This book examines a series of common metaphors in the works of Derrida and the Sufism of Muhyddin Ibn 'Arabi, considered to be of the most influential figures in Islamic thought. The author addresses the significant absence of attention on the relationship between Islam and Derrida and also provides a deconstructive perspective on Ibn 'Arabi.

Jacques Derrida, one of the most influential, controversialb and complex thinkers of our time, has come to be at the center of many political debates. This is the first book to consider the political implications of Derrida's deconstruction. It is a timely response both to Derrida's own recent shift towards thinking about the political, and to the political focus of contemporary Continental philosophy. Richard Beardsworth's study, Derrida and the Political, locates a way of thinking about deconstruction using the tools of (...) political philosophy. (shrink)

Despite accusations of irresponsibility and negativity, Jacques Derrida's deconstruction has had an immense influence on contemporary social, political and cultural critique. 'Evolving negativity' offers a preliminary explanation of this influence by tracing the philosophical 'family tree' that links deconstruction to German Critical Theory via the Frankfurt School. The paper explores the origins of a certain dynamic and productive notion of negativity in Hegel's dialectic and describes its 'evolution' in the works of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno as a process of (...) de-determination that finds its culmination in Derrida's notion of 'différance'. Set free of its totalizing, teleological force, Derrida's negativity as 'différance' is compared with Hegel's more general and generative notion of Negativität. The paper concludes that for this branch of 'critical' thinking, to flourish in the shadow of Hegel means also to be continually reinventing his respect for difference and negativity, and transforming it to respond to the questions of the present. Key Words: Adorno • Critical Theory • deconstruction • Derrida • dialectic • différance • difference • Hegel • Horkheimer • negativity. (shrink)

Interrupting Derrida is a major new work by Geoffrey Bennington, internationally renowned Derrida scholar and translator of Derrida's work. This bold and provocative collection of essays surveys key themes in work by and about Derrida. Presenting a compelling challenge to influential readings of Derrida that have emerged from both the philosophical and literary traditions, Bennington shows how Derrida's work "interrupts" metaphysics, not by redefining philosophy but by rendering it indefinite. Arguing that we can fruitfully interrupt Derrida himself, Bennington offers us (...) a dazzling and provocative reading that points the way towards any future dialogue with Derrida's work. (shrink)

How to introduce 'politics' as a specific concept within a deconstructive style of thinking? In order to answer this question, this contribution compares Derrida with Laclau. According to the former the starting-point of a deconstructive style of thinking is différance. It links together the economic detour of homecoming and the relation to otherness. Laclau's analysis of politics as hegemonization within a situation of undecidability presupposes this notion of différance and can therefore be useful in introducing politics within a deconstructive style (...) of thinking. But there still is a major difference between Derrida and Laclau's decisionism: if différance as the relation without relation of economy and otherness cannot avoid decisions based on power in order to stabilize the social, these decisions are always marked by passivity and therefore deconstructible in the name of 'justice' that exceeds politics even if it takes place nowhere but within politics. Key Words: decisionism • . Derrida • . hegemony • . Laclau • . law. (shrink)

Among educational theorists and philosophers there is growing interest in the work of Jacques Derrida and his philosophy of deconstruction. This important new book demonstrates how his work provides a highly relevant perspective on the aims, content and nature of education in contemporary, multicultural societies.

The difficulty to pin down the philosophical content of structuralism depends on the fact that it operates on an implicit metaphysics; such a metaphysics can be best unfolded by examining Jacques Derrida's deconstructionist critique of it. The essay argues that both structuralism and Derrida's critique rely on holistic premises. From an initial externalist definition of structure, structuralism's metaphysics emerges as a kind of 'immanent' holism, similar to the one pursued, in the contemporary analytic panorama, by Donald Davidson. By contrast, Derrida's (...) deconstructionist critique appears engaged in a 'quasi-transcendental' version of holism, which the author analyzes in connection with Martin Heidegger's notion of Verwindung, or twisted overcoming. Key Words: deconstruction • differenc • genealogy • holism • internalism/externalism • structuralism • Verwindung. (shrink)

: Are Derrida’s critique of presence and Dōgen’s emphasis on presence incompatible? I argue that they are not—and, in fact, that there is a deep connection between the projects of the two thinkers. In showing this I hope to combat some serious misconceptions about essential aspects of both Zen Buddhism and deconstruction.

This paper offers a critique of Derrida's deconstruction of the promise on the grounds that it does not adequately account for the ethical constitution of the promise in the pragmatic context of face-to-face dialogue. Instead, Derrida focuses on the way in which the promise opens the horizon of interpretation or readability for an indefinite community of readers. Derrida's view is explicated at length, drawing on Limited Inc, Le monolinguisme de l'autre: ou, la prosthèse d'origine, and 'Avances', the Preface to Serge (...) Margel's Le tombeau du dieu artisan. Paul Ricoeur's interpretation of the promise as an attestation of my availability to the other person is presented as a more justifiable grounding of ethics. Key Words: attestation • community • Derrida • ethics • pragmatics • promise • Ricoeur. (shrink)

This paper explores two different methods of reading ‘Derrida’s own conscience’ – that is, of raising the question of ethics and obligation in deconstruction. The two readings under discussion here are staged by Jean-Luc Nancy in his seminal essay ‘The Free Voice of Man’. In the first half of the paper, I engage in a reading of Nancy’s essay in which I seek not only to highlight Nancy’s double formulation of the place of ethics in deconstruction, but also to re-mark (...) the transition in Derrida’s writings from the priority of the question to an emphasis on a call that precedes the question. In order to further explore this displacement of the priority of the question, the second half of the essay takes up an analysis of Derrida’s employment of the motif of ‘ Viens ’ (‘Come’) in his essay ‘On a Newly Arisen Apocalyptic Tone in Philosophy’. I suggest that ‘ Viens ’ should be read as Derrida’s formulation of: (1) another response, beyond questioning, to a call that precedes any question; (2) another thought of conscience and obligation; and (3) a thought of the trace of alterity at the very heart of conscience that signals the impossibility of any form of good conscience. Key Words: apocalypse • call • conscience • ethics • question • Viens. (shrink)

What is the significance of and logic behind Jacques Derrida's recent "political" writings? While Derrida's work refuses to obey any singular movement or register, he does, nonetheless, make recurrent attempts to negotiate between a politics of identity and difference. A similar undertaking can be found in the radical democratic writings of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. An encounter between these thinkers is here carried out in order to elucidate key themes in Derrida's The Other Heading. The reading aims at developing (...) and contextualising Derrida's relation to radical democratic thought so that his political strategies can be made more explicit. (shrink)

This article focuses on Michel Foucault’s concepts of authorship and power. Jacques Derrida has often been accused of being more of a literary author than a philosopher or political theorist. Richard Rorty complains that Derrida’s views on politics are not pragmatic enough; he sees Derrida’s later work, including his political work, more as a “private self-fashioning” than concrete political thinking aimed at devising short-term solutions to problems here and now. Employing Foucault’s work around authorship and the origins of power, I (...) show that Derrida is indeed fashioning himself. This self-fashioning is not merely private or fanciful. Rather, I argue that Derrida can be read as employing what Foucault would call “technologies of the self” to not only show the play of possibility and impossibility at work in all politics and thought, but also to use his savoir to create two important and potentially constructive power structures. First, there is the power of deconstruction itself as a “militant critique” that calls for a forceful and irreducible justice. Second, there is the power of Derrida himself, understood as leaving behind a legacy of himself as the “originator” of deconstruction and as a public intellectual. (shrink)

Rodolphe Gasché, The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986. 348 pp. Irene E. Harvey, Derrida and the Economy of Différance. Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. xv & 285 pp. John Llewelyn, Derrida on the Threshold of Sense. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986. xiii & 137 pp.

Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida: these are not merely the names of three authors, but of three matters for thought, of three ways beyond metaphysics, three transgressions. I want to offer here a reflection, first, upon the dynamics of these transgressions—how each conceives metaphysics and where each makes its move against metaphysics—and, then, upon the relationships of the three to one another, on the interplay of their transgressive practices.

In recent continental philosophy of religion there has been significant attention paid to the Abrahamic doctrines of creation ex nihilo and divine omnipotence, especially by deconstructive thinkers such as Derrida, Caputo, and Keller. For these thinkers, the doctrine represents a form of agency that does violence to various forms of alterity. While broadly supportive of their fundamental philosophical and ethico-political views, especially about the primordiality of alterity, I differ from them in that I argue that creation ex nihilo articulates the (...) very structure of the alterity they are concerned with. The essay proceeds through a reading of Derrida’s representation of the doctrine and a “deconstruction” of his view by means of a reading of Augustine and Anselm. (shrink)

It has often been considered that the most important part of Derrida's work consisted in the five books published between 1967 and 1972. This paper intends, by way of a re-reading of Derrida's most powerful text from this period, Speech and Phenomena, to bring to light Derrida's specific manner of uniting the question of the disruption of presence to the question of writing. What is therefore questioned is Derrida's emphasis on death, considered as the very condition of possibility of language (...) and writing. As Derrida rightfully shows, Husserl, in spite of the importance he conferred upon writing in the process of idealization, was not aware of the fact that the relationship to death constitutes the concrete structure of the living present. But on the other hand, by still opposing in a too dualistic manner presence and absence, life and death, Derrida himself was not able to see that the condition of language is not so much the death of the subject as the being toward death and the finitude of Dasein. (shrink)

Psyche: Inventions of the Other is the first publication in English of the twenty-eight essay collection Jacques Derrida published in two volumes in 1998 and 2003. Advancing his reflection on many issues, such as sexual difference, architecture, negative theology, politics, war, nationalism, and religion, Volume II also carries on Derrida's engagement with a number of key thinkers and writers: De Certeau, Heidegger, Kant, Lacoue-Labarthe, Mandela, Rosenszweig, and Shakespeare, among others. Included in this volume are new or revised translations of seminal (...) essays (for example, "Geschlecht I: Sexual Difference, Ontological Difference," "Geschlecht II: Heidegger's Hand," "How to Avoid Speaking: Denials," and " Interpretations at War : Kant, the Jew, the German"). (shrink)

Derrida's first book-length work, The Problem of Genesis in Husserl's Philosophy , was originally written as a dissertation for his diplôme d'etudes superieures in 1953 and 1954. Surveying Husserl's major works on phenomenology, Derrida reveals what he sees as an internal tension in Husserl's central notion of genesis, and gives us our first glimpse into the concerns and frustrations that would later lead Derrida to abandon phenomenology and develop his now famous method of deconstruction. For Derrida, the problem of genesis (...) in Husserl's philosophy is that both temporality and meaning must be generated by prior acts of the transcendental subject, but transcendental subjectivity must itself be constituted by an act of genesis. Hence, the notion of genesis in the phenomenological sense underlies both temporality and atemporality, history and philosophy, resulting in a tension that Derrida sees as ultimately unresolvable yet central to the practice of phenomenology. Ten years later, Derrida moved away from phenomenology entirely, arguing in his introduction to Husserl's posthumously published Origin of Geometry and his own Speech and Phenomena that the phenomenological project has neither resolved this tension nor expressly worked with it. The Problem of Genesis complements these other works, showing the development of Derrida's approach to phenomenology as well as documenting the state of phenomenological thought in France during a particularly fertile period, when Levinas, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Ricoeur, and Tran-Duc-Thao, as well as Derrida, were all working through it. But the book is most important in allowing us to follow Derrida's own development as a philosopher by tracing the roots of his later work in deconstruction to these early critical reflections on Husserl's phenomenology. "A dissertation is not merely a prerequisite for an academic job. It may set the stage for a scholar's life project. So, the doctoral dissertations of Max Weber and Jacques Derrida, never before available in English, may be of more than passing interest. In June, the University of Chicago Press will publish Mr. Derrida's dissertation, The Problem of Genesis in Husserl's Philosophy , which the French philosopher wrote in 1953-54 as a doctoral student, and which did not appear in French until 1990. From the start, Mr Derrida displayed his inventive linguistic style and flouting of convention."--Danny Postel, Chronicle of Higher Education. (shrink)