Jacques Derrida Research Articles

A Deconstructive Analysis of Postmodern Themes in Selected John Ashbery Poems

This paper utilizes the deconstruction theory of Jacques Derrida to perform an extremely close reading of some chosen poems by John Ashbery, where the poets portrays the postmodern concepts. It provides a thorough overview of how Ashbery talked about fantasy through the language that later became his signature. By means of the use of Derrida’s approach, it is shown that in the middle are the myriad zones of obscurity, contradiction, and also many interpretations. This poetry, through critical scrutiny of the lingual pattern and the concept/allusion system, enlightens how the principle of Ashbery’s works confuses the approach to traditional thoughts and also perverts semantic stability. This analysis of Ashbery portrayed his questioning wanderings in the sphere of the unattainable notions of the sense in the post-modern context that extend the interpretations of the philosophical basis of postmodern literature.

This strange institution called performativity: Jacques Derrida, the anarchy of literature, and the counterinstitution of democracy

This strange institution called performativity: Jacques Derrida, the anarchy of literature, and the counterinstitution of democracy

Decoding Deconstruction: Unveiling the Layers in Mahakavi Devkota’s Poetic Works

“Decoding Deconstruction: Unveiling the Layers in Mahakavi Devkota’s Poetic Works” explores the intricate tapestry of Mahakavi Laxmi Prasad Devkota’s poetry, using a deconstructionist point of view. The paper reveals unimagined Deconstructionist features within Devkota’s works, akin to the ideas developed by Jacques Derrida during the 1960s. Devkota has questioned all the so-called hierarchies that were prevalent in Nepali society then. He has questioned human-centric discourses. Thus, his poems exemplify a deconstructive mindset. They invite readers to embrace ambiguity, explore new perspectives and transcend traditional modes of interpretation. This study illuminates how some of the poems by Mahakavi Devkota are so very close to the deconstructionist view developed by Derrida and so e other theorists in the 1970s.

Religion Counts: Faithful Realism and Historical Representation in George Eliot’s Romola

This article explores the importance of faith in the Victorian historical novel, with a particular focus on George Eliot’s Romola (1862–1863), and rethinks past secularist approaches to the genre. Romola was arguably the most meticulously researched historical novel of the nineteenth century. Set in Florence from 1492 to 1498, the novel traces the rise and fall of the Dominican friar, Girolamo Savonarola, as he pursued the spiritual and political reform of the city, leading to his excommunication and martyrdom. Despite the religious setting of the novel, Eliot’s painstaking effort to imagine a realistic historical representation of Florentine society has often been approached in secular terms as a tour de force of the author’s humanist vision of a progressive march towards modernity. Building on recent work in postsecular studies, this essay rethinks the novel’s historical realism in terms of Christian faith. Centering on the spiritual journey of the protagonist, Romola de’ Bardi, the novel presents a faithful depiction of Renaissance Florence by imagining historical representation as an act of faith. Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s essay, “Faith and Knowledge”, the article analyzes how Eliot frames the significance of the novel’s historical representation as an act of faith that one’s life is bound meaningfully to those of others.

It’s only a mirage: Tahar Djaout’s critique of logocentrism in L’Invention du désert

Set in Algeria, France, and the Arabian Peninsula in the early twelfth and the late twentieth centuries, L’Invention du désert is about an author who reexamines his life and his craft while writing a history of the Almoravid dynasty that ruled Andalusia and a large portion of the Maghreb from 1056 to 1152 CE. Accordingly, the novel is made of two basic narrative strands. The first focuses on the private musings and reminiscences of the narrator, moving forwards and backwards in space and time and going all the way to his childhood. The second narrative strand recounts the life, rise to power, and downfall of Mohamed ibn Toumert, the religious scholar and zealot whose followers brought down the Almoravids and founded the Almohad dynasty that lasted from 1152 to 1269 CE. The two major story-lines that constitute the novel are brought together by the narrator’s reflection on history and archiving for the purpose of problematizing the way Algerian history is conceived and used to address two major social and political concerns confronting Algerians: religious fundamentalism and national identity. The purpose of this article is to examine how Djaout uses the desert both as a topography and a metaphor to challenge the logocentrism of religious fundamentalism and narrow and essentialist definitions of Algerianess. The paper at the same time shows how the understanding and critique of historical logocentrism that are advanced in L’Invention du désert parallel Jacques Derrida’s philosophy put forward in Of Grammatology (Derrida in Of grammatology, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1976) and other early works. Because the manuscripts, critical of Islam as practiced under Almoravid rule, Ibn Toumert carries with him function as archives, the paper also engages with some of the themes Derrida developed later in Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Derrida in Archive fever: a Freudian impression, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1996).

ESCREVIVÊNCIA

In this text, we weave together the poetics and aesthetics of writing, by Conceição Evaristo, with deconstruction, seeking to identify new bases for the history of rights, based on an art history of African descent. We seek, under the framework of research in Law and Literature, assuming the legacy of Jacques Derrida, to think of the right to joy as an open path for the recognition of other rights.

Considering the past, present and future: making the case for a hauntological approach to youth

ABSTRACT Young people’s emergent position in the life-course means that they are widely perceived to embody the future, with their ‘successes’ and ‘failures’ in youth considered important portents of the future viability, prosperity, and moral character of wider society. In many regards, this futurist lens is reflected in research within youth studies, including in the extensive youth transitions literature and in temporal and relational streams of research exploring young people’s ‘imagined futures’ in the context of rising precarity, uncertainty and risk in the contemporary period. While this emphasis on the future is undoubtedly important, it has contributed to the significance of the past in young people’s lives being overlooked and, moreover, often erroneously characterises the future as somehow temporally disembodied from what precedes it. In this article, I argue that there is a need for more meaningful engagements with the past in contemporary youth studies. Specifically, I suggest there is considerable value in Jacques Derrida's (1994. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. New York, NY: Routledge) concept of hauntology for enriching current understandings of youth. This article describes how hauntology’s pantemporal focus represents an increasingly timely and important conceptual tool through which to capture, analyse, and address the structural and temporal complexities confronting contemporary generations of youth.

Logics of Alterity in Derrida’s and Deleuze’s Philosophies of Justice

Jacques Derrida’s and Gilles Deleuze’s philosophies of justice share many similar features. For both, justice involves an overturning of law by extralegal means, made possible by an “undecidability” in the judgment-making process. To distinguish their conceptions of justice, we examine their implicit modes of non-classical reasoning with regard to “otherness,” building from Routley and Routley and Daniel Smith, to conclude that Derrida’s thinking on justice is at least paracomplete (or analetheic) while Deleuze’s is just paraconsistent (or dialetheic).

Derrida and Parle-Ment (Parliament)

Recent scholarship on Jacques Derrida’s work has turned toward his political and institutional engagements. I further this body of research by outlining a twofold problematic regarding the issue of “parliament.” Its first dimension concerns what I call a poli-technic of lying, which denotes that politically impactful techniques of lying demand we follow the lacunae of the polis, the phenomenality of an international public sphere and technologies of public circulation, and the relationship between the construction of categories of “peoples,” “nations,” “borders,” and their “authorities” with practices of force or violence. In the following, I consider Derrida’s relation to the International Parliament of Writers (IPW) as a supplementary institution from which examination of this problematic might be situated in light of alternative traditions predicated on hospitality, and on sheltering the other as a practice inextricable from a “frank concept of truth.” I also consider the emergent possibilities this approach opens for responding to immediate conditions – attacks on the lives of writers around the world, accelerating global displacement, intensifying border closures, and unchecked police enforcement. I look toward the political unit Derrida identifies as crucial for these actions: the city as a space for frank and open speech – the ville franche.

Quoting the Other

In “Toward an Ethic of Discussion,” Jacques Derrida returns to the controversy with Jonathan Searle to clarify his position but above all because he “would have wished to make legible the (philosophical, ethical, political) axiomatics hidden beneath the code of academic discussion.” I intend, in turn, to return to this text in order to find in it not only the conditions of an ethics of academic discussion but also of interpretation in a deconstructive perspective. In “Toward an Ethic of Discussion,” in fact, it is possible to point out the necessity of a certain ethical treatment of the texts. In particular, how can we determine the conditions of an ethical use of quotation against the always possible manipulation of the text that quotation makes possible? I attempt to answer this question claiming that the reading protocol of deconstruction meets these conditions showing us at the same time the ethical conditions of scientific discourse in general, beyond any scientific claim of objectivity.

“What is Proper to a Culture”

This article considers sociocultural identity and identification in the work of Jacques Derrida. Though Derrida’s philosophy is often presented as a source of inspiration for identity politics, Derrida’s precise position on identity is far from evident. This discussion will unpack his account of identity through a dialogue with the work of Amartya Sen, a Nobel laureate in economics and moral philosopher, known for his capabilities approach. In spite of their philosophical differences, I propose that Sen and Derrida share strikingly similar views about identity. Descriptively, they both understand sociocultural identity as inherently hybrid, anti-essentialist and plural. Sen’s argument for this is based on empirical and historical examples, while Derrida’s focuses on the relationship between cultural identity and the other. Their shared understanding of identity is reflected in a similar normative argument: we should consciously select our identities, so as to protect the plural nature of identities. In the case of Sen, this is accomplished through reason. Derrida takes a broader understanding of this, based on his concept of inheritance. I propose that inheritance needs to be interpreted as involving active and critical deliberation on identity and that this is an ethical dimension of Derrida’s work. I conclude by pointing to the potential for future dialogue between Sen and Derrida, the need to reflect further on the normative aspects of inheritance and the potential for their work to inform identity politics.

Language by Birth and Nationality by Death

Most countries provide some form of nationality or citizenship either by birthright or inheritance. This paper accepts Jacques Derrida’s invitation to imagine nationality or citizenship otherwise, this time by death and burial: you are from where you die or are buried. I read Derrida’s invitation alongside his four studies of Martin Heidegger’s use of “Geschlecht” to argue that we ought to reconsider the relationship between the nation and (its) philosophy. I show that Derrida’s proposed “law of the eclipse” provides us new resources to rethink nationalism today.

Fugitive Philosophy

: The central inquiry of this article concerns the ethical orientation within post-structuralism, specifically questioning its potential affinity with deontology. While the “philosophers of difference” offer divergent perspectives on the doctrine of judgment, Jacques Derrida folds it within Deconstruction as a nomo-aporetic transcendental horizon. To understand this operation and its potential ethical significance, I suggest Jean-François Lyotard offers the best counter-model with which to compare against Derrida’s. Amongst their direct and indirect exchanges with each other is a dialogue concerning the law and its fundamental ground. Through their respective readings of Kafka – Derrida’s reading of “Before the Law” and Lyotard’s reading of “In the Penal Colony” – both attempt to delineate how the specific nature of the ground of the law determines the way in which an individual becomes subject to the law. Despite the enigmatic nature of their discourses, their comparison reveals converging and diverging trajectories in their ethical reflections as they push toward thinking the limits of lawfulness. Through such a comparative study of their texts, this exploration aims to unveil the shared fugitive vector of their ethical contemplations within the post-structuralist framework.

Fidelity to Life ∼ Hospitable Biopolitics

While fidelity is a crucial aspect of Jacques Derrida’s thinking as it pertains to issues of faith, ethics, and responsibility, this key position in deconstructionist discourse has hardly yet been brought to light. Less still have the biopolitical resonances of Derrida’s work, with its careful attention to the terms and stakes of life particularly in his later writing, been considered as a deconstructionist practice of fidelity and infidelity in its own right. In pursuing these threads, this essay argues that thinking a deconstructionist ethics through fidelity and biopolitics makes possible the crafting of a new philosophical weave for catching our responsibilities to others – to the very otherness of life itself – that Derridean hospitality opens up. Taken together in this way, a deconstructionist fidelity to life otherwise, to a biopolitics to come, makes possible an infidelity to political order as we know it that explodes the limitations of biopolitical theory. In squinting, blinking, tearing up, and listening, the borders of life are blurred in an ambivalent ethics of a transness within which life itself is made to waver and arrive anew.

Deconstruction’s Animal Promise

Based on a reading of the opening of The Animal That Therefore I Am, this essay exposes the genealogy and structure of the articulation of two motifs of Jacques Derrida’s thought: the promise and animality. Following a confrontation between Heidegger’s and Nietzsche’s conceptions of the human, we will show that, for deconstruction, the possibility to promise, or the possibility of having an “avenir,” is characteristic of an “animal” structure of experience. The anthropological specificity is not pertinent in this context: if animality names the structure of experience in general, and if humanity is reinscribed into it, then this reconfiguration is not a matter of classes, but of structure. Therefore, the promise of deconstruction is an implication of the structure of experience of finite living beings: experience is open, historic, insofar as it is animal. Finally, we will show why the affirmation of this articulation coincides with that of deconstruction’s “categorical imperative.”

‘I was right here, the whole time, none of you could see me’: Background Ghosts, Fear, and Vision in Mike Flanagan’s The Haunting (2018–2020)

This article focuses on Mike Flanagan’s Haunting series and brings the pervasive background ghost to the foreground of analysis by studying that which is, as expressed by young Nell in The Haunting of Hill House, ‘right here the whole time’ and yet cannot be seen. Using Jacques Derrida’s seminal notion of ‘spectre’ and its related ‘visor effect’ concept to build textual analyses of both The Haunting of Hill House and The Haunting of Bly Manor, this study demonstrates the ways in which the background ghost both reflects and challenges conventional horror dynamics of visuality and spectacularity. Such dynamics extend beyond the story space and involve the implied and near-sighted spectator, at once imperfect ghost-hunter and hunted by the background ghost. Such pervasive mechanics of haunting allow Flanagan to create a space of highly contemporary terror oozing from the screen to the implied viewer.

I'm mortal, therefore i am: the mourning memory and the politics of mourning in Jacques Derrida

Nosso objetivo é apresentar uma leitura sobre a questão do luto na obra de Jacques Derrida. Essa questão intervém desde seus primeiros escritos, num embate com Edmund Husserl até sua obra tardia, em que ressaltaremos o diálogo com Martin Heidegger. Sem pretender esgotar a questão, buscamos investigar: 1) como o luto constitui intimamente, para Derrida, o que se denomina o “humano”, concorrendo para a formação da sua subjetividade, marca de uma etapa na história da vida; 2) os aspectos ético-políticos que atravessam a questão do luto, por meio dos temas da memória e da herança.

Прикладні функції архіву: епістемологічна, політична та освітня

The article explores and formulates the applied functions of the archive. In addition to its function as a resource for understanding the past, the archive has important applied functions in the present. The task of defining the functions of the archive also requires defining the concept of the archive. For this aim, the concept of “archive” in the works of philosophers Alyda Assman, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, as well as Ukrainian researchers – Vitaly Turenko, Volodymyr Prykhodko, Serhii Rudenko, Maryna Palienko, was considered and studied. These philosophers have found a methodological connection with regard to the etymology of the ancient Greek term “Αρχη”. Detailed studies of the semantics of the concept of Αρχη allow to investigate the understanding of the origin of the functions of the archive. The French philosopher Michel Foucault considered the concept of the archive as a component of his ontological system, “Archaeology of Knowledge”, which explains the functioning of human knowledge, memory and power. So, Foucault explained the epistemological function of the archive. Another French philosopher, Jacques Derrida, focuses on the human desire to take hold of the past, which he calls “archive fever,” and develops this concept in his famous work “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression”. Among the general concepts of the archive, Derrida focuses on the main and important political function of the archive, the embodiment of the archive in the body. The way the archive functioning is an important factor in the political regime, but at the same time it ensures the successful operation of the education system. In its various forms, the archive transmits to posterity information that appears as a warning and instruction based on the experience of the past. Based on these conditions, the archive acquires an important educational function in the modern world and forms the key ideological conditions for the functioning of society.

Deconstructing the Language Poetry in Some Selected Poems of Charles Bernstein From a Derridaian Perspective

This paper investigates the language poetry and its practice in some poems of the American poet Charles Bernstein. The study will examine several poems for Bernstein, like "April" and "March" from Stigma, "Locks without Doors" from Dark City, "Slowed Reason" from Rough Trades, "Lift off", and "The next Available Place". It argues that the Derridaian perspective plays a prominent role in the way Bernstein visualizes meaning in his poetry. According to Jacques Derrida (1993), the divergence of indicative communication by making intentional gaps between expression and indication creates the signification to difference, deviation, and departure. The gaps for Derrida are gaps of space which become gaps of time and those of time become gaps of space, adding that the gaps of difference are in themselves gaps as difference. The gap itself works for the auto production and the auto-determination of meaning which will keep on travelling.
 The study will analyse the language of Bernstein in the above mentioned poems to prove that meaning emerges through interpretation and that even authors do not control the text interpretation, and that texts, like language itself, have no outside referents or transcendental signified.

To do justice to Foucault: Foucault and Derrida in couples therapy with Freud

This paper elaborates key factors in Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida’s long polemical argument over the question of madness. The paper focuses on Foucault’s consideration of a constitutive exclusion underlying the discourse of reason and unreason, as well as his insistence on that exclusion’s singular relationship with madness. This exclusion is then developed in psychoanalytic terms augmenting the constitutive gesture that Sigmund Freud attributed to the plurality of subjective structures elaborated in his metapsychology. The psychoanalytic determination of constitutive exclusion is posed as being situated at a privileged position that enables it to consolidate the polemic debate between Foucault and Derrida about madness. By doing so, the intersection of Foucault's theory of madness with Freud’s psychoanalysis is shown to be fruitful territory, epitomizing a hospitality to madness—thus, doing justice to Foucault in light of Derrida’s critique.