Derrida's Reading Research Articles

Wyschogrod’s Hand

In his lecture Hand (Geschlecht II), Jacques Derrida announces his topic as follows: are going to speak then of Heidegger. We are also going to speak of monstrosity. We are going to speak of word Geschlecht.1 slippage from Heidegger to monstrosity to Geschlect - Geschlect once again, a second time, moreover - is not merely provocative but downright stagy. will not reopen today question of Heidegger's 'politics,' Derrida asserts subsequently. everything I will try to do now will maintain an indirect relation to another, perhaps less visible, dimension of same drama. Today, I will begin then by speaking of . . . monstrosity. This will be another detour through question of man (Mensch or homo) and of 'we' that gives its content to a Geschlecht''2 Indeed, this question of man, of humankind or human race, will here animate and focus Derrida's close reading of two Heideggerian texts, namely, first lecture in Was heisst Denken? and lecture on poet Trakl in Unterwegs zur Sprache. It is in former that hand makes its appearance,3 marked as distinctly and exclusively human - marked, that is, by its capacity to point and, precisely in so doing, to designate enigmatic content of a Geschlecht. Derrida prepares us for this appearance of hand by dramatizing it in advance, calling to mind an archive of photographs of German philosopher that once came into his own hands. The play and theater of hands in album would deserve an entire seminar, he enthuses. Were I not to renounce this project, I would stress deliberately craftsmanlike staging of hand play, of monstration and demonstration that is exhibited there, whether it be a matter of handling of pen, of wielding of cane, which points rather than supports, or of water bucket near fountain.4 However reluctantly, Derrida has, then, renounced engagement with Heidegger's politics and also with his photographs, so as not to have to renounce his current project. Yet each of these apophatic gestures is itself crucial to framing ofthat project, it would seem. Heidegger's politics and Heidegger's photographed hand haunt Derrida's readings - latter the only thing that overflows on cover of album, as we are told. If, as Derrida argues, doubly monstrous figure of Heideggerian hand is icon of a humanity that refuses animality absolutely, what is cost of this refusal? Heidegger's own hand in politics hovers just outside frame of Derrida's query. Derrida's lecture, delivered in 1985 and first published in 1987, was picked up swiftly by Edith Wyschogrod. Her 1990 Saints and Postmodernism devotes several pages to its engagement, in a section of a chapter entitled Thinking, Animality, and Saintly Hand.5 Here I want to trace path of Wyschogrod's reading of Derrida and, through him, of Heidegger, with regard to hand. It will be precisely in slippages of her reading that we shall most easily detect Wyschogrod's own hand at work. That hand gives us both saints and animals where we might not have expected to find them - in a Levinasian ethics.6 It gives us an innovative theory of imitation and excess that bypasses nomianism while also challenging constraints of narrativity. Wyschogrod's saintly hand finally gives us more than a hand; it gives us embrace of arms, of a womb, indeed of a whole body laboring in pain on behalf of so many other bodies-in-pain. These gifts are lavish. But certain questions will press. Has Wyschogrod inadvertently closed distance of alterity, by appealing not to a common humanity but to a snared animality that may (or may not) add up to much same thing? Or does her thinking of sanctity and animality together finally allow us to engage question of Geschlecht, of man, of monstrosity, differently? Near end of this essay, I shall try to circle back to these issues through a brief reading of a fourthcentury Christian work, Jerome's Life of Paul. …

Enduring Resistance: Cultural Theory after Derrida/La résistance persévère: la théorie de la culture (d')après Derrida ed. by Sjef Houppermans, et al

his own work. Although the article aptly presents the use of sensory memory, the inclusion of the language of flowers, and the exploration of the finite and infinite in Andrade’s poetry, these themes were not unique to Proust’s writing, and it would be difficult to infer any concrete relationship between the work of the two authors based solely on these examples. Manet von Montfrans explores a possible relation between Proust and Perec in their depictions of Venice. The focus is on Perec’s embroidering on Roussel’s biography by the invention of a fictional trip to Venice, in which Perec described, in a coded manner, his own story. The essay, which concentrates mainly on Perec with very little reference to Proust, evinces the thesis that this is yet another instance of how Perec, while using similar themes as Proust, takes them in a different direction. On the other hand, Emily Eells’s historical investigation of the lack of influence of Wilde’s work on Proust deftly cuts through the myths that have been propagated about their relationship and carefully maps out the sparse examples that might suggest that Proust was familiar with Wilde’s “The Decay of Lying” as well as the introduction to The Picture of Dorian Gray. Franc Schuerewegen’s tour de force linking Charlus’s memory to the missing memories needed to create the book winds through a plethora of seemingly unrelated and yet cleverly linked themes: the poster Charlus observed in Balbec and later recalls on the Champs- Élysées, Liebig concentrated beef extract, Wagner and the use of Parsifal as an advertising strategy, Parsifal’s memory. Sjef Houppermans rounds off the collection with an engaging analysis of how the genre of the graphic novel is used to visually mimic the superimposition of Proust’s thematic style in the new edition of Heuet’s Un amour de Swann 2. Indiana University Juliette Dade HOUPPERMANS, SJEF, RICO SNELLER, and PETER VAN ZILFHOUT, eds. Enduring Resistance: Cultural Theory after Derrida/La résistance persévère: la théorie de la culture (d’)après Derrida. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010. ISBN 90-420-3030-5. Pp. 346. $91. This bilingual collection of essays seeks to explore not only the ways Jacques Derrida’s work has been exploited by “cultural theory” but also—and especially— “la résistance à une telle exploitation qui est inhérente à sa pensée” (16). Such a goal is extremely promising, especially at a time when, proliferating references to it notwithstanding, Derrida’s texts appear to be as little read as ever. For if it is a commonplace today for critical discourses to establish their theoretical bona fides through reference to Derrida’s work, too often these discourses appear unaware of the ways his text resists what it is being made to say. Consequently, they often end up inscribing themselves all too quickly in positions that Derrida went to great lengths to “deconstruct.” The fact, then, that Derrida continues to be a pierre de touche for so many different discourses is by no means an indication that his legacy is alive and kicking; indeed, it may well be part of the process of burying it. Given the initial promise of the volume, one is disappointed to find so many entries symptomatic of the very problem it purports to address. Numerous essays exemplify an almost comical resistance to actually reading Derrida. In “Traces of Nihilism,” for example, Peter van Zilfhout proposes to “take a look at Derrida’s lecture “La différance” prior to “implement[ing] his logic of traces in a case study” 360 FRENCH REVIEW 85.2 (99). Yet when van Zilfhout finally gets to his discussion of “La différance” after many a detour, it is only to tell us that, although “an extensive reading of the lecture by Derrida is interesting [...], for the moment it is sufficient to point to the consequence embodied in this lecture” (111). So much for reading it. One pays a price, however, for such a non-reading. When van Zilfhout claims that “poetry is, read with eyes and ears influenced by Derrida, the one place where memory and nothingness can be reconciled” (112—my emphasis), he...

Rejecting Friendship: Toward a Radical Reading of Derrida’s <i>Politics of Friendship</i> for Today

Rejecting Friendship: Toward a Radical Reading of Derrida’s <i>Politics of Friendship</i> for Today

“Now smile”: Recent Developments in Jacques Derrida's Work on Photography

Jacques Derrida died more than five years ago now, but his work keeps on coming out and, in the case of his work on photography, keeps on developing. While three important works on photography were published in English during Derrida's lifetime (“The Deaths of Roland Barthes” [1981], Right of Inspection [1985], and a series of reflections on the photographs of Frédéric Brenner in Diaspora [2003]), the three works that are set to come out in English in 2010 are likely not just to supplement but to radically augment and transform our understanding of Derrida's reading of the photographic medium. In the forthcoming “Alētheia,” Copy, Archive, Signature, and perhaps most especially Athens, Still Remains, Derrida develops a powerful reading of the unique temporality of photography and its essential relationship to memory, ruin, and mourning. This essay argues that these recent works on photography illuminate in a most striking fashion some of Derrida's earliest reflections on time as deferral or delay; on survival as trace, testament, and archive; and on the now as always divided from itself and so always developing in several different, noncontemporaneous times—a veritable “now theory” that should resonate well with this special issue of the South Atlantic Quarterly on theory now.

Reading Derrida and Ricoeur: improbable encounters between deconstruction and hermeneutics

Reading Derrida and Ricoeur: improbable encounters between deconstruction and hermeneutics

Re-thinking What We Think About Derrida

Although many still see Derrida as a thinker opposed to a unified systematic meaning, there has recently been growing recognition that Derrida, in his later years, suggested that his work is not averse to formalisation. In support of this view, this paper points out that, in 1990, Derrida himself told us that his first work of 1954 reveals a “law” which impels his career, and that some responses had arisen even there. Some benefits of adopting such a common pole are set out, and an interrelated “system” developed to relate the law of 1954 to the later responses, in order to help find a common, systematic base for Derrida’s oeuvre. The need to accommodate approaches which are wary of a systematic approach is nevertheless acknowledged, and possible ways of reconciling the diverse readings of Derrida’s intent and collaboratively furthering the formalisation of Derrida’s oeuvre for posterity are outlined in closing.

Queer Hospitality in Herman Melville's "Benito Cereno"

Queer Hospitality in Herman Melville's "Benito Cereno" Daniel Hannah (bio) Questions about hospitality (or hostipitality) and about queerness emerge as often implied though rarely articulated bedfellows in both Jacques Derrida's late work and Herman Melville's fiction.1 This essay addresses this surprising alignment of these two writers, arguing that Derrida, specifically in Of Hospitality, and Melville, in "Benito Cereno," elliptically trope queer desire as both enabling and threatening the possibility of hospitality. While Derrida's reading of perverse exchanges between hosts and guests provides, I will suggest, a valuable model for examining the erotically fraught relationships between Melville's captains and slaves, "Benito Cereno" complicates the terms by which readers might frame such exchanges. Reading, Melville's tale implies, is a queerly hospitable act, a taking up and extending of hospitality that calls into being a desire for, and to be, the other. Negotiating uneasy slides between narratorial and authorial voices that position the text within and outside networks of desire, readers of Derrida's meditations and Melville's short fiction are called on to recognize their dysfunctional roles—the guest as host, the host as guest. Queer desire might be said to trace Jacques Derrida's articulation of a politics of hospitality, driving its imaginings of an exchange between self and other even as that exchange erases its erotic potential. This queer trace emerges, first, in Derrida's delineation of the perverse interdependence of conditional and unconditional hospitality in a series of five seminars delivered in Paris in 1996. For Derrida, the term "hospitality" takes the form of [End Page 181] a non-dialectizable antinomy between, on the one hand, The law of unlimited hospitality (to give the new arrival all of one's home and oneself, to give him or her one's own, our own, without asking a name or compensation, or the fulfillment of even the smallest condition), and on the other hand, the laws (in the plural), those rights and duties that are always conditioned and conditional . . . by all of law and all philosophy of law . . . across the family, civil society, and the State.2 These "antagonistic terms," the "two regimes of law," as Derrida goes on to argue are, nevertheless, interdependent and inseparable. While the law of hospitality is "outside the law," it "requires" (79) the laws in order to mark out the possibilities of its coming into effect and, at the same time, the laws depend upon a concept of unconditional hospitality, of the law, in order to define themselves as hospitable. Derrida frames this antinomial relation between the law and the laws, on more than one occasion, through a rhetoric of perversion: "the law . . . needs the laws, which, however, deny it, or at any rate threaten it, sometimes corrupt or pervert it. And must always be able to do this. For this pervertibility is essential, irreducible, necessary too" (79). Derrida's returns to the pervertible and perverting trajectories of the laws of hospitality underscore the instabilities of this "conjugal model, paternal and phallogocentric" (149), this imagining of hospitable home-space as familial, self-contained, private, heterosexual. Indeed, Derrida queerly partners the home and the state as participants in the breakdown of their own principles of inviolability. The "right" to hospitality, "whether private or familial, can only be exercised and guaranteed by the mediation of a public right or State right" so that the sanctity, the hospitality of the "private domain" can only be gained through the State "controlling it and trying to penetrate it to be sure of it" (55). Yet for all Derrida's vested interest in exposing the perverse manifestations of a phallogocentric model of the home and of the host (hôte), his staging of hospitality remains, as a number of feminist critics have pointed out, strangely limited by the very terms it would seek to expose. Indeed, drawing as it does so closely on Emmanuel Levinas's account of ethics as a radical opening of the self to the Other in all their otherness, Derrida's relocation of this scene to the threshold of a masculinized home-space strangely forgets the feminine casting of the host in Levinas's model. Penelope Deutscher notes how...

Sagetrieb : The Forgetting of Ezra Pound

Poetry plays a peculiar role in Derrida's thinking since he defines it as a "wish to learn by heart." This approximates statements by Erza Pound, praised in Of Grammatology for having pushed Western poetry towards the Chinese ideogram. Reviewing Derrida's reading of Pound, I ask whether we can use Pound's theories and forget their involvement in fascism and anti-Semitism. Unable to reach a discursive answer, I resort to poetry, explaining how I once failed to remember the site of Pound's grave in San Michele, the Venetian cemetery that I had visited before: was this forgetting or forgiving, or both?

Looking for a Logic in Derrida: Assessing Hurst's “Plural Logic of the Aporia”

Summary Derrida was increasingly overt in later years that he employed a kind of “logic”, in which the classical tools of reasoning have their place. This article thus enquires into whether Derrida can be approached logically – to seek this logic – through the foil of Andrea Hurst's1 work. Hurst suggests Derrida proceeds via one “plural logic”, arising from the nonpresence of any concept, contamination and refusal of choice from binary options. These interact to arrive at aporia. Derrida's system thus works via one “internal/external” binary which proceeds in constructive and destructive moments. However, this article suggests that despite arguing for consistency, Hurst elides contradiction as a tool, thus cannot distinguish error from aporia. A critical criterion which utilises noncontradiction is developed, which suggests some ways by which seeking Derrida's logic could proceed, then points to the importance of suspension of logic in Derrida's work. The immediate practical application is to the question of whether Derrida is politically relevant, and it is hoped the outcome will justify the use of this method in reading Derrida.

Line and Colour: Instrumental (Ir)rationality in Adorno's Musicology

This essay subjects Adorno's historical dialectic of musical material, as it pertains to instrumentation, to Bataille's economic reading of dialectics (and latterly, to Derrida's reading of Bataille). There is a certain excess, an accumulation of waste, that cannot be jettisoned in Adorno's musicology; the problems that arise pertain directly to a musical work's ontological status as transcendental ‘thing in itself’, score, and/or performance. The implications of this reading point to a radical discontinuity between score and performance that cannot easily be reconciled by recourse to some fictive notion of the ‘work’ itself.

Responsibility, Biodegradability

My paper broaches the possibility of a rapprochement between a modulating ethic of responsibility and the environmental issue of biodegradability. The latter is a trope that Derrida has carefully worked through and over extensively, in a response to his critics in the wake of controversial revelations about Paul de Man's early wartime writings in his native Belgium. Derrida's vigilance stems from what he saw as biodegradability's double edge with regard to the survival of a text: foolishly optimistic in its claim to return to a tradition or milieu, even while eradicating the text's singular event. Yet in connecting this text to simultaneous readings of other texts concerning the responsibilities underlying discussion, as well as Derrida's reading of de Man's notion of ‘materiality’ in ‘Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2)’, I make and trace moves towards a modulating and literal biodegradability that, when thought alongside these readings, brings together futural and material modes of deconstructive responsibility, while remaining responsive to the inter-generational disseminating pressures of past signatures, present events and future contexts.

Questioning corporate codes of ethics

This paper argues that corporate Codes of Ethics lose their ability to further moral responsiveness because of the narrow instrumental purposes that inform their adoption and use. It draws on Jacques Derrida's reading of Emmanuel Levinas to argue that, despite the fact that all philosophical language entails a certain violence, corporate Codes of Ethics could potentially play a more meaningful role in furthering ethical questioning within corporations. The paper argues that Derrida's reading of Levinas' notion of ‘the third’ could precipitate the emergence of a broader sense of ethical responsibility towards multiple others within corporations. Codes may also present the opportunity for corporations to engage in the reconsideration of their own purposes in the light of questions of justice towards multiple others. How these changes in the establishment and use of Codes may be accomplished is explored towards the end of the paper.

Deconstruction, Justice of the "Other," and Enlightenment Spirit: Notes from Reading Derrida

Deconstruction, Justice of the "Other," and Enlightenment Spirit: Notes from Reading Derrida

Reading Derrida: Language, identity and violence

Reading Derrida: Language, identity and violence

Democracy and Critique: Recovering Freedom in Nancy and Derrida

In this paper, I argue that we need to re-address the issue of freedom as it relates to democracy and critical practice. My argument is drawn out of Derrida's deconstructive reading of Jean-Luc Nancy's The Experience of Freedom which proposes freedom in ontological terms as an experience of indeterminate openness that must be thought prior to any freedom of the self. I show how Derrida's reading of Nancy's text is itself a re-enactment of the freedom that Derrida finds wanting in Nancy's text, but which, by that very fact, affirms the power of critique in its capacity to think freely. The urgency of the thought of freedom is not something that can be avoided, but is itself the fact of critique in its thinking of democracy as a possibility, as something that might come about, as distinct from an already accomplished idea. To think in this way is, I argue, a matter of virtue, that is, of being free, as the virtue of critique and its capacity to act decisively, thereby bringing something forth by risking what it already is, in the absolute possibility of it not being.

‘The discipline of the question’: Rereading Derrida's ‘Violence and Metaphysics’

This article recalls Derrida's reading of Levinasian ethics as a discourse of the other, particularly in ‘Violence and Metaphysics’, in order 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 earlier texts, which must be recalled amidst any appeal to absolute alterity, especially of the kind frequently found in Derrida commentary today. The article suggests that, in the process of Derrida reading Levinas, the radical alterity of the other is sustained in ‘Violence and Metaphysics’ principally in terms of the legitimacy (or ‘discipline’) of a question that arises only on the hither side of a phenomenology of the other – a phenomenology that emerges, nonetheless, as its unacknowledged ground. Thus, in contrast to Levinasian thought (and yet also in deeper affinity with what we might term, for Derrida, its still obscured originality), 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.

You're There and You're Not There: Musical Borrowing and Cavell's “Way”

Examples of borrowing strategies in both musical and philosophical texts are outlined. Cavell's position on quotation as `being the other to one's self' is explored. Three cases of musical versus philosophical modes of borrowing are surveyed: Cavell borrowing Thoreau versus Ignaz Friedman borrowing Bach in Gavotte (1948); Cavell borrowing Emerson versus Berio borrowing Mahler in Sinfonia (1960); and Cavell borrowing Derrida reading Austin versus Richard Beaudoin borrowing Martha Argerich reading Chopin in Étude d'un prélude IV—Black Wires (2009). Cavell's theories of the voice are applied to the understanding of musical borrowing.

Of All Things: On Michael Marder's Reading of Derrida

The Event of the Thing by Michael Marder is probably one of the most comprehensive and integrative readings of Derrida’s oeuvre to date. A virtue of the book is that, despite the comprehensiveness of its subject matter, it does not assume the removed posture of an introduction, an exposition, or an explication. Its relation to the Derridian text is much more internal and intimate, and it should be noted that it presupposes a rather thorough knowledge of Derrida’s oeuvre as well as of Derrida’s philosophical “reading list” (primarily Husserl, Heidegger, Freud, Marx, and Kant). Marder’s confident and elegant prose reveals an original style, distinctly different than Derrida’s and yet just as carefully performative and rhythmic. While the text is virtually replete with citation and paraphrases—drawn as if effortlessly in a criss-cross fashion from as many as fifty different texts by Derrida—these are, for the most part, seamlessly woven into it like dialogues in a Saramago novel, rarely interrupting its flow. On occasion, however, Marder pauses on a passage from Derrida that he finds particularly pregnant and embarks upon a word-forword study that can be truly illuminating. The text follows, to some extent, the pattern of a fugue (a term which serves as a leitmotif in Marder’s work, etymologically referring to the act of fleeing [fugere] and, by implication, to the fugitive, the

The Devil Reads Derrida and Other Essays on the University, the Church, Politics, and the Arts – By James K. A. Smith

The Devil Reads Derrida and Other Essays on the University, the Church, Politics, and the Arts – By James K. A. Smith

Apories de la poésie

How is it possible today to write poetry that does not repeat the subjection of the literary to the poetical production created by a whole tradition for which the initial form of literature is poetry? That is the question that is considered in this paper, using Derrida’s texts. This question raises issues like the writer’s responsibility, dream and calculation, invention and discovery, quest for the idiom, the inheritance of a language, secret, essence of the language, translatability and untranslatability. Finally, using certain studied motives, this contribution tries a reading of Derrida’s Che cos’è la poesia?, in particular the expression “to learn by heart”.