Jacques Derrida Research Articles

‘Always try to welcome people into the home of your story’. Forms of hospitality in Ali Smith’s <em>Seasonal Quartet</em>

This article analyses how hospitality emerges as a key issue in the four novels of Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet (2016-2020), on different levels: thematically, linguistically, narratively and readerly. Firstly, hospitality is a recurring theme, as an act performed or not by institutions or individuals. Secondly, hospitality is present as a topic explicitly reflected upon as a linguistic act, an act of bridging different meanings and opening up the language. A third form in which hospitality emerges in the Seasonal Quartet is as a narrative practice, both through marked interventions of the narrator and through the open narrative structure. By constantly juxtaposing different texts and lives, Smith allows for very different voices to be heard. The reader is invited to actively make these voices resonate with one another, a process we would call training a fourth form of hospitality: readerly hospitality. Informed by notions of hospitality as theorized by Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas, but especially Paul Ricœur and Derek Attridge, in this article we analyse how Smith’s seasonal novels thematize, stage and perform hospitality, as well as reflect on it. We conclude that Smith endows the reader with the ethical responsibility to be hospitable: a responsibility to engage with and open up to the stories of others.

Binary of Major Character and Minor Character in Amruta Patil’s Graphic Novel Sauptik: A Deconstructive Study

A novel is an organic whole and even its smaller components have significant roles to play. The bigger body components in a human are the head, the heart, the arms, and the legs. Minor parts include the fingers, ears, and eyes. A man who is blind, deaf, or without fingers may live a long life, but he will undoubtedly be inferior to a person with a well-built body. The same is true of a novel. It cannot gain a great readership if the smaller characters are missing or are not properly recognised. Minor characters are often not the main focus of a literary work, but they are crucial to a story’s advancement since they make the narrative move. By spurring the primary characters’ behaviour, they can influence how the story of the novel develops. They occasionally contribute to the novel’s central conflict, but they also frequently aid in its conclusion. There are a number of supporting characters who contribute to the development of Amruta Patil’s Sauptik. This paper demonstrates the significance of all secondary characters in this work, in addition to the main ones, for the unfolding of the story. For meeting this purpose this paper employs Jacques Derrida’s concept of deconstruction to deconstruct the binary of major characters and minor characters.

A Collision of Narratives: Archives of Ivan Kliun in the Collections of Nikolai Khardzhiev and George Costakis

Abstract The article explores the remarkable fate of the personal archive of Ivan Kliun (1873–1943), an important representative of experimental modern art from early twentieth-century Russia. His case presents a rare scenario where the artist’s archive fell into the hands of the era’s two most prominent collectors, who held starkly contrasting views on his art. While George Costakis (1913–1990) highly appreciated Kliun’s talent and built a comprehensive collection that included both his artworks and archival materials, Nikolai Khardzhiev (1903–1996) considered Kliun a mere epigone of Kazimir Malevich. By examining the collectors’ choices through the lens proposed by Jacques Derrida in his book “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression,” the present article delves into the collision of the narratives that molded the historiography of Kliun’s work.

Bacterial Sex and Death: Darwirigaray and Life Death

This article discusses the New Materialist interest in biology and agency, drawing on Elizabeth Grosz's Becoming Undone, a work that provides a feminist ontology of life based on sexual difference. Grosz presents a ‘cross-fertilized’ reading of Charles Darwin and Luce Irigaray, placing them in what she calls the vitalist philosophy of ‘the question of life’. In order to conceptualize life, she posits sexual reproduction as the philosophical essence of life in terms of the maximalization of creativity, productivity (overabundance) and diversity. In this context the article contrasts this vision with Jacques Derrida's reading, in Life Death, of the notion of life based on sexual reproduction in François Jacob's The Logic of Life, with particular attention to Jacob's discussions of sexual reproduction and death. Read in the light of Derrida's insights, Grosz's deployment of this vitalist discourse of infinite productivity necessarily misses complexity in the notion of life that she develops.

The Tropic-Concepts of Life: Jacques Derrida’s Contribution to the Question of Metaphor in the Life Sciences

In the field of life science there is a growing awareness of the metaphorical tenor of many of its key concepts and the problems that arise from them, as in the now-controversial case of the genetic ‘program’. In the seminar Life Death (2019) Derrida addresses this question from Georges Canguilhem’s difficulties in establishing a clear distinction between metaphor and concept, precisely with regard to the notion of ‘program’, concluding that this difficulty ‘demand[s] a recasting of this division and of the law of this division’ between metaphor and concept. Beginning with these pages from Life Death, the present essay aims to reconstruct the deconstruction of this opposition and its epistemological consequences by going back to the Derridean essay ‘White Mythology’ (1971), to which Derrida refers in the seminar and in which the question of metaphor in the life sciences had been addressed in a critical confrontation with Bachelard and Canguilhem.

The treachery of writing about democracy (this is not an epilogue)

ABSTRACT The title of this article parodies the name of one of René Magritte’s most famous paintings called The Treachery of Images, which, underneath its hyperrealist rendition of a pipe denies it being a pipe (Ceci n’est pas une pipe). Pushing the boundaries of standard epilogue-writing conventions, the present philosophical section discusses our compilation of articles through the lens of apophasis, which recognizes the limits of language to accurately describe undefinable concepts such as ‘democracy’ and ‘the people’. As a rhetorical device that speaks something into being while negating this very possibility, apophasis is a key characteristic of negative theology. Because it accepts the impossibility of defining the divine, it leaves room for the denial of its existence. Yet, at the same time, the apophatic paradox affirms the divine’s existence precisely by acknowledging its transcendental unspeakable nature. Inspired by Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, who were themselves inspired by negative theology, scholars from various fields in the arts, social sciences, psychology, and the humanities have already developed useful apophatic-analytical tools in their methodological debates. My suggestion to employ a similar yet adapted lens for studying parliamentary history has been triggered by the thread that ties all contributions to this research anthology together. As they centre on parliamentary meta-discourse about tried and tested procedures, they feature negation, negotiation, and other apophatic rhetoric in the MPs’ struggles to define and perform their jobs as representatives. A more deliberate introduction of the apophatic lens – with an emphasis on apophatic rhetoric of materiality of parliaments in their interactions with the ineffable people – would take the concept quite paradoxically out of this discourse-analytical framework, to draw attention to political and colonial histories of experiences of the unspeakable.

The metafictional depiction of burial in Son of Saul

ABSTRACT Critics have noted that the Hungarian Holocaust film, Son of Saul (2015), draws on Sophocles’ Antigone in its depiction of burial. In this paper, this depiction is shown to be rigorously metafictional, based on how it recasts Antigone’s mission and rewrites Holocaust discourse on the Sonderkommando. I argue that the film’s metafictional depiction of burial takes Antigone’s ethical stance on dehumanization forward by shifting the focus from kinship to the otherness of death. The inaccessibility of death, a fundamental feature of Holocaust discourse, is communicated via a metafictional device known as the implied viewer. That said, the co-implication of death and fiction exceeds the use of metafictional conventions. For the focus on inaccessibility underscores that death is a reality that can only be imagined, not experienced as such. The fictiveness that lines our relation to death is analyzed in the light of Jacques Derrida’s discourse on death and burial, which stresses the animality of mortals (their inability to know death).The animality that drives burial is what enables the film to give dehumanization another ethical dimension.

Sometimes a Ghost is Just a Ghost: Agnes and Spectrality in Henrik Ibsen’s Brand

Abstract The article focuses on the ghost of Agnes in Henrik Ibsen’s play Brand (1866). Drawing upon different theoretical articulations of the so-called spectral turn, and most notably on Jacques Derrida’s concept of hauntology, the article studies the spectral manifestation of Agnes and how it affects our understanding of Ibsen’s play. Avoiding a metaphorical and/or psychological reading of spectral figures, which sees ghosts as projections of the minds of other characters, the article will concentrate instead on a “proper” or “material” ghost and study its spectrality. The article will therefore seek to answer the following research questions: what role does this seemingly secondary figure play in Ibsen’s dramatic poem? If one of the characters in Brand is in fact a ghost, what are the consequences for our interpretation of the play? In the course of the analysis, this article will show that these perspectives are especially related to the Christ-like status of the protagonist, Brand, and to Agnes’ agency.

Identity politics and the politics of difference: critical transformations in contemporary thought

This article explores the relationship between identity politics and the politics of difference, focusing especially on the tensions that characterise this relationship within progressive theories and political discourses, and on their implications. The development of the concepts of identity and difference, as well as their limits and possibilities, are examined in relation to several theorists: Slavoj Žižek, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Michel Foucault, Cornel West and Judith Butler. This is followed by a discussion of Fromm’s social psychology insofar as it anticipates the growing importance of the concepts of identity and difference within late modern culture, and insofar as it identifies a number of critical concerns around these concepts which remain relevant today.

COVID-19 and (ir)responsible (im)mobility: Reading counter-practices through Levinas and Derrida.

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected virtually all daily activities, relations and practices. People were expected to act responsibly by following social distancing, masking, sanitation and stay-home rules. The prevailing ethos of the time was that to protect others, one must first protect oneself. By examining the creative modalities through which (a few) people in Paris circumvented mobility restrictions to help and support those in need, this article investigates the relation between (im)mobility and (ir)responsibility. Is mobility, during a time of forced immobility, an irresponsible act? What does it mean to act responsibly during a life-threatening emergency? Does responsibility always require complete and unequivocal compliance with extant norms, or should responsibility also be evaluated in light of the motives that inspire (unauthorised) mobility? The issue of (ir)responsible (im)mobility is scrutinised here by drawing upon the work of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida. While the former furthers our understanding of ethical relations, the latter makes us rethink the concept of response-ability and, in particular, the aporia this concept entails. As Derrida highlights, truly ethical acts are impossible for the very reason that all ethical acts are, at the very same time, responsible towards some and irresponsible towards others.

Masculinity: Phallogocentrism and Performativity. A Philosophical Analysis Based on the Studies of Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler and Raewyn Connell to Counter Patriarchal Hegemony

Feminist considerations have induced a rethinking of many aspects of our contemporary world, such as the concept of gender and power relations. This has led to a re-examination of the entire previous tradition of thought, finding in phallogocentrism the paradigm of reference. This term indicates, starting with Derrida's considerations, the Western tendency to have centred not only the logos, but also the phallus, weaving an intricate relationship between masculinity and language. It's precisely this bond that makes man the archetype on which society is founded, placing his supremacy in the natural order, defining power relations and nailing pre-established categories. A being-nailed in the Lévinasian sense, thus an adherence between the agreement of voices and being, which produces 'category-beings' in which pre-delineated social identity is concealed in a condition of 'nature', such as the 'being-male'. It's precisely this naturalness, discursively produced, that has made man universal. Consequently, man has convinced himself that he can speak for all humanity, becoming the logos through which he declines the rest. Declinations that have produced rigid and hierarchical categories that precede and define each person, prescribing 'consonant' ways, rhetorically assumed as 'human nature'. The "nature" of being man or woman does not, in fact, concern monolithic essentialisms, but rather movements of intertwined meanings in a process that Derrida defines as différance. A process, therefore, in becoming, which has over time produced unequal power relations, justifying them as "natural", and which daily reiterates a hegemonic and sexist social model. The aim of this analysis, hence, will be to bring phallogocentric masculinity and consequent hegemonic structures into the field of philosophical reflection, with the purpose of redirecting praxis towards performative processes of characterisation the person, rather than a pre-delineated categorisation. Thus, to release being from socio-cultural categories, which historical-performative praxis nails to each body.

Drawing in the dark: faith and knowledge in Jacques Derrida’s Memoirs of the Blind

ABSTRACT This essay focuses on Jacques Derrida’s Memoirs of the Blind, the catalog accompanying the exhibit of the same name that Derrida organized and curated at the Louvre Museum in Paris in 1990. The essay begins by considering Derrida’s seemingly surprising choice of themes, that is, darkness, blindness and invisibility, for an exhibit of drawings and paintings that belong to the so-called ‘visual arts’. The essay goes on to explain what Derrida calls in Memoirs of the Blind two intersecting logics in the visual arts, the ‘transcendental’ and the ‘sacrificial’, both of which are related in some way to blindness or invisibility. It then considers how these two logics come to intersect in Derrida’s own exhibit and in the autobiographical narrative – the memoir – of his exhibition, a narrative that, as we see, also proceeds from a certain blindness or lack of knowledge. The essay concludes by asking what Derrida’s analyses might teach us about the blindness at the very origin of the visual arts and, especially, about a certain ‘elementary faith’ – a notion taken from his 1996 essay ‘Faith and Knowledge’ – that is required in order to practice them.

Voicing the Border: On Some Spectral Essay Films

Giving prominence to the auditory nature of the border, this article argues for the importance of voice to the epistemological practices of border essay films. By engaging with three relevant case studies—Appunti del passaggio by Maria Iorio and Raphaël Cuomo (2014–2016), Spectres Are Haunting Europe by Maria Kourkouta and Niki Giannari (Fantasmata planiountai pano apo tin Evropi, 2016), and An Asian Ghost Story by Bo Wang (九龍東往事, 2022)—it carries out an acoustemology of spectral border essay films that, to cite Jacques Derrida, speak of the ghost to speak of justice. In so doing, it shows that, through an experimental use of voice, these films perform the border by making it audible. Their experimental approach to make the border “heard” subverts the standard relationship between sound and image in documentary cinema. Simultaneously, it de-forms and re-forms the essay film via postcolonial and feminist appropriations and spectral modifications of the essayist’s translocal, border-crossing voiceover.

Roundtable: On Jacques Derrida's Writings on Money

Roundtable: On Jacques Derrida's Writings on Money

Derridova výzva historii_ text a kontext

Jacques Derrida´s deconstruction is a way of thinking that is still not very well known in Czech intellectual life and for various reasons professional historians see it as a threat to the history as a scientific discipline. In reality, as can be seen from the example of G.G. Iggers, such fears tend to be based on ignorance or irresponsible treatment of Derrida´s texts, and as a result the possible benefits of Derrida´s conceprts for history are overlooked. This study aims to elucidate the key concepts and sections of Derrida´s philosohpy, especially those that relate relatively directly to historical science and have potentially important consequences for it.

Digital Mini-Archives: Social Media Users as Curators of an Architectural Utopia

This paper explores the importance and meaning of a new concept of architectural archives – digital mini-archives in the form of social media profiles (Instagram profiles), whether they are public or private. The paper's interpretation of digital architectural archives is based on Jacques Derrida's interpretation of archives. The aim is to analyze the relationship between archivists and users in the context of social media platforms, and the structure and content of digital mini-archives. I tried to select examples of different Instagram profiles whose content (photos, videos, and quotes) relates to architectural history and architectural design presented in an innovative manner. The hypothesis emphasizes a curating role of social media users as interpreters of architectural history references and their (new) meanings, as well as curators of the future of architecture. Also, the concept of architectural utopia concerns Nathaniel Coleman's theory of utopia in architecture and its contemporary interpretations. There is a strong bond between architectural utopia and digital mini-archives which enable architecture's utopian potential because of their flexibility, openness to change, and transformability. Thus, experimental projects with utopian potential are created based on digital mini-archives. However, do these digital mini-archives contribute by deciding which (part of) architectural history ought to be forgotten or remembered in collective memory and translated to another temporal context through experimental architectural design?

Gifts for No One or Anyone: Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida on Personne

In Parages, Jacques Derrida writes that the ‘Donner – le temps’ seminar ‘led up to’ a study of Maurice Blanchot’s La folie du jour. That study is the improvised fourteenth session of Donner le temps II. Derrida turns to La folie du jour to treat in more explicit terms the structure of the ‘ récit’ which was particularly relevant to his reading of Charles Baudelaire’s récit ‘La fausse monnaie’ earlier in the seminar, but which is almost entirely absent from the sessions included in Donner le temps II. This paper proposes one possible reason for Derrida’s insistence on Blanchot in the seminar and for thinking the gift: La folie du jour’s narrator, which is not someone determinate, but personne (which, in French, can mean either an indeterminate ‘no one’ or a substitutable ‘anyone’ depending on the context). I argue that the aporetic structure of the gift is best expressed when the gift’s subject and object are indeterminable and substitutable, which is the case when the gift is given to or received from an impersonal personne (to or from no one or anyone).

From Metabolism to (Gift) Exchange: On the Propensity to Propensity

In this paper I explore how the limitations of sociological and economic approaches to the gift can be exposed not only through deconstructive analysis, such as Jacques Derrida pursues in Given Time, vols. I & II, but also through the philological resources and biological conceptuality of ‘metabolism’. By bridging Derrida’s textual conception of survival with neurobiological and phenomenological approaches to life, I argue that what ‘gift’ names is nothing distinctly human but, rather, a possibility at the origin of any economization of differences, be they ‘textual’ or ‘biological’ in nature.

Deconstructing Radiant Inventory: Christopher Dewdney's Representations of the Natural World in Radiant Inventory

This article presents an analysis of Christopher Dewdney’s “Radiant Inventory” using the literary theory of deconstruction. The purpose is to try and understand the poem through Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction. The article will further examine how the deconstruction of the poem can bring the traditional notion of reading a text into application and how the perception of reality can be challenged to show multiple perspectives using language and imagery. The analysis sheds light on the poem’s questioning of the relationship between object and identity and the role of language in shaping our understanding of reality. It will strictly adhere to Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction. The purpose is to demonstrate how the deconstructive approach can offer a deeper understanding of the complexities and nuances present in the poem.

The Postcolonial Unconscious in North African Migrant Fiction

The impact of the postcolonial unconscious on North African migrant fiction has been extensively explored and revealed through both theoretical frameworks and literary practices throughout the postcolonial era. Scholars and writers alike have delved into how the psychological remnants of colonialism continue to influence the narratives, themes, and character development in this body of work. This ongoing examination highlights the deep-seated cultural and psychological legacies that shape the identities and experiences of both individuals and communities within North African migrant literature. As a reflection of the long-lasting consequences of colonial history on people and society, North African migrant writers, like other postcolonial writers worldwide, tackle themes of identity, displacement, and post-colonialism. Theorists like Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Frantz Fanon, and Jacques Derrida have theorized that the unconscious influences language and subject creation, which in turn shapes their narratives. This analysis uses Fanon’s concept of the postcolonial unconscious, which explores the psychological effects of colonialism, such as internalized trauma and cultural hybridity, as a major framework. This study examines how postcolonial unconscious and related themes appear in the writing of North African writers who have immigrated to Europe and the USA, emphasizing the psychological and cultural effects of colonization on both individuals and groups. In addition to offering in-depth examinations of some texts, the paper presents a comprehensive view of the importance of postcolonial literary criticism in comprehending the complexities of postcolonial societies.