Play Of Difference Research Articles

Language and Difference: A Deconstructive Reading Of Niyi Osundare’s “Poetry Is” and Abubakar Othman’s “Wordsworth Lied”

The paper examines, using Deconstruction as an analytical framework, the desire by Niyi Osundare and Abubakar Othman to resolve the problematics in and around the composition and reading of poetry in particular and literature in general. The analysis of Osundare’s “Poetry Is” and Othman’s “Wordsworth Lied” demonstrates the ways in which language is not a transparent medium for the representation of truth, knowledge, beliefs since the reading of poetry must scrupulously and tenaciously tease out the point at which the texts differ from themselves. Indeed, language may be a medium through which humans express thoughts, feelings, ideas or forge an identity, but it cannot be reduced to a subjective apprehension. Arguably, the play of difference within language is what makes identity possible and at the same time, thwarts it infinitely. Therefore, the paper concludes with the argument that the two speakers in the selected poems are caught up in self-contradiction or auto-deconstruction, in that there are tensions between what they meant and what the texts say.

Makers-Philosophers-Researchers: Experimentations with (Dis)placements

In 2017, a graduate class became something otherwise. It became an experimental place in which experiences poured through students rather than providing students ready-made experiences. It became a space to encourage the play of difference that challenge our ideas about race, class, gender, ability, sexuality, and so on as frictional events (Puar, 2012). It became a space in which students came to know themselves differently, even subjectify themselves in different ways through experience. By attending to the delicacies of social, material, aesthetic, cultural, historical, and disciplinary forces, the class became a generative space of producing knowledge differently, knowledge that changes us as it much as it changes disciplines (Manning, 2016). It became a space to write and do scholarship differently so as to stay close to the ground to attend to “the sensed social-material-aesthetic atmospherics resonant in a scene, the threshold onto worlds of expressivity in a problematics” (Berlant & Stewart, 2019, p. 34). This Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology special issue offers five experimentations that materialized from such a course.

Faithful representation as an ‘objective mirage’: A Saussurean analysis of accounting and its participation in the financial crisis

Abstract This paper takes as its starting point the claims of critics that fair value was an active participant in the dynamics of the financial crisis, and then sets out to explore this participation through drawing on the works of Saussure and Derrida. For Saussure, the relation between sign and referent is always ‘arbitrary’ and, as applied to accounting signification, suggests the impossibility of the seemingly realist ambition of standard setters for accounting to simply ‘faithfully represent’ independently existing ‘economic phenomena’. Instead, for Saussure and Derrida, meaning is purely differential and relational and arises only in the play of difference between signs over time. Following their views on the nature of signification, our account begins with a description of the complex credit derivatives whose rapid shift from profit to loss under fair value triggered the financial crisis. We then explore accounting’s participation in the crisis along three dimensions: the collapse of difference between accounting signs that characterised derivatives’ initial construction as profitable, and their later valuation using the ABX.HE index; the self-interested neglect of how fair value accounting signs would interact over time with accounting dependent remuneration practices, credit ratings, and capital adequacy rules; and the introduction of new sources of heterogeneity to accounting in the application of the fair value measurement hierarchy. The paper concludes by suggesting that, in allowing the recognition in the present of values derived from inherently uncertain forward estimates, fair value accounting made possible not the management of risk, but its exploitation.

Domesticity and Immigrant Women’s Labor in Julie Otsuka’s The Buddha in the Attic

Tracing the stories of Japanese picture brides, a generation of Japanese women who arrived in San Francisco in the early 1900’s for arranged marriages, and their American lives, Julie Otsuka’s novel The Buddha in the Attic (2011) combines a literary and historical focus. The experiences of dislocation, otherness, assimilation, and exclusion mark the protagonists’ lives, illustrating the dominant narratives of race, ethnicity, and gender. Otsuka articulates the problems oscillating between national consciousness and ethnic particularity, providing a critique of U.S. structures of domination and oppression that regulate the immigrant labor market. My paper offers a discussion about Japanese American women protagonists who must constantly reinvent themselves in the play of difference. The female lens, which the author employs, allows her to demonstrate how they are subjected to the forces guided by discourse of culture, ethnicity, and gender. The subaltern woman’s perspective on the domestic politics of U.S. is rendered through a collective narrator, and the absence of an identifiable individual voice stresses the characters’ fragmentation. America as home is transvalued, revealing itself as the site of unhomeliness, insecurity, and violence.

Writing and Différance

AbstractThe theme of pedagogy and more generally education as supplementarity has been all but ignored in critical discussions engaging Jacques Derrida’s of grammatology. By and large, the sustained emphasis of inquiry has instead been on evaluating the epistemological and methodological parameters of deconstruction as a theory of reading and writing and not as a treatise on the ethics of pedagogical praxis. The essay rereads “... That Dangerous Supplement...,” the chapter on Rousseau on writing, while keeping the theme of pedagogy at the forefront of the analysis of supplementarity. Derrida presents for the “science of a new writing” in the “gram” that flourishes within the codic play of differences. But it is as différance that the grammatological conversion of semiology takes place via deconstruction. Such a focus provides new insights into deconstruction that could allow us to effectively gauge the edusemiotic potential of its influence on educational theory, not only as a theoretical departure from classical modes of reading and writing, but as the inaugural steps toward and beyond a theory of education that could ground an ethical praxis.

Kalpana Rahita Seshadri: HumAnimal: race, law, language

We recall Jacques Derrida’s critical engagement with Giorgio Agamben’s biopolitical framework from Seminar Twelve of The Beast & the Sovereign: Volume 1: ‘‘I don’t believe, for example, that the distinction between bios and zōē is a reliable and effective instrument, sufficiently sharp and, to use Agamben’s language, which is not mine here, sufficiently deep to get to the depth of this ‘[so-called] founding event’’’ (Derrida 2009, 326). This is a crucial element in Derrida’s critique of Agamben’s work on bio-politics. However for Kalpana Rahita Seshadri this critique needs to be subdued and reimagined in order to show how Derrida’s thinking itself underpins Agamben’s work on bio-politics. For as much as Derrida lambasts Agamben’s binary separation of bios and zōē, Seshadri’s HumAnimal: Race, Law, Language posits that a Derridean notion connects these two concepts, thus allowing Agamben to highlight and resist the ‘bare life’ resulting from bio-political mechanisms. Seshadri’s vibrant and lucid book (published in the University of Minnesota Press’ Posthumanities series) begins by setting out the risk in her thesis. In attempting ‘‘to discern the prevalence of what can be termed nonsovereign power, a power without right, as that which empties the legitimized power of disciplines and law (moral and juridical)’’ the risk which Seshadri faces is that she conceptualizes this ‘‘nonsovereign power’’ as ‘‘the temporal spacing that is constitutive of all named identities—what Derrida indicates as the ‘trace’ or the play of differance—thereby

Voir le corps de la langue, écouter la langue du corps. Ernst Jandl et la critique du logocentrisme

This article discusses the work of Ernst Jandl from the viewpoint of those twentieth century thinkers who challenge the idea of a transcendent logos, which pervades the Western tradition in the guise of God, Being, or Truth. According to Derrida, logos never broke its original link with phonè, the voice through which a divine pneuma find expression. Phonocentrism is therefore the corollary of logocentrism : it devalues writing as a merely secondary trace of voice, and it presupposes a system of values which subordinate the written text to the mind, and the materiality of the body to the immateriality of the noumenon. Against the signifier’s duty of transparency towards the signified, Jandl, just like his Dadaist predecessors, overcomes the opposition between the written word and its meaning through a poetic “materialism”. However, he neither gives priority to oral performance by declaring it the sublime purpose of writing, nor does he exclusively value the mute visuality of typography. On the contrary, Jandl’s poetry is the scene where the written equals the spoken word, it is a post-Dadaist overcoming of differentiation or – to use Derrida’s words – a play of differance that endlessly defers the signified in a chain of signifiers.

Negotiating the Moral Education of Medical Students in the Age of Multiculturalism

Formal teaching of ethics in medical courses has failed, providing little more than a vehicle for recapitulating conventional theories and reinforcing social prejudices. Courses are most typically based on out-dated and partial hyper-rationalistic theories that bear little relevance to the tasks of decision making in actual clinical life and on outmoded educational theories. A more adequate approach must recognise two paradoxes. First, the educational process in medicine has to be both limiting and enabling: it must control behaviours, characters and interpersonal styles, and it must achieve exactly the opposite, by establishing the possibility of responding to novel situations and inventing original solutions to ethical uncertainties. Second, despite the extreme complexity of ethical encounters and cultures, communication among contending discourses is always possible; indeed, the more profound the gulf is, the richer and more fecund the play of differences that constitute the dialogue can become. The multiple, diverse tasks of ethics are linked to contrasting technologies and pedagogies. In recognition of this, this article highlights the need for educational approaches in medicine that do not only reproduce the moral assumptions and prejudices of the mainstream culture but also are faithful to the actual practices of clinical decision making, thereby contributing to the cultivation of multidimensional competencies covering many levels of personal and social experience.

MYSTICISM AND MOURNING IN RECENT FRENCH THOUGHT

There has been a lot of ink spilled lately regarding the various symptoms generated in French intellectual, cultural, and political life by a malady diagnosed as the triumph of neoliberalism and American consumerism at the end of the Cold War. In recent years, some French scholars afflicted with the disease have revisited and revised well-worn political models, and others returned defensively to the tradition of French secular republicanism as an antidote to “multiculturalism” and “communitarianism” (what Americans would call identity politics), which French authors often envision as American imports. This defensiveness on both the French left and right responds to the apparent exhaustion of nationalism, of revolutionary ideals, and of French identity. Joan Scott's recent book onThe Fantasy of Feminist Historydoes a particularly incisive job of revealing the various investments in secular republicanism as themselves forms of sexism and racism or nostalgia, especially on the right. She cites a discussion in which Mona Ozouf, Phillipe Raynaud, and others argue that the particularly “French” form of “seduction” and heterosexual coupling encourages men to exercise dominance through gallantry if they want to win over women. Gallantry civilizes society by using sexual difference as armor against an imagined leveling and sameness represented by those who cannot understand seduction as a means metaphorically of reconciling the differences that inevitably arise in democracies—feminists, “militant homosexuals,” and Muslims who refuse to play by French rules. Here the play of difference relies on a rigid gender difference—and the subordination of women—that sells itself as natural and quintessentially French.

“We Are Text”: Reading, Dwelling and Narrative Identity in Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient and Divisadero

Outlining two ways of thinking about the relationship between speaking and writing—one which holds speech as anterior and superior to writing, which it sees as a secondary system of representation, and the other which views speech as being a form of writing itself operating within the play of difference and deferral that is language as such; the essay suggests that the two novels in question propose a third position that contains elements of both the previous two. This position is captured in key instances in both The English Patient and Divisadero of the written word being read out loud in a communal setting. In view of Lucien and Marie-Neige’s and Hana and the English patient’s practice of reading out loud to each other, Divisaderoand The English Patientsuggest that reading—whether it be studious, curious, or otherwise escapist in nature—is a vital act of incorporation, a political act of consumption wherein words become flesh and the stories in books come into confrontation with the texts of our selves in an explosion of intertextuality.

Toward a Non-Stoical Cosmopolitanism

Toward a Non-Stoical Cosmopolitanism

A Play of Differences: Remarks on Heidegger and the Greeks

A Play of Differences: Remarks on Heidegger and the Greeks

The Otherness of Children as a Hint of an Outside: Michel Foucault, Richard Yates and Karl Barth on Suburban Life

The essay shows how the ordinary life of children might save suburbia from itself. Disenchanted with contemporary existence, temptations of ideality tend to both vilify and verify suburban life as banal, yet to the extent that suburban life means life with children, profound possibilities subsist in that strange world. The argument unfolds in three parts. Beginning with Michel Foucault, the author shows how power courses through every form of life, colonizing depth such that desire reveals power's most fundamental expression. Secondly, Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road exemplifies power's machinations as Yates compassionately portrays the tragedy of belittling ordinary life. Finally, the author turns to Karl Barth in order to resituate Foucault's account of immanence within a larger horizon where children might be embraced as the aleatory play of difference of God's peace and patience.

PROLEGOMENA TO A NEW ACADEMIC RESPONSIBILITY: WHAT IT MEANS TO KNOW AND THE UNIVERSITY

AbstractIn this essay, Peter Trifonas tries to show that there is no overcoming of the techno‐philosophical grounding of intellectual freedom and academic responsibility or research action within the speculum of an all‐seeing, all‐knowing university. Instead, he argues that through Derrida's notion of an open “community of the question,” deconstruction has the promise to infuse the university and its teaching body with the play of difference in interpretation and invention that will produce new forms of knowledge and an altered academic responsibility. This new academic responsibility born of a deconstruction of the university and its closed system of disciplinary logic is worked out as a performative intelligibility or an inkling of purpose “yet‐to‐come” (avenir). The call for an open community of research around questions and not disciplines displays the ethical undercurrent of a new kind of academic responsibility—a responsibility negotiated both within the extant community and between that community and those to whom the highly problematic “we” of “higher” education are more or less ultimately accountable: the State and the political constituency of public society.

‘The Story in which the Children are Sent to Throw the Sleeping Sun into the Sky’: Power, Identity and Difference in a /Xam Narrative

This article examines a single story from the /Xam materials in the Bleek and Lloyd collection. After briefly relating the narrative, I discuss its aetiological implications. Various interpretations of the story are then offered and critiqued. The article proceeds to consider the story in terms of power and agency and to investigate its discursive features: its chain of speaking, the nature of the laughter it presents and its mode of interpellation. This is followed by an examination of identity in the context of the narrative and an investigation into how a /Xam mythic framework plays itself out in the story. The article concludes with a consideration of the story's narrative voice. My discussion of the story aims primarily to show that the structuralist, comparative and functionalist ways in which the /Xam narratives have previously been read have missed much of the play of difference that becomes apparent when the discursive character of the /Xam materials is foregrounded.

Myth of origin or play of difference: A discussion of two versions of the /Xam story of the origin of death

This paper argues that some of the interpretation of the /Xam narratives in the Bleek and Lloyd collection has emphasised their aetiological characteristics at the expense of their discursive and ideological properties. The identification of the stories as creation tales has formed an important part of the task of establishing a broader framework in which to understand the corpus as a whole. While this has been an essential project, it has produced certain assumptions about the narratives that need, in my opinion, to be questioned more closely. It has also tended to suppress the significance of the differences between stories and between versions of the same story. The second part of this article investigates these assertions in the course of a discussion of two versions of the well‐known /Xam “Story of the Origin of Death”.

Signing in the Flesh: Notes on Pragmatist Hermeneutics

This article offers an alternative to classical hermeneutics, which focuses on discursive products and grasps meaning as the play of difference between linguistic signs. Pragmatist hermeneutics reconstructs meaning through an indefinite triangulation, which brings symbols, icons, and indices to bear on each other and considers a meaningful occasion as an embodied semiotic process. To illuminate the word-body-action nexus, the discussion identifies three basic types of signifying media: (1) the symbolic-discursive, (2) the somatic-affective, and (3) the behavioral-performative, each one marked by a special relationship between signs and their objects. An argument is made that the tension between various type-signifying media is unavoidable, that the pragmatic-discursive misalignment is an ontological condition, and that bridging the gap between our discursive, affective, and behavioral outputs is at the heart of ethical life.

Gendered substances and objects in ritual: an australian aboriginal study

ABSTRACTThe creative action of the foundational beings known as Dreamings lies at the heart of Aboriginal Australian ceremony. In ritual, gender is drawn into a nexus of generative action and interaction. I will make the case that gender characterizes country, ceremonies, many sacred sites and many objects and substances. People, country, sites and ceremonies are integral to the bringing forth of the life of the world, and draw on a root paradigm of birth. I will examine that paradigm from the perspective of gender in domains of blood, ritual, country, men and women, and objects. The analysis will show that while gender is most assuredly a difference that makes a difference, in Gregory Bateson's famous words, it is the play of difference itself that is most productively worked with in ritual.

Caraibe Fantome: The Play of Difference in the Francophone Caribbean

Caraibe Fantome: The Play of Difference in the Francophone Caribbean

Dialectics and difference: against Harvey's dialectical ‘post-Marxism’

David Harvey's recent book, Justice, nature and the geography of difference (JNGD), engages with a central philosophical debate that continues to dominate human geography: the tension between the radical Marxist project of recent decades and the apparently disempowering relativism and ‘play of difference’ of postmodern thought. In this book, Harvey continues to argue for a revised ‘post-Marxist’ approach in human geography which remains based on Hegelian-Marxian principles of dialectical thought. This article develops a critique of that stance, drawing on the work of Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. I argue that dialectical thinking, as well as Harvey's version of ‘post-Marxism’, has been undermined by the wide-ranging ‘post-’ critique. I suggest that Harvey has failed to appreciate the full force of this critique and the implications it has for ‘post-Marxist’ ontology and epistemology. I argue that ‘post-Marxism’, along with much contemporary human geography, is constrained by an inflexible ontology which excessively prioritizes space in the theory produced, and which implements inflexible concepts. Instead, using the insights of several ‘post-’ writers, I contend there is a need to develop an ontology of ‘context’ leading to the production of ‘contextual theories’. Such theories utilize flexible concepts in a multilayered understanding of ontology and epistemology. I compare how an approach which produces a ‘contextual theory’ might lead to more politically empowering theory than ‘post-Marxism’ with reference to one of Harvey's case studies in JNGD.