Derrida's Reading Research Articles

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.

Metaphysical Desire

Abstract This article revisits the debate on the ‘religious and ethical readings’ of Derrida that was instigated by Martin Hägglund’s Radical Atheism. The impasse in this debate can be overcome in a new reading of Derrida’s work that combines the strong elements of the opposing interpretations. At the same time, this new and critical reading exposes an implicit metaphysical desire, a desire without desire, in Derrida’s work, the presuppositions and consequences of which are not well understood in all the other interpretations. This desire turns out to be an excessive desire, which should be balanced with a more contextual approach.

The Fraternity of Milk: Sovereignty and Anthropotheophagy in Derrida’s Unpublished Seminar Manger l’autre (1989–1990)

Abstract In the unpublished seminars given in the United States and France between 1989–1991, Manger l’autre: Politiques de l’Amitié and Rhétoriques du Cannibalisme, Derrida analyzes the rhetorical function that the act of eating has in the Western tradition’s philosophical texts. In this paper I analyze the reading Derrida makes in those seminars of Saint Augustine’s Confessions, in order to show that they are entangled with a critique of political sovereignty. For Derrida, Augustine has a cogito of his own, which is a cogito du manger l’autre. Augustine’s formulation is “I think, eat and drink” (ego cogito, manduco et bibo), and Derrida understands it as a way of constituting both the self of the ego and the self of the community. The first form of Christian community configured through the intake of food is the fraternity of milk: infants that suck the same milk from the breast of their nurse or mother. The second configuration of the community is, of course, the sacrament of Eucharist, in which the body of the father is divided (partagé) among the brothers. I show how the analysis Derrida makes of Augustine in these seminars is a way of deconstructing the very concept of community and its relation to sovereignty. This is attempted by Derrida through the problem of jealousy: the brothers of milk will always be jealous of each other, being themselves the condition for the breaking of the community and their sovereignty. But the second form of community is also threatened by food: since the holy wafer is an edible thing and the act of incorporation of food is really an act of theophagy.

A Poetic Revolution of the Political

In this paper I attempt to give a reading of Jacques Derrida’s second extended interpretation of Paul Celan’s “Meridian.” This second interpretation can be found in Derrida’s “seminar,” The Beast and the Sovereign, and differs from the first – which appeared in Shibboleth: For Paul Celan – in that it is placed in the broader context of the seminar: the deconstruction of sovereignty. In this context Celan’s “Meridian” acquires a special status because Derrida can identify in it a “step,” an act of freedom, a way, which can perhaps take us beyond all sovereignty by bringing about what Derrida calls “a poetic revolution of the political.” In my reading of Derrida’s reading of Celan I try to spell out the “structure” of this step as Derrida conceives it. I argue that it is ultimately in the difference between two poetic gestures, two equally necessary but still distinct acts, that the poetic revolution of the political and thus the step beyond all sovereignty becomes perhaps possible.

Derrida, Autoimmunity, and Islamic Medicine

Autoimmunity often refers to a medical condition, yet it was used by Jacques Derrida to theorize the conflict between religion and science as well as Islam and the West. Derrida’s use of the term autoimmunity became widespread after he used it to diagnose the “American Organism” in the aftermath of the attacks on the Twin Towers in New York City on September 11, 2001. Most commentary on Derrida’s political diagnosis have focused on his reading of Islam as an Other within the US body politic. This essay takes a different approach and reads Derrida’s diagnosis within the tradition of Islamic Medicine. If we are to truly rethink the othering of Islam as a viral autoimmune disease in the body politic of the US empire, we need to understand Islamic thought as forming the very basis of the West’s image of itself. I argue that Islam is far from a self-contained category opposing the West: a virus or a plague attacking it from the outside. Rather, Islam is the swallowed-within of the West itself, to which, the West continuously returns/reacts in an autoimmune fashion.

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.

Life, Would That it Might Be To Say – Power, Metaphor, Tragen, Épuis(s)ement

In Insister – À Jacques Derrida Cixous declares that she will have to write ‘the book of words’, among which ‘words of power’ will be vermögen (to be able), together with Unvermöglickeit (impossibility), and tragen (to carry), along with austragen (to bear to term) and übertragen (to transfer, translate, also in the sense of metaphor). By examining Derrida's reading of Cixous in H. C. pour la vie, c'est à dire … this article deepens the association of tragen with life and power that fascinates Derrida in the second year of his final seminar where he tracks a thread between Austrag, Walten, Trieb, and Vermögen. Its point of departure is a passage towards the end of H. C. pour la vie where Derrida speaks of the trap of metalanguage or, rather, metaphrasis that lurks in the c’est of c'est à dire. I link this passage both to the discussion of metaphorization in the earlier ‘Le puits et la pyramide’ and the characterization of puisse as ‘the exhaustion [ l'épuisement] of the sun before its time’ in the essay on Cixous to associate puissance with the wearing-out of the world and its usure in the double sense elaborated in ‘La mythologie blanche’.

Re-Listening to Derrida and Benjamin

News on the publication of Two Plays for the Stage was announced on the Performance Philosophy website during 2021 but only received my attention this year, when I ordered a copy of the book out of curiosity. After reading it and making copious notes, I contacted the two authors to give them my impressions, particularly those concerning my responses to it in terms of sound. The trigger for this ReView came from an email discussion with John Schad on critical-creative writing, which I interpret as creative criticism, meaning that this could take any form appropriate to the artist’s discipline. Indeed my essay in an earlier edition of the journal (Wilkins, 2016) took the form of a labyrinthine script during its writing process, this as a response to Freddie Rokem's initial article (Rokem, 2015). It later manifested itself in an audio piece presented in Vol. 7.1, a collaboration between myself and Leona Jones entitled With W/Ringing Ears. (Jones, Wilkins, 2022). Fred Dalmasso’s research into the syncope (2017), which surfaces within the concluding essay to the book, has interested me for some time in terms of its possible parallels in the world of sound.
 In this current contribution I present a parallel sound-world that was spontaneously invoked during my reading of Derrida | Benjamin. I refer to key phrases / quotes that became pointers for triggering the sonic responses that follow. This is by no means an attempt to suggest audio for any future production of the plays, rather a series of independent sonic ideas that spring from the writings of John Schad and Fred Dalmasso.

Resisting Ex-Appropriation: Artistic Remains at Times of Environmental Instability

With rapidly spreading extractive practices on a global scale, the amount of residue generated raises the question of waste management and economic externalities. Are humans, and most crucially the Earth, equipped to welcome such an exponentially increasing quantity of restants? Artworks, as inexhaustible in their readings, are congenial to this idea of irreducible remains. In this paper, I argue Derrida’s treatment of remains might provide a waste-based approach to ecocriticism which, in turns, can be leveraged to articulate an insightful reading of some artworks in times of extractive overconsumption and environmental destabilisation. Lee Bae’s Issu du feu (2000) and House of Moon (2014), Emerson Pontes’s Mil Quase Mortos: Boiúna, and Rochelle Goldberg’s Cannibal Actif (2018) are three contemporary artworks that directly challenge those externalities by explicitly engaging with remains ranging from charcoal, human-made waste and oil. Through a formal analysis of these artworks and a close reading of Derrida’s Feu la cendre, ‘Biodegradables Seven Diary Fragments,’ and the seminars Manger l’autre and Rhétorique du cannibalisme, it appears that eco-deconstruction is perhaps above all a matter of engaging with the structure of remains.

The Radical in Ambedkar: Critical Reflections

The Radical in Ambedkar: Critical Reflections

The Agency of the Other and the Question of Violence: Otherwise than Levinas

It is well known that Emmanuel Levinas places the ‘other’ at the heart of his phenomenology, as an agency the relation toward which constitutes subjectivity. As such, the Levinasian other is deprived of violence, and it is identified with the figures of the foreigner, the orphan, and the widow. The only resistance the other could muster against the violence directed at him/ her, argues Levinas, is what he terms as the resistance of lack of resistance. This article aims at questioning this premise. Is the other indeed deprived of any violence? The readings of Derrida, Sartre, Foucault, Agamben, Freud, and Lacan can prove otherwise: either the other is equipped with contingent violence, in accordance with its intentions, as Derrida argues; or it is equipped with a priori violence, administered through the gaze, as Sartre shows. The violence of the other is linked to the violence of identity, as that which alienates the self from itself by depriving it of its fluctuating heterogeneity, whatever name it assumes.

Écrire sans voix: une approximation en clé derridienne aux « confessions » de Santiago Amigorena

"The current paper is a cartography of Santiago Amigorena’s literary project, following to construct the basis for a wider comprehension of his scriptural plan. To that end, we offer an overview of the issues that triggered his writing, and to undertake the enormous auto-bioencyclopaedic project implied by his Le dernier livre. Also, this paper de-particularises his project linking it to other literary strands, at the same time that we contextualise the concepts used by Amigorena in his works. Finally, we propose a Derridean reading of the particular relation built by Amigorena between writing, silence and speech, taking as case study two of his novels where the afore-mentioned link shows a preponderant role: Une enfance laconique (1998) and Le ghetto intérieur (2019)."

Derrida’s Speculative Materialism/Marxism’s Promethean Scientism

This paper examines the relationship between deconstruction and Marxism by turning to recent attempts to read Derrida as a materialist philosopher. Following Martin Hägglund, I propose that Derrida’s critique of logocentrism implies a commitment to certain seemingly materialistic philosophical positions, most importantly, the radical foreclosure of an entity exempt from a transcendental field of differences. However, Derrida’s materialism remains speculative to the extent that it results in a philosophy of infinite finitude itself premised upon a transcendental style of argumentation excluded from scientific verification or falsification. By contrast, I suggest that Marxism with its commitment to Promethean scientism—the claim that all limits on human theory and practice are relative and subject to possible transformation—offers a more radical form of philosophical materialism.

PHÉNOMÉNOLOGIE OU STRUCTURALISME. FOUCAULT, DERRIDA ET LA SYNTHÈSE PASSIVE

Foucault and Derrida react in two different ways to the new paradigm imposed by structuralism. Foucault uses structuralism to overcome phenomenology, in fact structuralism shows the naivety of phenomenology, in its claim to rely on conscience to constitute meaning. Instead, Derrida on the contrary immediately nurtures a certain distrust of structuralism, especially in its philosophical ambitions and uses the resources of phenomenology to criticize it, showing the metaphysical implications operating in it. We want to show how this opposing position is generated by the specific way in which the two philosophers have responded to the open problems and bequeathed by Husserlian phenomenology. In particular, the theme of “passive genesis,” which was raised in the French debate by Tran-Duc-Thao and Merleau-Ponty, is central. In the first writings it emerges how Foucault has received Merleau-Ponty’s theses and it is precisely to overcome them that he inaugurates an archaeological analysis to try to distance himself from the normalizing anthropological discourse present in the passive synthesis. Derrida reads passive genesis in a radically different way from Merleau-Ponty (and therefore Foucault): the radical nature of Husserl’s phenomenology has opened a space to question the transcendental genesis of philosophical discourse and its possibility of transcending its historical, social and psychological genesis and therefore the sciences that preside over these dimensions. Consequently, showing the naivety of structuralism, Derrida’s research of the sixties is configured as post-structuralist.

Mourning and Translation as Topological Events

Derrida’s thought is a dynamic dimension, a movement beyond any attempt of conclusive definition. However, is there any possibility to grasp this task of endless destabilization? This paper brings up the proposal of reading Derrida’s work from the close but at the same time aporetical relation between place and space. In this sense, we question the common understanding of space as uniform and empty continuum where place would be just a ‘limit’, a perimeter. In order to do so, we will pay attention to the particular Topology that ‘translation’ illustrates in Derrida’s work, just as the reality of the spectre and mourning, stating these two dimensions as examples of Derrida’s strategy. In this sense, through translation and mourning, we manage to make out that Derrida’s work, even though cannot be summarized in a single object or idea, it might be understood as the endless question about the place of and for deconstruction, that is, about place as deconstruction of space. Thus, Derrida’s Topology may constitute a new and radical way to read not only his own work, but to question ourselves.

Caught on the Hop: Politico-philosophical Writing of the ‘Leap’

This essay reads Derrida’s Geschlecht III: Sex, Race, Nation, Humanity in the context of the philosophical and political legacies associated with the motif of leaping. Surveying the philosophical and textual ‘politics’ of this figure of the leap in the work of Kierkegaard, Hegel, Marx, Freud, Heidegger and others, the essay tracks its connection to the question of philosophical nationalism (and associated images of place, ground and gathering) explored by Derrida in Geschlecht III, speculating on the ambivalent resonances that ‘leap’ across the political spectrum.

Locating Media in Cultural Theories

This paper examines means of facilitating research on media as a critical component of contemporary culture based on assessments of recent publications on media. The primary target is in the fundamentally heuristic value of social theories relative to the topic. Based on semiotics, practice, and, to a much lesser degree, speech act theory, analysts generate constructs wherein media often deviate from the conceptual horizons in respective schemes. Reading Derrida’s views on speech act theory suggests that an endeavor to resolve the mismatch demands the decomposition of core concepts of a theory. Just as Anderson’s formulation casts a delicate light on the use of semiotics in media research, media prefigured through the lenses of the performative forces us to rethink its presence in everyday occurrence as a problematic unthought. The paper concludes that the application of speech act theory to media is a plausible solution to the problems so far encountered if accompanied by historical perspectives on the formation of illocutionary acts.

The fourth estate operating by means of silencing

The traditional foundation of the placed reserved for the Fourth Estate in democratic practice is under pressure. To revitalize this idea, a focus upon how journalists handle silence professionally is suggested. It is argued that it is important to bring out how the handling of silence is carried out, and to understand that silence is not only something to be avoided. Silence is of foundational importance for communicative significance to emerge. In a reading of Deleuze, Heidegger and Derrida, we argue for a model in which silence is necessary for significant communicative exchanges. We avoid thoughtlessness by allotting a function to silence; for communication requires not just information but a channel of silence, so to speak. It is, finally, argued that it is important not to expect the revealed forms of silence to be problematic. It is demonstrated that certain forms of silence can be analysed as democracy enhancing because they permit less heated exchanges that make room for thoughtful contemplation.

Nietzsche, Trump, and the Social Practices of Valuing Truth

Nietzsche, Trump, and the Social Practices of Valuing Truth

A Toast to the Damned Waiting for Tomorrow: Hauntology and Mourning for a Future that never Comes

Drawing on Berardi (2011), and Hägglund (2008), Mark Fisher (2009; 2014;2021) posits two pillars upon which his thoughts on history and philosophy are built; the first, what is called a slow cancellation of the future, or in a general sense, how the XX century more than simply casting its shadows over the XXIst, it never really ended. For Fisher, this is due to an ongoing deflation of people’s expectations regarding what is yet to come and a cultural nostalgic turn. Here, nostalgia as Jameson proposed it should be seen more as an attachment to old techniques and formulas than to a psychological state. The second pillar reads Derrida’s hauntology as a failed morning which in Fisher’s work appears linked to the ghosts of a future that never took place. A future of possibilities dreamt during labor and civil rights movements but that ended up being crushed by neoliberal policies. Thus, hauntology and the cancellation of the future as seen in Fisher, and Berardi will be the tools through which this article will analyze Hideo Kojima’s 2019 game Death Stranding, as well as its homonymous novelization (2021) by Hitori Nojima.