Derrida's Work Research Articles

Chronophilia: Nabokov and the Time of Desire

A metaphysical conception of desire dominates Nabokov scholarship. Historically, metaphysics has understood desire as the desire for the absolute fullness of timelessness. In contrast, I argue that temporal finitude is not a lack of being that testifies to an absent fullness. Rather, temporal finitude is the condition for both the desirable and the undesirable. I conceptualize this double bind in terms of the constitutive entanglement between chronophobia and chronophilia. The fear of time (chronophobia) does not stem from a metaphysical desire to transcend time. On the contrary, I argue that chronophobia and chronophilia are two aspects of the same condition. It is because one desires temporal phenomena (chronophilia) that one fears losing them (chronophobia). Accordingly, there is an incurable chronophobia at the heart of chronophilia, since whatever one wants to hold on to is constituted by the fact that it will be lost. There is no way out of this double bind because the threat of loss is not extrinsic to what is desired, but intrinsic to its being as such. The essay explores this double bind in a number of Nabokov's texts, mainly focusing on Ada. The logic of "chronophilia" that is developed opens a new perspective on the writing of time and the finitude of desire, which draws on the work of Derrida.

‘No Place Like Home’: The Ambivalent Rhetoric of Hospitality in the Work of Simone Lazaroo, Arlene Chai, and Hsu-Ming Teo

This essay addresses the ‘neither here nor there’ rhetoric of not belonging in Anglophone Chinese Australian literature. Jacques Derrida's recent work on hospitality and cosmopolitanism, together with Ien Ang's work on being ‘hosted’ as an Asian person in Australia, provides a theoretical framework to approach recent Chinese Australian texts such as Simone Lazaroo's The World Waiting to be Made, Arlene Chai's The Last Time I Saw Mother, and Hsu-Ming Teo's Behind the Moon. My analyslis highlights the ambivalence that surrounds ideas of ‘home’ in the context of migration (Lazaroo), the return to ‘homeland’ (Chai), and the refugee experience (Teo), as nationalism asserts itself as a force that denies true belonging to those who are nonetheless ‘hosted’.

Encounters Possible and Impossible

In this essay I want to reflect on the issue of mourning and melancholia in Derrida's and Butler's work. I am interested in the question of mourning because it is one of those dense spots where an in-depth encounter between Derrida and feminist philosophers could have happened and yet did not occur. Why then should we revisit this missed encounter? I would like to do this for two reasons: First, not merely a common concern of feminism and deconstruction, mourning raises the very question of the encounter with the other, problematizes the ethics and the politics of such an encounter, and foregrounds its relation to language and thought. second, the juxtaposition of Butler's and Derrida's work will allow us to trace an intersection between the ethics, sexuality, and the politics of mourning. What is at stake in this intersection is the question of how gender politics renders an ethics of mourning impossible and what kind interventions are required to affirm the ethics of impossible mourning. Consequently, the encounter between Butler and Derrida shifts the refection on ethics and politics from the register of the possible to that of the "impossible." Impossible: Ethical Injunctions and Psychic Disavowals of Mourning Both Butler and Derrida foreground the impossibility of mourning but from two very different perspectives. Derrida affirms the impossibility of mourning as the aporia of the ethical injunction to preserve both the memory and the alterity of the dead friends. It is thus an ethical impossibility that opens the ethical relation to the other. As he puts it, "this singular... affirmation [of mourning] must affirm the impossible. ... The impossible here is the other."1 By contrast, Butler exposes a very different impossibility, which is intertwined with psychic and social operations of power in the spheres of sexuality, kinship, and subject formation. The impossibility of mourning in her texts is an effect of the disavowal of loss and the unconscious prohibition of grief. Hardly the affirmation of the other, the impossible manifests instead the force of psychic conflicts and prohibitions which "demand the loss of certain sexual attachments, and demand as well that those losses not be avowed, and not be grieved."2 Such disavowal of loss, according to Butler, produces melancholic culture in which homosexuality is "unlivable passion and ungrievable loss."1 The impossible in this case is intertwined with prohibition and ungrievable losses. Consequently, Butler examines the circumstances in which psychic and social antagonisms render impossible the ethical injunction of impossible mourning. We could say that in contrast to Derrida's ethical affirmation of impossible mourning, Butler explores the impossibility of the impossible, or to put it in a different way, the disavowal of an ethical affirmation. The juxtaposition of Butler's and Derrida's work on mourning presents us, therefore, with two mutually exclusive injunctions, with the clash of the political and ethical modalities of the impossible. And this in turn provides a new insight into the relation between ethics and power: one effect of the political regulation and prohibition of mourning would be a resolution of the aporia of an impossible ethical task. As we shall see, such "resolution" can take different forms of violence, ranging from the repudiation of loss through the identification with the dead to the exclusion of ungrievable lives beyond the boundaries of the polis. Let us first focus on the affirmation of the ethical impossibility of mourning. As is well known, Derrida's deconstruction of the psychoanalytic distinction between mourning and melancholia4 is motivated by the ethical relation to the other, in particular, the ethical relation to a dead friend. Consequently, the ethical aporia of mourning echoes and restages Levinas's dilemma of how the absolutely other can be inscribed in consciousness without being assimilated or constituted by the subject. …

Understanding Derrida

Edited by Jack Reynolds and Jonathan Roffe. New York — London, Continuum, 2004. 168 pp. Pb £17.99. This is Derrida as understood by scholars from Departments of Philosophy and English in the Anglophone world. The editors have organized this volume around twelve themes — language, metaphysics, religion, the subject, politics, ethics, the decision, translation, religion, psychoanalysis, literature, art — and follow these thematic concepts with a series of short, intelligent pieces on philosophers with whose work Derrida has engaged, such as Husserl, Lévinas and Hegel. The articles are brief, eschew secondary materials (apart from David Roden's reference to Rodolphe Gashé's The Tain of the Mirror) and, at the end of each chapter, there is a section that lists the relevant texts by Derrida and provides a commentary of a few lines on each. These sections are too brief to be useful. Certainly, framing Derrida's thoughts within thematic binds makes for useful pathways, but the theme can subsume the disparate elements at play in Derrida's work. Kevin Hart's article on religion is a cogent piece, but his claim ‘If la différance is beyond being and unable to be captured by our concepts, it resembles the God of negative theology’ tells us perhaps more about Hart's argument than it does about différance. In Chapter 1, the editors suggest that ‘where this text differs from other introductory volumes is in its ongoing insistence on returning to Derrida's own writings’. None the less, though we get an understanding of Derrida's thought from this volume, we rarely get an insight into the work of Derrida's close readings, into how Derrida works with ideas and texts. Also, at times, the intricacy of Derrida's thought is left aside due to the constraint of space. In his chapter on decision, Jack Reynolds, for example, writes: ‘Derrida's main purpose in discussing the supplement is to problematize any suggestion that the supplement is, in fact, secondary (and this is a complicated argument that I cannot address here).’ Organizing the volume around themes is understandable, but within these articles the student needs to be exposed to complicated arguments that deal with Derrida's operative concepts, such as différance, supplement and trace. Unfortunately, the index can prove to be a barrier: there are, for example, too many inaccuracies in the page references to the trace. More positively, the editors have intelligently ordered the chapters such that they overlap and set up a series of cross-references. Claire Colebrook's chapter on literature is followed by Julian Wolfreys on art and David Roden on the subject. All three touch upon questions of the border and the frame and the result is satisfying. Indeed, this collection includes a number of chapters that elucidate Derrida's positions with critical poise. The best of these make clear their terms of reference and provide examples from Derrida's work. Christopher Norris's piece on Derrida and metaphysics is lucid, as is David Roden's excellent chapter. In these articles, as in others, complexity is acknowledged and its distillation provides a pure drop. Overall, the parts are greater than the sum but students will find this volume helpful.

Questioning Freedom in the Later Work of Derrida

"What must be thought," Derrida writes in the closing pages of Voyous, "is this inconceivable and unknowable thing, a freedom that would no longer be the power of a subject, a freedom without autonomy, a heteronomy without servitude, in short, something like a passive decision."1 What could be more undemocratic, less open and intelligible to the demos of democracy, than this and what Derrida called in The Other Heading a "'freedom' to be invented. Every day. At least. And democracy along with it."2 The question that confronts us: Are we free to rethink freedomand democracy along with it-when freedom has become yet another or rather the alibi for hegemony and Empire-building? Freedom, we are led to believe, in the political rhetoric of the day, is on the march, and one does not need to be an enemy of democracy-far from it-to tremble at the martial rhetoric that has too often underwritten freedom in the West. It is because of this alibi that Derrida long hesitated, as he admits in Voyous, to present his own thinking on freedom, worrying, for strategic reasons, that such a thinking of freedom, however self-deconstructive, could only have the effect of bolstering neo-liberal ideologies that present themselves as being founded on certain conceptions of freedom. Nevertheless, Derrida's work offers a thinking of freedom that is a corrective to thinking of freedom as mastery and independence, that is, as sovereignty. Derrida, of course, is not the first to challenge traditional conceptions of freedom, of the coupling of freedom and sovereignty, as we will note.3 We can cite two exemplary moments in Arendt and Levinas in this regard. For example, Levinas challenges in "From Existence to Ethics," a thinking of freedom as sovereignty, a mastery and a "power" "without memory or remorse," yet one that will always already come undone with a thinking of the Other, especially the otherness of death, the absolute future that calls into question the "bonne conscience" within which a certain freedom operates.4 For her part, Arendt argues, "politically, [the] identification of freedom with sovereignty is perhaps the most pernicious and dangerous consequence of the philosophical equation of freedom and free will.... If men wish to be free, it is precisely sovereignty they must renounce."5 Freedom, Derrida notes, has for an entire heritage of thinking been the political aligned with democracy and also a certain conception of sovereignty, the moment when a decision within a democracy is to be made. "This will be true throughout the entire history of this concept, from Plato's Greece onwards" (R, 22). For Derrida, the autoimmunity of the democratic, the indeterminacy and self-criticism at the heart of any democracy worthy of the name, is nothing other than the "freedom of play, an opening of indetermination and indecidability in the very concept of democracy, in the interpretation of the democratic" (R, 25).6 This freedom in the concept of democracy is intrinsic to its "plasticity," that which gives rise to a democratic thinking of the democratic. "Democracy is what it is only by spacing itself beyond being and even beyond ontological difference; it is (without being) equal and proper to itself only insofar as it is inadequate and improper, at the same time behind and ahead of itself," he argues (R, 38). Derrida's thinking of freedom not only challenges a certain concept of the political, as one finds in different ways in Arendt and Levinas, but also the politics of the concept.7 For Derrida, there is no democracy without deconstruction, as he argued in the Politics of Friendship; there is also no deconstruction without freedom.8 Derrida has long been attuned to indecidability in political structures and concepts, articulating the view that "ethics, politics, and responsibility, if there are any, will only ever have begun with the experience and experiment of the aporia" (The Other Heading, 41). In Voyous, Derrida argues that any politics worthy of the name must be marked through and through by structural indecidability and aporia. …

From Now On

In the wake of Derrida's disappearance, this essay asks the question of how to take responsibility, now, for the world one is left to bear. It retraces the path Derrida followed in thinking the event of a coming world and isolates a number of concepts that assumed prominence in his late work: sovereignty, unconditionality, possibility, ipseity. Drawing on the essay The Reason of the Strongest in Rogues, it discerns an important distinction made between sovereignty and unconditionality, and situates Derrida's work as an explicit rethinking of the concept of possibility. It argues that this work offers significant leverage, conceptually and practically, on the legacy of sovereignty as the right of the strongest.

Lethe: The Art and Critique of Forgetting by Harald Weinrich, Steven Rendall

8I4 Reviews Smith are essays that aremore or less well known and more or less celebrated, by Ann Wordsorth, Antony J. Cascardi, Ian Maclean, Jane Marie Todd, Irene E. Harvey, Timothy Clark, and Jill Robbins. When evaluating such a collection, one is prompted to ask what are the guiding principles presiding over its organization, structure, and content. The explanation advanced byMaclachlan is only half-reassuring on this count. In the preface, he tells us that 'I have adopted two simple principles: that the essays included should not previously have been collected in book form, and that they should be substantial pieces illuminating important and potentially difficult aspects of Derrida's work.' The second part of the rationale here seems substantive; but the first appears to be almost entirely arbitrary. The question then becomes one of whether the book has managed to gather together a sufficiently instructive and sufficiently broad or influential range of essays. That itwill not necessarily contain the most instructive or the most influential ismore or less guaranteed by the first part of Maclachlan's rationale. This said, it is useful to revisit many pieces reprinted here. Now, after Derrida's death, itmight well be a good moment to start reconsidering how it is that a certain 'Derrida' and a certain 'critical thought' associated with deconstruction were put into currency. In this respect, this collection is a useful starting-point for further work. In turning, once more, toAnn Wordsworth, say, it is good to be reminded of the preci sion of the early work on Derrida (a precision that, sadly, was not often maintained by some of his keenest 'readers'). Despite a prevailing view of early Derrida as a kind of neo-formalist, it is salutary to readWordsworth pointing out that 'Deconstructive reading must inhabit the text [. . .] by reading into its internal historicity', for ex ample. Or, in reconsidering Cascardi on 'Skepticism and Deconstruction', we can be reminded of the particular value that was once given to a reading of Derrida in the light ofWittgenstein (a reading that was given its greatest examination in the work of Henry Staten, not included here). The Derrida-Searle debate is revisited here in IanMaclean's I985 essay, 'Un dialogue de sourds'. That essay, initially appearing in Paragraph, is also revealing of that journal's presiding ambitions, and again, a useful reminder of where we were in themid- I980s. It is helpful here to read this alongside Wordsworth and Timothy Clark, both of whose pieces initially appeared in the Oxford Literary Review, also from the I980s. At times, one is recalling a period asmuch as anything in these mid-Ig8os works. The pieces are relatively familiar, if in some cases less well remembered. The final one, Smith's 'Memento Mori', by the editor's own admission, appears to be rather tangential to themain thrust of the book, even if itmight be clearly read as an example of work by one who is saturated with Derrida. Where, then, does the book leave us? Itworks, at best, as a kind of prompt: recalling an epoch of great ferment and the seriousness (often po-faced, we might admit); yet also-and this ismuch more important-starting a chain of reflection that might be continued in other collections through which we can begin towrite the history that was Jacques Derrida. UNIVERSITYOFWARWICK THOMASDOCHERTY Lethe: The Art and Critique of Forgetting. By HARALDWEINRICH. Trans. by STEVEN RENDALL. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. 2004. vi+254pp. $35. ISBN 0-80I4-4193-5. This is an oddly compelling, if at times confusing, book. Its subject is the art of forgetting, conceived as a counterpart to the more established rhetorical arts of me mory, and its canvas is Western literary culture from (before) Homer up to our own MLR, I0I.3, 2oo6 8I5 day. First published inGerman in I997, it is here translated by Steven Rendall, and stands as a kind of monument to the dying art of Romanistik: that peculiarly German humanistic marriage of philological analysis and broad-brush historicist erudition. Although it argues, in large part, for the necessity of forgetting, the study reads as an elegy for the very book-learning of which it is also a...

A Mêlée without Sacrifice

In this essay I want to explore a certain community of writing, namely the one between Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy. The ongoing dialogue between the two on the subject of community has left in their writings only traces (with the exception of the first essay in Derrida's Voyous): implicit allusions or short references to be found mainly in footnotes. Those allusions turn mainly around the question of fraternity. Derrida claims that it is necessary to deconstruct the concept of community, to severe it from its genealogical ties. It is, according to Derrida, such a deconstruction of the concept of community that is missing in Nancy's work and that might still lead his thinking in the direction of a certain fraternity.1 Nancy, on his part, answers that he agrees with Derrida's critique of community as fraternity but adds that he already thinks beyond it and thus he reproaches Derrida for not getting at a deconstructed concept of community which could be used to think our being-with anew. Given the double movement of deconstruction (reversal and displacement),2 one could explain the "dialogue" as follows: while Derrida claims that Nancy skips the first phase (that he uses an old concept to name something new without analyzing the genealogical ties of that concept), Nancy claims that Derrida remains stuck in the first phase (that he does not sketch a new, displaced concept-as he did for example with "writing"). Because the two movements are necessary for a full deconstruction of a concept, it is my view that one can read Derrida and Nancy together, with one another in the strong sense of the term, as two sides of the same discourse. In this essay, however, I would like to read Nancy against Derrida. I want to underline a difference, maybe even an opposition, in their way of thinking the singular plural, the singular in the plural, or the plurality of singularities. To do so, I will oppose what I want to call Derrida's politics of sacrifice to Nancy's ontology of offering. Derrida on the Singular Plural Derrida has expressed in many places his reserve not only toward the word community, but also toward the thing itself (Pts 366). One reason for his reserve is that communities tend to neutralize differences and reduce the incommensurable alterity of the other by thinking it under the figure of the brother, the same, the next of kin, the neighbor, the fellow man. By severing the bond that binds the one to, or excludes the one from, a group, Derrida's deconstruction of community wants to make way for an experience of the other which would respect its incommensurable singularity. But one must also ask what kind of plurality remains when singularity is thought in such a radical way. In Derrida's work, singularity is another name for the tout autre (the wholly other) and is associated with two values which Nancy distinguishes from singularity, namely the absolute and the secret, or the absolute secret. Both words serve to describe that which is separated, isolated, remote, inaccessible. What is absolutely secret is the alterity of the other, its singularity: "The secret is not only a thing, a content that would have to be hidden or kept behind oneself. The other (autrui) is secret because he is other. ... A singularity is essentially secret, isolated" (PM 296). Or in Husserlian terms, the alter ego is other because he can never be given to me en personne (leibhaftig) in an originary presentation, but always only in an analogical appresentation (or presentification).11 can never gain a direct access to the subjective face of the lived experiences of the other as they are lived by him. This secret-that is the other-is absolute and must be distinguished from conditional secrets, secrets that can be uncovered or deciphered, secrets waiting under a veil, in a crypt, in a book or in one's heart to be unveiled, decoded or expressed. This thought of singularity as absolute secret introduces a heteronomical and dissymmetrical bend in the space where the one and the other-the absolute other-"meet" (PA 258). …

The Ghost of Jacques Derrida

This essay examines the phrase-here, now, yes, believe me, I believe in ghosts-a phrase uttered by Derrida in a filmed interview. It takes up Derrida's avowal ofbelief in not simply to explain the significance of ghosts, simulacra, doubles, hence images, in Derrida's work and to show their relation to death and mourning, or to merely draw an analogy between the structure of doubles or simulacra and what we may call synthetic images, but also to attend to the alliance between the image, the ghostly, and belief.

Life after Derrida: Anacoluthia and the Agrammaticality of Following

AbstractWritten on Derrida's "'Le Parjure,' Perhaps: Storytelling and Lying," this essay takes the concept of the anacoluthon from Derrida's text (as he has done from J. Hillis Miller, as he did from Proust) and—commenting on the figure of the woman in this male lineage—further invents the concept of the anacoluthon by demonstrating how its formal linguistic definition provides a model for the event of reading and writing—of thinking—that Derrida so admires in Hillis Miller's work and practices in his own. By employing this same reading practice in its own thinking, this essay does not respond to Derrida's death in mourning, nor in thinking about mourning, but in the memory of thought. Produced out of Derrida's work, the essay remains faithful to him only by simultaneously being faithful and unfaithful, thereby enacting the agrammaticality of following represented in and by the anacoluthon.

Derrida and the Question of Presence

AbstractIt has often been considered that the most important part of Derrida's work consisted in the five books published between 1967 and 1972. This paper intends, by way of a re-reading of Derrida's most powerful text from this period, Speech and Phenomena, to bring to light Derrida's specific manner of uniting the question of the disruption of presence to the question of writing. What is therefore questioned is Derrida's emphasis on death, considered as the very condition of possibility of language and writing. As Derrida rightfully shows, Husserl, in spite of the importance he conferred upon writing in the process of idealization, was not aware of the fact that the relationship to death constitutes the concrete structure of the living present. But on the other hand, by still opposing in a too dualistic manner presence and absence, life and death, Derrida himself was not able to see that the condition of language is not so much the death of the subject as the being toward death and the finitude of Dasein.

Derrida

In this paper, I address the issue of Derrida's influence on philosophy by focusing on the nature of deconstructive reading as double reading, and tracing this to the specific reception of Heidegger's thesis on the history of being. After reviewing some of the dubious and mistaken polemics against Derrida, I go on to describe what 1 see as the ethical and political richness of Derrida's work, focusing in particular on the theme of democracy to come.

The Fall of Sovereignty

Reflecting on the fall or failure of sovereignty, this essay considers Derrida's recent work under the heading of auto-immunity, and develops some consequences of that work, first of all in the political sphere (especially around democracy), but also some more general consequences around conceptuality itself.

"One Nation … Indivisible": Jacques Derrida on the Autoimmunity of Democracy and the Sovereignty of God

AbstractDuring the final decade of his life, Jacques Derrida came to use the trope of autoimmunity with greater and greater frequency. Indeed it today appears that autoimmunity was to have been the last iteration of what for more than forty years Derrida called deconstruction. This essay looks at the consequences of this terminological shift for our understanding not only of Derrida's final works (such as Rogues) but of his entire corpus. By taking up a term from the biological sciences that describes the process by which an organism turns in quasi-suicidal fashion against its own self-protection, Derrida was able to rethink the very notion of life otherwise and demonstrate the way in which every sovereign identity, from the self to the nation-state to, most provocatively, God, is open to a process that both threatens to destroy it and gives it its only chance of living on.

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...

Taking Responsibility for Our Common Morality

Scholars in all fields should hold themselves morally responsible for what they publish and teach. One would think that everyone would take this for granted, but Hilary Putnam, for one, has earnestly warned that we dare not. As he writes, “To-day, as we face the twenty-first century, our task is not to repeat the mistakes of the twentieth century.” He sounded this warning at the conclusion of his analysis of Jacques Derrida's philosophical works. Putnam regrets that philosophers reside among the all too numerous scholars whose publications and instruction aided and abetted the development of the “political tragedy” exemplified by the regimes of Hitler and Stalin. Derrida the philosopher counts among current scholars whose thinking raises the specter of repeating those mistakes of the twentieth century and their horrendous aftermath. Taking the renewal of philosophy as the theme for his Gifford Lectures of 1990, Putnam characterized the writings of Derrida as not only philosophically unsound, but also as dangerous and irresponsible.

International Relations and the `Problem of History'

The recent emergence of the discourse of the `historical turn' in International Relations (IR) suggests that the discipline shows greater sensitivity to history. However, despite the ubiquity of more historically informed research, mainstream IR has failed to take account of the `problem of history' as highlighted by on-going debates between traditional historians and critical historiographers. According to Jacques Derrida the `problem of history' is not problematic in the conventional sense: rather it is precisely because we can never arrive at a closed historical interpretation that there is historicity in the first place. Therefore, with its continued refusal of the `problem of history', the extent to which IR has turned historical must be questioned. This article draws on Derrida's work in order to argue for an alternative approach to the way we look at the past: one that embraces rather than side-steps the radical indeterminacy of historical meaning in order to bring historicity into analyses of world politics.

The Future of Critical Philosophy and World Politics

This paper considers the legacy of Derrida's thought in the context of the future challenge of contemporary politics: the construction of world polity. It rehearses, first, the steps of the recent `reconciliation' between Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, and suggests, from out of the terms of this reconciliation, that the deconstruction of reason has been caught out by the contemporary movements of irrationalism. It then deepens this historical viewpoint by giving a neo-Marxist account of modern history in economic and political terms and by setting up from out of this history the continuing problematic of modernity above and beyond recent distinctions between the modern and the postmodern. The third section of the paper returns to Derrida's late work on world democracy, underlines its critical rigour with regard to modernity, the dilemma of law and world sovereignty, and shows how this rigor can be considered to address critically our future political challenge. The fourth section then contends that the way in which Derridean thought disposes itself to the real but nevertheless occludes concerted development of our historical actuality and, in this sense, falls short of the critical. I conclude, accordingly, by arguing for a renewed engagement between critical philosophy and social science, with a focus on the promotion of international institutions and strong interdisciplinary work between international relations, international economics, and political philosophy.

From the Posthumous Memoirs of Humanity: “Democracy to Come”

Taking Derrida's work as point of departure, this commentary aims to articulate the concept of the humanities with the postulation of a democracy to come. The humanities are thought through their constituent but posthumous humanism, and through their power within the university. The humanities have rewritten Humanity. Their autobiographical traces, unfindable traces of this writing, mean marks for a democracy to come. Following Derrida, this commentary asserts that no event of democracy is thinkable without the dissymmetry that comes from the humanities. Beyond Derrida, however, the productivity of fiction provides more elements for the untamed reactivation of the contemporary democratic discourse.

Crisis Between the Wars: Derrida and the Origins of Undecidability

ABSTRACT Jacques Derrida's turn to the political took deconstruction in a new direction this past decade. Central to this later political writing was the concept of undecidability. This essay traces the use of undecidability in Derrida's work, from its early appearance in textual theory to its redeployment in his political philosophy, before tracing out the origins of this idea in interwar thought. The argument is that this idea was already highly politicized in interwar discourse. Mathematical and logical concepts of undecidability were linked to other approaches to crisis and decision in the period. Unearthing this context shows that any evaluation of deconstruction's impact will require a thorough historicization of twentieth-century thought, something that has been hindered by Derrida's own lack of engagement with these broader intellectual currents.