Online research in philosophy

This paper compares the "future politics", and the philosophies of time, of Derrida and Deleuze.

Jacques Derrida returns relentlessly to the question of literature which is already a prominent concern in early texts such as Writing and Difference. The focus of this article is the conception of literature in ‘Literature in Secret: An Impossible Filiation’, in which Derrida discusses filiation with reference to Abraham and Isaac, the fundamental necessity of secrecy and the notion of the pardon. Above all, it is Kafka's Letter to His Father which perhaps provides a paradigm for defining literature. In this specular address, the promise of a heritage is in the balance. Writing incessantly on Kafka, Maurice Blanchot also reflects on literature. The notion of literature put forward by Derrida in ‘Literature in Secret: An Impossible Filiation’ is considered in this article, as well as reflections by Blanchot, to show what might be at stake in Kafka's Letter to His Father.

Part of a series on the question of what is the good life, the essay is structured as a montage. Part 1 contests the received notion that death is exterior to the work of Deleuze. To this end, it gathers together a telegraphic collection of examples – ‘corpses’ in his corpus – that invariably show up whenever the question is raised. Part 2 attempts a Deleuzian move: it puts death to work. If death is not nothing, it argues, it must be productive of something absolutely new. Drawing upon Blanchot's seminal essay, ‘The Two Versions of the Imaginary’, it makes the case that this creation is the cadaver: the first time-image.

Repetition plays a significant, productive role in the work of both Derrida and Deleuze. But the difference between these two philosophers couldn''t be greater: it is the difference between negation and affirmation, between Yes and No. In Derrida, the productive energy of repetition derives from negation, from the necessary impossibility of supplementing an absence. Deleuze recognizes the kind of repetition which concerns Derrida, but insists that there is another, primary form of repetition which is fully positive and affirmative. I will argue that there is nothing in Derrida''s philosophy to match the affirmative, primary form of repetition articulated by Deleuze. Moreover, it is precisely this difference that accounts for the most exciting features of Deleuze''s work: the possibility of breaking through to the other side of representation, beyond authenticity and inauthenticity, becoming-becoming.

This paper approaches the problem of the relation between Deleuze and Derrida by focusing on their respective readings of Heidegger's interpretation of Nietzsche's eternal return. It argues that the difference between Deleuze and Derrida cannot be measured in terms of their explicit statements about Heidegger, but in terms of how they relate their own readings of Nietzsche to Heidegger's positioning of him as the last metaphysician. The paper focuses on Deleuze's brief analyses of Heidegger in Difference and Repetition and Derrida's numerous references to the eternal return throughout his oeuvre, particularly in the essay Différance. I argue that Deleuze and Derrida articulate two different relations to the simulacrum through the way in which they position their own work in relation to Heidegger's understanding of Nietzsche.

The fifteen essays, written by such eminent scholars as Derrida, Heidegger, Deleuze, Klossowski, and Blanchot, focus on the Nietzschean concepts of the Will to ...

An almost unheard-of analogy : Derrida reading Levinas -- This monstrous figure without figure or face -- Ça me regarde : regarding responsibility in Derrida -- The ghost of Jacques Derrida -- Phantasmaphotography -- By the board : Derrida approaching Blanchot -- Salutations : between Derrida and Nancy.

Eternal return is the paradox that accounts for the interplay between difference and repetition, a dynamic at the heart of Deleuze's philosophy, and Blanchot's approach to this paradox, even and especially through what it elides, further illuminates it. Deleuze draws on Blanchot's characterisations of difference, forgetting, and the unlivable to depict the ‘sense’ produced via eternal return, which, for Blanchot, is where repetition implicates or ‘carries’ pure difference. However, for Deleuze, difference and the unlivable are also developed by the living repetition or ‘contraction’ of habit, which results in his distinctive characterization of ‘force’, ‘levity’, and sense in eternal return.