Derrida's Writings Research Articles

Roundtable: On Jacques Derrida's Writings on Money

Roundtable: On Jacques Derrida's Writings on Money

After the World's End, before the Resurrection: Thinking Mourning and Christian Hope after Jacques Derrida

AbstractIn light of Jacques Derrida's writings on death and mourning, it may seem that the Christian teaching that the dead will be raised is a betrayal of others, a failure to take up one's responsibility to testify to those who have died. In conversation with Emmanuel Falque's work on finitude, Martin Heidegger's reading of 1 Thessalonians, and Søren Kierkegaard's reading of Abraham, I respond in two movements to this objection to faith that God will raise the dead. First, I propose that even for the Christian, the death of the other remains a loss, since the Christian must surrender the other to God. It is, however, this very surrender of the other to God that seems to be an abdication of responsibility. Second, therefore, I argue that faith in the resurrection decenters the self and challenges our understanding of responsibility even more than does Derrida's own analysis. Faith, I conclude, means giving up the desire to cling to one's own responsibility.

Female Nudity, Interspecies Sexuality and ‘Horseness’ in Laetitia Dosch's Hate (2018)

The aim of this paper is to analyse Laetitia Dosch's play Hate, first performed in Lausanne in 2018, in light of recent theories on female nudity, interspecies sexuality and non-human animal subjectivity. Featuring a completely naked woman and a white stallion, the show revolves around the possibility of interspecies communication and the need to re-evaluate the meaning of humankind and animality through theatrical performance. I begin by drawing on Derrida's writings on the subject of shame and nakedness as a means to explore interspecies identification. I then turn to recent ecofeminist theories in order to discuss Dosch's performative criticism of industrial exploitation of non-androcentric ‘others’, as well as the implications behind her dramatization of interspecies sexual intercourse. Finally, I examine how her ‘ventriloquist’ techniques to provide the horse with a voice invite considerations regarding Levinas's concept of ‘the face’ and how that affects animal subjecthood and subjectivity.

Coviderrida: The Pandemic in Deconstructive Philosophy

Because the pandemic has kept the world busy in the last two years, a revival of Derrida's writings on biology is an urgent prerequisite today. The tsunamic invasion of the Coronavirus or Covid-19 pandemic took more than two million lives and thousands are still being tested positive as I write. The speed of the virus and the seeming human inability to stop its spread necessitates a study on the relationship between Covid-19 and Derrida's deconstructive philosophy. Hence the portmanteau Coviderrida – inspired by Hélène Cixous’ ‘ derridevilishly’ ( Cixous 2004 , 16) – attempts to demonstrate how the pathogen operates as an event or (im) possibility to which Derrida's neologisms ‘différance’, ‘supplement’, ‘trace’, ‘archi-writing’, and ‘text’ testify. The main concern of this paper is to restore the deconstructive logic that Derrida advocates to restructure the relationship between life and death in his 1975-6 seminar La vie la mort, and reshape our notion of human survival in his 2001 interview with Giovanna Borradori, ‘Autoimmunity’. These two texts redefine the political and religious questions, which are ‘left hanging, uncertain, still in movement and therefore, yet “to come”’.

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...

Tout contre Heidegger

Derrida's relation to Heidegger can fairly be described as ‘complicated,’ and marked by a deep ambivalence. Although he has always recognized his debt towards Heidegger, Derrida has also insisted on his profound allergy towards some aspects of Heidegger’s thought. The reader is thus often faced with this ambivalence in Derrida's writings, which offer, on the one hand, uncannily precise and insightful readings of Heidegger's texts, with on the other hand less than generous interpretations. We find a Derrida tout contre Heidegger, at once entirely against Heidegger, but also right up close to Heidegger. I will explore this debate between Derrida and Heidegger by focusing on the motifs of deconstruction, presence, the proper and the inappropriable.

Review

Review

Spectra of Sovereignty: Nationalism and International Relations

AbstractThis article furthers our understanding of the ontology of modern international relations by foregrounding the neglected structuring role of nationalism. Most accounts of nationalism in international relations reduce the phenomenon to a peripheral threat, whereby nationalism only seems to become relevant in moments when the international order is in crisis. In contrast, I argue that the ontology of modern international relations is inherently parasitic on nationalism. Leveraging on Jacques Derrida's writings on “hauntology,” this article recasts nationalism as a spectral logic that silently structures the ontology of modern international relations, even when it seems to remain absent and ineffective. In particular, I explain how the contradictions of nationalism become embedded in the concept of sovereignty, which serves as the ontological cornerstone of modern international relations. Transgressions of sovereignty are therefore not reducible to a tension between normative and factual levels, or logics of appropriateness and logics of consequences, but stem from the structural impossibility of the nationalist project itself. Viewed this way, the aporetic form of sovereignty is not merely a logical conundrum but a vital and productive ontological opening that sets international relations in motion.

‘The look that gropes the objects’: Derrida's Photographs

In his introduction to Copy-Archive-Signature: A Conversation on Photography published in 2009, Gerhard Richter observes that while photography is concerned, ‘like deconstruction’, with ‘questions of presentation, translation, techné, substitution, deferral, dissemination, repetition, iteration, memory, inscription, death, and mourning’, relatively little attention has been given to those texts of Derrida's that specifically address photography and the work and thought of the photograph: ‘Aletheia’, Rights of Inspection, Athens, Remains, to name the most obvious. Things have changed a little since 2009, but it remains the case that photography, with its strange logic and uncanny temporalities, situates itself in Derrida's publications as, possibly, the most performative of tropes in Derrida's writing. As Richter argues, it is available to our view as a ‘metalanguage’, through which all other questions are brought into focus. This paper therefore focuses on the photograph: the photograph in Derrida's writings and photographs of Derrida.

Philosophy and Its Relation to Other Disciplines in Derrida’s Writings on Education

Derrida's writings on education, most of which are gathered in Du droit a la philosophie, form a rich and multifaceted body of work.1 In these writings Derrida covers a wide range of topics related to the teaching of philosophy, including the appropriate age at which should be learned, the relation between philosophical teaching, educational institutions, and the State, the links between and national languages, the position of both within and outside the University, and the role of means-ends thinking in philosophical research, to name just a few. Those of us interested in education in thus have much to learn from this resource, and I would advocate strongly for a closer engagement with it than is currently the case.2In this essay I pursue this engagement by following one thread of thinking in Derrida's education writings, namely his attempts to transform how is conceived, paying particular attention to the role played in this transformation by Derrida's rethinking of philosophy's relation to other disciplines. My task is complicated somewhat by the fact that has more than one referent in these writings. In texts related to Derrida's involvement in French education debates of the 1970s, refers for the most part to philosophy in By contrast, in other texts, notably those associated with the College International de Philosophie, the term transcends this national boundary, signaling a broader European anchored in Kant. This duality means there is no single transformation of taking place in Derrida's work, and the content of these referents also poses challenges of translation for those, like myself, working in other institutional contexts, who still want to learn from what Derrida has to say. Nonetheless, these challenges are not insurmountable, and my wager is that Derrida's new understandings of philosophy, specifically as they developed through rethinking philosophy's relation to other modes of inquiry, can provide inspiration for our own attempts to defend and transform philosophical education.One constant across Derrida's work is that is never spoken of as eternal or unchanging, as something that transcends time. Rather, for Derrida always appears in institutional forms-with institution understood broadly, covering practices, traditions, and organizational bodies-and among these forms, one to which he refers frequently is the of in France. Now to speak of this in the singular is to some extent misleading. Philosophy in France is constituted by multiple institutions, in multiple areas of society, containing multiple divisions. Philosophy is taught in the lycees, in the universities, and in the grandes ecoles, and philosophical research is supported in many of these establishments, as well as at the College de France and the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. Philosophy also appears in the French public sphere at a level perhaps greater than in any other nation, with a presence across the media and a publishing industry that addresses a large public outside the academic world.Nonetheless, this complex multiplicity is given some measure of coherence due to its being organized around a focal point, the class in the lycee. Philosophy has long been a central feature of the baccalaureat, and, even as its presence has been reduced over time, it remains a required course across the general and the technical streams of the certificate today. This presence in the lycee curriculum has important practical consequences for everywhere else in France. The fact that studying in the grandes ecoles and universities might lead to a specific profession at the end-that of becoming a lycee professor-helps sustain enrollments in the subject. This in turn supports positions for those teaching in higher education. …

Derrida's Rethinking of Professorial Authority

ABSTRACT:In this paper I argue that Derrida's writings on education contain a profound rethinking of professorial authority. I first outline the sources of professorial authority and describe how they were traditionally conceived in France at the time when Derrida was working. I then show how Derrida challenges and transforms these sources, focusing in particular on a new relation to knowledge, a new relation to the state, and a new understanding of charisma that emerge from his work.

Clarity and Doubt: Derrida among the Palestinians

This essay takes the Genet column of Derrida's Glas as its point of departure for a wider discussion of Derrida's contribution to thinking on the question of Israel–Palestine. What would it mean for Genet to be at war, encircled or outcast? What of the polemos in Genet, in Derrida, in Glas? How are we to show that what always interests Derrida takes place (or the place of Genet) among the Palestinians? What is the space of literature here? How does Genet explode as Western thought takes a bow? Through a reading of Genet's Prisoner of Love and a number of Derrida's writings on Israel–Palestine, this essay unpacks an important configuration of the biographical, the literary and the philosophical in Glas, which still has profound significance for us 40 years after its original publication.

Mourning Becomes Dedalus: Ethics, Prosopopoeia, and Impossible Mourning in Ulysses

In this essay, I examine the ethics of Stephen Dedalus's approaches to mourning his mother in Ulysses. Using Jacques Derrida's writings on impossible mourning, I argue that Joyce uses Stephen's struggles over his mother's death in Ulysses to reflect on the proper ways to commemorate the dead, as his brooding over the face of the departed May Dedalus becomes a perpetual mourning process inhibited by his ambivalence towards his continued ethical responsibility to her. I thus conclude that Stephen's inability to "[g]ive up the moody brooding" throughout Ulysses highlights both the impossibility of such relinquishment and the resulting obligation to the other that persists beyond the grave, themes that recur throughout a Joycean oeuvre consistently shrouded in mourning.

¿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.

Practices of Hospitality in a Sovereign World

INTRODUCTIONDue in large part provocations from Jacque Derrida's writings on topic, concept of hospitality has taken a prominent place in discussions on ethics, human rights and social justice. This is especially case with issues that pertain an increasingly globalized and interconnected world but one which is still characterized by strictly enforced territorial borders. Questions have been raised as whether there exists a right hospitality, what tins might look like and what limitations exist when we think of hospitality in certain ways that are connected sovereign, territorial nation-state. This article examines concept of hospitality and suggests that idea of unconditional hospitality is particularly appropriate for consideration of ethical dimensions in responses undocumented migration. Unconditional hospitality is a borderless hospitality that calls for absolute, unqualified welcoming of the who is neither formally/officially invited or expected. Claviez asks Can a place possibly be imagined where unconditionality, which both Levinas and Derrida helped us think, can play a role-let alone be exercised-or does such an idea of hospitality represent a genuine utopia: a u-topos, a nonplace, in which by definition, nothing, can 'take place'? This article suggests that we can imagine places of unconditionality and that we can point concrete practices of hospitality without conditions. While Derrida refers unconditional hospitality as an impossibility, a promise, a to come, he also speaks of possibility of impossible. This phrase is only contradictory if we restrict our thinking and our imaginations regarding possibilities and impossibilities and close our minds what Derrida is attempting get at. Unconditional hospitality is in fact impossible if we look for it in realms of policy, law, and sovereign state edicts. However, if we refuse limit our scope official governmental realms and codifications of accepted courses of action created therein, we can locate practices that approach Derrida's possibility of impossible, impossible that just might happen, impossible that may alter our thinking as what is possible. I show this by examining instances of pro-immigrant activism in United States on part of those who cannot and do not wait for policy changes and who engage in practices which I argue approach a kind of hospitality without conditions.NATIONAL SOVEREIGNTY AND THE RIGHT TO MOBILITYHospitality is intricately connected human rights and especially pertinent right mobility, a right that is readily accorded some but denied many.3 This right is enshrined (in part) in Article 13-2 of Universal Declaration of Human Rights which states that everyone has right leave any country, including his own, and return his country. This right emigration, i.e. leave, is recognized as a fundamental human right. However, without corresponding right immigrate, i.e. enter another country, right leave becomes extremely problematic, potentially meaningless, and exposes contradiction between regarding right leave a country as a basic universal human right issue and right immigrate another country as a matter of national sovereignty.The human rights aspect of mobility becomes especially significant when we consider reasons individuals leave their countries of origin, including war and violence, persecution, gross economic inequality and inequality of opportunity amongst countries of world. Movement in general is an intricate part of globalization, which continues apace and has given rise on part of much of world's political and corporate leaders support free circulation of goods, services, and capital throughout world, but near complete lack of support for free movement of human beings. The European Union is only region in world where trade and other economic agreements have been accompanied by a degree of free movement for people. …

Time of Death: Herzog/Derrida

This article proposes to explore questions of testimony, truth and fiction in Werner Herzog's 2011 documentary film Into the Abyss: A Tale of Death, a Tale of Life through Derrida's writings on Maurice Blanchot.

THE ELEPHANT AND THE SCAFFOLD: RESPONSE TO KELLY OLIVER

abstractThis paper responds to Kelly Oliver's “See Topsy ‘Ride the Lightning’: The Scopic Machinery of Death” by questioning the presuppositions and implications of her discussion of the spectacle of elephant executions and their relation to Derrida's writings about animals and the death penalty. This paper proposes to reframe the approach to Derrida's reflections on the death penalty and its problematic relation to the category of the human by focusing on the double function of the concept of the scaffold in his writings. Rather than looking at it as a spectacle or as an object for visual studies, I show that the scaffold is a paradoxical concept and has a double (and duplicitous) function in the conceptual founding of human law and human rights, as it is both the architectonic philosophical principle of the rational executive function of the law and the name for the purely mechanical technological machine that carries out the death penalty. In either case, however, the scaffold serves as a nonhuman prosthetic without which the concept of a just and humane and properly “human” law is shown to be untenable.

Uma "possibilidade impossível de dizer": o acontecimento em filosofia e em literatura, segundo Jacques Derrida

Este artigo focaliza certa "possibilidade impossível de dizer o acontecimento", motivo fértil nos últimos escritos de Derrida. A expressão "a possibilidade do impossível", emprestada do pensamento heideggeriano da Ereignis, concorre a uma ética aporética que repensa as figuras da responsabilidade face à "inapropriabilidade do que acontece". Nos lugares bem conhecidos da lógica derridiana da aporia - a justiça rebelde à regra, o "fantasma do indecidível" em cada acontecimento de decisão, a ilegalidade de toda invenção -, uma ética da alteridade propõe o sujeito apartado dos lugares da adequação a si, ao sabor da interpelação inderivável do acontecer. A dimensão da alteridade de toda decisão solicita a cada situação que se invente "a lei do acontecimento singular", promessa de originalidade. Ora, dizer a "singularidade incalculável e excepcional" do acontecimento é propósito que, para Derrida, somente se justifica como promessa de uma "monolíngua do outro", superfície comunicacional homogênea onde interromper a disseminação. Face às "reservas de indecidível" da ficção, essa promessa de unicidade conhece sua mais evidente impossibilidade, razão porque este artigo procura, por fim, avaliar a fertilidade desconstrutora da relação testemunho-ficção em literatura, nos momentos em que o pensamento de Derrida rompe com as categorias de verdade, de modo a revelar o literário como o "outro" do filosófico.

Finitude and Violence: Žižek versus Derrida on Politics

In a recent article, Martin McQuillan has inaugurated a vigorous Derridean critique of a violent tone that has recently arisen in continental philosophy, exemplified by Slavoj Žižek's attempt to retrieve Robespierre's notion of Terror. This article sets out to complicate such critique, opening a new perspective on the Derrida- Žižek debate on the question of politics. In particular, it examines Derrida's and Žižek's respective approaches to difference and violence as differing responses to a shared problematic of constructing a consistent (immanent) politics within the horizon of a finite world. It proceeds by elaborating Žižek's critique of Derridean deconstruction, highlighting how Derrida's attempt to minimise violence via maximal openness to difference, within the horizon of the future-to-come, inadvertently reinscribes a minimal but problematic ontotheological trace which ironically circumscribes deconstructive openness to difference. The article goes on to examine how Žižek's alternative construal of a purified violence and (Hegelian) self-difference ends up repeating in somewhat different terms these same problematic features of Derrida's writings. The article concludes by arguing that each approach requires a theoretically-integrated ethos of 'becoming other' in which the unavoidable theoretical anticipation of difference (and the risk of invocation of the ontotheological) is ruptured by the actual encounter with difference.

‘By force of love … something should happen to God, and someone happen to him’: the other's other(s) in Derrida

This essay seeks to re-elaborate Derrida's own account of the other's heterogeneity, notably in light of critiques of deconstruction's thinking of difference, alterity, and the unconditional. At stake here is the precise meaning of what may be termed wholly other; or, better still, the specific nature of the arguments about the question of the other from among Derrida's writings, which must be recalled amidst any appeal to absolute alterity, especially of the kind frequently found in Derrida commentary today. Beginning with the argument that deconstruction's discourse of the other opens onto the wholly other not simply as the ‘beyond’ or the ‘outside’ of phenomenology's limits, but only at the point where the phenomenological gives way in something like a double sense, the essay wants to speak of the mark and touch of the other, the ethics and politics of the other, indeed love of the other, in ways that disorganise and yet transform the very grammars of relationality.