White Mythology Research Articles

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.

Strategic ignorance, is it appropriate for indigenous resistance?

ABSTRACT In The Racial Contract, Charles Mills introduces the notion of an ‘inverted epistemology,’ an epistemology that construes social and racial ignorance as knowledge (p.18). As Mills points out, such ignorance can be used to oppress people by creating alternate realities or ‘white mythologies’ about race (p. 19). If the racial contract results in a society that oppresses people of color and supports white supremacy, then the question of how to correct an inverted epistemology becomes critical. Mills proposes the correction of history and the racist thinking underwriting it as a solution to the problem. Others, like Alison Bailey, seek to confront racial ignorance with active resistance by suggesting that individuals from historically marginalized groups exploit what members of dominant society don’t know (p. 77). While Bailey’s solution, referred to as strategic ignorance, may originate from good intentions, I argue that it is in general inappropriate for Indigenous people. Strategic ignorance is a product of the Western worldview, and it privileges Western values. In fact, both solutions offered by Mills and Bailey fail to consider Indigenous values. Mills’ proposed solution, however, is less objectionable. Instead of either solution, a more suitable form of resistance – one that embraces connectedness, balance, and harmony – would be ideal for the Indigenous communities of Turtle Island.

Exoheliotrope: Metaphor in the Texts of Astrobiology and Deconstruction

This article undertakes a deconstructive reading of astrobiology’s search for extraterrestrial life. Taking its lead from Derrida’s ‘White Mythology’, it explores ‘metaphor in the text of astrobiology’—and includes within the astrobiological ‘text’ not only scientific publications and work on astrobiology in the philosophy of science, but also ‘life detection technologies’. I situate astrobiology in the tradition of a metaphysical analogy that goes back through the enlightenment and early modern astronomy to the ancient Atomists’ notion of the ‘plurality of worlds’. This analogy, which constitutes an identification of life with being and therefore serves as the conceptual basis for the notion that life must exist on other worlds, experiences a mutation in the middle of the twentieth century when molecular biology refigures life in terms of a scriptural metaphor as text. The result is an aporia whose logic Derrida formalised in ‘White Mythology’.

The Question of Metaphoricity: French Epistemology in Deconstruction

In his recently published 1975–76 seminar on Life Death (§3), Jacques Derrida offers a severe critique of French epistemologists and philosophers of life. On Derrida’s view, they do not seem to be concerned with the question of the metaphoricity of metaphor but, rather, by taking the epistemological cut between (inadequate) metaphors and (adequate) concepts for granted, they explain the scientific process as a movement of critical rectification of metaphors by concepts. Moreover, they do not engage with Nietzsche seriously. Here I build on this last point to examine the project of accounting for the very condition of the scientific process that Derrida puts forward in ‘White Mythology’ (1971) and Life Death. My reading hypothesis is that this project rests on Derrida’s original interpretation of Nietzsche’s Darwinian-type genesis of thinking, according to which selective reproduction consists in the metaphoricity of metaphor.

Wandering Comparisons—Between Derrida and Zhuangzi

This article explores the comparison between Derrida and Zhuangzi and their approaches to the question of metaphor and analogy, examining the deconstruction of essentialist and culturalist forms of philosophical comparativism. The author contends that the notion of ‘Western metaphysics’ relies on an implicit comparison between the West and its others, shaped not only by philosophical factors but also by historical, sociological and strategic considerations, as exemplified in Aristotle’s exclusion and subjection of metaphor. Derrida’s approach in ‘White Mythology’, with its ‘internal reading’ and ‘quasi-transcendental’ perspective, challenges the unity and identity of the conventional representation of philosophy as a Western achievement. However, the article also advocates for an ‘external’ and ‘quasi-empiricist’ viewpoint that recognises the erratic character of comparisons, resisting the appropriation of philosophical differences into general categories such as ‘Western’ or ‘Chinese philosophy’.

Recanonizing Rhetoric: The SecretinandofDiscourse

AbstractChallenges to rhetoric’s canon often occur under the rubric of revising that canon and its foundational, shared meaning. Read through the strategies of deconstruction, the secret offers a common ground for recanonizing approaches by centering either a concealed quantity in ancient rhetoric’s granular archive (the secret in discourse) or an unfolding idea whose transformation has rendered it unrecognizable to its original version (the secret of discourse). This article draws on Jacques Derrida’s “White Mythology” (1974) and A Taste for the Secret (2001) before addressing how the secret’s registers in and of discourse animate de- and recanonizing readings of ancient Greek and Roman rhetoric. Its implications address scholars distressed by the durable forms of oppression ensconced in rhetoric’s ancient canon.

“I wanted to become an Abyssinian”: Rewriting Indro Montanelli’s memories of colonial Africa in Francesca Melandri’s Sangue giusto (2017)

ABSTRACT This article focuses on journalist Indro Montanelli’s memories of Destà/Fatìma or Fatuma, the 12-year-old child he bought as his “wife” while he was a volunteer in the 1935 Italo-Ethiopian war, and on a colonial narrative echoing his story in the 2017 novel Sangue giusto by Francesca Melandri. It considers the roles of race, gender, sexuality, and national memory in the texts, moving from the debate around the monument dedicated to the prominent journalist in the city of Milan to the analysis of the power dynamics in the novel. John Akomfrah’s notion of memory as “a deconstructive gesture against white mythologies” and Aimé Césaire’s and Michel Foucault’s idea of memory as counter-cartography are used to analyse both Montanelli’s recollections of Destà and the relationship between Attilio Profeti, the main character of Melandri’s novel, and Ababa, the girl he turned into his servant and lover during the fascist occupation of Ethiopia.

The Detour of Metaphor: Metaphor, Concept, and Strategy in Althusser and Derrida

Following some of the main arguments Derrida develops in ‘White Mythology’, in this article I propose an unexplored dialogue between Derrida and Althusser considering the use and the place that each of them gives to metaphor in their philosophical strategies. I give special attention to some rather isolated passages of ‘Elements of Self-Criticism’ and ‘Lenin and Philosophy’, where Althusser, against all evidence, seems to be quite aware of the importance of metaphor and mataphorization in every philosophical practice. As Balibar has argued, contrary to the metaphysical tradition, metaphor would not be the opposite but what anticipates the concept. In this sense, it is possible to observe how Althusser’s work has continuously put into practice – as the singular signature of his theoretical practice – something that I call the ‘detour of metaphor’ as a necessary ‘deviation’ for the production of new concepts. Without any evidence that Althusser may have known Derrida’s essay, I show how Althusser’s own theoretical work, one in which ‘metaphor’ as a philosophical theme appears to be rather anecdotic, is unexpectedly close to Derrida’s own positions concerning the margins of philosophy and its ‘outside’, the relation to the metaphysical tradition, and the importance of strategy in philosophy.

Representation of Turkey in the News on the Cyprus Problem: An Analysis on the British Press (2000)

This study aims to explore the representation of Turkey in the British news texts covering the Cyprus problem in the 2000s. The article goes on to question how the British broadsheet press represents Turkey, as one of the role-playing states in the fate of Cyprus. Using Said’s Orientalism and Young’s White Mythology as a theoretical basis for evaluation, a qualitative content analysis was utilized upon 45 news texts. Findings established that the othering of Turks was alive during this period. The British press portrayed Turkish people involved in the Cyprus problem as ‘dark-skinned Turks’, ‘from underdeveloped eastern Anatolia’ that ‘wear Islamic dress and have large families’ and are ‘settlers’ invaders or occupiers on the Cyprus island. Comparatively, the other role-players in the Cyprus problem (Greece, Greek Cypriots, and Turkish Cypriots) were less frequently Orientalized and not in the traditional sense, as presented by Said, their level of being orientalized relating to their relations with the British.

Een zee in het midden van de wereld : Afrikaans-Europese migratie, zwarte filosofie en het einde van de witte mythologie

In Derrida’s 1971 text 'White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy' one can distinguish two interconnected strands of reflection: a critique of modern European metaphysics and of the idea that white culture should dominate the world. The commitment to the exceptionality of European culture is — I will show — based upon the metaphysical illusion that something truly universal has come out of this region of the world. The clear and consistent critique of whiteness in Derrida is put into context by showing that such a critique has been around much longer in the works of black thinkers such as Aime Cesaire, Frantz Fanon, and has been continued by Emmanuel Eze and others. Referring to Derrida’s attention in other work for undocumented immigrants and their ghostly presence in European society, I center the fact that European ideas of cultural purity make the death in the Mediterranean of thousands of migrants from the African continent an inescapable effect of white mythology. Like the Berlin Wall, this most dangerous border of Europe will in the end succumb to the continuous attempts of migrants to cross it. When that happens, the Mediterranean could again become what it once was: a sea in the middle of the world, a center which made the complex identity of someone like Derrida as North-African Jew in France first possible.

Metaphor as Lexis: Ricoeur on Derrida on Aristotle

Both Derrida and Ricœur address philosophy’s relation to metaphor, and both take Aristotle as their starting points. However, though Ricœur’s The Rule of Metaphor is largely a response to Derrida’s “White Mythology,” Ricœur seems to pass right over Derrida’s critically important interpretation of Aristotle. In this essay, I dispel concerns that Ricœur may have been intellectually irresponsible in his engagement with Derrida on this point, and I demonstrate how Study 1 makes better sense as a detailed response to Derrida.

Counting Form: Gender and the Geometries of Address, in Frances Presley and Carol Watts

This essay treats two innovative site-specific sequences produced by women in the first decade of the twenty first century. Both are explicitly interested in the relationship between geometry, writing (as material and political practice) and geo-cultural space, a relationship each finds inflected to some extent by gender emphases. Starting from the premise that any piece of writing is itself a place, the essay considers the self-conscious textualities of its primary texts—one concerned with Exmoor; the other with a sheep-farm in rural mid-Wales—in the light of their different, if similarly rural and relatively remote, contexts. Presley’s ‘Stone Settings’ explores the relationship between some of the quasi-geometrical Neolithic stone arrangements dotted across Exmoor, and the mediation of their apparently Euclidean sometimes barely visible forms in/as text. Watts’ work-in-progress Zeta Landscape mobilises in the ‘analytical’ or ‘projective’ (ie non-Euclidean) geometry of its title the complex weave of routine care-giving and accountancy charging the contemporary (Michel Foucault’s ‘distributive’) pastoral. Both sequences wryly suggest that poetic form can finally no more adequately figure place than the abstractions of mathematical discourse can utter the cultural ecology of any environment, however concrete-seeming. Aided by Jacques Derrida’s powerful essay ‘White Mythology’, the account comes to rest on the equally equivocal recognition of the in/effectuality of metaphor in any kind of address, critical or creative.

Quenched: Five Fires for Thinking Extinction

By the light or remains of five fires, this paper considers how the current extinction crisis might be thought in relation to the future and the past, to speed and acceleration, to ir/reversibility, and to the evolution of human language and consciousness. The thought of extinction as the extinction of thought is elaborated through engagement with J.G. Ballard's The Drowned World, Jacques Derrida's ‘No Apocalypse, Not Now’ and ‘White Mythology’, and the October 2018 IPCC report. The paper concludes by speculating upon an answer to the following questions: if we know that there will be an end to thought, what will have been the end of thought? To what end do we think at all?

Queer Rebellion in the Novels of Michelle Cliff: Intersectionality and Sexual Modernity by Kaisa Ilmonen

Reviewed by: Queer Rebellion in the Novels of Michelle Cliff: Intersectionality and Sexual Modernity by Kaisa Ilmonen Mary Zaborskis ILMONEN, KAISA. Queer Rebellion in the Novels of Michelle Cliff: Intersectionality and Sexual Modernity. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017. 272 pp. £61.99 hardcover. Kaisa Ilmonen's recent monograph explores "textual rebellion" (3) in Michelle Cliff's three major novels, Abeng (1985), No Telephone to Heaven (1987), and Free Enterprise (1993). Ilmonen reads these three texts as a quasi-trilogy, arguing that reading Free Enterprise "in a continuum" (4) with the previous two enables her to trace "an evolving line regarding the construction of identity" (4) for queer diasporic women of color operating within and/or bearing the legacies of colonization. Drawing on women of color feminism, queer studies, postcolonial theory, cultural studies, and Caribbean scholarship, Ilmonen demonstrates how Cliff is part of a genealogy of queer women of color whose texts feature journeys to "feel at home" (3) when home as a literal place and an affective site has been compromised. Attempts to find home reveal home is not entirely geographical, but can be temporal, linguistic, relational, and bodily. Ilmonen argues that Cliff has "been read too narrowly" (245) and mines her texts for their representations of racialized sexuality, alternative kinship, and home-making practices among diasporic women. These representations are part of the "textual rebellion" she identifies as "creating a liberatory poetics" (16) for the girls and women of the novels. "Textual rebellion" names a range of strategies Cliff's novels employ in order to counter colonial, heteropatriarchal paradigms that delimit Caribbean subjectivities, epistemologies, and futures. Textual rebellion materializes in narration, narrative structure, language, characters that break with gender and sexual norms, and speech acts. The omniscient narrator of Abeng who teaches Jamaican history, the "nonlinearity" (59) of No Telephone to Heaven, and the "feminist archive" (67) of "forgotten…abolitionist women" (67) in Free Enterprise are all examples of textual rebellion in Cliff's oeuvre. Ilmonen pays special attention to the women who populate the novels and particularly to the "othermothers" (174), women who surround the texts' protagonists and model resistance against heteronormative mandates of motherhood. Textual rebellion enables representations that rebel against both the colonial authority and the white mythologies that erase Caribbean histories. In this way, Ilmonen makes the case for a mimetic relationship between the texts' formal features and their political aims. She names these formal features as creating "counter-stories" (32), "counter-discourse[s]" (120), "counter-narrative[s]" (128), "counter-myths" (129), and a "counter-mythos" (135). Ilmonen importantly notes that these multiple types [End Page 307] of counterforces aren't merely "opposition[al]" (243) but instead disrupt totalizing narratives of colonization that attempt to structure marginalized persons' realities. Ilmonen examines how Cliff's novels reveal the centrality of sexuality to colonization and how gender expression and sexual desire can counter these colonizing forces. In this way, the body and its relations are sites of decolonization in the texts; Ilmonen thus reads queerness as one route toward decolonization. Cliff's textual rebellions are queer rebellions because they break norms that colonization renders natural and stable. Ilmonen identifies queerness in Cliff's novels as "something which is inappropriate, questionable, other, and strange" (41). However, she also calls her own reading practice "queer" (41). Ilmonen invokes David Bell and Gill Valentine to think of "queer reading as 'daring epistemological guerrilla warfare' which is an act of 'intervention, contestation, resistance, subversion, interrogation'" (42). The metaphorical invocation of guerrilla warfare to describe queer interpretation resonates with Ilmonen's reading of Clare Savage's literal participation in guerrilla warfare in No Telephone to Heaven. The guerrilla group that Clare joins models alternative kinship, "confront[s] the 'fake archaelogy' of Jamaican history" (101), and is a "site of radical agency for Clare" (64). In these ways, the guerrilla group is queer because they break with norms regarding heteronormative families and colonial versions of history. While Clare dies fighting, Ilmonen queerly reads her death as subversive because it ultimately returns her to "the Jamaican ancestral home" and "free[s]" her "from all language" (142). This tension between liberation and violence reveals that queer is not always inflected with a...

Texture as Substance: Reading Homi K. Bhabha Re-membering Frantz Fanon

[T]he idea of Man as his alienated image, not Self and Other but the “Otherness” of the self inscribed in the perverse palimpsest of colonial identity. (116)According to Isaac Julien, the director of Black Skin, White Mask, a film imagining the life of Frantz Fanon, Homi Bhabha is presented in a nonspeaking role as a colored, racialized “colonial subject” to lend “texture” to the cinematography (Interview). Unlike the eloquent postcolonial critics Stuart Hall and Françoise Vergès, who are interviewed extensively in the ilm, the mute Bhabha is a cipher, a visual trace of diference in the philosophical, cinematic, and audio montage that composes Julien's meditation on decolonization (Frantz Fanon [Director's cut]). In many ways, Julien's Fanon seems indebted to Bhabha's strong reading, against the grain of Fanon's oeuvre, in “Remembering Fanon: Self, Psyche and the Colonial Condition,” a foreword Bhabha wrote for a new British edition of Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks, published in 1986. Julien's Fanon is an interstitial igure, stitched together through multiple viewpoints and physically composed of cinematic elements juxtaposed in striking contrast to one another. He emerges from scraps of discourse cast of and reassembled, much as Bhabha's Fanon is captured in Fanon's ungrammatical utterance that betrays by ellipsis the nature of identity, which is that identity is “not”: “The Negro is not. Any more than the white man” (113). The revelation that the nature of identity is spatially split and temporally deferred-the deinition of Derridean diférance-is most truly represented in the colonial situation, where white mythologies of wholeness and authenticity are actualized as performances of power. When these mythologies are accompanied by paranoid fantasies of blackness that reveal the contradictory duplicity of white representations of the other-the simian Negro, the inscrutable Chinaman-this racial discrimination and its neurotic imagery reveal the nature of the white self and its pretense of universality: that the human is not whole and that the Enlightenment dream of self-presence is an illusion thrown up by the anxious exercise of mastery over those lesser humans, the Negroes.

Identity, Race and the State: Policing Black Sexuality

In contemporary news there have been several highly salient incidents where a black person has been shot and or killed by a police officer, security guard, or vigilante. But in actuality, in 2012 alone, there were 313 African American killed by police, security guards and vigilantes (Eisen, 2014). That is a rate of one African American killed every 28 hours (Eisen, 2014). With this in mind it is the oppressive state, that minority communities should be suspicious of. It is not the politics of the right or left that minorities should be leery of, it is white racist mythology manifested through state action. In order to control a group of people the state must use two things: law and force. We see the force in that there are roughly six blacks to every one white person incarcerated in the U.S and the extrajudicial killings but we do not focus enough on the law itself and the rationales and assumptions connected to them (Sentencing Project, 2012; Eisen, 2014). Cohen, Brown and Organski (1981) find that the expansion of state power is highly correlated with collective violence. I will show how these and other extralegal forms of policing black sexuality have persisted throughout history and how even today these extralegal killing of blacks have a sexual undertone and how public memory has been altered to [re]signify what these incidents mean. But most importantly I will show how the state has supported and continues to support the policing of black sexuality though public policy.

Race and Pedagogical Practices: When Race Takes Center Stage in Philosophy

This paper presents a segment of a broader research project titled “When Black Consciousness Meets White Consciousness,” which first developed out of my research work with White women in violence‐against‐women organizations. It documents an interview between a White woman and me, a Black South African philosopher. I lived and worked in Canada at the time but I traveled to the United States for conferences on a regular basis. I was presenting my work on Black consciousness, White consciousness, and Black existentialism—relying on Derridean deconstruction and psychoanalysis—when I had the exchange with a White woman, a young faculty member in the philosophy department, which had jointly hosted the talk with the women and gender studies department. This paper offers a verbatim account of this dialogue wherein the history of philosophy is unraveled and where I draw on Jacques Derrida's “White Mythology” to demonstrate how White consciousness is engraved. It is out of this intertwined analysis that my work on White consciousness emerged in the 1990s—and with which I continue—as is evidenced throughout the paper. In unpacking this dialogue, I situate the complexities that arise from the pedagogical practices within philosophy when race takes center stage within a discipline that has written itself as though race does not exist.

White Noise: Composition, Colonization, and Colour

This paper examines the links between Western music, Western metaphysics, and Western imperialism. Taking Derrida's reading of "White Mythology" and "Violence and Metaphysics" as its point of departure, the paper explores the relationship between the theories and practices of musical composition formalized in Europe in the eighteenth and finalized in the nineteenth century, and the theories and practices of race, racial differentiation, and empire that coincide(d) with it.

Reflections on the Tenth Anniversary of the Caine Prize for African Writing

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. On the critical role of the English language in resistance literature and in postcolonial writing see Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o Ngũgĩ , Wa Thiong'o . Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature . Oxford and Portsmouth, NH : James Currey/Heinemann , 1986 . [Google Scholar], Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. 2. For a discussion of ‘whiteness’ as imbricated within a myth of the West see Young, White Mythologies. 3. For further critical exploration of the term ‘The Fetish of “the West”’ see Lazarus, ‘The Fetish of “the West” in postcolonial theory’ in Marxism, Modernity and Postcolonial Studies. 4. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's talk focused on ‘Writing Now’ at Wasafiri's twenty-fifth anniversary events entitled ‘Everything to Declare’ on Saturday 31 Oct. 2009 — see ‘Language in Everything to Declare’. See also Decolonizing the Mind. 5. For a fuller understanding of cosmopolitanism in this utopian context see, for example, Appiah Appiah , Kwame Anthony . Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers . New York : Norton and Company , 2006 . [Google Scholar], Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. 6. For a more detailed history of the Mau Mau and violence, see Odhiambo and Lonsdale Odhiambo , Atieno E S and John Lonsdale . Mau Mau & Nationhood: Arms, Authority & Narration . Athens : Ohio UP , 2003 . [Google Scholar], Mau Mau & Nationhood: Arms, Authority & Narration.

Photography, the Index, and the Nonexistent: Alfred Watkins’ Discovery (or Invention) of the Notorious Ley‐lines of British Archaeology

Some current debates about the history of photography revolve around its alleged indexicality. Emphasizing this aspect plays into the “white mythology of photography” at the expense of other ways of comprehending the medium’s semiotics and epistemology. Consideration of the use of photographs by Alfred Watkins (1855–1935), the British photographer and archaeologist, offers a semiotic model for the working of photography that can answer to both ontological and epistemological questions raised by the medium in general and by Watkins’ works in particular. Watkins photographed features of British countryside and terrain that rival archaeologists have consistently alleged not to exist. It is only by not taking sides over this question that we can use the case to help understand how photography works in a situation of epistemological ambiguity. On the way, we can conclude that although their reputation for representing plain fact is precisely what is called into question, photographs continue to work persuasively on the reader, maintaining a rhetorical force in excess of their documentary value.