ABSTRACT Therapeutic recreation professionals contribute to client well-being through meaningful recreation and leisure experiences. However, the profession has been divided by competing orientations that favour either a medical/rehabilitation approach or a social/community approach. Drawing on post-structural philosophy, I explore how therapeutic recreation might be re-imagined beyond binary oppositions by using the work of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. I discuss the relationship between knowledge and power, as well as the role of deconstruction in critically examining dominant discourses. Finally, I conclude by advocating for therapeutic recreation scholars and professionals to critically reflect on their assumptions, beliefs and practices and to consider the value of engaging a multiplicity of theories and philosophies to re-envision what therapeutic recreation might become.

This essay reflects upon the archival curatorial project surrounding the history and memory of Kufur Bir'im, a Maronite village in the Upper Galilee (near the Lebanese‐Israeli border), through official documents, photographs, maps, diaries, poetry, testimonies, and the contemporary artworks of Hana Farah Kufur Bir'im, a Palestinian‐Israeli artist whose family roots lie in the Kufur Bir'im history. The essay reflects on how that project unfolded and its significance for the essay's author as an artist and art historian to examine the displacement of the village dwellers through a process of promises never fulfilled, and hopes to return never realized. By juxtaposing the official state discourse with the intimate registers of private letters, diaries, and artistic expression, the project resists the reduction of Kufur Bir'im's story to a single authoritative narrative. Rather, it foregrounds multiplicity and intertextuality, drawing on theoretical insights, especially from Jacques Derrida's reflection of his own Jewish background and heritage, to situate the archive as both a site of occlusion, as well as new insights. The article also draws upon Palestinian‐Israeli author Anton Shammas, whose language of writing is Hebrew, to call to “un‐Jew” the Hebrew as a potential position to reexamine the politics of language as an example of decolonial practice. Ultimately, Kufur Bir'im serves as a metonym for contemporary struggles, demonstrating how the visual, textual, and material traces of the archive create spaces for mourning, survival, and political imagination.

Reading the written and film versions of Isak Dinesen’s ‘Babette’s Feast’ together, as texts in dialogue, offers deeper insight into this religious refugee parable and the spiritually rooted friendship, or sisterhood-philia, between its three central female characters. This is a relationship that is often overlooked by critics. Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s thoughts about friendship, particularly his observation that there has been a ‘double exclusion of the feminine’ from the historical and philosophical canon, in this article I argue that, through comparative close reading of the 1950 short story and the 1987 film of the Babette story, both Dinesen and film director Gabriel Axel contribute narratives that challenge the male centred tradition which has historically silenced the possibility of friendship between women.

This essay conducts a comparative analysis of the literary use of kabbalistic motives in the two seemingly very distant authors: Jacques Derrida and Philip K. Dick. It shows how the Lurianic “fable,” conceived in the Derridean terms as a literary récit, shapes their understanding of time as an open-ended game whose outcome remains unknown. It thus wants to prove that Derrida’s essay Given Time, based on the little prose by Charles Baudelaire called “The False Coin,” and the penultimate book by Philip K. Dick, The Divine Invasion, tell the same story which is also a meta-story: a speculative meditation on the nature of temporality and story-telling, which involves the messianic “theology of risk.” In both cases we deal with what the essay terms as an “inverted Gnosticism”: while the traditional Gnostic doctrine envisions time as the factor of the world’s decay and imperfection, Derrida and Dick, inspired by the Lurianic kabbalah, see it as the chance of the world to verify itself, that is, to make itself real and true in the process of “unprejudiced becoming.”

This study aims to analyze the novel Amba by Laksmi Pamuntjak using the Poststructuralism paradigm through Jacques Derrida’s strategy of Deconstruction. Laksmi Pamuntjak’s Amba is analyzed based on the dismantling of binary oppositions, the process of deferred meaning (différance), and the presence of the trace (trace). The research method employed is the qualitative descriptive method. This study utilizes stages of deconstructive analysis, including reconstruction, deconstruction, and reinscription. The analysis process was conducted by collecting data findings in the form of words, phrases, clauses, sentences, and paragraphs within the research object that indicate the instability of meaning. This study found various forms of deconstruction of historical narratives and identities within Laksmi Pamuntjak’s novel Amba. The dismantling of binary oppositions was found in the hierarchical shift between History and Fiction, where the text challenges the dominance of official history through personal narratives. Furthermore, the concept of différance is illustrated in the identity of the character Amba, which is fluid and consistently defers the finality of meaning. Meanwhile, the presence of the trace (trace) explains the remnants of wayang myths present to demonstrate the limitations of language in encapsulating the historical trauma of 1965. This study concludes that the novel Amba actively deconstructs itself by rejecting the authority of a single meaning.

Abstract The postmodern turn in political theory represents a seismic epistemological and normative change of the certainties of modernist structures in the face of fragmented, contingent and discursively constituted view of politics. Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-Francois Lyotard are also thinkers that undermine the conceptual grounding of universal truth, rationality and stable political subjectivity and thus reconfigure the conceptual landscape of power and legitimacy. This paper explores the ways in which postmodern political theory transforms the conceptualization of power into a diffuse, relational, and networked relationship between knowledge and discourse as opposed to being concentrated in a centralized position of the state or ruling elite. It also examines how discourse is involved in the production of political realities, identities and regimes of truth based on the discursive and hegemonic paradigm introduced by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. It is within this theoretical framework that the paper critically examines the new crisis with regard to democratic legitimacy in the modern societies. The weakening of the normative basis of the democratic consensus and public reason is due to the erosion of meta-narratives, the proliferation of rival truth claims, and the mediatization of politics. The legitimacy becomes volatile and disputed as democratic institutions are more and more likely to work in a terrain of fragmented identities, algorithmic communications and symbolic struggles. Postmodernism is a space that enables pluralism, marginal voices and critical resistance, but it is also a space that raises the threat of eroding the potential of shared norms and joint decision making. The article ends by suggesting a re-conceptualization of democratic legitimacy that balances postmodern lessons with the imperative to have normative foundations, participatory politics and institutional responsibility in a more complicated political order.

This study critically analyzes the dialectical encounter between Jacques Derrida’s Deconstruction of the Biblical Logosentrisme and Herman Bavinck’s Internal Witness of the Holy Spirit (ITHS) as the decisive epistemological solution. Derrida’s critique, centered on différance (the deferral of linguistic meaning), exposes the text’s vulnerability at the level of human language, consequently fostering skepticism and hermeneutical relativism in the postmodern era. Utilizing a qualitative, dogmatic-philosophical method, this research argues that while Derrida's analysis accurately reflects the limitations of fallen human reason, it is ultimately rendered irrelevant to the believer. ITHS functions as a supranatural act of illumination, strategically shifting the anchor of certainty from the vulnerable object (the text) to the sovereign action of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit effectively bridges the différance gap, implanting an autoptistic and certain conviction regarding the Logos's authority. This synthesis supports presuppositional apologetics, establishing ITHS as the primary warrant that safeguards the Biblical Logos as the final and binding truth against contemporary relativism

This article offers a reading of Andrey Platonov’s short story The Cow (1938) through the lens of social reproduction theory and practical manuals on livestock care, situating the analysis within the context of Soviet animal husbandry from the 1920s to the 1940s. Platonov, a Soviet writer who deeply reflected on collectivization and the building of communism in relation to nature, as well as a practitioner – land-reclamation specialist, and engineer – is today being widely reconsidered from an ecological perspective. In this work, I aim to complicate the discussion of Platonov’s ecological poetics by turning to agricultural practices of care toward different beings. Accordingly, I refer to practices that took shape in the first half of the twentieth century, before the emergence of the concept of “animal welfare,” and went hand in hand with the communist ideal of liberating all exploited workers, regardless of their gender, race, or species. By considering The Cow as a vivid bifurcation point between socialist animal-care practices and communist ideology, and reading the text through the agrobiological discourse of brochures advocating care for all beings, both classed and classless, I develop a critical analysis of the relationships among the story’s characters. My approach extends the material-discursive and biopolitical dimensions of Platonov’s work, especially in relation to care, caregiving, and the construction of a new communist society envisioned to include both human and nonhuman proletarians. To trace the cow’s ambiguous position as a being that is neither fully human nor fully animal but inhabits a liminal space between nature and culture, I engage with the intersections between Platonov’s texts and the concepts of the animal (Jacques Derrida), the Other (Emmanuel Levinas), and communitas (Roberto Esposito), exploring more broadly the possibilities of care for the nonhuman.

ABSTRACT This study explores the structural resonance at the level of philosophical function between Śaṅkara’s concept of Brahman as articulated through the Upanishadic method of neti neti (not this, not this) and Jacques Derrida’s notion of aporia. Instead of a simple method of negation, neti neti functions as a systematic removal of empirical and conceptual predication, guiding inquiry towards that which exceeds linguistic determination, while Derrida’s aporia signifies the structural impossibility of closure within conceptual systems. Without claiming doctrinal sameness, this study isolates a shared philosophical tension: inadequacy of conceptual predication to secure final meaning or presence either in ultimate reality or self-identity. The paper reads Brahman as a figure of aporia within Śaṅkara’s Vedānta through a Derridean lens, where it appears as aporetic with respect to language, representation and conceptual access. Thus, Aporia here functions as a hermeneutic marker of the limit at which conceptual thought falters in articulating the non-dual absolute. By reading across traditions, understood here as a comparative engagement that acknowledges asymmetries, risks, and interpretive limits, the study foregrounds the impasse at the heart of both traditions, proposing that Śaṅkara’s negational metaphysics reveals a structural configuration that can be read alongside what deconstruction later theorizes as undecidability.

Abstract Jeremy Bentham's question (“Can they suffer?”), and its centralization of suffering, remains a notorious contribution to animal ethics. In this article, I begin by problematizing Peter Singer's interpretation of Bentham's question—an interpretation that remains hegemonic in contemporary animal ethics—and highlight its latent anthropocentrism. Then, I reread Bentham's question through Jacques Derrida, arguing for Derrida's interpretation's force in deconstructing anthropocentrism. Despite the advancements in animal welfare that Singer's thought has propelled, his interpretation of Bentham's question contributes to a reaffirmation of anthropocentrism/carnophallogocentrism, since the “capacity to suffer” is interpreted as a power tout court, indexing it, consequently, to several powers or capacities, resulting in a hierarchy of human and animal suffering and in a disregard for the philosophical problem of putting another animal to death. Derrida's reading of Bentham's centralization of suffering requires the affirmation of a fundamental vulnerability that amounts to a fundamental nonpower, common to all finite, mortal beings. I demonstrate that Bentham's legacy gains a revolutionary impulse, which should inform animal philosophy today, when read through Derrida, because, by decentralizing power, it questions the anthropo-carnophallogocentric subject (the human, male, powerful, carnivorous subject), thus aiding in delineating a compassionate ethical relation with other animals.

In her seventh novel Too Much Lip, Australian Aboriginal writer Melissa Lucashenko employs a self-reflective counter-narrative to engage in Australians’ national reconciliation in the new Millenium, exploring possibilities for Indigenous young adults to transcend racial victimhood and enhance agency. This article constructs its framework around a self-reflective counter-narrative and draws on Jacques Derrida and Roberto Esposito’s insights into auto-immunization, especially their perceptions of contamination and contagion, to consolidate its sub-arguments. Focusing on the Salter sisters’ tortuous negotiation of ethnicity and sexuality, Lucashenko scrutinizes Indigenous “victim” narratives intertwined with colonial, patriarchal and female auto-immunization, presents the possibility of transcending Indigenous intra- and inter-racial “hate” narratives through disclosing racial contamination within and among First Nations and white settlers, and envisions Indigenous “agency” narratives premised on external and internal contagion to promote individual development and collective well-being. Through such a self-reflective counter-narrative, Lucashenko calls on Indigenous and non-Indigenous readers to promote Australia’s constitutional recognition of and institutional support for the First Nations with a concerted effort.

This article investigates the 2022 Yahidne war crime, during which Russian forces confined approximately 368 civilians, including 69 children, to the basement of the local school. Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s concept of hauntology, the authors explore satellite images of unfolding events and the enduring material traces of the occupation—drawings, abandoned toys, military rations, propaganda newspapers, spent military equipment and damaged infrastructure. They consider how these traces contribute to processes of collective memory and to the transformation of the site’s significance through public memorialisation, reflecting on the role of contemporary archaeology in documenting and interpreting material legacies of recent conflict.

Purpose Recent debates in library and information science have cast neutrality and social justice as irreconcilable–like oil and water. This paper challenges that view, advocating for balanced librarianship, where diverse values are negotiated through an ongoing democratic process. Design/methodology/approach Drawing on political philosophy, it warns that treating values as absolute, enforcing rigid definitions and overemphasizing incompatibility risk sliding toward authoritarian forms of librarianship. Findings This viewpoint highlights three principles of democratic librarianship. First, it should be acknowledged that librarianship as a concept is open to multiple interpretations. Second, democratic librarianship should be grounded in more than one core value. Third, democratic librarianship is an ongoing negotiation between library professionals, politicians and citizens, because democracy is an unfinished project. Originality/value By situating the neutrality–social justice debate within broader political theory, this paper reveals its parallels with the tension between liberalism (neutrality) and state perfectionism (social justice). It further grounds the case for balance in the work of Karl Popper, Chantal Mouffe, Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida offering a philosophical framework for resisting authoritarian tendencies while embracing diversity.

ABSTRACT This article examines Damon Galgut’s The Promise (2021) with reference to Marcel Mauss’s gift theory (1950), Jacques Derrida’s concept of différance (1992) and Erich Fromm’s notion of authentic love (1995). It argues that the novel’s central themes – land, inheritance and unfulfilled promises as gifts – reflect South Africa’s unresolved colonial and post-colonial tensions, revealing gift exchange as a mechanism of social cohesion, symbolic violence and identity formation. Through analysis of stagnated reciprocity within the narrative, the article demonstrates how Galgut critiques the failure of both intimate and national promises. The promise of a house to the black servant, Salome, exemplifies a fractured reciprocity, deferring return and perpetuating hierarchy. This deferral also embodies a negative form of différance, suspending justice and meaning. In contrast, the character Amor’s eventual act of restitution represents an attempt to complete the cycle of exchange while opening the future. Through this gesture, Amor expresses authentic love and embraces her identity as a giver. Ultimately, the article contends that a synthesis of social obligation, openness and authentic love provides an ethical framework for reimagining gift-giving. This framework offers a path toward genuine reciprocity and decolonial justice, suggesting that healing requires not merely material restitution but a transformative ethic of giving, grounded in historical awareness and mutual recognition.

ABSTRACT This paper explores the ethical and political implications of trauma becoming the dominant frame in professional and cultural discourse. Although the term trauma has gained widespread use in clinical practice, education and public life, we argue that it risks flattening lived experience, relocating harm inside individuals and obscuring acts of violence, responsibility and resistance. Through a dialogical form, we examine what is lost when trauma replaces more specific words, such as rape, racism or violence and consider what alternative frames—story‐informed, justice‐informed and solidarity‐based—might make possible. Drawing on the work of Michael White, Kathie Crocket, David Newman, Angel Yuen, Vikki Reynolds, Alan Jenkins, Alan Wade, Jenny Snowdon, Loretta Pederson and others, we weave Jacques Derrida's concept of deconstruction with narrative practices, such as double listening, response‐based enquiry and documenting small pieces of justice. We argue that words are never neutral: they perform, they shape how responsibility is named and what accountability may come to require, and they influence who is seen or silenced. Our purpose was not to offer closure, but to open commitments and questions. We invite practitioners to resist the reduction of lives into trauma, to centre people's responses, values and acts of living, and to come alongside those whose stories call for clarity, dignity and justice.

ABSTRACT Drawing on Judith Butler, Homi Bhabha, Achille Mbembe, and Jacques Derrida, the article argues that Enter Ghost redefines adaptation as decolonial authorship. It examines Isabella Hammad's Enter Ghost (2023) as a feminist and decolonial rewriting of Shakespeare's Hamlet, transforming the canonical tragedy into a stage for Palestinian resistance and survival. Through a close reading informed by adaptation theory, postcolonial criticism, and gender performativity, the study explores how Hammad's protagonist, Sonia Nasir, a British-Palestinian actress, reclaims Hamlet as a site of embodied resistance under Israeli occupation. The analysis highlights how performance, bilingualism, and spectral imagery function as tools of political and linguistic reclamation, demonstrating how code-switching and theatrical embodiment translate colonial trauma into collective endurance. By recasting Gertrude as a figure of maternal strength and reframing the ghost as a metaphor for historical persistence, Hammad fuses feminist ethics with national allegory.

ABSTRACT This essay reads Haruki Murakami’s Killing Commendatore (2017) by way of Husserlian phenomenology as interpreted by Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida. The essay proposes that Murakami’s text functions both as an example of and an original contribution to that tradition. The story follows a nameless portraitist as he mediates the enigmatic relationships between his neighbours. Through the narrative’s necessarily self-aware commentaries on the nature of art and its creation, Killing Commendatore’s phenomenological contributions consider the ethics of coming to know others by way of their artistic rendering, especially through their faces. In so doing, by its own complicated logic, Murakami’s novel becomes a meditation on murder, and the witnessing thereof.

This article analyzes Sima Qian’s Shiji within the framework of the relationships between power, knowledge, and silence. Drawing on poststructuralist approaches, the study conceptualizes historical silence as a semantic and syntactic phenomenon formed within the internal structure of the text. The theoretical framework is developed in dialogue with the ideas of Michel Foucault, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Jacques Derrida. The research corpus focuses on juan 123 of the Shiji (“Dawan liezhuan”). The analysis employs methods such as token frequency analysis, co-occurrence analysis, and semantic clustering. Artificial intelligence–based analysis is used to identify patterns of repetition and structural linkages in the text, while the findings are substantiated through historical-philological interpretation. The results indicate that silences associated with envoys, the peoples of the Western Regions, and other peripheral subjects are not random in nature. Imbalances in agent–patient relations, the uneven distribution of active and passive verb constructions, and semantic fields clustered around jié (the symbol of envoys), zhōng (loyalty), and Hàn (the imperial center) reveal this pattern. As a result, voice is concentrated at the center, while subjects outside the center remain discursively constrained. Within the scope of the article, silence is not understood as a passive condition in historiography but rather as a discursive mechanism intrinsically linked to power relations. The convergence of digital analytical approaches and classical philological reading is discussed within the framework of critical humanities research.

This paper examines how Jacques Derrida’s concept of the crypt challenges Catherine Malabou’s notion of destructive plasticity. Reading Derrida’s ‘Fors’ (1976), the Life Death seminar (1975–76), and Of Spirit (1987) alongside Malabou’s The Future of Hegel (2005), The Ontology of the Accident (2012), and The Heidegger Change (2011), I argue that Malabou misreads supplementarity’s ‘play in form’ as writing’s capacity to convert trace into form, when plasticity merely supplements supplementarity with the trace of form. Because plasticity does not recognise the structural redundancy of différance/supplementarity that blinds writing to its operations, the trace incorporates plasticity as the supplement that dissimulates itself in form. Reading Derrida’s reading of Abraham’s and Torok’s The Wolf Man’s Magic Word, I demonstrate how the crypt’s three pleonastic functions (‘topos’, ‘death’, and ‘cipher’) correspond to the three senses of origin-heterogeneity: heterogeneous from the origin, with respect to the origin, and at the origin. After the accident, after the trace is supplemented by plasticity, it dissimulates its legibility in the historicity of forms. Because of Malabou’s supplementation, the trace can now be read as plasticity, opening deconstruction’s capacity to move between materiality and conceptuality.

In his 2001 Theodor W. Adorno Prize speech, ‘Fichus’, Jacques Derrida imagines a book on the German philosopher that he would never have the opportunity to write. Its last chapter would concern animals, which for Derrida constitute the most important future direction in reading Adorno. This article takes this moment as its point of departure to suggest that among the many threads that connect deconstruction with critical theory, the question of the animal takes on central significance. Reconsidering ‘Fichus’ as a reflection on the responsibilities of thinking about and after the end, I argue that for both philosophers, animals point to an alternative form of thought, one that is not only concerned but imbued with finitude. Non-coercive and anti-totalitarian, it is a thinking without ends, a form of contemplation that arises from and in response to other animals but is not limited to them. Reading Adorno and Derrida through, with, and after each other, I interpret ‘Fichus’ as an exercise in such poetic thinking, exploring its implications in and beyond Derrida’s speech.