This paper examines the relationship between deconstruction and Marxism by turning to recent attempts to read Derrida as a materialist philosopher. Following Martin Hägglund, I propose that Derrida’s critique of logocentrism implies a commitment to certain seemingly materialistic philosophical positions, most importantly, the radical foreclosure of an entity exempt from a transcendental field of differences. However, Derrida’s materialism remains speculative to the extent that it results in a philosophy of infinite finitude itself premised upon a transcendental style of argumentation excluded (...) from scientific verification or falsification. By contrast, I suggest that Marxism with its commitment to Promethean scientism—the claim that all limits on human theory and practice are relative and subject to possible transformation—offers a more radical form of philosophical materialism. (shrink)

In this paper I address Jacques Derrida's consistent phenomenological critique of his colleague Louis Althusser. Over the course of many decades, Derrida explicitly draws attention to what he takes to be Althusser's problematic pre-critical scientism, which is the direct result of the latter's failure to engage with Husserl and Heidegger. However, as I attempt to show, Althusser sought to reveal deeper problems associated with transcendental-critical questions in post-Kantian philosophy. For Althusser, questions concerning the ‘conditions of possibility’ of knowledge and experience (...) reproduce the idealist problematic that he calls ‘empiricism’. Charting a different trajectory within contemporary French philosophy, Althusser combines insights from Spinoza, Marx, and other figures often unmentioned by Derrida to produce a novel, non-transcendental philosophical approach to key problems that arise in epistemology and the philosophy of science. (shrink)

"Alexandre Matheron is considered one of the most important interpreters of Spinoza's philosophy in the 20th century. These 20 essays, translated into English for the first time, focus on ontology, knowledge, politics and ethics in Spinoza, his predecessors and his contemporaries."--Publisher description.

In this brief essay Stiegler synthesizes his critical approach to Simondon’s philosophy of individuation. He states his debt toward Simondon’s concept of a systemic indeterminacy in the processes of transindividual individuation, and focusses on his underdeveloped intuition concerning the role played by technics in anthropogenic processes. Situating himself in the phenomenological lineage of Husserl through Derrida, Stiegler explains his own “pharmacological” understanding of “technical individuation” as, at the same time, the intrinsic condition of individuation and the inevitable risk of disindividuation (...) defining the political as such. On this basis he critically extends Simondon’s understanding of religion and psychanalysis. This allows him to move beyond the political optimism implicit in Simondon’s “theoretical indecision” concerning the binding power of technical individuation yet relying on his very study of the question of individuation, which “is political through and through.”. (shrink)