, the dimension could be described as biocentrism, or as an approach to ecological ethics. Central to my argument is Jacques Derrida’s seminal essay ‘The Animal that Therefore I Am’ ([1997] 2002. Critical Inquiry 28 (2): 369–418) which I suggest is an intertext for Elizabeth Costello because its thinking is so congruent with Coetzee’s. I place my analysis of the Derrida text between my first and final sections on Elizabeth Costello, as the Derrida text throws light both on Costello’s initial anthropocentrism and, through Derrida’s concept of the animot, on the biocentrism towards which I argue Costello is moving.

On the Brink: Identity and Language in the Poetry of Arab-American Women

On the BrinkIdentity and Language in the Poetry of Arab-American Women Lubna Safi Almost a decade ago, Al Raida (lit. The Pioneer), a journal based out of the Lebanese American University, published an issue on "Arab Women Writing in English." Among its concerns, the journal hoped to highlight the problem of translating experience into language asking: "How does one translate their experience of Arabness into another language whose signifying capacities will always tend towards distortion?" Whether the language is a European one or British and American English, the particular power dynamics between languages are concerns posed within a post-colonial frame of imperial and non-imperial languages. This struggle to translate experience is illustrated in a quote by Abdelfattah Kilito, a writer of French and Arabic, who cites an ancient source that describes a relationship with the Arabic language in this way: "I defeated her then she defeated me, then I defeated her and she defeated me again" (21). In the struggle between the subject and language this question arises—whether or not language, given its state as an inheritance from previous generations, can bring into articulation an identity when in fact it has an identity of its own. If this encounter with Arabic highlights a tense relationship between the subject and his native language; a struggle that ends with language's victory and the defeat of the speaker, then any relationship with language used as a means to articulate an identity must be one of complete surrender to that language. The question of language's capability to express or articulate poses too broad a scope to attempt in this paper. However, the choice of a writer's language as a mode of identification through writing becomes a significant one when considering bilingual writers. In his semi-autobiographical text, Monolingualism of the Other; or, the Prosthesis of Origin Jacques Derrida proclaims, "I have only one language; it is not mine" (2), a refrain he echoes throughout the rest of this work. At the heart of this contradictory statement stands the question of possessing language. As the foreigner, i.e. colonial subject, who speaks only the master's (or the host's) language, Derrida's dilemma of possessing language becomes a question of bestowing belonging through language, of being allowed access to a group, like a cardholder whose card [End Page 309] proclaims membership in a certain society. For Derrida, language only grants one an identity as a speaker of that language because of language's homogeneity with regards to itself: it is always open to assimilating the other.1 In justifying the refrain posed at the beginning of his book, Derrida qualifies it thus: … a necessity that, however, is there and that works: translation, a translation other than the one spoken about by convention, common sense, and certain doctrinaires of translation. For this double postulation, —We only ever speak one language … (yes, but) —We never speak only one language … is not only the very law of what is called translation. It would also be the law itself as translation. (10) Taking Derrida's text as a starting point for thinking about questions of identity vis-à-vis language, this paper examines the works of three Arab-American women writers within the context of an ambivalent relationship to language embodied through a particular practice of translation. As a foundation for approaching questions of identity, Derrida's text poses the question of translatability, both as a means and mode of understanding the integral problem of identity through and in language. This question of possessing a language—within its connection to an ethnic identity and the ability to translate both the language and an identity associated with that language—is the central metaphor in the poems below by Naomi Shehab Nye, Dima Hilal, and Suheir Hamad. Previous scholarship on Arab-American writers has focused on the negotiation of 'Arabness' within a community-based context, concentrating for example on ethnicity, religion, or within the parameters of reclaiming self-representation in writing. According to Carol Fadda-Conrey, writing, for Arab-American writers, especially post 9/11, "becomes an important tool to establish and practice self-representation, and to dismantle blanket and inaccurate portrayals inherent...

Os discursos do etnólogo, do filósofo e do ficcionista na estrutura do romance Nove noites

Este artigo pretende colocar em diálogo dois textos: "A estrutura, o signo e o jogo no discurso das ciências humanas", de Jacques Derrida, pensador francês, e Nove noites, de Bernardo Carvalho, romancista contemporâneo brasileiro. O texto de Derrida parece conter as matrizes do pensamento desconstrucionista do filósofo e parte de uma aporia lançada por Claude Lévi-Strauss na dicotomia natureza-cultura para questionar o modelo centrado do pensamento ocidental. Esse escândalo, assim, está ligado à atividade do etnólogo e tem suas origens na etnografia. Este texto procura, então, refletir como a ficção se apodera do discurso das ciências humanas para questioná-la, num movimento semelhante ao pensamento de Derrida na interpelação permanente do desconstrucionismo ao discurso científico. A narrativa, que de início parecia conduzir para a resolução de um crime, à guisa de romance policial ou relato jornalístico, frustra as expectativas do leitor, terminando por diluir o que parecia ser a trajetória segura de uma estrutura montada em torno de um firme centro.

Book Review: Derrida, Africa, and the Middle East

Derrida, Africa, and the Middle East. By Christopher Wise. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. ISBN 978-0-230-61417-8. Pp. xiii + 214. $95.00. In Derrida, Africa, and the Middle East, Christopher Wise presents a unique and highly significant argument for working with Derrida in the two regional contexts of his title, individually and in their overlaps. Wise makes strong cases for resonances between Derrida's writing and the Sahelian culture of Africa, as well as the Abrahamic religious traditions. Both lines of argument combine sustained, perceptive close readings of specific works with broader perspectives of how these individual works and passages fit into trends, patterns, and shifts across Derrida's oeuvre. As such, the reader takes away intensive insights into and an extensive view of the ways Derrida, Africa, and the Middle East have converged and changed. Near the end of the preface, Wise states, My final chapter, which compares Egyptian, Hebraic, Greek, and Sahelian concepts of the word, could not have been written until the problem of Derrida's Jewish bias was first addressed. Now that it has been addressed, it is my hope that this book will lead to a renewed interest in Derrida for scholars in African and Middle Eastern studies (xi-xii). This succinctly states the aim of the book, but there remain two points to add. First, it is crucial to consider Wise's claim of a Jewish bias in Derrida within Wise's commitment to the importance of Derrida for scholars working on the history, politics, ethics, and aesthetics of Africa and the Middle East. Far from condemning Derrida, Wise attempts to make the imperfections in and limits of Derrida's work explicit so that scholars can observe Western ideological blind spots concerning Africa and the Middle East and move forward in thinking through these regions with Derridean deconstruction. Second, the book does not simply renew interest, as Wise suggests. Rather, it provides precise models of what it looks like and means to think Derrida together with Jerusalem, for example, or Derrida together with Abrahamic and Sahelian notions of the word. There are eleven chapters in all. Wise opens with a chapter on the lectures, book, and subsequent responses to and critiques of Derrida's Specters of Marx, part of the 1993 Whither Marxism? conference at the University of California, Riverside. Through attentive reading of Derrida's text, including his dedication of the lectures to the African activist Chris Hani, along with analysis of the conference presenters and agenda, Wise uses this central text to establish the core ideas of his book. Subsequent chapters range from figures of the veil and Jerusalem to complex analyses of Derridean notions of trace and logos in cultural collisions and intersections in Africa and the Middle East. Throughout the book, Wise employs deconstruction techniques, but he puts these in conversation with other literary critical approaches such as the system of Christian exegesis, especially as used by Fredric Jameson on allegory. chapter called Conjuration, for example, blends deconstruction through close reading of Derrida's Specters of Marx, particularly of Derrida's use in that book of Shakespeare's Hamlet, with an argument about how Derrida's reading and Marxist applications of Shakespeare reveal his otherwise unstated assumptions about political objectives, including As such, Wise reads like an accomplished deconstructionist, yet one who insists upon the role of alternative approaches in order to identify and illuminate precisely the slippages that he asserts exist in Derrida's deconstruction work. Readers engaged with literature and the Abrahamic religions will be especially interested in arguments about Paul and veils, Jerusalem as allegorical figure, and Abrahamic-African cultural traffic. Perhaps the most striking chapter is The Figure of Jerusalem. Wise makes a compelling case that the messianicity which Derrida proposes as a universal concept for re-orienting Marxism and specifically for deconstructing geopolitics as they converge in Jerusalem is not, in fact, universal: Christians who remain loyal to their own concept of Messianic Truth, which for them is a concept that implies Messianic incarnation, may understandably feel that Derrida's assertion that his faith in a Messiah who never comes is far from being a matter of universal truth. …

Rethinking Human-Animal Ontological Differences: Derrida's “Animot” and Cixous' “Fips”

Dominant philosophical discourse has long attempted to reinforce the human-animal opposition that privileges the human and relegates the animal to a state bereft of logos, spirit, consciousness, and reason. Yet the recent watershed in the emerging multidisciplinary field of animal studies decisively rejects the hierarchically based human-animal distinction. Among recent scholarship, the work of Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous is exemplary. Jacques Derrida's seminal text The Animal That Therefore I Am and Hélène Cixous’ Stigmata engage in a profound reflection on the anthropocentric fallacy that humans are privileged vis-à-vis animals. I argue that Derrida's concept of the “animot” establishes criteria inherent to animals that change their stature in relation to humans, which I relate to Cixous’ autobiographical narrative. As I show, Cixous’ primal encounter with the dog Fips produces a stigma that ruptures the barrier between the human and the animal; its dehiscence reveals a profound human animality generated by shared suffering. Derrida's and Cixous’ post-anthropocentric reflections are pivotal to rethinking ontological difference between animals and humans based on shared suffering, finitude, and compassion that ethically raises the stakes of the question of the animal and destabilizes established notions of what is intrinsically human.

The Secrets of Paul de Man

Through an account of Derrida's late text on Paul de Man, ‘“Le Parjure”, Perhaps’, as a deliberately indiscrete confession, this essay considers the wider question of secrecy. It examines an unsuspected institutional history of deconstruction while suggesting a role for secrecy as the necessary condition of any critical reading. Along with De Man, the essay finally revisits the claim for ‘the radical secrecy of fiction’ as a basic structure of phenomena.

Mark Morrisroe's Self-Portraits and Jacques Derrida's ‘Ruin’

The work of the American photographer Mark Morrisroe (1959–1989) has been the object of a recent resurgence of interest. Morrisroe's work might be said to constitute an extended practice of self-portraiture, from the early images documenting his involvement in the 1980s Boston punk scene to his final works exploring the effects of AIDS on his body. This article brings together Morrisroe's photographic practice of self-representation with Jacques Derrida's reading of the self-portrait as ‘ruin’. It outlines the moral, physical and aesthetic implications of ‘ruin’ in relation to Morrisroe's work, and explores the way in which both Morrisroe's images and Derrida's text evoke the physical deterioration of the body. It then suggests ways in which Derrida's ruin fulfils a similar function to the notion of performativity or masquerade, raising questions about issues of identity, authenticity and the possibility of self-representation.

The Gift and the Return: Deconstructing Mary Shelley'sLodore

This paper begins with Barbara Johnson's examination of the erasure of sexual difference within the Yale school, and in particular her comments upon the work of Mary Shelley. Taking up hints in her statements about the relation between Mary Shelley's work and deconstruction, I suggest a reading of Mary Shelley's penultimate novel, Lodore, in relation to Derrida's Given Time. Lodore, which traditionally appeared a rather conservative novel to Mary Shelley's critics, has a number of parallels in its plot to the logic of the gift as set out in Derrida's text. It also, however, allows us to begin to think through the related concept of the return, so crucial to both of the Shelley's thinking and writing. The essay analyses Lodore in relation to Derrida's account of the impossibility of the gift, in order, eventually, to move towards some comments about sexual difference, the novel, the gift and the return.

Handling Value: Notes on Derrida's Inheritance of Marx

Derrida's Specters of Marx asks whether and how we could inherit Marx today: whether we might find, in a certain spirit of Marx, the critical resources to challenge resurgent liberal ideals, without this challenge assuming a dogmatic or totalitarian form. Derrida's own response to this question involves a curious move: a material transformation of Marx's text, in which Derrida first foreshadows, and then carries out, the excision of a single sentence from the pivotal passage in which Marx christens the commodity fetish. The excision subtly transforms the meaning of Marx's text and, in the process, acts out a vision of inheritance as an active, transformative performance, rather than as a passive transmission of inherited content to its heirs. In this paper, I explore the way in which Derrida foreshadows and then effects this curious elision. I highlight the distinctive understanding of transformative inheritance at the heart of Derrida's text, and also pose the question of why Derrida should effect this particular transformation in the search for a certain deconstructive spirit in Marx's work.

Desire and Language in Derrida’s Force of Law

In this article the author proposes a reading of Force of Law from two angles: boundless desire and the 'law' of language. The author contends that an analysis from these perspectives casts new light on the notion of the 'mystical', as well as repetition, singularity and good/evil as they appear in Derrida's text. In exploring the 'notion' of desire, the article focuses specifically on Derrida's analysis of Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle in To Speculate – On Freud where the death drive is explored. The author shows the importance of this essay for an understanding of the relation between justice and law. The mystical and justice, the author contends, is to be understood with reference to the death drive, and repetition or law enforcement as its return. Law enforcement could also be viewed in terms of the 'notion' of iterability in Derrida's texts on language. These perspectives furthermore allow for an understanding of singularity in terms of unconditionality and of justice as beyond good and evil.

A Palintropic Genealogy of the Diaphanous Exactitude ofPe(n)ser

Derrida frequently comments on the need to read and reread the texts of the tradition, to be always starting again with them. In On Touching – Jean-Luc Nancy Derrida offers another reading of (he starts again with) Aristotles's De Anima. By paying attention to the play of the palintropic, diaphanous, exactitude and ‘penser’ in Derrida's text, this paper seeks to show how important Aristotle is for Derrida in this book and in any deconstruction of the sense of touch.*

The scene of Babel

Jacques Derrida's texts pose specific and notoriously complex challenges for the translator. In particular, the performative nature of his writing makes the transfer of meaning and rhetorical effects especially difficult to negotiate. This paper examines Joseph F. Graham's English version of “Des Tours de Babel”, arguably Derrida's most influential text on translation. In a translator's note, Graham acknowledges the limitations of his version and claims – despite these limitations, or precisely because of them – to have succeeded in enacting Derrida's ideas on translation. My paper examines the implications of this claim and asks: first, what are the “principles” derived from the source text that Graham sees as taking shape in his translation and “guiding” it; second, how does the performativity invoked by Graham, if it is at all present, come about in his translation; and third, is Graham's stated approach borne out by his translation choices? It is not my concern to reach an evaluative judgment on Graham's translation, but rather to trace the workings of this peculiar Babelian scene.

Passionate Secrets and Democratic Dissidence

This essay begins in the mode of exposition of the problem of the secret as the link between literature and democracy but moves to respond to Derrida's text with a “heretical rewriting,” pursuing the notions of heresy and of rhetorical dissidence and the functioning of the anecdote, which illuminate Derrida's account of democracy

<span xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:m="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" style="font-style:italic;">The Impossible Mourning of Jacques Derrida</span> (review)

Reviewed by: The Impossible Mourning of Jacques Derrida Simon Morgan Wortham Sean Gaston. The Impossible Mourning of Jacques Derrida. London and New York: Continuum, 2006. viii + 152pp. Sean Gaston's The Impossible Mourning of Jacques Derrida, written during the ten weeks after Derrida's death, takes the form of a philosophical journal containing daily entries (although not without gaps) which see the author struggling to respond to the question of mourning, both in relation to Derrida's passing and in regard to the intricately knotted threads in Derrida's own thought which tie philosophy to mourning and death. Quick to recognise the inevitable disappointment of those who would turn to Derrida's texts in order to discover a resource for confronting or overcoming the experience of mourning itself, [End Page 377] Gaston's writing endures the most difficult of encounters with its subject matter, which indeed—for all the book's scholarship and eloquence—it hardly seems to know. In short, Derrida's death discomposes the work. Or, rather, Derrida's many deaths (including the deaths of others, philosophers and friends, strangers, too, which he inherits or foresees, like his own, but cannot reconcile or appropriate) deny Gaston's writing its composure. But animate rather than decompose, too, in the very gap of knowing which causes such a "deeply read" study (as Nicholas Royle observes in his endorsement of the book) to resist the temptation to "monu-memorialize, to idealize and interiorize the 'father' as an act of mourning, to make a monument out of a memorial, to make an Aufhebung of the death of Jacques Derrida" (2). Each entry in the diary, beginning with the first, is not only marked by the date of its composition, but haunted by its own time, a time that is much less its own than impossibly inherited in the unsituatable experience of Derrida's passing. "I shall now try to write in the past tense," Gaston begins (1). Written in the present tense—"now"—these opening words, as faltering as they are urgent, inaugurate the event of writing as at once an unfulfillable anticipation of what is to come, what is ahead of or in the work, and an all too precipitate (and therefore "improper") decision about the past as, from now on, the "proper" tense. And Gaston knows this, senses it at least, for all that he doesn't know. Starting out from a time that is impossibly dislocated, then, it is as if Gaston nevertheless wants to recall Derrida somehow, fanning echoes of the occasional style of Derrida's own textual performances amid dreams and recollections of him, while minding the gaps which gape "now" as we read Derrida again, gaps which from the very beginning structure his thought and writing about language, literature, philosophy and philosophy's history, but which also intervene to complicate "our" relationship to him, and indeed his to himself. Writing about Of Grammatology, Gaston notes: Derrida links the interval to spacing, two pages later he links it to temporization. As soon as there is representation, one cannot avoid 'the gap [le décalage] between the thing and its double' . . . Un décalage, a gap, an interval, is also a time lag: the time difference (le décalage horaire). For Derrida, there (are) always gaps: the gaps of space becoming time and of time becoming space, the gaps of différance and gaps as différance—différance always leaves a gap . . . . (10) The gap—which makes as much as it breaks—is therefore where Gaston starts, and re-starts time and again, so that "Envois," La dissémination, Politics of Friendship, and other writings by Derrida are read as "prefaces to Glas, preface to an impossible mourning on the gap" (12). Meanwhile, Plato, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, and others return to haunt the book, making us dwell in and on the gaps they continue to open across the history of philosophy, gaps of space and time which lead back to (as much as away from) the book's founding problem. Dwelling among these gaps, the book understands itself as yet another preface, nothing more than "a prefatory aside" (18), one that indeed observes the double...

An Open-ended Song of the New International: (How) Can It Be Invented?

Focusing on the paradoxical refrain in Derrida's autobiographical text, Monolingualism of the Other, namely, ‘Yes, I only have one language, yet it is not mine (Je n'ai qu'une langue, ce n'est pas la mienne),’ this article sets out to unravel points of connection between formal logic, natural language, bureaucratic violence, imperial politics and, most importantly, emancipatory practices and possibilities musically sustained by the contrapuntal temporality of postcolonial future and hope; demonstrated, with and against Derrida, is a way in which performative self-contradiction becomes a textual prosthesis for the originarily dispossessed that, this article stresses further, embody the psycho-political topos of inventive life. A certain philosophical freedom from position and possession, this very ‘excluded middle’: that is something else.

Interdictions: Language, Religion & the (dis)Orders of Indian Identity

Although religion and language have long been accepted as crucial to the formation of nationalisms, they continue to be analysed as separate components. Derrida's theorizing of the nexus religion-language-subjectivity, however, shows that language and religion, far from being separate, are inextricably connected. Indeed it could be claimed that the two processes (monotheism vs monolingualism) should be considered as part of a single formation that I prefer to call mono-theo-lingualism. In order to examine this claim this paper will juxtapose Derrida's key text on religion (Faith and Knowledge Within the Limits of Reason Alone) with his text that looks at the formation of the mother tongue (Monolingualism of the Other: or, the Prosthesis of Origin), and refract these texts through the South Asian experiences of colonization and decolonization. More specifically, I explore the above claim by attempting to forge a psychological and existential connection that links the work of a colonialist technology in a past historical moment with its legacy in the present. This link between past and present will be crystallized by weaving together personal memories and experiences of the disorders of my own identity as Sikh/Indian and British and relating them to a mode of monotheolingual address which was established between colonizer and colonized in the Anglo-Vernacular schools of nineteenth century North India. The multiple effects of this mode of address include: (i) the production of an economic (fluent) exchange between English as the First Idiom of the Raj, and the regional vernaculars represented by the imaginary figure of the mother tongue; that is to say, the invention of the mother tongue (Punjabi, Hindi) as the monolingual other of English; (ii) closely related to this, the colonizer's paternalistic demand for ‘true religion’ fostered through a belief in the unhindered translatability of religio, and the reciprocation of this demand by neo-colonial elites who invent the monotheistic formations we know today as Sikhism and Hinduism in order to inscribe themselves within the political and ideological space of Christianity; (iii) the ghostly yet machine-like returns of this regime in a post-colonial era through religio-linguistic retrievals of identity that are central to the working of contemporary multiculturalism. Together, the politics of language-making and the politics of religion-making continue to haunt not only the access that Indians have to their past, but, more importantly, the possibilities for engaging the political present as seen in the demand posed by the ideology of multiculturalism for understanding South Asians in the West in terms of identity.