Derrida's Work Research Articles

Fisher zeroes and the fluctuations of the spectral form factor of chaotic systems

The spectral form factor of quantum chaotic systems has the familiar ‘ramp ++ plateau’ form. Techniques to determine its form in the semiclassical or the thermodynamic limit have been devised, in both cases based on the average over an energy range or an ensemble of systems. For a single instance, fluctuations are large, do not go away in the limit, and depend on the element of the ensemble itself, thus seeming to question the whole procedure. Considered as the modulus of a partition function in complex inverse temperature \beta_R+i\beta_IβR+iβI (\beta_I \equiv \tauβI≡τ the time), the spectral form factor has regions of Fisher zeroes, the analogue of Yang-Lee zeroes for the complex temperature plane. The large spikes in the spectral form factor are in fact a consequence of near-misses of the line parametrized by \beta_IβI to these zeroes. The largest spikes are indeed extensive and extremely sensitive to details, but we show that they are both exponentially rare and exponentially thin. Motivated by this, and inspired by the work of Derrida on the Random Energy Model, we study here a modified model of random energy levels in which we introduce level repulsion. We also check that the mechanism giving rise to spikes is the same in the SYK model.

On heritage pharmacology: Rethinking ‘heritage pathologies’ as tropes of care

This article develops the concept of heritage pharmacology as an encompassing critical framework in order to radically recast the interactions and efficacies of heritage as a particularly potent pharmacology of care. I critically engage with Stiegler's philosophic reflections On Pharmacology, which builds on Derrida's work and recasts pharmacology – a term usually reserved for that branch of the biomedical sciences dealing with drugs and their interactions and efficacies – in order to draw out the ‘curative-toxic’ dimensions at play in wider care tropes. By placing core concepts and practices of heritage and pharmacology in critical dialogue, my aim as heritage critic is to gain mutual insights into ‘care’, as that which links together the two domains of heritage and health, as otherwise distinct discourses, concepts, technics, and practices. My specific intervention rethinks the crucial role of ‘heritage pathologies’ and the underpinning memory-work at play within these tropes while grounding these in a case study of Jerusalem Syndrome (JS). I argue that it is the dynamic of heritage pathologies, best crystallized in JS debates, that invests us in the wider Stieglerian quest/ion of ‘pharmacology’, as a concern with ‘what makes life worth living’. Such quests ultimately take this article into the realpolitik of Palestine.

The Derridean Event: History, Including the Life and Work of Derrida, as Rain

The Derridean Event: History, Including the Life and Work of Derrida, as Rain

Literature Now and Democracy to Come: Jacques Derrida, Ben Lerner, and Leaving the Atocha Station

Abstract: On March 11, 2004, Madrid was hit by devastating train bombings. The attacks and the resulting protests play an important part in Ben Lerner's Leaving the Atocha Station (2011), but the novel is not simply about them. Instead, Lerner addresses the relationship between literature and politics. Discussing the influence of John Ashbery's and Allen Grossman's work on Lerner, this article shows how the novel develops an understanding of literature as an immediate mediation between the virtual and the actual. Responding to Lerner's challenge to consider "literature now," and drawing on Jacques Derrida's work on democracy to come, the article then explores how an experience of reading is, for Lerner, an experience of temporality and of exposure to an event to come that requires a decisive, improvised response. Concluding with the novel's recontextualization of the Spanish government's response to the Madrid bombings, the article argues that an experience of literature is an experience of deciding the meaning of what is happening here and now, mirroring an experience of democratic politics.

Stereotipype Tokoh Ayah dalam Cerpen Guru Karya Putu Wijaya: Kajian Dekonstruksi Derrida

Abstract This research aims to describe stereotype The father figure in the short story Guru by Putu Wijaya is in accordance with Derrida's theory. The research method uses a deconstruction approach to Derrida's theoretical literary works. Deconstruction of literary works is able to analyze short stories from the language that has various meanings in a text. The data in this research is in the form of text documents containing fragments of characters, plot, caritas background in short stories. The data source comes from Jawa Pos, 05/08/2016 edition of teacher's short stories by Putu Wijaya. The data collection technique uses heuristic techniques, namely reading the initial stages by analyzing the elements contained in the story such as characters. The data analysis technique uses the hermeneutic technique of in-depth reading of literary works in the form of the social environment in the story and analyzing it in depth in accordance with deconstruction theory. Research result stereotype The character of the father can be shown based on dialogue or the character's speech, such as the environment, the character's reactions to other characters. It is known that the character of the father does not depict the attitude of a parent who is firm, wise and unemotional. And the meaning of opposition which shows my father's bad thoughts towards teachers is a form of criticism of the government.

Ghostly Interpellations: Testimonial Inscriptions on the Stage

Colombian theatre-makers have been searching for aesthetic languages to speak about the national conflict for decades. By analysing two of the most prominent theatrical productions from the 2010s, I explore the mechanisms they employ for the inscription of testimonies on audiences. I argue that the use of ghosts onstage to make the disappeared present transforms these plays into both ritual spaces and testimonial encounters at the same time. I do this by engaging with Derrida's works on spectres, along with the work of Latin American scholars who have explored the ethical and aesthetic challenges of making art in times of war.

Untranslatability and the ethics of pause

ABSTRACT Untranslatability has been seen as a problematic concept in Translation Studies, rooted in outdated views of translation as doomed to failure. In this paper, I argue against such a view of untranslatability to make two claims. The first is that at least a temporary untranslatability is the condition of translation, without it translation would be redundant. The second is that untranslatability offers us both an ethical and descriptive model for intersubjective relations such that it does not merely refer to a textual practice but also to ways in which we relate to each other as human beings. In the first part of the paper, I engage with two critics of untranslatability – Ricoeur and Venuti – to claim that in their rejection of the untranslatable, they lose something productive. Against a view of the untranslatable as something ‘sacred’, as described by Heidegger; I argue that we might think of the untranslatable as that which exceeds our understanding yet generates the desire to understand at all. Drawing on the work of Derrida, Levinas, and Cassin, I claim that the untranslatable offers us a way of thinking of translation and understanding in general as ethical when they are paused, suspended, or interrupted.

Unearthing crypts and blurring borders in Anna Burns' «Milkman»

Drawing primarily on the work of Derrida, this paper provides an analysis of Belfast writer Anna Burns’ award-winning novel Milkman (2018) from the perspectives of secrecy, hauntology and the crypt, with the aim of offering new insights into the ungraspable haunting effects of trans-generational trauma. Two literary applications of the crypt are studied: a severed cat’s head found by the protagonist in the so called ‘ten-minute area’, and cryptic letters stuffed inside an old ragdoll and hidden in plain sight. I propose that the speculative conclusions reached as a result of this study not only allow for a sharper (re)reading of the novel itself, but also work towards the deconstruction of real and symbolic borders.

Engram: Derrida's Reply to Stiegler

This article focuses on two indices from Geschlecht III session XIII: (1) an apparently insignificant reference to Stiegler and (2) the recourse to the concept of the engram as a trope of other grammatological figures that are more frequent in Derrida's work. By interweaving these indexes together, the article suggests that Derrida's text can be read as a noteworthy stage in his ongoing dialogue with Bernard Stiegler surrounding the question posed by human evolution to any accounts of the history of life. Along this path, the article inscribes Derrida's (en-)grammatological history of life within the line of thought that goes from Richard Semon's engram theory to Simona Ginsburg and Eva Jablonka's contemporary re-elaboration of this theory. In doing so, it argues that, although for Stiegler Derrida's grammatology aligns with biological reductionism, the latter may provide the theoretical framework for current evolutionary accounts of life as plasticity.

Deconstruction in the Neighborhood of Art. The Problem of Painting in the Philosophy of Jacques Derrida.

The author analyzes the theme of painting in the philosophy of Jacques Derrida, referring to one of his defining works on this subject: "Truth in Painting". Consistently considering the four-part structure of this book, the author touches on such concepts of deconstruction as "parergon", "passepartout", "cartouche" and others. Of particular interest is the problem of truth in the structure of fine art – this topic is a cross-cutting theme throughout Derrida's work. At the same time, the philosopher rejects the classical ontological-epistemological aspect of truth in the context of art history. The picture does not limit itself to the representation of an object or the truth attached to it. She crosses the line, overflowing her boundaries. That is why the logic of a work of art is inevitably the logic of a Kantian parergon. In the book "Truth in Painting" Derrida rethinks all aspects of artistic creativity. For Derrida, painting is, first of all, an action and the most correct question is: "What does this painting do?". The picture in the produced action breaks away from the conditions of the image, moves away from the discourse, setting in motion the difference. The structure of a painting work consists not of presence or representation, but of a projection of movement. The painting is silent and remains outside the language, is unrepresentable and heterogeneous, is out of line with any discourse, is irreducible to any text and is not subject to archiving despite all the efforts of museum authorities.

Philippe Beck’s art of poetry

Contemporary French poet Philippe Beck through his intriguing poetic project Opéradiques (2014; which has yet to be translated into English) demonstrates a new understanding of writing poetry through the deconstructive, reconstructive, boustrophedon process. Beck finds the foundation of his art of poetry in the "ruins" of existing written poems, stories, texts of all genres and forms. When it seems that writing poetry has lost all direction, and almost become irrelevant, Beck's work shows us the "cracks in the wall". Is it that these "cracks in the wall" should be received as a bold attempt to secure a new enthusiasm for the future, to form a stronger poem able to say that which cannot be said? Does Beck's work tell us that poetry must be the answer to the question "what is poetry?" The works of Derrida, Walter Benjamin, and Jean-Luc Nancy, provide an opening through which to grasp Beck's poetics.

The Wounds of Rhetoric: Derrida on Condillac and Rousseau

The publication of Derrida's fragment Le Calcul des langues — Distyle offers an insight into Derrida's negotiation with empiricism and his rethinking of rhetoric in the early 1970s. Delineating Condillac's pervasive idealization of empiricism, Derrida gestures to a pain-becoming-pleasure and pleasure-becoming-pain that resists the fixed identity of the proper body. His emphasis on the pains and wounds of rhetoric registers both the limits of Condillac's philosophical project (rhetoric re-marks the excess of metaphor and the sensuous origins of language) and the possibility of another kind of empiricism, of the gaps that border on the word and the body. The article includes a reading of rhetoric and sex in Rousseau, as a gesture to Derrida's still unpublished seminar on rhetoric. It closes with an examination of the two-columned nature of Derrida's work, which ends mid-word (on the left) and mid-sentence (on the right).

Listening to “the Squirrel's Heart Beat”

Listening to “the Squirrel's Heart Beat”

Derrida's Missing Woman

Since Sarah Kofman's death in 1994, many critics have investigated her friendship with Jacques Derrida, and have tried to make sense of its striking dissymmetry. Contrary to those merely deeming Kofman ‘an orthodox Derridean’ (Alice Jardine), thus ascribing to her the unrewarding role of the disciple, Penelope Deutscher and more recently Ginette Michaud, among others, have endeavoured to interpret Derrida's odd silences and omissions regarding Kofman's work in a more subtle manner. Drawing on these readings, this article questions the erasure of ‘Sarah Kofman’ from Derrida's oeuvre by comparing it to the paradoxical effacement of ‘woman’ in the philosopher's texts, arguing that ‘Sarah Kofman’ both as a proper name and as a corpus figures the ‘woman’ missing from Derrida's work. Drawing on the work of feminist critics like Jardine, Miller and Spivak, the article retraces the ambiguous function of ‘woman’ in Derrida's writing, before stressing parallels between ‘Sarah Kofman’ and the Derridean ‘woman’.

Izlaganje Deridine kritike metafore kao prilog tezi o nesuvislosti religijskih sukoba

In the context of the question of metaphor, Jacques Derrida plays a particularly important role in the history of thought. In his work La Mythologie Blanche with the important subtitle: La métaphore dans le texte philosophique, among other questions, he problematizes the history of metaphor problems, implications arising from historical and contemporary metaphor, as well as the possibilities of the relation of science to it. And, because the question of metaphor is given as one of the important sources of religious conflicts in this paper, the metaphor in the theological text is to be problematized, following in the footsteps of Derrida's thought achievements. In other words: in this paper, one has to read one question of metaphor in a philosophical text as a question of the possibility of metaphor in a theological text. The hypothesis of this paper to be proved is that religious conflicts arise from a multitude of phenomena that we can reduce to the lowest common denominator named as ignorance, and in this context as a source of subject ignorance -among many other phenomena -a metaphor is given in the theological text: there is no intention here to prove the existence of metaphor in the theological text but the possibility of the existence of metaphor in the theological text in the wake of Derrida's mental achievements on the basis of which Derrida's work La Mythologie Blanche is given as a contribution to the incoherence of religious conflicts.

Also Intransitive. Mark Fisher's Hauntology

This article offers a reading of the version of Jacques Derrida's concept of ‘hauntology’ that is developed by Mark Fisher in his essay collection, Ghosts Of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. The article begins by noting some salient genealogical features of Fisher's critique of Derrida, and argues that Fisher's engagement with hauntology prompts an elaboration of Fisher's thinking about Derrida which corresponds to the elaboration in Derrida's thinking which, for Fisher, hauntology marks. But it also goes on to suggest, in a manner that is intended to pay tribute to Fisher's final work, The Weird and the Eerie, that Fisher's engagement with Derrida has a weird performativity, irreducible (as always in Fisher) to mere commentary or exegesis, and having more to do, like the weird, with ‘ things which do not belong together’. Fisher's adoption of ‘hauntology’ is of particular interest because it develops from an earlier hostility to Derrida's work which was of a piece with the position of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU), of which Fisher was a member during its existence at Warwick in the late 1990s/early 2000s. This late, phantasmatic reconciliation between Fisher and Derrida is at once intellectually fertile and undeniably poignant.

Understanding Derrida’s “Structure, Sign, and Play”

Deconstruction, a philosophical post-structural theory derived mainly from the work of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, has evoked a great controversial debate over the past few decades. Promoting a sophisticated philosophical view of literary criticism, deconstruction has always been a complicated topic to comprehend especially for students and novice researchers in the field of literary criticism. This article review paper attempts to present an explanation of the main notions of the theory by reviewing one of Derrida’s most influencing articles on critical theory: “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences”. The article which marked the birth of post-structuralism theory, was first delivered in 1966 at John Hopkins International Colloquium on “The Language of Criticism and the Sciences of Man”. This seminal work of Derrida criticizes structuralism for the great importance given to centralism and binary oppositions for the sake of accessing meaning. It can be claimed that the article sums up his ideas on deconstruction which in fact attacks all notions of center, totality and origin. Deconstruction is perceived as a method of breaking down and analyzing text in an attempt to approach some new interpretations which might be totally different from any other previous ones.

White generosity: black freedom faced with good intentions

PurposeThe author advances a theory of white generosity, a product of whiteness and of hierarchised relationships between races characterised by the giving to the racialised person that which has not been asked for and which has no practical immediate purpose, which can be used by anti-racist scholars as a framework for analysing racial oppression.Design/methodology/approachUsing postcolonial and cultural studies and deconstructionist techniques in tandem with autoethnography, the author uses textual readings to examine instances of “giving” shaped by white generosity, drawing on Jacques Derrida's work on the gift in order to deconstruct the structure and rhetorical moves of white generosity.FindingsWhite generosity demands gratitude in excess of the value of the thing given. If for Derrida the gift is given unconditionally, becoming devalued as soon as it demands acknowledgement or draws attention to itself as gift, white generosity is the gift's inverse: a “giving” that manifests itself only as a demand for its supposed recipient's gratitude. Emancipation is no gift at all; simply a deferral of debt. The “gifts” of diversity, decolonisation, widening participation or access are all objects of brokerage in a system that is inherently unequal and violent for black folx.Originality/valueWhite generosity is related to theoretical constructs, such as white fragility, that have commanded significant scholarly engagement. However, it has not previously been named or analysed in a systematic way. This article offers a theoretical framework for use by anti-racist activists and scholars to name, interrogate and deconstruct a powerful narrative used in the continued marginalisation of non-white folx.

Idea of Quasi-transcendental in Philosophy of Deconstruction

Paper deals with investigation of deconstructive concept of quasi-transcendental in the context of general thematization of transcendental philosophy framework of which deconstruction is thought as a representational version. It was established that quasi-transcendental thinking amounts to such a re-interpretation of theoretical foundation of transcendental discourse in the frame of which moments of critique and hyperbolizing are united.Author brings to light and explores main topics of transcendental thought primarily and foremost subjected to the quasi-transcendental reflection: namely, the problem of relationship between transcendental and empirical and the problem of conditions of possibility. In the first case, an ambivalence of “transcendental-empirical” relation, inherent to transcendental discourse turns out to be sharpened. This relation combines in itself characteristics of opposition and juxtaposition, up to reciprocal conditioning. Transcendental becomes such only with regard to empirical and vise versa. In the second case, questioning on conditions of possibility is reshaped in discourse on conditions of impossibility, which proves to be both critical restriction and hyperbolic extension of the former. Paper shows that development of idea of quasi-transcendental in deconstructive philosophy is an outcome of mutual work of Derrida himself and his eminent commentators. The function and basic senses of concept “quasi”, which it obtains within the scope of deconstructive version of transcendentalism, are determined. In particular, an affinity of Derridian “quasi” with Kantian als ob is ascertained, as well as its connection with both critical attitude and discursive realm of fiction. A peculiarity of concept of ultra-transcendental as variation of notion “quasi-transcendental” is found out.Author explores the relation of quasi-transcendental discourse to empirism and gives reasons for priority of transcendental realm over empirical in Derridian thought. Paper lays bare the relationship of quasi-transcendental thinking with discourse of other, as a fundamental theme of deconstructive philosophy.In sum author claims that (1) importance of the theme of (quasi)transcendental in deconstructive discourse and (2) personal Derrida’s self-identification as quasi-transcendental philosopher serve as crucial reasons for investigation of deconstructive philosophy as a prominent version of transcendental thinking.

Given (No) Time: A Derridean Reading of Denis Villeneuve's Arrival

The central character of Denis Villeneuve's 2016 film Arrival, Dr. Louise Banks (Amy Adams), is a linguist tasked with deciphering a logographic alien language in time to avert a seemingly impending global war. I argue that the alien heptapods' logographs exemplify the understanding of language advanced by Jacques Derrida in seminal texts such as Of Grammatology (1976), while also engaging some of the themes concerning time and gift-giving that he develops in later, more explicitly political works. Derrida argues that written signifiers, rather than being a mere vehicle for representing speech, confer their own, supplemental meaning onto communication. Furthermore, he emphasizes that writing is not bound by the same linear temporality as spoken utterances, inasmuch as it is inscribed in a format which allows it to be revisited repeatedly. The significance of this disruption of linear temporality becomes clear in Derrida's later works such as Specters of Marx (1994) and On Cosmopolitanism (2001), where he describes such disruption as a necessary condition for the type of political change he believes is needed in the world. The ability to experience time in a nonlinear fashion allows Banks to prevent the looming war, in an illustration of the connection that Derrida draws between time, violence, and politics. However, it also puts humanity in the heptapods' debt, thus exemplifying the paradox of genuine gift-giving that Derrida claims is impossible. Despite the complex ethical questions it invokes, however, the unique nature of the gift in Arrival signals that this gift might be a genuinely altruistic offering after all.