Derrida's Work Research Articles

The Politics of Justice and the French Blood Affair in Hélène Cixous's The Perjured City

In the article, I examine Hélène Cixous's play La Ville parjure ou le Réveil des Erinyes (The Perjured City) as a political contribution to the debate over memory and justice. The focus is on the question of how the telling of a story of atrocities may be therapeutic to both the victim and to society. I stress Cixous's alternative way of addressing justice: through forgiveness instead of criminal prosecution or other forms of retribution or reconciliation. Referring to Jacques Derrida's work, the main argument revolves around the question of whether forgiveness for unspeakable crimes should be unconditional or conditional. Instead of seeing Cixous's play as an unequivocal stance on restorative justice in general, and on conditional forgiveness in particular, I stress that the main protagonist, the Mother, is not willing to forgive the crime itself because of its unforgivable nature.

Mallarmé's Sunset: Poetry at the End of Time

This study analyses the crucial role of Stéphane Mallarmé's poetry in the work of two of the twentieth century's most important theorists: Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida. Mallarmé's Hegelianism, a long-contested issue in Mallarmé scholarship, assumes centre stage in Barnaby Norman's understanding both of the poet's development and of the position Blanchot and Derrida assign him as marking the transition from the Livre to écriture. Readers familiar with the work of Derrida will recognize aspects of Derrida's argument regarding Georges Bataille's engagement with Georg Hegel's philosophy in Derrida's ‘De l'économie restreinte à l'économie générale: un hégélianisme sans réserve’ (L'Écriture et la différence (Paris: Seuil, 1967), pp. 369–407 (p. 373)), as Norman here applies Derrida's rhetoric from this essay to the poetry of Mallarmé. Following the insights of Gardner Davies and Bertrand Marchal concerning the important structural role of the sunset in Mallarmé's work, Norman connects the transitional sunset motif to Blanchot and Derrida's vision of the poet at the close of History and the opening of the space of littérature. The book follows a rough chronology through readings of four key texts by Mallarmé: ‘Hérodiade’, ‘Sonnet allégorique de lui-même’, ‘Igitur’, and ‘Un coup de dés’. Chapter 1 highlights Hegel's formulation of a poetic Absolute at the apotheosis of the art-historical development the philosopher traces in his Aesthetics. Norman perceives Mallarmé's early pursuit of a purely self-reflexive work as the poet's attempt to achieve Hegel's Absolute. Chapter 2 outlines how Mallarmé's work on ‘Hérodiade’ and ‘Igitur’ deepens the poet's understanding of the difficulties involved in this task. In Chapter 3, these difficulties amount to an impossibility in the ‘Sonnet allégorique de lui-même’, where, Norman argues, Mallarmé discovers the ‘irreducibility of externality’ (p. 60). Beyond this point, Mallarmé's work becomes a powerful challenge to Hegel's Absolute. Chapters 4 and 5, where readers will find some of Norman's most insightful and well-founded arguments, explore Mallarmé's role in Blanchot's and Derrida's writing respectively. Norman argues that both theorists situate Mallarmé at the site of passage from the totalizing idea of the Livre to the space of littérature as a result of the poet's co-ordination with — and eventual challenge to — Hegel. Norman enters slippery territory when he attempts to demonstrate a ‘coordination’ (p. 37) between Mallarmé's early poetry and Hegel's poetic Absolute. (The author acknowledges the difficulty of such an argument: ‘there is no mention of the philosopher [Hegel] in the correspondence and only one in the Œuvres complètes’ (p. 37).) The first chapters successfully establish Mallarmé's interest in purity and reflexivity, interests that indeed co-ordinate with Hegel, but Norman does not address the poet's preoccupation during this period with creating effects and impressions, including those of a sensory nature. What we do find in the correspondence, after all, is Mallarmé's dedication to the Edgar Allan Poe of The Philosophy of Composition. A more compelling argument would, among other things, give some account of Mallarmé's thrill in producing ‘une sensation assez cabalistique’ (p. 56; my emphasis) with his ‘Sonnet allégorique de lui-même’ and explain how this aligns with Hegel's apotheosis in which ‘poetry would begin to detach itself from its sensuous element’ (p. 11).

Before Levinas, after Derrida: from Alterity and Hospitality to Xenophobia

This article aims to constructively reconsider the accepted relations of the language of alterity and hospitality, traditionally drawn from Levinas and Derrida, which have been assumed to be applicable to xenophobia. A closer assessment of Levinas reveals that his ‘structure’ fails to apply to recent sorts of xenophobic incidents. Just so, Derrida's work upon hospitality does not apply, which Derrida was aware of. Indeed, nor will Levinas and Derrida be disagreed with; a shadow-phenomenology will rather emerge which allows for a more sympathetic and applicable treatment of some ‘xenophobic’ incidents – in South Africa and globally.

The Crowd

What if we took the phrase la démocratie à venir at its word? In other words, what if we understood ‘democracy to come’ as the abrupt arrival of the people, as the instant in which a crowd floods in with overwhelming force? Reading Jacques Derrida alongside Elias Canetti's Crowds and Power, ‘The Crowd’ answers these questions by considering Derrida's ‘democracy to come’ in terms of political figuration rather than representation. Through the tropes of touch, masking and flight, this paper explores the play of distances that occurs between members in the crowd and in turn suggests an inextricable link between democratic thought, on the one hand, and, on the other, the metamorphoses that the crowd precipitates. Between fluidity and paralysis, individual and collective, this paper grapples with a surprising aporia—that democracy is the aristocratic secret of the crowd. ‘The Crowd’ was originally presented as ‘La Foule’ at the 2002 Cerisy Conference, La démocratie à venir (Autour de Jacques Derrida), which explored the political significance of Derrida's work.

¿Utópica, indecidible o aporética?: sobre política y deconstrucción

Since the death of Derrida, the question of politics is at the forefront of debates about deconstruction. This article covers the main criticisms that Derrida's work on the political has received. The argument put forward is that these thinkers assimilate Derrida and Levinas thoughts, which leads to describe the political aspect of deconstruction as «utopian», «useless» or «aporetic». However, a closer reading taking charge of Derrida's writings published posthumously, reveals both his objections to the thought of Levinas and the political implications of deconstruction.

Constructing a Deconstructive Sublime

ABSTRACTThis article attempts to construct a distinct formulation of the sublime via an inspection of some of Jacques Derrida's principal works. Through a reading of his assessment of Kantian sublimity and a development of the dialectical from deconstruction, two patterns of the sublime can be formulated. These two constructed patterns of the sublime, which I shall name “sublime of différance” and “aporetic sublime,” are predicated on the notions of infinity and dialecticism. The aporetic sublime includes in its constitutive structure the element of an orientation to an irreducible other. It is argued in the article that these constructions are open to an incorporation of the sublime as located beyond subjectivity and discourse.

Double Features: An Interview with Samuel Weber

work of Samuel Weber has long been essential for contemporary reflections on modern German and French philosophy, literary theory, and psychoanalysis as well as for thinking today about media or, as he prefers to say, mediality. A foremost interpreter of Walter Benjamin's large oeuvre, Weber has also made important contributions to the ways we are able to read and encounter Derrida's work today. We therefore wanted to ask him to engage with Derrida's interview, which even in its original French has not circulated much beyond its initial 2001 publication in the issue of Cahiers du cinema. Sam graciously consented to take part in this interview-conversation with me, which we conducted by e-mail over several weeks in January 2014.PK: I wanted to begin by asking you to say something about your own memories of cinema in adolescence and how they might compare with Derrida's description of experience in Cinema and Its Ghosts.SW: I tend to regard all of my memories as exemplary instances of what Freud calls memories, which I guess is appropriate since we are talking in part about the and also of the relation between film and psychoanalysis, one of the points Derrida stresses in his interview (referring also to Benjamin in respect). Anyhow, I myself suffer a great deal from this sense of for the simple reason it tends to screen out what I feel was really going on at time, but what remains elusively beyond my grasp. To some extent every memory is inevitably and structurally a screen-memory in this sense-i.e., in the sense of being finite-but in my case the screening-out seems particularly extreme. Nevertheless, let me try to remember what I can and see where it leads. Jacques writes about his early experience with film in a seems to me both utopian and unreachable: a kind of introduction to eros, that adolescent erotic thrill-this erotic shiver of the child. In my case, in my memory, the shiver was there, but it was less erotic than anxious: some of the films I remember seeing as a child were Thing from Another World (1951, directed by Christian Nyby) and Mummy's Ghost (1944, directed by Reginald Le Borg)-but also Black Bart (1948, directed by George Sherman), a Western starring Dan Duryea and Yvonne De Carlo. This was as a boy growing up in New York City, on the upper West Side, an area as I found out much later was home to many of the Jewish exiles from Nazism. Whereas Jacques writes of cinema in his youth as a way of freeing myself from prohibitions,1 what I remember is somewhat different: namely stealing off to see Mummy's Ghost without telling my parents where I was or when I would return. This was a sense of transgression, but not one liberates from the but rather confirms it in its violation. On the other hand, all of the films mentioned-there are others I will come to in a minute-circle around the relation of life and death: both Mummy's Ghost, whose narrative I don't remember (I could look it up: all this is available today easily on the Internet) and Thing involve formerly living beings return to life, but always to wreak havoc among the living. These are definitely not nice specters or ghosts. In the period of the burgeoning Cold War-around 1950-it seems as if the emphasis coming out of Hollywood was more on the production of anxiety as a means of mobilizing aggression rather than as a means of experiencing alterity in any other form. Indeed, what I take to be the basic pattern of politics, in general, but particularly since the Cold War and beyond (i.e., in my lifetime), has always involved the production of anxiety is then transformed into aggression through projection, targeting an enemy. In Thing this is explicit: the Thing is destroyed through quasi-military means, by fire; in Mummy's Ghost it is more implicit. It is quite different in Black Bart, in which the title hero, played by Dan Duryea, is a bandit (based on a historical figure) who ultimately is destroyed by fire, burnt alive in a cabin where he has fled his pursuers, The Law as I remember it. …

Spectres Of New Media Technologies In The Public Sphere

New media technologies are mechanisms of representation that reveal the relationship of technology and society. In the deconstructive politics of Jacques Derrida, the social and technological ontology of new media technologies produce spectres. Spectres introduce doubts and instability in dominant discourses and modes of representation in the public sphere; this becomes possible through iteration, which refers to the transformation of hegemonic authority through repetition of its fundamental terms of identification. The essay presents a critique of new media technologies in the context of the Philippines. It is inspired by the work of Derrida, in his deconstructive reading of Marx’s spectres, and Jürgen Habermas, whose theory of the public sphere offered an implicit appraisal of spectres. This examination of spectres will answer the question: what are the political possibilities of new media technologies in the public sphere?

The Transcendental and Inexistence in Alain Badiou’s Philosophy

Though Alain Badiou and Jacques Derrida circulated some of the same French academic circles, they rarely had anything to do with one another. While Derrida was alive he never engaged Badiou's work, neither speech nor writing. The opposite was also true, as we find no substantial reference to Derrida Badiou's work until after the former's passing: It was only after Derrida's death, Badiou's later work Logiques des mondes: L'Etre et l'evenement II, that Badiou explicitly acknowledged the impact of Derrida's work on his own thinking.1 Badiou concedes that his concept of inexistence is what Derrida understands by differance. La pensee de l'inexistant formalise ce que je crois etre l'enjeu de la sinueuse demarche de Jacques Derrida. Depuis ses premiers texts, et sous le nom, progressivement academise (mais non par lui) de 'deconstruction,' son desir speculative est de montrer que, quelle que soit la forme d'imposition discursive a laquelle vous etes confronte, il existe un point qui echappe aux regles de cette imposition, un point de fuite. Tout l'interminable travail est de le localiser, ce qui est aussi bien impossible, puisque c'est d'etre hors-lieu-dans-le-lieu qui le caracterise. Pour restreindre l'espace de fuite, il faut forcer les signifiants de l'imposition discursive, diagonaliser les grandes oppositions metaphysiques (etre/ etant, esprit/matiere, mais aussi bien democratie/totalitarisme ou Etat de droit/ barbarie ou juif/arabe . . .) et d'inventer une langue de l'excentrement, un dispositive d'ecriture acephale. Or, tout cela gravite autour de ce qui aurait a se tenir sous l'inexistant. . . . Dirons-nous que . . . inexistence=differance (LM 570-71).Undoubtedly, Badiou's profound recognition of Derrida's impact on philosophy as well as his defence of Derrida2 are remarkable. In this paper, I argue that though there is a certain resonance between the two concepts, there is also a marked point of divergence. In particular, I wish to claim that Derrida's double bind of possibility and impossibility, which are mutually co-constitutive and flow from the spatio-temporising that is differance, is less binary its logic than Badiou's notion of inexistence allows. Also, I maintain that whereas Derrida's differance is rooted a conception of time and space that gives differance its very flow and arch-structure, Badiou's inexistence is grounded the time and space that stem from the very structure of the multiple that is given what he calls the transcendental. Time is constituted with the event and the subject, by a decision and the fidelity to a decision. Badiou has no real sense of Derridean space: Badiou discusses space as localisation, atoms, situations or the containment that is proper to any set. Derridean spatialsing stems from de Saussure and his view of the differentiation between signs and words and phrases that produces meaning. For Badiou, the inexistent is set within worlds, whereas for Derrida differance never works within the logics of Badiouan worlds. It simply is already there and is already operating. In short, I claim that though there may be a resemblance between the two philosophers qua what they see is unaccountable, lies closed or hidden yet conditions any given system or meaning-structure, the way they justify such accounts would suggest a greater gap than what Badiou may be prepared to concede.BADIOU'S TRANSCENDENTAL AND THE INEXISTENTThe concept of inexistence does not appear the first volume of Being and Event, but it is introduced and developed the second one. Inexistence is rooted within the structure of the transcendental and worlds. Badiou defines inexistence as a mode of being-there of an element of a multiple that appears the world. The element in the configuration of multiplicities called a world, but it never exists any intense or maximal form. In fact, it exists the least possible way. Every object the world contains an inexistent element and can, according to Badiou, contain only one at any given moment (LM 610). …

Deconstructing the Psychoanalyst of Philosophy

This paper tries to demonstrate how Jacques Derrida deconstructs Hegel's philosophy through detecting an abyss at the hub of the Hegelian system. Derrida's work on Hegel, Glas, which is concerned with Hegel's philosophy, highlights the remarkable resemblance between Hegel's dialectic and Freud's psychoanalysis. Derrida's argument draws a comparison between the Hegelian concept of Aufhebung and Freud's repression. This comparative study aims at showing that no systematic thinking or analysis can release itself from an indigestible and paradoxical element that constitutes the abyss of the systematic or analytical thinking. The first part of the article shows how Derrida, inspired by Kant, thinks of the abyss of the system as the quasi-transcendental that, in a paradoxical way, makes philosophical system both possible and impossible. Concentrating on the concept of repression, the second part delineates similarities of the dialectic and psychoanalysis. In Hegel's view, there is nothing out of cognition; however, Hegel's obsession with Antigone's tragedy reveals that there are dark sides remained outside of the Hegelian system. The last section deals with these remains in Hegel's account of Antigone. Such abyssal points assert that there is a sort of resistance to psychoanalysis, or the process of analysis in general, which deconstruction has always attempted to make us more sensitive to it. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2014.v5n23p1949

How close to Hegel is ‘close’? Revisiting Lawlor on Derrida's Early Logic

This article aims to restore a way to approach Derrida by revisiting the essentialist ‘logic’ that Leonard Lawlor put forward in 2002. Lawlor argues that the early Derrida developed a ‘logic of totality’ from Hyppolite's reading of Hegel, which formed the basis for a ‘logic of contamination’ and différance; moreover, Lawlor demonstrated such progress. We will situate his implicit premises before following his sequential argument, and thus isolate how Lawlor is aware that Derrida disputes Hyppolite's basic premises and outcomes, so as to suggest the difficulty is methodological. By that we will support Lawlor's discovery that Derrida's earliest work can be approached ‘logically’, so as to help re-orientate both an approach and strands of thought that Derrida helped to inspire.

Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability

Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability

NE ME RACONTE PLUS D'HISTOIRES: DERRIDA AND THE PROBLEM OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY

ABSTRACTThis essay reads Derrida's early work within the context of the history of philosophy as an academic field in France. Derrida was charged with instruction in the history of philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure, and much of his own training focused on this aspect of philosophical study. The influence of French history of philosophy can be seen in Derrida's work before Of Grammatology, especially in his unpublished lectures for a 1964 course entitled “History and Truth,” in which he analyzed the semantic richness of the word “history.” According to Derrida, “history” comprised both the ideas of change and of transmission, which allowed the writing of history at a later time. In the Western tradition, Derrida suggested, philosophers had consistently tried to reduce the idea of history as transmission, casting it simply as empirical development in order to preserve the idea that truth could be timeless. Derrida's account of the evolving opposition between history and truth within the history of philosophy led him to suggest a “history of truth” that transcended and structured the opposition. I argue that Derrida's strategies in these early lectures are critical for understanding his later and more famous deconstruction of speech and writing. Moreover, the impact of this early confrontation with the problem of history and truth helps explain the ambivalent response by historians to Derrida's analyses.

Visual time: the image in history

To render time sensible: transmissibilityReview of:Keith Moxey, Visual Time: The Image in History, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2013, 207 pp., 8 col. plates, 21 b. & w. illus., $89.85 hdbk, $24.95 pbk, Hardback ISBN 978-0-8223-5354-6, Paperback ISBN 978-0-8223-5369-0.Jae EmerlingKeith Moxey's Visual Time: The Image in History imagines itself as an art historical methodology when in fact it only rhetorically questions the discipline's 'epistemology certainty' about images and temporality. Moxey never enacts a methodology capable of confronting the complicated issues of temporality, images, and art historiography. Instead, he traipses through seven chapters on these issues that read more like transcriptions of conference talks than the in-depth work one expects in a book project. While Moxey offers convincing explanations of art historical shortcomings regarding an artwork's essential anachronism-for example, the simple fact that a work from 1907 is encountered anew, time and again, in each present, by new sets of viewers-he fails to arrive at either a method or a theoretical framework to address what he terms the 'anachronic power' of an artwork. Nonetheless, this text astutely surveys much recent work on images and historiography. It does so by addressing pre-existing methodological issues such as linear chronology, ekphrasis, contemporaneity, and aesthetic experience.The problem is that Moxey only flirts with theory in a text purportedly about images and time. This is baffling. How could a book purporting to rethink art history by focusing on the complex temporality enfolded within an aesthetic encounter refrain from fully engaging with Jacques Derrida's late work on photography and temporality, or Gilles Deleuze's quite famous theory of the time-image? I mention these figures not to assert that their work offers the only answers to the issues Moxey foregrounds. Quite the contrary. I mention these figures because Moxey chose to address this topic in a manner that reads like a kind of aristocratic overview, a survey of thought that never quite gets its hands dirty. Rhetorical questions and faint suggestions of a method abound in this text. But in the end, there is nothing like the critical and creative work found in Georges Didi-Huberman's Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art (1990, 2005) or T. J. Demos' Return to the Postcolony: Spectres of Colonialism in Contemporary Art (2013).1 As Moxey writes of his own approach: 'Instead of offering even tentative answers to these issues confronting the history of art today, these essays ally themselves with persistent questions' (8).I would argue that we are well aware of the questions facing the history of art. The problem is that we persist in the same historiographic mode despite theoretical challenges and the creation of new artworks. What remains to be done is to create an art historical mode capable of encountering an artwork as a material-force, as a mode of transmissibility wherein art historians could grasp that an event is dated (it takes on a consistency in a specific past) even as it continues to produce effects into the future, effects that alter and change the past. This would be to creatively involve ourselves with an ontology of the work of art as a temporal passage. It would be an art history truly capable of thinking thresholds and passages, becoming and history-a diagrammatic art history wherein art history becomes a theory-practice of multiplicities, a practice more aligned with Spinozist joy than historicist melancholy.2Moxey articulates the motivating problematic he desired to confront in his book here: 'The aesthetic power of works of art, the fascination of images and their capacity to shape our response in the present, argues against treating them as if they were simply documents of particular historical horizons' (137). Of course, Moxey is correct to identify this fundamental art historical paradox as a problematic. …

There's a Promise Hidden in the Ruins of a Pure Ethics

There's a Promise Hidden in the Ruins of a Pure Ethics: Reviewing Anderson's Ethics under Erasure Nicole Anderson, Derrida: Ethics under Erasure (London: Continuum, 2012)What does politics look like when it stands on the shaky grounds of 'ethics under erasure'?Derrida: Ethics under Erasure presents a sustained argument for the import of Jacques Derrida's work for contemporary discussions of ethics, politics, and the everyday. Anderson must be commended for the clear and sophisticated manner in which she enters this discussion. While it is no doubt important to recall that all language brings us back to the funda- mental ambiguity of meaning, Anderson nonetheless is able to convey a strong and succinct argument that would be of great interest to scholars just getting into Derrida as well as experienced Derrideans who may already have a thorough knowledge of the parameters of the debates occurring in the field. Ethics under Erasure is a welcome contribution to ever-growing scholarship centred on the themes of hospitality, the gift, decision and responsibility in Derrida's work. More than this, it is the groundwork for future engagements with ethics and politics, beyond an uncomplicated acceptance of unconditionality. Rather than resting on the assurance of a pure and righteous ethics, Anderson's book brings to the fore the very contestation of the concept of 'ethics' and as such has implications for discussions of hospitality, the gift, and so on. It is a must-read for those interested in the relevance of deconstruction for politics, big and small, global and personal.This book proceeds by introducing the general concerns at stake. Chapter 1, The Ethics of Deconstruction, situates the thematic issues of the book. By taking us back to the significant debates of the 1990s, the so-called 'ethical turn' in Derridean scholarship is critically evaluated. Here, Anderson engages closely with Simon Critchley, a key figure in the ethical turn. Chapter 2 expands Anderson's challenge of Critchley by examining the relationship between Der- rida and Nietzsche. By bringing Nietzsche into the discussion, the emphasis on a Levinasian ethical influence in Derrida is lessened or at least put into dialogue with other voices. Having offered a strong contextualisation, chapter 3 offers an outline of 'ethics under erasure' as an original intervention into Derrida Studies, an engagement with deconstruction which, I think, could contribute to debates regarding how scholars of Derrida think about political action. And finally, chapter 4, Ethical Experience: A Cinematic Example, takes us into the world of Cathy and Sybil, characters in Todd Haynes's Far from Heaven in order to explore the ethics of the everyday.For the remainder of this review I would like to focus on two particular issues Anderson's thesis is useful for: firstly, ethics in the everyday, and secondly, ethics and political in liberal democratic systems. In both instances I am interested in the ramifications of Anderson's thought for the relationship between theory and action, or ethics and politics, and policy and politics. is not intended to provide a strict separation between the everyday and the world of politics, nor between theory and action. Indeed, Anderson is critical of any such division, countering the claims of Derrida's critics: This theory/practice opposition also implies that theory is not 'transformed' and changed by the context or practice (material or otherwise) in which it is discussed or placed, and vice versa (133).Everyday EthicsEthics under Erasure argues for the relevance of philosophical thinking for ev- eryday life. However, rather than contributing to the discussion by introducing another prescriptive ethical formula for adherents to follow, Anderson deploys deconstruction to the field of ethics in order to show us that inheritance produces 'undecidability' [which is] endemic to choice-making and decision-making (105). …

DECONSTRUCTION OF EPIC BEOWULF IN JOHN GARDENER'S NOVEL GRENDEL

This article presents an analysis of the epic Beowulf, and the novel Grendel under the light of deconstruction theory. It also compares and contrasts the two works in terms of plot, characterization, and theme. The epic Beowulf is an influential text in English Literature and has been reinterpreted variously by different writers. John Gardner in his novel Grendel reinterprets the events taking place in the epic. This novel adaptation of the epic, which displays the contents of the epic from a different point of view, reconstructs the epic. The reconstructions include crucial changes in the epic although the main events remain the same in both works. The term “deconstruction” gains importance at this point. “Deconstruction” is a complex concept and is not defined by its initiator Jacques Derrida. However, when Derrida’s works are analyzed closely, we see that he gives some signposts about how to “deconstruct” a literary work. The present article claims that the novel Grendel deconstructs the epic Beowulf and provides a larger and more complete account of the events in the epic: first, it tries to define the term “deconstruction” in some works of Derrida and other writers. Then, it shows how the novel deconstructs the epic.

A Response to My Commentators

I want to begin by thanking my commentators for the care they have taken to read my book. Their care is evident from the force of their remarks in which, from my perspective at least, they are deemed to be fitting remarks, and as such they demonstrate a faithful understanding of the text. As we know from contemporary hermeneutics, a fidelity to the text is not marked by an effort of mere repetition but by a seriousness of critical engagement which provides an opportunity for the expansion, if not correction, of the ideas presented in it. One might say that it is an opportunity not simply for contestation which thrives on a relation to difference, but for a certain generation of understanding within the life of understanding. So, I am committed from the outset to test this fittingness with a corresponding thoughtfulness.As I try to make clear in the book, the very idea of the life of understanding is to be an expansion of Gadamer's project, but not simply Gadamer's project, for it is Heidegger's hermeneutics too that is in play in this expansion, and, in a more limited sense, Plato's work as well. In this regard, I appreciate very much Ted George's use of the word to describe the way in which I have tried to think from and along with these central figures named in the book, and I consider such amplification a matter of hermeneutic honesty. One reads and thinks as if in a conversation-whether it be in relation to the question of the text that addresses us or with respect to our own questions that demand a response-and one cannot so easily move beyond one's conversational partners without committing some form of hubris. I think it is because of this approach to reading and thinking-and thus to interpretation-that this book remains essentially Gadamerian, and as such forgoes a more violent approach in which interpretation is set within the unsaid of a work in order to force the concealed inner passion of a work into speech. But the difficulty with this Gadamerian approach is that, in the end, I am not sure exactly whose voice it is that speaks in the text. Certainly the hermeneutics presented in this small book takes the position that Gadamer's hermeneutics is more radical in what it is saying than how Gadamer at times presented it and how some commentators have interpreted it. It is this radicality that I think keeps Gadamer closer to Heidegger and also puts him in proximity to Derrida's work. But here I am not alone in this contention. I think one finds it also in the work of Dennis Schmidt and Donatella Di Cesare, and others.Regarding the specifics of my attempt at a contemporary hermeneutics, what Ted George sees so well is that this amplification is directed at what I call making one's way in life-what he names as human transcendence-which is expressed in relation to the finitude confronting us with the limits of our possibilities to understand. This is not the finitude of the limit of time, but of a resistance that belongs to the very activity of life. As I attempt to make clear in the chapter on convalescence, it is this finitude that keeps hermeneutics from becoming a practice of conservatism as well as a practice of progressivism in the reading of history and in the way-making of life. There has never been much of a question about Heidegger's notion of finitude staying true to itself and thus capable of being interpreted in the way I am proposing; but such is not the case for Gadamer, whose own expression that he sought to save the honor of Hegel's bad infinity is actually insufficient to convey just what hermeneutical finitude entails. Unlike the implication of Gadamer's acceptance of the analogy with Hegel, the hermeneutics of history presented here does not progress and does not make it possible to repeat the past without introducing real differences in meaning. And unlike Hegel's bad infinity, the hermeneutics of language and the questioning commensurate with it in this contemporary hermeneutics take place under the condition of the immanent possibility of failure. …

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. …

Derrida and the Eco-Polemicists

This article argues that the recent critical readings of Derrida's work in relation to climate change, the anthropocene and the post-human limit the possibilities of the concept of world and repeat a Heideggerian idealization of the concept of earth. I describe this as a geo-logocentrism.

Developing Derrida's Psychoanalytic Graphology: Diametric and Concentric Spatial Movements

Derrida's work encompasses dynamic spatial dimensions to understanding as a pervasive theme, including the search for a ‘new psychoanalytic graphology’ in Writing and Difference. This preoccupation with a spatial text for repression also occurs later in Archive Fever. Building on Derrida, this paper seeks to develop key aspects of a new dynamic psychoanalytic graphology through diametric and concentric interactive spatial relation. These spatial movements emerge from a radical reconstruction of a neglected aspect of structural anthropologist Lévi-Strauss’ work on spatial relations prior to myth. This psychoanalytic graphology is argued to silently pervade Freud's own direct accounts of repression. This graphological domain is developed through diametric and concentric spatial movements across common concerns of Derrida and Freud such as inversions, interruption and restoration, regarding traces in the unconscious. A spatial text is uncovered for diverse features of Freudian repression, including ambivalence in obsessional neurosis and psychosis, splitting of the ego and repetition compulsion. This psychoanalytic graphology challenges the construction of a restricted subjectivity based on repressive diametric spatial relations. It goes beyond Freud's logocentric repression, resonant with Derrida's more radical call for a wider spatio-temporal understanding of structures of differential relation, prior to causality and myth.