An analysis of Derrida’s early work engaging Plato, Hegel, and the life sciences. Germs of Death explores the idea of genesis, or dissemination, in the early work of Jacques Derrida. Looking at Derrida’s published and unpublished work from “Force and Signification” in 1963 to Glas in 1974, Mauro Senatore traces the development of Derrida’s understanding of genesis both linguistically and biologically, and argues that this topic is an overlooked thread that draws together Derrida’s readings of Plato and Hegel. Demonstrating how (...) Derrida’s analysis liberates the understanding of genesis from Platonic and Hegelian presupposition, Senatore also highlights Derrida’s engagement with the biological thought of his day. Senatore also shows that the implications of Derrida’s insights extend into contemporary ethical and political questions relating to postgenomic conceptions of life. “Senatore here demonstrates with stunning insight, clarity, and economy that Derrida’s work of the 1960s and ’70s needs to be understood as a radical critique or deconstruction of both the philosophical concept of life (from Plato to Hegel) and the prevailing biological model of heredity as a ‘genetic program.’ It will be impossible henceforth to read Derrida on questions of the trace, dissemination, life, and so on, without coming to terms with ‘the germs of death.’” — Michael Naas, author of The End of the World and Other Teachable Moments: Jacques Derrida’s Final Seminar “The book represents a major contribution to the field of Derrida studies and phenomenology, particularly its attention to the concept of genesis that formed the basis of Derrida’s earliest study of Husserl and the origin of his concept of writing. The unique contribution is the inclusion of the works from the periods of the mid-1970s, which have been neglected in the mainstream scholarship on Derrida.” — Gregg Lambert, author of Philosophy after Friendship: Deleuze’s Conceptual Personae. (shrink)

. Time and the event. Cultural Values: Vol. 2, No. 2-3, pp. 223-242.

This essay argues a case for viewing Derrida's work in the context of recent French epistemology and philosophy of science; more specifically, the critical‐rationalist approach exemplified by thinkers such as Bachelard and Canguilhem. I trace this line of descent principally through Derrida's essay ‘White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy’. My conclusions are (1) that we get Derrida wrong if we read him as a fargone antirealist for whom there is nothing ‘outside the text'; (2) that he provides some (...) powerful counter‐arguments to this and other items of current postmodern wisdom; (3) that deconstruction is more aptly viewed as continuing the epistemo‐critical approach developed by thinkers like Bachelard; and (4) that it also holds important lessons for philosophy of science in the mainstream Anglo‐ American ‘analytic’ tradition. (shrink)

“El hecho material de escribir (…) es uno de los fenómenos mas enigmáticos y preciosos que puedan concebirse. Es el punto de convergencia entre lo invisible y lo visible, entre el mundo de la temporalidad y el de la espacialidad”. (J.R. Ribeyro) -/- ¿Cual es la relación entre la materialidad física de la escritura y el carácter ideal de los conceptos? Una forma asequible de acercarse al pensamiento de Jacques Derrida es a través de esta pregunta. Usándola como hilo conductor, (...) el presente libro Escritura y objetividad ideal en el pensamiento de Jacques Derrida busca ser una introducción al pensamiento del filósofo francés durante el periodo entre 1962 y 1972. -/- De acuerdo a Derrida, la tradición filosófica occidental ha rebajado la escritura a una mera representación de la voz y ha considerado a esta ultima como el significante privilegiado del concepto. Asimismo, ha concebido al concepto como objetividad ideal y trascendental inmediatamente presente a la conciencia. Contra estas tendencias –“fonocentrismo” y “logocentrismo”– Derrida enfatiza que la escritura es constituyente de la idealidad y que todo lenguaje es, en cierto modo, una escritura. Así, mediante un concepto “ampliado” de escritura, Derrida deconstruye la comprensión representacional de la escritura, la distinción entre “pensamiento” y “lenguaje” y los presupuestos ontológicos que las fundamentan. -/- Escritura y objetividad ideal en el pensamiento de Jacques Derrida plantea un camino a través de las idiosincráticas y creativas lecturas que Derrida hace de Platón, Rousseau, Hegel y Husserl para introducirnos a su concepto de escritura y para comprender las implicancias que este puede tener en nuestras lecturas y escrituras filosóficas. (shrink)

This essay situates Kristeva's theory of semiotics in the context of the controversial debate about the status of the maternal body in her work. I argue that, if we rethink the opposition between the semiotic and the symbolic as the relation between the trace and the sign, it becomes clear that the maternal semiotic is irreducible either to the prelinguistic plenitude or to the alternative symbolic position. The second part of the essay develops the connection between Kristeva's linguistic theory and (...) the alterity of the maternal body, articulated here as the in-fold of the other and the same. (shrink)

In “Violence and Metaphysics” Jacques Derrida suggests that “the only effective position to take in order not to be enveloped by Hegel would seem to be…to consider false-infinity…irreducible.” Inversely, refuting the charge of logocentrism associated with Hegelian true infinity ( wahrhafte Unendlichkeit ) would involve showing that Hegel’s speculative logic does not establish the infinity of being exempt from the negativity of the finite. This paper takes up Derrida’s challenge, and argues that true infinity is crucial to Hegel’s understanding of (...) ideality as a question of normative authority, which does not fall prey to logocentrism. Through an exposition of the dialectic of the finite and the infinite in Hegel’s Science of Logic , I argue that true infinity is not an ontological category that eliminates division, but rather refers to the metalogical standpoint involved in a philosophical account of determinacy. Although fully achieved at the end of the Logic , the metalogical standpoint that Hegel elaborates in the Seinslogik under the banner of the true infinite already clarifies that determinacy is a product of normative authority that is itself precarious. (shrink)

The majority of those who comment upon the theories of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe - both supporters and critics - treat the work of the two authors as a coherent unity. I see acute differences that demarcate the ideas of Laclau and Mouffe: differences that impede any straightforward delimitation of the authorial identity `Laclau and Mouffe'. The purpose of this paper is to bring to the fore the incommensurate political differences that separate the work of the two authors, and (...) to establish the superiority of Mouffe's position. At its most basic both authors view politics as described in their co-authored Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: i.e. `as a practice of creation, reproduction and transformation of social relations' (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 153). This agreement, however, conceals the fact that the authors describe the political articulation of social relations in distinct ways, and that those descriptions are implicated in, and reinforce, contrasting ethico-political commitments and prescriptions. These differences reflect the differences between the politics of the Marxist tradition retained by Laclau - albeit understood as a negative apparition of its former (ultimately) fully positive self - and Mouffe's radical democratic pluralism. This latter perspective - in its more recent formulations - represents a political compound of civic-republicanism with a defense of liberalism; this is a political imaginary that retains little if anything from the Marxist tradition. (shrink)

The paper asks about the difficulty of reading Schelling's work today given the historical biases that dominate contemporary philosophical inquiry. But if we cannot succeed as the readers Schelling himself appears to be looking for, this does not already have to mean that his work cannot speak to our time. Such a possibility, however, presupposes that we consider Schelling's work as it is inseparably connected to a critique of the modern project and as it points thereby to the monstrous discord (...) that defines human philosophical discourse as such. In particular, the paper considers the Kantian opposition between faith and knowledge and claims that this opposition itself appears to establish a kind of limit for philosophical inquiry today. In this context, some reflections are offered on the history of European nihilism and the death of God. The paper concludes by giving several indications of how Schelling's thought promises to subvert this opposition and this limit. (shrink)

This paper intends to verify the extent and effectiveness of the transforming appropriation of the Derridean concept of ‘differance’ by Stiegler with respect to the problems that, according to Stiegler, make this creative critical operation necessary; in particular with respect to the most recent question concerning the possibility of thinking about and putting into practice a ‘neganthropological différance’ capable of facing the ecological crisis that today seems to threaten the very existence of life on earth. The paper goes back to (...) Technics and Time 1. to analyze the distinction between ‘vital difference’ and ‘noetic difference’ that constitutes the condition of possibility of the ‘neganthropological différance.’ In this perspective, the distinction proposed by Stiegler seems to re-propose the hierarchically oriented oppositional structure that characterizes metaphysical thought and in particular the opposition between man and animal, attributing to the human being the ability to free himself from the constraints of his biological-natural condition. Finally, the paper attempts to account for the repercussions of this approach on the very possibility of an effective response to the ecological crisis, concluding with a provocation regarding the role that theory can and must play with regard to such an urgent and far-reaching problem. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 48, Issue 2, pp 209 - 232 In _Specters of Marx_, Derrida suggests that the most fundamental condition of phenomenality lies in the ambiguous status of the noema, defined as an intentional and non-real component of _Erlebnis_, neither “in” the world nor “in” consciousness. This “irreality” of the noematic correlate is conceived by Derrida as the origin of sense and experience. Already in his _Of Grammatology_, Derrida maintained that the difference between the appearing and the appearance, between (...) the world and the lived experience, is the condition of all other differences. Unfortunately, Derrida limits himself to a few self-evident remarks, without further elaborating.The aim of this paper is twofold: on the one hand, to contextualize Derrida’s interpretation of the noema from a theoretical and historical perspective; on the other hand, to show its effects on the early moments of Derrida’s philosophy. The result will shed light on a neglected issue in the relationship between deconstruction and phenomenology. (shrink)

Derrida always stipulates that deconstruction is not a ‘‘method’’. But deconstruction nevertheless involves a certain strategy and protocol: terms that both designate a process and serve as an example of that process. Derrida's deployment of these terms clarifies how his analyses of logocentrism anticipate the political texts of his later career. In his early texts, Derrida famously shows how the dyad of speech and writing is a ‘‘violent hierarchy’’ in which speech is everywhere privileged. I show how, by contrast, his (...) later analysis of law and force necessarily redoubles this strategy because each of these terms is privileged in rival traditions of political thought. (shrink)

This essay aims to bring to light a specific movement elaborated by Derrida in Of Grammatology, which goes from the experience of dispossession in speech and the economy of signs that replaces speech itself with writing, through the chains of supplements, to the merging of language and auto-erotism into the differentiated totality of auto-affection as the universal rule of experience or as life itself. I will point out that idealization, as the submission of the world to a certain power of (...) repetition in the living and, thus, as the only condition at which the world can affect the living, marks the becoming-spontaneous of the possibility of auto-affection and, at the same time, the very articulation of life, across its history, into a hierarchy of more and more complex symbolical operations. As I aim to demonstrate throughout my reading, the ultimate task of this movement is that a phenomenology cannot account for the structure of auto-affection insofar as, with a gesture parallel to phonocentrism, it would dissolve the irreducible trait of sexuality into the self-presence of self-touching. 1. (shrink)

This paper reflects the inversion between the discourse on the Good and that on the khôra in view of the deconstructionist paradigm of the khôral mise en abyme as portrayed by Jacques Derrida and later elaborated on by John D. Caputo. Iddo Dickmann, further describing this paradigm as “lacunal”, schematically illustrates how it can create sameness in difference through reflective repetitions. This schema is used here in a Christian negative theological context and on the accounts of Incarnation and reincarnation to (...) investigate the immanence khôra introduces into transcendence, rendering the Word/Logos as flesh. The present study takes a novel perspective in observing how this self-referential and meta-significatory paradigm can conversely render flesh as the Word, when flesh comes to reflect/interface the Good by negating itself ending up with the elliptical and creative contours that transcribe the Word, and outline a khôral negative-fleshly space that infinitely traces an abyssal “black sun”. (shrink)

This paper examines the relation or, more precisely, tension between postmodern deconstruction and ethics by elaborating upon the ethico-political dimensions of deconstructionism. It embarks on a critical assessment of postmodern discourse on ethics in view of its political implications by analyzing Jacques Derrida''s and Richard Rorty''s arguments with an assumption that their positions represent a certain logic in the postmodern discourse on ethics. Postmodern ethics is based on incredulity with regard to traditional metanarratives, and it defines ethics in terms of (...) sensitivity or responsibility to otherness and difference. Its proponents believe that the negation of modern metanarratives opens a way to the Other which has been marginalized and suppressed both in thought and in social practice. Derrida and Rorty represent this position with their emphasis on the ethical nature of deconstruction and the need to elaborate new languages for ethics. Despite postmodern appeal to ethics of this sort, however, postmodern thinking shows its limits in dealing with most ethical-political matters in the contemporary world. The postmodern approach to ethics, being restricted within the perspective of the individual, does not provide any determinate framework for deciding how to adjudicate conflicting ethical claims or how to link the unconditional affirmation of emancipatory ideals, enlightened social criticism, and democratic accountability in determinate political terms. In the main, this paper contends that philosophical deconstruction and responsibility to otherness undermine each other in the public sphere. (shrink)

This highly multidisciplinary collection discusses an increasingly important topic among scholars in science and technology studies: objectivity in science. It features eleven essays on scientific objectivity from a variety of perspectives, including philosophy of science, history of science, and feminist philosophy. Topics addressed in the book include the nature and value of scientific objectivity, the history of objectivity, and objectivity in scientific journals and communities. Taken individually, the essays supply new methodological tools for theorizing what is valuable in the pursuit (...) of objective knowledge and for investigating its history. The essays offer many starting points, while suggesting new avenues of research. Taken collectively, the essays exemplify the very virtues of objectivity that they theorize—in reading them together, the reader can sense various anxieties about the dangerously subjective in our age and locate commonalities of concern as well as differences of approach. As a result, the volume offers an expansive vision of a research community seeking a communal understanding of its own methods and its own epistemic anxieties, struggling to enunciate the key problems of knowledge of our time and offer insight into how to overcome them. -/- (Contributors: Alex Csiszar, Scott Edgar, Peter Galison, Ian Hacking, Sandra Harding, Moira Howes, Paolo Savoia, Judy Segal, Joan Steigerwald, and Alison Wylie). (shrink)

This paper asks how we find our way in the hitherto unknown. In search of an answer, the author returns to the three Critiques of Immanuel Kant, noting especially their grounding in the geometric mode of (re)presentation and the thingification processes connected therewith. It is argued that Kant's choice of metaphors in effect makes him more of a geographer than of a philosopher. To understand the taken-for-granted of thought-and-action, the time has therefore come for the writing of a fourth volume (...) entitled A Critique of Cartographical Reason. The focus must there be on the relations between personal pronouns and prepositions, on the one hand, and the powers of tautology, on the other. (shrink)

This paper asks how we find our way in the hitherto unknown. In search of an answer, the author returns to the three Critiques of Immanuel Kant, noting especially their grounding in the geometric mode of presentation and the thingification processes connected therewith. It is argued that Kant's choice of metaphors in effect makes him more of a geographer than of a philosopher. To understand the taken-for-granted of thought-and-action, the time has therefore come for the writing of a fourth volume (...) entitled A Critique of Cartographical Reason. The focus must there be on the relations between personal pronouns and prepositions, on the one hand, and the powers of tautology, on the other. (shrink)

The built environment and the organisation of public spaces reflect the normative notions of male and female. Public toilets, amongst other widely common public spaces, underline these two opposing concepts and challenge the presence of transgender. Within the boundaries of public toilets, transgender and gender non-conforming individuals become a crucial point of debate, scrutiny and controversy. Analysing the politics of such gender-segregated space, this article explores the notion of uniformity and challenges the idea of single-ness as the absolute expression of (...) the self. (shrink)

This article considers the war against terror in relation to classical tragedy. It uses Heidegger's analysis of Sophocles's play Antigone to argue that human beings are essentially `homeless' and yet our destiny lies in the continual attempt to overcome this homelessness by establishing foundational principles that might bring our journeying to an end. The tragedy of this situation is that the search for foundations and a search for a home invariably bring differing worlds in conflict with each other as their (...) paths to truth collide. Lucien Goldmann's analysis of the tragedy of refusal is also considered in relation to a non-foundational politics that may permit us not only to endure, but actually to affirm our homelessness as an attempt to resist the terror and anabolic militarism that marks the current age. (shrink)

Reflection names the central activity of Western philosophical practice; the mirror and its attendant metaphors of reflection are omnipresent in the self-image of Western philosophy and in metaphilosophical reflection on reflection. But the physical experiences of being reflected by glass mirrors have been inadequately theorized contributors to those metaphors, and this has implications not only for the self-image and the self of philosophy but also for metaphilosophical practice. This article begins to rethink the metaphor of reflection anew. Paying attention to (...) the history of the glass mirror in Europe reveals and challenges the modern emergence of clear ontological distinctions between disembodied subjects and the objects of their knowledge, and suggests a compelling terrain of metaphilosophical analysis. On the reading offered by the article, the inherent complexity of the relationship between selves and their mirror images, a complexity mediated by social location, historical situation, and particular projects, points to significant spaces of unknowing, of indeterminacy, and of ontological ambiguity. (shrink)

Certain familiar theoretic claims of both popular and academic postmodernism are examined for their implications as to the necessary and desirable limits of social life. Taken to the end, these claims promote errancy as a means of freeing conduct from the constraints of foundation. But this kind of freedom, one which treats all limitation as pernicious, generates social action that is mechanical, scattered, and without substance—it is a pyrrhic emancipation which trades content for self-sufficiency and thus constitutes an empty life (...) of unhappy social dispersion. And yet an opportunity does remain to address the way a limit can also be inspiring if we think through how interpretation, a limit which is itself limited, invites nevertheless what Derrida glossed as joyous affirmation. Interpretation, though imperfect, offers powers that are genuine and enjoyable because these powers supply life with content and thus with the vitalizing collective and individual possibility of conduct which is affirmative (and disaffirmative). Perhaps it could even be said that interpretation emancipates us from the emptiness of pure freedom. (shrink)

The most important sources of contemporary American literary theory are neither the linguistics-based movement of French structuralism, as the term 'poststructuralism' implies, nor a 'modernity' that has been superseded, as the term 'postmodernism' implies, but rather a modernist tradition of aesthetics shaped by eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century German romanticism and idealism, movements that culminated in the work of Heidegger during the Weimar period between the World Wars and afterward, exercising an increasingly dominant influence on French theorists after World War II, (...) from Sartre through Derrida, and subsequently on the development of poststructuralism and postmodernism during the 1970s and 1980s in the United States. This essay strives to put well-accepted facts and issues within what Wittgenstein called a 'perspicuous' perspective. Although it is common to observe that deconstruction shares with Romanticism certain very general features, the same judgment is not often applied to deconstruction's semiotic account of language as a system of arbitrary signs without positive values. The essay's claim, by contrast, is that romanticist, especially German influences, operating in complementary relation with influences from the English and French Enlightenments, provided the cultural and conceptual milieu in which literary theory's distinctively modern, characteristically ontological, and anti-metaphysical view of language developed. (shrink)

In this article, I rely both on Derrida's 1974 work Glas, as well as Derrida's 1971–72 lecture course, “La famille de Hegel,” to argue that the concept of the quasi-transcendental is central to Derrida's reading of Hegel and to trace its implications beyond the Hegelian system. I follow Derrida's analysis of the role of Antigone—or, as the lecture course has it, “Antigonanette”—in Hegel's thought to argue that the quasi-transcendental indicates a restriction of empirical difference into the transcendental, which is thereby (...) only ever provisionally transcendental. I then argue that the economy of difference indicated by the quasi-transcendental is neither a general economy, nor is it in each case singular, but rather it ambivalently oscillates between these two. Finally, I treat the temporality of the quasi-transcendental, arguing that the economy of difference indicated by the quasi-transcendental is not prior to the restriction of empirical difference, but is paradoxically produced by it by being retroactively constituted. I take up this analysis for the sake of describing what I contend is the quasi-transcendental structure of constitutive exclusion, a way of understanding the conceptual structure of political bodies, and the political structure of concepts. (shrink)

The ArgumentThis paper focuses on the opening of a discursive space: the emergence of informational and scriptural representations of life and their self-negating consequences for the construction of biological meaning. It probes the notion of writing and the book of life and shows how molecular biology's claims to a status of language and texuality undermines its own objective of control. These textual significations were historically contingent. The informational representations of heredity and life were not an outcome of the internal cognitive (...) momentum of molecular biology; they were not a logical necessity of the unravelling of the base-pairing of the DNA double-helix. They were transported into molecular biology still within the protein paradigm of the gene in the 1940s and permeated nearly every discipline in the life and social sciences. These information-based models, metaphors, linguistic, and semiotic tools which were central to the formulation of the genetic code were transported into molecular biology from cybernetics, information theory, electronic computing, and control and communication systems — technosciences that were deeply embedded with the military experiences of world war II and the Cold War. The information discourse thus became fixed in molecular biology not because it worked in the narrow epistemic sense (it did not), but because it positioned molecular biology within postwar discourse and culture, perhaps within the transition to a post-modern information-based society. (shrink)

This article inquires into a paradoxical position held by the concept of ‘nature’ in Derrida's thought. While a pivotal part of his project of deconstruction is devoted to a critique of the metaphysical privileging of nature over its others (technics, culture, and so on), the same project also aims at dismantling the hierarchical binary opposition of man/animal. Insofar as the term ‘animal’ or ‘animality’ to a large extent overlaps with nature, these two strands of his thought appear to stand in (...) a significant tension with each other. I explore this conceptual tension by re-examining Derrida's early critique of the notion of nature – specifically in his reading of Rousseau – in conjunction with his later engagement with the question of animality. As my reading shows, deviating from his early approach, his later work indicates the way in which animal others (and, by extension, all living and non-living others) are indeed constituted by supplementarity and yet, in their irreplaceable singularity, exceed the very structure of supplementarity. This opens up a new way of conceiving nature, no longer as originary presence nor simply as an effect of supplementary play, but in terms of the aporetic relation between supplementarity and what may be termed ‘the unsupplementable’. (shrink)

An argument is made for the relevance of phenomenological hermeneutics to economics, with special attention to recent debates on hermeneutics among economists of the Austrian school of Ludwig von Mises and F. A. Hayek. Hermeneutics is explicated in the context of Husserlian phenomenology, with special attention to phenomenology's Aristotelian roots. Naive and methodological forms of ?objectivism?; are contrasted with hermeneutics, which recovers the horizons of scientific knowledge: the whole, and the activities of the human knower. Finally, the charges that hermeneutics (...) entails pernicious forms of relativism and historicism are confronted. (shrink)

The article is devoted to the historical-philosophical analysis of the problem of ambivalence as a fundamental principle of Derrida’s philosophical thinking. It shows how such primordial philosophical questions as ones of limits of philosophies and of limits of philosophy define the basic problem dimensions of Derridean conception. It consideres the correlation of the theme of marginality with both the problem of Derrida’s cultural self-identification and the idea of the metaphoricity of language as the initial premise of différance logic. Also the (...) article examines the role of transcendentalistic implications in Derridean thought that determine a his-torical and philosophical context of Derrida’s philosophy. The analogy between quasi-transcendental and metaphorical aspects of deconstructive thinking is drawn. The identifica-tion of Jewish and metaphorical in Derrida’s conception is demonstrated. The author introduces the concept of "literal metaphor" as the quintessence of Derrida’s philosophical thought which structures its basic forms, namely: aporia, hyperbole, question, commentary. (shrink)

The paper addresses the problem of the place of deconstruction in the history of transcendental philosophy. J. Derrida’s project is considered as one of the most representative and consistent realizations of theoretical foundations of transcendentalism along with prominent conceptions such as Kant’s critique and Husserl’s phenomenology. The author suggests a number of attributes of transcendental thinking that allow historical reconstruction of the transcendental paradigm. Derridian approach is considered as a turn towards this tradition, conceived as a transcendental tradition par exellence, (...) guided by the attitude of «turning. Historical legacy of deconstructive «turning» is analyzed with respect to Husserlian Rückfrage: return-inquiry as method, idea and attitude, reproducing in deconstructive strategy of interpretative critique. A concept of hyperbolic transcendentalism is introduced in order to (1) define a deconstructive version of transcendental philosophy and (2) indicate an immanent tendency in the transcendental thought, constitutive for both Kantian critical project and Husserlian strive towards intellectual radicalism extending from methodological hyperboles (reduction and epoche) to radicalization of «transcendental motive». The author relies upon the concept of quasi-transcendental (thematized by Derrida himself), which defines a mode of de-dogmatization, critical purifying and preservation of proper transcendental foundations of philosophical thinking. (shrink)

The idea of aporia, according to the author, leads to the transformation of Derrida’s philosophy on the basis of a new kind of universalism. This new universalism is based on the principles of relation and difference; it involves the concept of“radically Other” (in particular, in the modes of particularity and singularity) into the field of the Universal. As an essential factor of binarism’s deconstruction, an aporia leads to undermine a paradigm of choice. Derrida substitutes this paradigm with an attitude to (...) “impossible” interdependence of concepts, which, according to traditional approach, are treated as incompatible. -/- The author proves that universalistic potential of Derrida’s thought reveals itself in application of transcendental approach to the problem of universal. Nevertheless, in case of Derrida it is quasi-transcendentalism that unites in itself moments of critics and radicalization of Kantian and Husserlian types of transcendental approach. -/- The paper proves that the idea of aporia has fundamental significance for constituting quasi-transcendental universalism. Interconnectedness (up to identity) of concepts of aporia and experience is evinced, as well as fundamental link between the concept of aporia and basic quasi-transcendental structure of “conditions of possibility/conditions of impossibility”. Within the problem of aporia, as is shown, inherently transcendental overlap between theoretical and practical dimensions is taken place. As is detected, in the discourse of aporia there appears a rethinking of Universal/Particular (Singular) relation: traditional contraposition is transformed into oscillation and overlapping (this rethinking is proper for the transcendental approach). -/- The results of the study, set forth in the article, allow historico-philosophical conclusion about presence, significance and peculiarity of the motive of universality in Derrida’s quasi-transcendentalism. Often remaining implicit, this motive, however, appears to be the driving force for deconstructive thinking. (shrink)

A possible relation between Derrida's deconstruction of metaphysics and connectionism is explored by considering diffeacuterance in neural nets terms. First diffeacuterance, as the crossing of Saussurian difference and Freudian deferral, is modeled and then the fuller 'sheaf of diffeacuterance is taken up. The metaphysically conceived brain has two versions: in the traditional computational version the brain processes information like a computer and in the connectionist version the brain computes input vector to output vector transformations non-symbolically. The 'deconstructed brain' neither processes (...) information nor computes functions but is spontaneously economical. (shrink)

Although many still see Derrida as a thinker opposed to a unified systematic meaning, there has recently been growing recognition that Derrida, in his later years, suggested that his work is not averse to formalisation. In support of this view, this paper points out that, in 1990, Derrida himself told us that his first work of 1954 reveals a “law” which impels his career, and that some responses had arisen even there. Some benefits of adopting such a common pole are (...) set out, and an interrelated “system” developed to relate the law of 1954 to the later responses, in order to help find a common, systematic base for Derrida’s oeuvre. The need to accommodate approaches which are wary of a systematic approach is nevertheless acknowledged, and possible ways of reconciling the diverse readings of Derrida’s intent and collaboratively furthering the formalisation of Derrida’s oeuvre for posterity are outlined in closing. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology, Volume 10, Edition 2, October 2010: 43-60. (shrink)

This paper argues that Derrida’s aporetic conclusions regarding moral and political concepts, from hospitality to democracy, can only be understood and accepted if the notion of différance and similar infrastructures are taken into account. This is because it is the infrastructures that expose and commit moral and political practices to a double and conflictual (thus aporetic) future: the conditional future that projects horizonal limits and conditions upon the relation to others, and the unconditional future without horizons of anticipation. The argument (...) thus turns against two kinds of interpretation: The first accepts normative unconditionality in ethics but misses its support by the infrastructures. The second rejects unconditionality as a normative commitment precisely because the infrastructural support for unconditionality seems to rule out that it is normatively required. In conclusion, the article thus reconsiders the relation between a quasi-transcendental argument and its normative implications, suggesting that Derrida avoids the naturalistic fallacy. (shrink)

In an age where diversity is increasingly accepted as a value as well as a fact, ethico-political cosmopolitanism should propose a notion of global unity that is composed of rather than imposed on difference. Jacques Derrida and Walter Mignolo offer different versions of this view of cosmopolitanism. Derrida’s version is based on his notion of “democracy to come”. He characterizes this notion as an “unconditional” or “quasi-transcendental” injunction. Mignolo castigates this injunction as an “abstract universal”. He offers instead “a critical (...) and dialogic” view of cosmopolitanism that is based more speci cally on the “colonial difference” or “border thinking” of Latin American subaltern groups. I argue that Derrida’s many implicit and explicit references to “voices” suggest a third alternative. This contender avoids certain problems in Derrida’s and Mignolo’s otherwise compelling views of cosmopolitanism. It also retains the universality of Derrida’s unconditional injunction but on the basis of the sort of worldly immanency urged by Mignolo’s border thinking. (shrink)

Data production in experimental sciences depends on localised experimental systems, but the epistemic properties of data transcend the contingencies of the processes that produce them. Philosophers often believe that experimental systems instantiate but do not produce the epistemic properties of data. In this paper, we argue that experimental systems' local functioning entails intrinsic capacities to produce the epistemic properties of data. We develop this idea by applying Derrida's model of arche-writing to study a case of theory-oriented experimental practice. Derrida's model (...) relativises or dissolves the conceptual distinction between the moment of data production and a subsequent moment of data dissemination. It thus has consequences for understanding both data production (despite being intrinsically local, data production a priori generates transferrable and modellable information) and data dissemination (when modelling information, researchers needs to refer this information to the context of its production). We study a case of data production in a non-exploratory experimental system designed to test a pre-existing hypothesis in visual neuroscience. A case of theory-oriented experimental practice should allow us to identify the autonomous functioning of experimental systems in data production more clearly, insofar as it allows us to study the limits of pre-existing theory in the activities of these systems. We suggest that pre-existing concepts, hypotheses and theories condition the relevance but not the production of experimental data. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

Recent attempts by American theorists to produce a radical politics, characterized by the effort to translate the insights of Continental philosophy into a political register, remain trapped in that which they purport to transcend: the metaphysics of subjectivity. In their essential determinations, the works of William Connolly, Stephen White, Richard Ashley, etc. remain firmly anchored in a traditional liberal schema. The reason for this is that while these efforts have sought to de-center political identity by exposing its relational character they (...) have not re-thought 'rela tionality' itself. Our attempt to develop the more profound political impli cations of 'relationality' unfolds through a synthetic explication of Martin Heidegger's analysis of language, Jacques Derrida's logic of the gift, and Emmanuel Levinas' consideration of the Other. The emergent thematic of asymmetrical relationality reconfigures liberalism and provides for a rethinking of the structure of welfare. (shrink)

In this essay, one of Derrida’s early texts, Plato’s pharmacy, is analysed in detail, more specifically in relation to its reflections on writing and its relation to law. This analysis takes place with reference to a number of Derrida’s other texts, in particular those on Freud. It is especially Freud’s texts on dream interpretation and on the dream-work which are of assistance in understanding the background to Derrida’s analysis of writing in Plato’s pharmacy. The essay shows the close relation between (...) Derrida’s analysis of Plato’s texts and Freud’s study of the dream-work. The forces at work in dreams, it appears, are at play in all texts, which in turn explains Derrida’s contentions in relation to the pharmakon as providing the condition of possibility of Plato’s texts. The essay furthermore points to the continuity between this ‘early’ text of Derrida and his ‘later’, seemingly more politico-legal texts of the 1990s. A close reading of Plato’s pharmacy, with its investigation via ‘writing’ of the foundations of metaphysics, and thus also of the Western concept of law, is obligatory should one wish to comprehend how Derrida attempts to exceed the restricted economy of metaphysics through his analysis of concepts such as justice and hospitality. (shrink)

Some feminist commentators ignore Luce Irigaray’s contributions to rethinking classical and neoclassical theories of the market when their aims and hers are often largely of a piece. Other feminist commentators celebrate Irigaray’s writings by privileging a certain conception of the gift her philosophy is said to evoke because it challenges the logic of the market economy and its masculinist biases. Instead of viewing the market and the gift in a binary way, I argue that Irigaray examines the conditions of possibility (...) for transvaluing value and exchange as such. By way of an internal critique of economic texts and discourses, Irigaray draws out the available conceptual resources for the possibility of a model of exchange between two positively valued – sexuate – subjects. In this article I focus on the texts where Irigaray explicitly engages with key components of political economy – ‘Commodities among Themselves’, ‘Women on the Market’ and ‘Women, the Sacred and Money’ – and also her conceptualisation of a nonmarket economy in Elemental Passions. These brilliant and complex essays yield an understanding of the forms and the flows (value and exchange) of all economies (whether symbolic, linguistic, cultural or political) necessary for cultivating a sexuate economy. (shrink)

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)

The article explores Jacques Derrida’s view of the secular as the field of the socio-political. It focuses on his argument as to why religion and politics cannot be strictly separated as in the classical modern paradigm. By engaging Derrida’s later writings, this article shows that the secular domain cannot be purified of all faith and is best thought of as theologico-political, where ‘theologico-political’ indicates the interrelatedness and distinction between the theological and the political. The article’s central claim is that by (...) opening up to some form of the theological that is not reducible to traditional conceptions, and to a faith that is not necessarily religious, Derrida provides significant resources for understanding the secular today in more complex and critical ways than usual approaches offer. (shrink)