Online research in philosophy

This article recalls Derrida's reading of Levinasian ethics as a discourse of the other, particularly in ‘Violence and Metaphysics’, in order to re-elaborate Derrida's own account of the other's heterogeneity, notably in light of critiques of deconstruction's thinking of difference, alterity, and the unconditional. At stake here is the precise meaning of what may be termed wholly other; or, better still, the specific nature of the arguments about the question of the other from among Derrida's earlier texts, which must be recalled amidst any appeal to absolute alterity, especially of the kind frequently found in Derrida commentary today. The article suggests that, in the process of Derrida reading Levinas, the radical alterity of the other is sustained in ‘Violence and Metaphysics’ principally in terms of the legitimacy (or ‘discipline’) of a question that arises only on the hither side of a phenomenology of the other – a phenomenology that emerges, nonetheless, as its unacknowledged ground. Thus, in contrast to Levinasian thought (and yet also in deeper affinity with what we might term, for Derrida, its still obscured originality), deconstruction's discourse of the other opens onto the wholly other not simply as the ‘beyond’ or the ‘outside’ of phenomenology's limits, but only at the point where the phenomenological gives way in something like a double sense.

The present paper deals with the philosophical styles of the hermeneutic project and deconstruction and tries to answer the question whether there really is, as Derrida argues, a fundamental difference, even an opposition between them. In this sense, taking the questions Derrida addressed Gadamer in their famous Paris encounter in 1981 as a clue, the author retraces the fundamental articulations of deconstruction, descending from Derrida's own description of the idea to his actual deconstructive practice, and shows that the presupposition Derrida takes as separating the hermeneutic project from deconstruction is actually one these two share in common.

Jacques Derrida is one of the most influential and controversial philosophers of the last fifty years. Derrida on Deconstruction introduces and assesses: * Derrida's life and the background to his philosophy * the key themes of the critique of metaphysics, language and ethics that characterize his most widely read works * the continuing importance of Derrida's work to philosophy. This is a much-needed introduction for philosophy or humanities students undertaking courses on Derrida.

Derrida argued at great length early on in his career that texts live on in the absence of their author. The question remains, however, of precisely how this survival takes place. In this paper I argue that the life of Derrida's own oeuvre is sustained through his particular practice of self-inheritance. I justify this claim by focusing on one moment in the text Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, in which Derrida inherits from himself through self-citation. In citing himself while at the same time modifying his citation, Derrida sets into motion a deconstruction of his own text that he does not seem to anticipate. It is this movement of deconstruction that enables Derrida's text to live on.

In looking at Derrida’s career, many people claim to see a “political turn” with the 1989 essay “Force of Law.” So on this reading, the early Derrida is concerned with metaphysics and literature and the later Derrida with politics and ethics. I disagree. The concerns have always been metaphysical/literary and political/ethical at once, but the “methodology” changes: from deconstruction to aporia.

Derrida is typically taken to be the thinker most antithetical to Hegel, and deconstruction to be the philosophical antithesis to Hegel’s systematic rationality.While I do not dispute the accuracy of this perception, I argue in this paper that it does not offer an adequate or a complete picture. Specifically, much aboutDerrida and about deconstruction is more similar to Hegel than is typically realized. I argue that Derrida’s deconstruction shares a great affinity to the method ofHegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, so much so that we could identify and articulate a latent Hegelianism in Derrida’s approach. I begin with a description of Derrida’s own project, then offer something of an apologia for his work. Finally, I describe Hegel’s method of exposition [Darstellung] and compare it to deconstruction, pointing out the fundamental similarities between the two thinkers.

This article will theorize how Derrida’s deconstruction signifies a fundamental ontological alterity. We will examine the use of both the tropes of “sacred” and ‘faith” as tropes to express this possibility. Wewill articulate how deconstruction, as a development of phenomenology, provides a theoretical nexus where the alterity of things and persons may be thought. We will arrive at the paradoxical formulation of“ontological alterity” as a key moment in deconstructive thinking. Essentially we will argue that deconstruction offers the resources to think the relation between other person and things in the world asmotivated by a firm radicalization of Heideggerean worldliness and Levinasian alterity.

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.

Matchbook consists of nine essays written around, or in response to, work published by Jacques Derrida since 1980. The focal point of the essays is the “Envois,” which forms part of Derrida’s Post Card. Particular attention is paid to how that text articulates with the ethical and political emphases of Derrida’s more recent work, but also to its autobiographical conceit. The “incendiary” reference of the book’s title underscores deconstruction’s engagement with questions of reading: relations between (slow) reading and the speed of technology, and the political effects of an internationalized deconstruction in a globalized culture. It is in terms of what deconstruction can have us think about the speed of technology and technologies of reading that Derrida’s work has made one of its most important contributions to philosophy and literary and cultural studies. The book concentrates on that as proof of the continued relevance of such work.

This book closely examines how the phenomenological lineage is received in deconstruction, especially the relation between deconstruction and Derrida's radical ...