Derrida's Work Research Articles

A Genealogy of Violence, from Light to the Autoimmune

This essay explores the treatment of violence in Derrida's ethico-political work, stressing the underlying continuity of Derrida's thinking of politics, from his first reading of Levinas to one of the last notions he developed, autoimmunity. Haddad analyzes the use to which the idea of a “lesser violence” has been put, arguing that it is incompatible with Derrida's other claims.

Rogue Democracy

Departing from Derrida's Rogues, this article outlines the political dimensions of Derrida's later work, especially his engagement with Carl Schmitt's concept of the political and the state of exception and his own elaboration of the notions of sovereignty and of autoimmunity.

Fors Clavigera: Outside Chances, Posthumous Letters

This reading of Ruskin's ‘ Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain ’ (1871–84) discusses what it might mean to think of these letters as ‘posthumous’—one description that Ruskin used of his work—and examines what in them resists that sense that they are free from the founding authority of the father, and so are controlled by chance (fors). Examining the letters closely, for the implications of the meaning of their title, and giving attention to their language, the essay sees the letters as divided between wanting to claim and use authority (as with the comments on Whistler), and as accepting a certain madness, or chance, within both life and art. The work of Derrida is used to comment on the power of this chance, and to give sense to the idea of the ‘gift’ as this appears in Ruskin's text.

There is no World without End (Salut): Derrida's Phenomenology of the Extra-Mundane

Patrick O'Connor's contribution brings us back to the question with which this issue started, namely whether, after Husserl, phenomenology can still profit from a thinking of the epoche. In There is no World Without End (Salut): Derrida's Phenomenology of the Extra-Mundane O'Connor brings out the radicality of Jacques Derrida's philosophy with respect to a thinking of 'world'. Developing key Husserlian and Heideggerian themes to broaden Husserl's phenomenological theory of consciousness, Derrida's early work, according to O'Connor, assesses the capacity of the phenomenological reduction to escape the mundane natural attitude. While working through phenomenology, Derrida still remains a post-phenomenological thinker, arriving at a more ontological albeit differential expression of phenomena. O'Connor then isolates the manner in which Derrida discusses phenomenological concepts such as the sensible and the intelligible, the natural attitude, immanence and transcendence, intentionality and finitude in order to reflect on how consciousness is pre-reflectively constituted by an irreducible intersection with the 'world' and the loss of world. O'Connor demonstrates that throughout his career, from his earliest work on genesis to his last works on spectrality and touch, Derrida always remained faithful to this centrality of a suspension of the phenomenologically mundane world.

The Time of his Life

Throughout his life, contemporaries of Blanchot either sought to relegate his writing to the past, or else espoused it uncritically in a gesture akin to what Jean-Luc Nancy once called syncope. Blanchot thus divided his epoch in a way that was less a polarization than a struggle for the present in which thought takes place. Consequently, readers today in search of what makes Blanchot continue to be a contemporary find that the time of his writing is shrouded in a curiously unstable quantity of oblivion. This article argues that Blanchot's refusal of biography brings about an inaugural disruption of the temporality of rational thought. From the outset, the ‘I am’ of reflection is accompanied in his writing by an ‘I am dead’ which is narrative in nature. Jacques Derrida's work is taken to exemplify the espousal of Blanchot by his contemporaries. Despite the acuity of Derrida's analyses of the fractured present of rational discourse, however, the article seeks to demonstrate that the priority of narrative in Blanchot's thought gives rise to a temporality for which philosophy can never find the measure.

The impact of `exile' on thought: Plotinus, Derrida and Gnosticism

This article examines the impact of `exile' — as an individual or collective experience — on how human experience is theorized. The relationship between `exile' and thought is initially approached historically by looking at the period that Eric Dodds famously called the `age of anxiety' in late antiquity, i.e. the period between the emperors Aurelius and Constantine. A particular interest is in the dynamics of `empire' and the concomitant religious ferment as a context in which `exile', both experientially and symbolically, appears to assume an overbearing significance. Plotinus' narrative of emanation and epistrophe as well as a group of narratives often classified as `Gnosticism' are juxtaposed as two radical examples of a wider spiritual trend at the time according to which `exile' could be considered constitutive of human experience. By way of an historical analogy, the insights gained from this study of late antiquity are then used to guide an analysis of the current, `restless' epoch, in which experiences of displacement and exile on a mass scale undermine traditional notions of belonging, thus reviving the gnostic vision of cosmic reality as an alien, exilic environment. The article concludes with a discussion of Jacques Derrida's work as an example of contemporary gnosticism, in which a `metaphysics of exile' is presented in the disguise of an `exile from metaphysics'.

A Date, a Place, a Name: Jacques Derrida's Holocaust Translations

f) n Rams, Jacques Derrida reflects on his un-interrupted [le dialogue / ininterrompu] with Hans Georg Gadamer.1 Across impassable caesura of German philosopher's death, Derrida extends a belated invitation to Gadamer to engage in a on Paul Celan' s poetry and prose. Interrupted yet unceasing, posthumous two infinities, poem, as stated in subtitle takes place as an act of witness to third and as a tribute to a common friend and his poetic legacy. This moment of recollection and (double) mourning also involves a translation and retranslation of Celan's poetic word word of a poet-translator, whose own poetry has been often deemed untranslatable. Indeed, question of limits of interpretation between hermeneutics and deconstruction pivots on question of limits of translation. As has often been noted, problematic of translation, of border-crossing both between languages and within each language, is central to Derrida's work.2 In his reflection on translation, Derrida acknowledges his indebtedness to Walter Benjamin's articulation of the task of translator, on one hand, and to Heidegger's writings on language on other. What is beginning to emerge here is a constellation of texts functioning as sites of textual encounters that Derrida orchestrates between Celan and Heidegger, to which Benjamin has also been invited (these are encounters that will culminate in coda of Derrida's posthumous exchange with Gadamer). For purposes of this essay, I will focus on three of these texts, which Derrida wrote between years 1984 and 1987: Des Tours de Babel, Shibboleth: For Paul Celan, and Of Spirit.5 In a way, in his respective engagements with Heidegger's texts and with Celan's poems, Derrida takes up theme of a hoped-for yet unrealized encounter between thinker and poet, as it was alluded to in Celan's Todtnauberg.JThe poem transcribes a fated meeting between Jewish German poet from Romania and German philosopher, and their walk in woods of Black Forest down path that will forever remain half-trodden (Celan 2001, 13).4 Yet, it is this irrevocably interrupted conversation that Derrida will take up and carry toward its unfulfilled promise.

Différantial Atopologies, Mathematical and Ethico-Political: Light, Space, and Alterity in Derrida

Taking as its point of departure the question of light vis-à-vis the question of being in Derrida's work, this article discusses Derrida's radical conceptions of khoral (a)spatiality and alterity, by linking his first book on Edmund Husserl's “The Origin of Geometry” and his early critique of Emmanuel Levinas to his exploration of the ethico-political problematics, in part, again, via Levinas, in his latest works. The article also considers Derrida's reading of Kafka in “Before the Law,” decisive for his analysis of the problematics in question and for our understanding of the relationships between “geometry and democracy.” These relationships, the article argues, are an essential concern of much of Derrida's work and of our culture, from the pre-Socratics on.

Without Derrida

This essay explores the adventures of the word “without” in Jacques Derrida's work from the mid-1970s until his death. It is argued that Derrida comes to Yale primarily with a new reading of Kantian formalism in mind (“purpose without purposiveness”) and that this in part explains both the ready acceptance and the resistance he found at Yale. It is further argued that by the time Derrida left Yale in the mid-1980s, the word “without” was serving a new end: ethics and religion. And yet Derrida remained Kantian in his main emphases.

Learning a Strange Native Language

The colonial practice of destroying native cultures and supressing native languages is already familiar; less thoroughly investigated is the set of practices adopted by newly independent (or simply new) nations in an effort to re-establish (or simply establish) a cultural and national identity, particularly insofar as that involves attempting to revive (or invent) a dead or moribund language. Here I bring Derrida's work to bear on these issues through an examination of the fate of the Irish language after colonization. Can a population now monolingual in the language of the coloniser be convinced that acquisition of its no-longer-native native language is a cultural imperative? How to describe the experience of a population upon whom this imperative is officially imposed by a state apparatus that is no longer that of the coloniser? In what sense is this unknown language its own? In what sense is this state apparatus or this culture its own? How is this peculiar split in the identity of such a nation-state to be understood? How is such an entity to understand itself in the midst of a post-national Europe?

On Jacques Derrida: The politics of mourning

This article, written in November 2004 in reply to the multitude of responses to the death of French philosopher-theorist Jacques Derrida in October of that year, is intended, nearly three years after his passing, to correct prevalent misreadings of Derrida's work and, it is hoped, to introduce his corpus (its breadth and depth) to a new ‘audience’. Rethinking History did not publish an obituary at the time, and given the impact of Derrida's ‘deconstructive readings’ on the discipline of ‘History’—as well as a multitude of other disciplines (Philosophy, Literature, Political Theory) the author's argument is that his corpus demands to be counter-signed affirmatively by a new generation of historians/theorists etc.

The Gift of Example: Derrida and the Origins of the Eighteenth Century

This piece reflects on the status of the example in Derrida's writing, especially the example of Rousseau in Of Grammatology. Whereas Derrida's work is often considered non- or even anti-historical I suggest, rather, that it tends to consider the text as having a complex historicity and temporality, indeed, that it is a kind of event. Reading has to respect both the singulârity of the text as well as what Derrida maintains are the "numerous epochs" (plusieurs ages) of any text. I point also to the fertility of Derrida's writing on the discourse of origins and outline one possible way to extend Derrida's work along those lines.

Loss and Presence in Three Poetic Texts of Mourning

In Truinas, le 21 avril 2001 Philippe Jaccottet recounts the funeral of Andre du Bouchet, which took place in Truinas on that day. (1) He describes the extraordinary non-ceremony; there was no liturgy, only a reading of du Bouchet's poem L'Avril, and informal addresses by friends and writers, including Jaccottet himself. (2) I shall discuss Jaccottet's text in conjunction with two others: Tubingen, le 22 mai 1986, in which du Bouchet responds to the work of Paul Celan, who died in 1970, and Yves Bonnefoy's L'Etranger de Giacometti, published in 1967 shortly after the death of Alberto Giacometti. (3) There are a number of connections between these figures, but the most important are ties of friendship. Jaccottet went to Truinas on the 21st of April 2001 to mourn his friend. Similarly, du Bouchet was a friend of Celan, as well as a translator of his work into French. Bonnefoy was not friends with Giacometti in quite the same way because he was born thirty years later than the artist, but Giacometti is famous for his friendships and associations with writers. Many writers considered they had affinities with him, and several of them collaborated on the journal L'Ephemere, the first issue of which was dedicated to his work. All issues would carry a Giacometti drawing of a standing nude on the front cover. Bonnefoy's text was published in this first number, alongside other tributes that included a piece by du Bouchet, although this is less easily described as a text of loss. Du Bouchet worked with Bonnefoy on the editorial board of L'Ephemere, and Jaccottet contributed occasionally to the journal. (4) With friendship, however, came difference. Bonnefoy is writing about an artist who worked in a different medium--plastic art--a medium that is other to language. Du Bouchet is discussing a writer to whom he felt very close, but who wrote in a foreign language that du Bouchet considered he did not know well. Conversely, Jaccottet and du Bouchet are usually viewed in similar terms, as poets of the natural world and the impersonal poetic subject. It is in Jaccottet's text, moreover, that we note the greatest sense of loss. In those by du Bouchet and Bonnefoy, otherness, or strangeness, paradoxically brings the lost person closer to the writer. Mourning is discussed in contemporary theoretical works as a realization of absence; the specter of loss haunts texts and shows presence to be an illusion. In this paper, I shall consider how these texts by Bonnefoy and du Bouchet work to nuance that conclusion. Mourning Presence Freud's distinction between mourning and melancholia has been questioned in recent work. Freud argues that mourning that is not successfully completed leads to melancholia, in which the subject is unable to detach him- or herself from the person s/he has lost and is therefore caught in a fixed attachment to an absent person. (5) Derrida considers whether successful mourning is possible or even desirable. (6) He refuses discussion of whether someone who was present can be successfully accepted as absent, because he insists that people are never present to one another in the first place. In Memoires: pour Paul de Man he writes that the other might only fully come to us as other after his or her death, through the experience of mourning. (7) The subject of mourning is especially pertinent to Derrida's later work, including his tributes to friends published as The Work of Mourning. (8) In their introduction to this volume, the editors stress that, for Derrida, loss was inherent in friendship; friends always know that one of them is bound to lose the other (1). They also discuss his dilemma over whether, and how much, to quote his friends' own words in these addresses. Derrida writes in his piece on Roland Barthes: Two infidelities, an impossible choice: on the one hand, not to say anything that comes back to oneself, to one's own voice, to remain silent, or at the very least to let oneself be accompanied or preceded in counterpoint by the friend's voice. …

Exploring ‘the Impossible’: Jacques Derrida, John Caputo and the Philosophy of History

In this paper I explore one possible motivational (quasi-) philosophy for historians continuing to write history in the wake of Derridean deconstruction. This philosophy of history is structured around one of the alternative terms for deconstruction in Derrida's work, namely the notion of ‘the impossible’. Throughout this paper I will be concentrating on John Caputo's interpretation of Derrida's work and, in the process, addressing some alternative (mis)readings of deconstruction (i.e. those at odds with my own reading and that of Caputo's) as they relate to the development of a philosophy of history and historical praxis generally. Specifically, I will argue for the importance of Caputo's exegesis of—and reflections on—‘the impossible’, as well as his own closely related notion of ‘a hermeneutics more radically conceived’, as important starting points for the development of a viable philosophy of history after the postmodern turn; a philosophy of history that is undecidably future oriented as opposed to closure oriented. I will argue that the implications of Derrida's work, and particularly of Caputo's reading of Derrida (and, in my estimation, Caputo is the most stimulating and suggestive interpreter and developer of Derrida's thought currently writing), opens up vital possibilities and challenges for historians in the production of their histories. Following Caputo, I will argue that a philosophy of history that is ‘open’ to and structured around exploring ‘the impossible’ is inescapably religious and messianic in structure—albeit in the Derridean sense of ‘religion without religion’ and ‘messianicity’—thus re-emphasizing the axioms of faith and belief vis-à-vis the role and work of the historian rather than—although not in opposition to—relativism and scepticism. In the course of this argument I suggest some possible distinctives of a philosophy of history that is shaped by a passion for ‘the impossible’—as opposed to appropriating it as just another method—as well as Caputo's associated desire for a hermeneutics more radically conceived and consider how they might, in turn, mould the types of histories produced by historians.

For the asking

"For the Asking" is published in "Sexuality and Culture: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly", a peer-reviewed academic journal. Sexologists, sociologists, filmmakers and novelists have frequently considered the question of what it is to be a prostitute. This paper questions the extent to which we can ever "know" a prostitute. Even prostitutes themselves, in interviews, in "confessions", in their autobiographies, are bound up in layers of fiction. This paper, utilising the works of a range of theorists, academics, prostitute voices, personal meetings, literary authors and trash literature, interrogates the nature of research in prostitution studies and looks at representations of the prostitute in both academia and literature. From a theoretical standpoint it draws on the work of Derrida and Barthes and is particularly concerned with the concepts of "knowing" and "naming". Like much of my writing, it considers cultural phenomena that is often ignored by mainstream society. The research leading to “For the Asking” draws heavily on and complements my fictional series Briefplays (plays on time and the prostitute/client exchange). The essay shares a theoretical perspective with this earlier work, particularly Briefplay 3, which appeared in "Feminist Review" Number 67, Spring, 2001, special issue "Sex Work Reassessed". The interlinked plays and performance pieces have been performed by the author as well as sex workers.

The Politics of Derrida: Revisiting the Past

Those who have read the recent issue of the journal SubStance that was dedicated to Jacques Derrida (34.1 [2005]) know that I have been among the first ones who protested against the indecent, almost obscene, obituaries that his death provoked, by the end of 2004, in the New York Times and The Economist. In fact, I may say that I have been one of the few persons who have always defended Derrida's work, both in France and in the US, and that I have done so continuously since my first articles on him appeared in Le Monde (1973) and Critique (1974). Derrida was a great professor, a powerful writer, and a philosopher who was instrumental in explaining why, contrary to what Heidegger believed, we simply cannot get out of the logocentrism characteristic of Western metaphysics. Furthermore, I am convinced that we still have a lot to learn from the way he deconstructed texts. Yet all this does not mean that I want to ignore the relevant critiques that have been expressed against some of his positions. And as his political positions, in particular, have often been a controversial issue, my aim, in the present essay, will be to revisit them and check their coherence-which I will try to do without indulging in unnecessary polemics. Let us go back to the year 1952, when Derrida was admitted into the Ecole normale superieure (ENS). At that time, the caiman (as the normaliens used to say in their own slang) or the department chair (as we would say today) who was in charge of philosophy students was Louis Althusser (1918-1990). Their first contact, in the early 1950s,

The Inclusion of the Other?

In his most recent work, Jürgen Habermas has proposed a deliberative account of tolerance where the norms of tolerance—including the threshold of tolerance and the norms regulating the relationship between the tolerating and the tolerated parties—are the outcomes of deliberations among the citizens affected by the norms. He thinks that in this way, the threshold of tolerance can be rationalized and the relationship between tolerating and tolerated will rest on the symmetrical relations of public deliberations. In this essay, and inspired by Jacques Derrida's work on the concept of hospitality, I propose a deconstructive reading of Habermas's writings on tolerance. I argue that Habermas is ultimately unable to provide a rational foundation for tolerance and that his conception of tolerance encounters the same problems he is trying to avoid, namely, the contingency of the threshold of tolerance and a paternalistic relation between tolerating and tolerated. Yet, contra Habermas, the deconstruction of tolerance does not result in its destruction and does not force us to give up on the concept and practice of tolerance.

Scènes des différences

The main issues of this interview are the continuity of Derrida's work since Writing and Difference and Of Grammatology, and the future - in its perpetually announced death - of deconstructionism.

Sites and parasites of meaning: Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess’

Robert Browning’s so-called dramatic lyric ‘My Last Duchess’ has been interpreted differently by different critics, some seeing the Duke as shrewd and others seeing him as witless. This article attempts to account for these differing interpretations by analysing indeterminacies in the language of the poem. Starting out with the work of Derrida on speech act theory, and findings on the role of the right hemisphere in language processing, it goes on to propose techniques of linguistic analysis based on systemic-functional linguistics and the concept of particle-waves of language first discussed in Melrose (1996). The article then analyses a number of these so-called particle-waves in ‘My Last Duchess’, and concludes that opposing interpretations of the Duke can be traced to the indeterminacies of language in the particle-waves.

“It’s a joke, I do not accept”: Derrida’s Demanding Call and Other Dead Voices

This paper explores the notions of indebtedness in the work of Derrida and the complex series of negotiations he employs in dealing with the work of Heidegger, Blanchot and Beckett, principally in the works The Post Card, “Living On: Border Lines”, The Work of Mourning and “Aphorism Countertime”. What does the obligation to read the work of Derrida entail? The ethical demand of history and the political is strewn with ghosts and phantoms; all the dead voices of a ruined Beckettian world that haunts the survivors with hoax calls from beyond the grave. Yet through this “hauntology” Derrida insists on the power of the future, the “to come”, as an event held open and irreducible to thought. The apparent stasis of this position—precisely its apparition—entails the obligation to “go on” beyond the affectation of mourning and engage most properly, that is on our own, with notions of the promise, legacy, survival and remains. The paper will trace through some questions posed by David Wood in “Following Derrida” concerning reverse charge phone calls and who pays or is asked to collect. The very foundations of community and responsibility are funded by the desire to accept the call of all the dead voices (to commodify them), but also on a certain refusal, or reaffirmation by those who live on: to not accept, and in doing so to respond to friendship, the time of the other and tomorrow.