Derrida's Work Research Articles

Derrida on the Line

By offering us a voice that is both at a distance and inside one's own head, the telephone causes interference in thinking and writing. But despite the multiple telephones that echo in and across Jacques Derrida's work, and specifically his writing to and with Hélène Cixous, it is only since Derrida's death that critical interest in the phone has fully emerged, with work by Royle (2006) , Prenowitz (2008) , Bennington (2013) and Turner (2014) stressing the value of staying on the line. Engaging with Derrida, however, is not simply a matter of picking up the receiver. For the telephone is also, Derrida insists in H.C. for Life (2006), a ‘poetico-technical invention’, that is, the telephone is ‘thought itself’. This paper is about how the telephone ‘thinks’ Derrida, about how it remembers Derrida, and about how it offers us a line for re-imagining his voice. Bound up with the uncanny mechanisms of the telephone, it invites readers to participate in long-distance calling – listening across species, texts and worlds.

Derrida's Error and Immunology

While Derrida's work is often seen as removed from matter, influential arguments have also been made about deconstruction's capacity to capture some foundational logic of matter or life. I offer an example of the way Derrida's work may be read to suggest the latter, even in a case where Derrida may be wrong: based on Thomas Pradeu's Limits of the Self, I suggest that Derrida's arguably erroneous use of autoimmunity anticipated recent developments in immunology. However, instead of simply concluding that Derrida ‘anticipates’ immunology, I suggest that Pradeu's theory had earlier been prefigured in immunology around the term ‘allergy’ in agreement with the Derridean use of it in ‘Plato's Pharmacy’. Last, I will briefly consider what Derrida calls ‘life in general’, in order to demonstrate a resistance in his work to be simply proven right within what he understands as the organicist discourse of living matter.

‘There is worse to come’: The biopolitics of traumatism in antimicrobial resistance (AMR)

This paper reflects on the different futures and imaginaries constructed through the politics and policy of antimicrobial resistance (AMR). We examine the role of catastrophism, trauma and notions of ‘resistance’ expressed at different moments in the development of the AMR debate. The paper focuses on a number of imaginaries in the politics of AMR, particularly a characterisation of Britain as the ‘sick man of Europe’ or the ‘British disease’ and, more recently, the catastrophist prospect of a ‘return to the dark ages of medicine’. We draw upon recent writing in biopolitical philosophy on immunity and autoimmunity, particularly in the work of Derrida and Sloterdijk, to interrogate immunitary politics of AMR at the intersections of the human and the microbial.

Jokes and the Performative in Austin And Derrida; or, The Truth is a Joke?

Jokes and the Performative in Austin And Derrida; or, The Truth is a Joke? Jeffrey T. Nealon (bio) There are disadvantages in being excessively solemn. — J. L. Austin, "Performative Utterances" Through comedy then. — Jacques Derrida, Glas The genealogy of this essay on jokes comes not so much out of a happy, laughter-filled context, but in the context of a death—most specifically, Jacques Derrida's death. I was asked to write something about Derrida's legacy on the tenth anniversary of his death in 2014, and the initial impetus on such an occasion is to follow out a trajectory that one learns from Derrida himself: when asked to mourn someone in print, immediately double down on the question by looking at how the topic of mourning is treated in his or her texts. And that could indeed present a rich itinerary: few people have engaged the work of mourning as centrally as Derrida.1 But I have to say, thinking back on Derrida's work, on what I found most admirable and useful within his texts (and given the few dozen times I had interacted with him over the years, what I took away from his personality), it was not mourning that I wanted to recall—not the Derrida of lack and loss, prayers and tears,2 but the Derrida of a certain kind of malicious performative joy. The Derrida of Glas, for example, who gleefully links G. W. F Hegel, that great thinker of normativity and dialectical progress, with the saint of queer transgression Jean Genet. Whatever else it is, a text like Glas is a tour de force comedy routine (and the genre is literally comic, a circle—the beginning is the end, Finnegans Wake style).3 And the joke is aimed squarely at [End Page 1] that most serious and tragic of philosophical projects, Hegel's. Indeed, to what two specific episodes does Derrida very economically reduce Hegel's entire corpus in the opening pages of Glas? (1) Hegel's discussion of the phallic columns of India; and (2) the status of flower-religion (2–3). These two seemingly frivolous throwaways in Hegel are, like so many other bits of marginalia (recall what Derrida does with Friedrich Nietzsche's "I have forgotten my umbrella"),4 going to be shown to be the heart and soul of a very serious project, and Derrida will perform this analysis in a magisterial and singular way … with numerous lowbrow jokes thrown in as well, musings for example on the chiasmic crossings between Derrida and derrière. In any case, to close this opening parenthesis, it's the joyful way Derrida does his work—its performative aspects, the illocutionary force of his work—that has really stayed with me over the years. And of course 1974's Glas is just the warm-up for Derrida's real comic tour de force—"Limited Inc abc" (hereafter simply "Limited Inc"), his late-70s back-and-forth with John Searle, over Derrida's essay on J. L. Austin and performative utterances. I'll get to all that soon enough, but I can't help but note right off the bat that Searle, if he had taken time to look twice at Derrida's work, should have seen it coming: the great comics really know how to take down hecklers. In any case, it's this underappreciated, comic, performative Derrida that I want to think about in this essay, and while this Derrida certainly doesn't get as much methodological play as the "prayers and tears" Derrida, I'm going to try to make some larger claims about the joke being crucial to Derrida's itinerary, especially surrounding his attraction to the performative. (I'll likewise suggest that even as Austin tries to keep the joke under control, its logic remains central to his work as well.) To anticipate some things I'll repeat and expand on later, the joke allows us to think in a very economical way about the performative deployment of force and provocation; the necessity and nonsaturability of context; the signature style of delivery; the idiomatics of timing; and the success or failure of a speech act being largely delinked from...

Philosophy and Its Relation to Other Disciplines in Derrida’s Writings on Education

Derrida's writings on education, most of which are gathered in Du droit a la philosophie, form a rich and multifaceted body of work.1 In these writings Derrida covers a wide range of topics related to the teaching of philosophy, including the appropriate age at which should be learned, the relation between philosophical teaching, educational institutions, and the State, the links between and national languages, the position of both within and outside the University, and the role of means-ends thinking in philosophical research, to name just a few. Those of us interested in education in thus have much to learn from this resource, and I would advocate strongly for a closer engagement with it than is currently the case.2In this essay I pursue this engagement by following one thread of thinking in Derrida's education writings, namely his attempts to transform how is conceived, paying particular attention to the role played in this transformation by Derrida's rethinking of philosophy's relation to other disciplines. My task is complicated somewhat by the fact that has more than one referent in these writings. In texts related to Derrida's involvement in French education debates of the 1970s, refers for the most part to philosophy in By contrast, in other texts, notably those associated with the College International de Philosophie, the term transcends this national boundary, signaling a broader European anchored in Kant. This duality means there is no single transformation of taking place in Derrida's work, and the content of these referents also poses challenges of translation for those, like myself, working in other institutional contexts, who still want to learn from what Derrida has to say. Nonetheless, these challenges are not insurmountable, and my wager is that Derrida's new understandings of philosophy, specifically as they developed through rethinking philosophy's relation to other modes of inquiry, can provide inspiration for our own attempts to defend and transform philosophical education.One constant across Derrida's work is that is never spoken of as eternal or unchanging, as something that transcends time. Rather, for Derrida always appears in institutional forms-with institution understood broadly, covering practices, traditions, and organizational bodies-and among these forms, one to which he refers frequently is the of in France. Now to speak of this in the singular is to some extent misleading. Philosophy in France is constituted by multiple institutions, in multiple areas of society, containing multiple divisions. Philosophy is taught in the lycees, in the universities, and in the grandes ecoles, and philosophical research is supported in many of these establishments, as well as at the College de France and the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. Philosophy also appears in the French public sphere at a level perhaps greater than in any other nation, with a presence across the media and a publishing industry that addresses a large public outside the academic world.Nonetheless, this complex multiplicity is given some measure of coherence due to its being organized around a focal point, the class in the lycee. Philosophy has long been a central feature of the baccalaureat, and, even as its presence has been reduced over time, it remains a required course across the general and the technical streams of the certificate today. This presence in the lycee curriculum has important practical consequences for everywhere else in France. The fact that studying in the grandes ecoles and universities might lead to a specific profession at the end-that of becoming a lycee professor-helps sustain enrollments in the subject. This in turn supports positions for those teaching in higher education. …

Joyce and Lacan: Reading, Writing, and Psychoanalysis by Daniel Bristow

Reviewed by: Joyce and Lacan: Reading, Writing, and Psychoanalysis by Daniel Bristow Luke Thurston (bio) JOYCE AND LACAN: READING, WRITING, AND PSYCHOANALYSIS, by Daniel Bristow. New York: Routledge Publishers, 2017. x + 190 pp. $135.20 cloth; $126.82 paper. This book begins, rather surprisingly in my view, by laying its Lacanian cards quite openly on the table: it is simply unabashed about the and which supposedly links the two famous names on its cover. It has no time, in other words, for all those critical and philosophical quibbles about the legitimacy of moving imperiously between the clinical and the cultural, and simply takes that legitimacy for granted. Once that initial step has been made, we are immediately plunged into the "case" of Joyce, a case to be explored psychoanalytically, like Sigmund Freud's "Rat Man" (with the obvious difference that the latter actually underwent psychoanalysis).1 Thus the question "Was Joyce mad?" (used as a chapter title) can be asked in all seriousness, as if it counted as a genuine inquiry, though I, for one, would not know how to start making it actually mean anything. Reading this book therefore requires a huge suspension of disbelief: if one can set aside the nagging sense of the speculative absurdity of the whole Lacanian appropriation of Joyce, an appropriation endorsed and indeed developed by Bristow, then there may be reasons to carry on reading, and even things of interest to Joyceans. It is a lively and playful engagement with Lacan's late work and the often obscure contexts of that work, and Bristow garners an impressive body of literary and philosophical sources, often hazarding unexpected connections. It is written with a breathless energy, a free-wheeling syntax that conveys a sense of almost evangelical excitement. An opening chapter sets out the often-told tale of Joyce's combination of interest in and hostility to psychoanalysis, noting the interactions with Carl Jung around the diagnosis of Joyce's daughter Lucia, the author's surreptitious redeployment of psychoanalytic texts in his writing, and then Lacan's notion of the sinthome, supposedly produced as a kind of solution to the enigmas of Joyce.2 Subsequent [End Page 231] chapters repeatedly return to that key notion, situating it with a range of striking diagrams within the overall field of Lacanian ideas. The book thus has much to say about the final period of Lacan's work, though the question of how relevant that work is to understanding Joyce remains uncertain. Bristow cheerfully ropes into his Lacanian knot some thinkers one feels might have been somewhat disconcerted to find themselves there, notably Jacques Derrida, who, in chapter 2, comes across as, in essence, a fairly Lacanian kind of chap. It is in one sense quite refreshing to find a writer who simply does not hesitate to make such extraordinary moves, though for anyone conversant with Derrida's work, with all its meticulous concern for the politics and ethics of the signature, again it is hard to suppress an anxious chuckle. The book is permeated with references to the latest work of Lacanians, above all of Slavoj Žižek: his colossal influence is evident on every page, from the wacky references (St. Augustine, Lord Byron, Hunter S Thompson, Red Dwarf …) to the often Yoda-like phrasing. The spirit of Žižek helps give the book its playful tone, though Bristow also pays close attention to the way the Slovenian panjandrum has chosen over the years to deploy and reinterpret the Lacanian sinthome. This is a timely reminder, in the end, of how open and "unfinished" this final phase of Lacan's work still remains and of the lack of overall consensus among psychoanalysts as to its value. Lacan's seminars in 1975-1976 were a mixture of abstruse technical reflections, addressed to practicing analysts, and creative, "wild" speculations about Joyce's "case," about his relationship with his father, about his daughter's illness, and so on. Bristow's book makes a laudable effort to sort out what may still be worth reinterpreting and developing from all this. But I think the end result of that effort, while stimulating and intriguing, is made less clear than it might be...

Andrew C. Willford. Tamils and the Haunting of Justice: History and Recognition in Malaysia's Plantations. Singapore: NUS Press, 2015, 336p.

Tamils and Haunting of Justice: History and Recognition in Malaysia's Plantations Andrew C. Willford Singapore: NUS Press, 2015, 336p.In Tamils and Haunting of Justice, Andrew Willford explores questions of justice and retribution confronting Malaysian Tamils as they face eviction from their homes and demolition of their community structures in former plantation districts in Kuala Lumpur by real estate developers.With urban development becoming hugely more profitable than rubber plantations in Malaysia's inner city districts, owners sold their plantation lands to lucrative housing developments. But these were lands in which thousands of Tamil residents have lived since late nineteenth century, and where British companies in colonial Malaya built their community-based model of rubber plantation production. Even as Malay government razes community structures of Tamils-the schools, temples, churches, and community halls-it also views them as merely ex-laborers to be classified as squatters and evicted. Tamils feel compensation for their lands is insufficient and desire for their longtime presence as important for achieving justice.Willford's study of Tamil plantation workers shows them resisting resettlement before negotiating compensation with notions of compensatory justice grounded in a desire for recognition. In attempts to prevent demolition of their temples and community buildings and the erasure of their associated memories, historiographic recognition becomes a kind of compensatory justice (p. 5).A key argument of book is that transformation of land usage in Malaysia cannot be separated from its inextricable links to religious-ethnic politics in nation-building, and deliberately measured politicizing of Islam and Malay rights. The book makes substantive and lengthy use of French philosopher Derrida's work to show that as a sense of victimization takes hold of an aggrieved minority, Malaysian Tamils, force of law that marks and sustains such dissonance becomes more visible, indeed deconstructible (p. 8). For Derrida, logic of is an important way of understanding justice (O'Riley 2007, 18). The spectral or haunting presence of past events, in this case demolition of Tamil ancestral lands and religious structures, disrupts and brings into question present history and events.Willford's extensive citing of Derrida's work forms essential strands of book's critique of Malaysian ethnic nationalism, racialized landscape within which these events unfold, and how seeking of justice by Tamils goes outside and beyond juristic or civil order, and even exceeds reason or logic to cross over into divine or sublime.The Tamil Sense of Cultural Historicity and JusticeBased on 17 months of ethnographic fieldwork in plantation areas between 2003 and 2009, Willford shows how ideas of race and ethnicity are produced, imagined, and negated within a political, material, legal, and discursive field. As they struggle for compensation and ultimately justice, book portrays sense of hurt and betrayal felt by Tamils as they are labeled as squatters despite their long community presence in area.The Tamil sense of justice goes beyond law. The strength of study is showing how notions of justice as imagined by marginalized and betrayed Tamils complicate legal demarcations of ethnic differences in post-colonial states (p. 6).The book provides a critique of development ideology of state, with its quite implicit cultural, nationalist, ethnic, and religious face. Malaysia's development politics have forced dramatic shifts in ethnic composition of Malaysia's industrial heartland, which as Willford notes intended goal all along (p. 34). As Willford says: To develop nation's core identity, politically constructed around Malay ethnicity and Islam, two being increasingly synonymous, Malays, it was argued, had to be united and strong-particularly at center (p. …

Life and the Technical Transformation of Différance: Stiegler and the Noopolitics of Becoming Non-Inhuman

Through a re-articulation of Derridean différance, Bernard Stiegler claims that the human is defined by an originary default that displaces all psychic and social life onto technical supplements. His philosophy of technics re-articulates the logic of the supplement as concerning both human reflexivity and its supports, and the history of the différance of life itself. This has been criticised for reducing Derrida's work to a metaphysics of presence, and for instituting a humanism of the relation to the inorganic. By refuting these claims, this article will show that Stiegler's doubling of différance enables him to articulate the human as constituted by both the individuation characteristic of ‘life’, and that of a technical, psychic, and collective individuation. Putting forward a reading of the logic of the trace in life, and emphasising the aspects of Leroi-Gourhan, Simondon, and Canguilhem that Stiegler uses in his reading of Derrida, I will demonstrate that the political stakes of adaption and adoption in his Noopolitics require this re-articulation of différance. Technics shapes the human future, arising from this differential mutation; marking the invention of the human as the site of the political.

Oddments: The Rest of Deconstruction

Though Derrida had often appealed to the notion of le reste, in works ranging from Glas (1974) to Shibbloth (1986) to Cinders (1988), it was not until his 2002 essay Reste – le maître that he would devote an entire work to the topic. In this essay, I look at a few of Derrida's early attempts to think le reste, particularly in relationship to poetry in ‘Che cos'è la poesia?’ before concentrating on Reste – le maître. I show that it is only in this latter work that Derrida develops a full ‘theory’ of le reste as a ‘quasi-transcendental’ along the lines of différance or, indeed – and Derrida himself makes the comparison – the ‘Good beyond being’ in Plato and Plotinus. But it is also in this latter text that Derrida uses the notion of the reste to suggest a relationship, an analogy, between the logic of sacrifice and mastery in Western onto-theology and the logic of sacrifice and mastery in the Brahmin culture of India. As such, I suggest in conclusion, le reste is perhaps the most suggestive and the most powerful notion in all of Derrida's work for thinking today the relationship between deconstruction and the rest of the world.

Postcardlogbook

‘Postcardlogbook’ is the “travel diary” of a rereading of Derrida's ‘Envois’ more than thirty years after its publication. It was penned during and after a period of research into the 1974–75 ‘La vie la mort’ seminar, undertaken at the University of California, Irvine, and mimics Derrida's own transatlantic voyages that provided the context for his text. My article borrows a series of formal devices that attempt to maintain it as a peripheral reading of the ‘Envois’. Notably, it refrains from quoting directly from the text or from entering into its substance. It nevertheless addresses, however indirectly, the intellectual climate in Paris at the time the ‘Envois’ were written, and draws comparisons with the current scene, with the current status of Derrida's work, and with problems of a more or less post-literary age.

Cascade of Remainders

In a very late essay on remains, one might say a throw away essay, Derrida doggedly tracks the relation of a certain desire to remains, linking it to sacrificial economy and to a hierarchical ontological order. If our concern is a thinking of desire as it pertains to remains, why should we not turn first, or perhaps exclusively, to Derrida's monumental works on the subject of remains, specifically Glas and Cinders, jettisoning the little-known essay we have not yet named? Certainly Derrida has said much in these well-known works about desire and remains, consumption and excretion, fire and ashes. So, why devote all one's attention, as we will do in this paper, to what might be said to be a morsel of an essay, which has remained largely unread and hence falls outside of Derrida commentary? The essay in question is his 2002 ‘Remains – the Master, or the Supplement of Infinity’, a homage to Charles Malamoud, a French ethnologist and scholar of Indian and Oriental religions whose work, especially his 1989 Cooking the World, was influential on Derrida's thinking concerning the ‘rhetorics of cannibalism’ and ‘eating the other’ and featured prominently in his seminars from 1989–1991 on the aforementioned themes. In ‘Remains – the Master’, a dense and rich essay, Derrida analogically links two vastly different cultures – the Brahmanic of India and the Greco-European – in terms of a ‘law of remainders’, which for both traditions, he claims, is an organizing principle of humans, gods, and the whole of the world. In his essay Derrida returns to or, more accurately, remains with a thinking of ‘the French word “reste”, the remnants [restance] of “reste”’, which, as Derrida notes, is ‘difficult to translate in an exhaustive or transparent manner,’ that is, ‘without remainder’ (2002, 41). However, what this paper will follow is the circulation of remainders in the Vedic tradition, as analysed by Derrida and Malamoud. In doing so, we can begin to not only translate the notion of Malamoud's ‘cascade de restes’ from one culture, logic, and idiom to another but understand how for Derrida this ritual downpour of remainders not only institutes a hierarchy of remainders but also produces ipseity.

Aut-ors of our Experience: Interrogating Intersections of Autistic Identity

Narratives of the Autistic experience are often told, interpreted, and assigned value by people who are not Autistic, allowing dominant cultural understandings of Autism to pervade without substantial inquiry. In academia, a space in which there is little room for Autistic people in the first place, the power of these dominant ideologies is used to minimize our voices, dismiss our concerns, and devalue our insights. Drawing from Spry’s definition of auto-ethnography and using the works of Derrida and Ronell as aesthetic inspiration, we share and interpret our lived experiences to reclaim our Autistic academic identity. We deliberately disrupt conventions of scholarly writing and storytelling to demonstrate that Autistic narratives should and do interrupt, challenge, or even completely undermine academic normativity. We deploy this cripping-up of our experiences to interrogate how Autistic identity is constructed and negotiated in academia. In doing so, we explore avenues to integrate and celebrate Autism in academic spaces so that scholarship in disability studies, critical autism studies, and gender studies can be enhanced.

The Play of the World: The End, the Great Outdoors, the Outside, Alterity and the Real

Both in his earliest debates with thinkers such as Foucault and Levinas, and in later critiques of political immediacy, Derrida invoked the inescapable burden of a necessary but impossible universalism. By raising the stakes so high it would seem that deconstruction generates hyperbolic conceptions of ethics and justice, but also precludes any form of day to day political positivity. In this essay I pursue the seemingly less ‘ethical’ conception of play in Derrida's work to argue for a multiple universalism.

Grammatology: A Vital Science

This essay argues that Jacques Derrida's early work on grammatology and the science of writing continues to have interventionary relevance for how we understand the scientific enterprise today. Catherine Malabou has argued that the importance of Derrida's contribution has waned because the metaphors and tropes that he deploys have been eclipsed with time, becoming less applicable in explanations of how things work. Offering her own replacement term, ‘plastology’, Malabou argues that insights into the operations of brain plasticity, for example, have superseded graphic metaphors. I suggest that Malabou's remedial is misguided because Derrida's ‘graphematic structure’ was never intended to answer the problem of representational accuracy. Indeed, Derrida advises that his non-concepts ‘trace’, ‘gramme’ or ‘writing’ are no more graphic than phonological, no more temporal than spatial. I argue, with Derrida, that a model, or representation, is not a third term in-between the biologist and biology or the writer and the world. In grammatology's onto-epistemological confounding of subject with/in object, we find that ‘writing's’ riddles also appear in/as the entanglements of quantum physics, where the one who knows, the measuring apparatus and the object to be interpreted are strangely involved.

Living Together v. Living Well Together: A Normative Examination of the SAS Case

The European Court of Human Rights decision in <em>SAS</em> from France illustrates how a policy and national mantra that ostensibly aims to enhance inclusiveness, ‘living together’, is legally deployed in a manner that may have the opposite effect. In essence, despite acknowledging the sincerity of SAS’s religious practice of wearing the niqab, and her agency in making the decision to do so, the Court focuses on radicalism and women’s oppression amongst Muslims. Taking the notion of living together as the beginning point, the paper explores the normative assumptions underlying this notion as illustrated in the judgment of the Court. An alternative approach, drawing on the work of Derrida for the notion of ‘living well together’ will be proposed and its implications for social inclusion explicated. The paper’s aim is to move beyond the specific example of <em>SAS</em> and France to argue that the <em>SAS</em> pattern of identifying particular values as ‘national values’, the deployment of those values through law, policy and public discourse, and their exclusionary effects is playing out in a number of Western democracies, including Canada, the country with which the author is most familiar. Because of this widespread dissemination of values and their framing as representative of who ‘we’ are, there is a pressing need to consider the potentially alienating effects of a specific manifestation of ‘living together’ and an alternative model of ‘living well together’.

Philosophy, Violence, Metaphor

If we did not stop to think, it would be easy (and veridical) to describe Ann Murphy’s 2012 study Violence and the Philosophical Imaginary as an ‘intervention’ or an ‘event’ in philosophical studies in the continental tradition. But Murphy’s book does what all good works of philosophy do. It makes us stop to think. It asks us to stand back from where we find ourselves. It prompts us, or at least those of us trained in a certain lineage of modern thought, to step out from behind the lenses through which we have come to see, and which have become almost invisible to us (Murphy 2012, 14). As its title suggests, Murphy’s work takes seriously the role of metaphor in philosophical work, and the shaping of the Bimaginary^ of specific philosophical traditions: their ways of talking, writing, speaking, even declaiming. ‘So far, so good,’ someone trained in the continental tradition might say—and indeed, Murphy’s book is informed by a deep familiarity with the works of Derrida, Nancy, Lyotard, Le Doeuff and others within this tradition who have questioned the old philosophy-literaturerhetoric distinction. But Murphy’s book, here drawing more specifically on Le Doeuff, is also a work that is animated by a desire to ‘take stock’ of the preeminence of violent metaphors to describe ostensibly non-violent phenomena, processes or objects in contemporary thought (117). Rather than ignoring these phenomena, Violence and the Philosophical Imaginary sets out to ‘think through what is at stake in the proliferation of these images’ of violence (1). Far from being incidental to the main philosophical game, Murphy’s claim is that images of violence have a literally transcendental, foundational role in many postwar continental thinkers’ works. They become what Hans Blumenberg has called ‘constitutive metaphors’ for a subfield of inquiry, vital to conceptions of subjectivity, identity, representation and knowledge. These are each often conceived of as operating, SOPHIA (2016) 55:1–4 DOI 10.1007/s11841-016-0522-4

<i>Imitatio Christi</i> and the holy folly of divine violence: The church as ultimate criminal

The calling of the church is to follow Christ ( imitatio Christi ). What does this calling entail? Following Žižek’s and Derrida’s interpretation of Benjamin’s interpretation of law and violence, the paper will argue that the call to follow Christ is not to subvert the law, but as Paul argues - Christ came to destroy the law. In this article, Christ will be interpreted as one who did not counter this violence of the law (state-maintaining violence) with a counter violence of state-forming violence, but completely undermined the justification of both forms of violence (state-forming and state-maintaining) with a divine violence. If the Christ event is read as an exemplary narrative of the post-metaphysics in the linguistic turn in the work of Derrida, this opens up new possibilities for both theology as well as the role of the church within the context of a postmodern world, and these possibilities will be explored.

The Pieties of the Death Sentence in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go

Since its publication in 2005, Kazuo Ishiguro’s bestselling novel Never Let Me Go has become a popular text in literary studies, no doubt because it addresses, however obliquely, a number of the preoccupations of contemporary criticism. The novel has been cited not only in discussions to do with its immediate themes of cloning, technology and the idea of the post-human, but also in relation to narrative ethics, the culture of socialization and the welfare state, and the production of world literature and the globalized literary novel. Moreover, the reception of the novel has also coincided with the decade since the death of Jacques Derrida in 2004, during which time there has been, according to some commentators, a ‘post-deconstructive’ turn in literary theory against the work of Derrida. Claire Colebrook, for example, has characterized this period as showing a pronounced ‘affirmation of life’ and a (in her opinion) regrettable move away from the problems of language and textuality in literary theory towards concepts of affect, the body and vitalism: ‘Discontent, ill feeling, sentiment, sensitivity, emotion and affect: all these terms are now championed as ways in which the “linguistic” prejudices of an earlier era of high theory might be overcome’. It is therefore tempting to consider whether the success of the novel in any way reflects the decade’s alleged critical turn to ideas of life.

Self-Re-Interpretations (Of the Trace): From Restricted to General Substitutability

This article elaborates on Christopher Norris's claim that certain aspects of Derrida's work are amenable to formalisation in modal-logical terms. Norris contends that any adequate analysis of the logic behind Derrida's work must provide an account of the notions of possibility, necessity, and necessary possibility, particularly as they are related to Derrida's notion of iterability. This article examines the further hypothesis that Derrida's understanding of modality, according to which possibilities must be accounted for even if they are never realised, might even better be described in terms of possible worlds. In possible-worlds semantics, the conceptual meaning of a statement is constituted by the set of alternative contexts in which that statement is true. This article argues, however, that possible-worlds semantics would be unthinkable without the experience that one referent can be substituted for another. The possibility of this experience is best described in Derridean terms. Read through Derrida's thought of the trace, the properly semantic substitutions (of names in view of a thing and of things in view of a concept) may come to be seen as dependent on the substitution of the thing for itself; on what Derrida calls ‘the substitution of the unique for the unique’.

The impossible diagram of history: ‘History’ in Derrida'sOf Grammatology

This article presents Derrida as a philosopher of history by reinterpreting his De la Grammatologie. In particular, it provides a schematic reconstruction of Part II of that book from the perspective of the problem of history. My account extends work on historicity in Derrida by privileging the themes of ‘history’ and ‘diagram’ in the Rousseau part. I thereby establish a Derridean concept of history which aims at accounting for the continuities and discontinuities of the past. This is in contrast to some criticism that Derrida leaves behind, or inadequately accounts for history. Derrida describes a necessarily contorted condition of relating any historical event or development to itself or to another. This historicity informs other well-known aspects of Derrida's work, like the ‘quasi-transcendental’ terms he developed. I conclude that ‘history’ is a critical element in any understanding of deconstruction, and that deconstruction entails new kinds of history, but that some axioms of current historical thought require reformation.