Derrida and Other Philosophers

In Voyous, Jacques Derrida develops his argument starting from the presupposition that democracy as such is the entity whose integrity and immunity are at stake and, therefore, under investigation. This gesture reflects the setting in which ten years before, in Foi et savoir, he had cast his reasoning about the logic of immunity. There, it was one of the sources of religion, the immunity of the sacred, that operated according to this logic. The hyphen between these two essays, beside Derrida’s (...) own crossed references, is the genealogical reasoning on the meaning and essence of the concept of democracy: contrary to what Derrida claims, it will be maintained that Athenian democracy had a clear immune matrix, whose constant exercise is clearly defined, in spite of himself, by Vernant, and it will be shown how modern democracy has been forced to change policy. Modern democracy is an entity characterized by an immune deficiency. In order to save Derrida’s intuition from both the collapse of different vantage points and from a quite bizarre reticence in taking into account of the immune value of rituals, our starting point will be René Girard’s œuvre and his reading of the role of immune logic in sacred systems and, more generally, in modernity. The threshold between the auto-immune reaction, immune deficiency and auto-immune disease, between the sacrifice who delimits and constitutes the self and the holocauste du peuple en détail, is the space where, constantly exposed to the risk of auto-denial, democracy lives. (shrink)

Este ensayo presenta una descripción de los escritos inéditos de Jacques Derrida sobre Marx y Louis Althusser en la década de 1970, y un estudio de conceptos como ideología, diferencia sexual, reproducción, violencia, dominación o hegemonía en perspectiva deconstructiva. Se trata de pensar en una otra economía, más allá de la economía del cuerpo propio. El artículo fue publicado en el Volumen 7 de la Revista Demarcaciones, "a 25 años de Espectros de Marx.".

In this 2004 interview — translated into English and published in its entirety for the first time — Jacques Derrida reflects upon his practices of writing and teaching, about the community of his readers, and explores questions related to corporeity and textuality, sexual difference, desire, politics, Marxism, violence, truth, interpretation, and translation. In the course of the interview, Derrida discusses the work of Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Maurice Blanchot, Hélène Cixous, Jean Genet, Paul Celan, and many others.

Habermas’s exchange with Jacques Derrida is situated within the debate about modernity and postmodernity. When he was awarded the Adorno Prize in 1980, Habermas defended the “unfinished project of modernity” in his acceptance speech; the opponents of modernity he identified included — in addition to old conservatives and neoconservatives of the recognizable variety — a group of “Young Conservatives,” among whom he numbered Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida (“Modernity,” 53). The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1985) devotes two chapters to Derrida, (...) in which Habermas details, at greater length, what prompted this judgment. In his estimation, Derrida’s philosophy represents a radicalized critique of reason (Vernunftkritik), which amounts to an inadequate response to the diremptions and dualisms of modernity. This account — as well as the debate in Germany, France, and the United States that followed — was marked by polemical intensity and political vehemence; the effect on institutional and theoretical-political lines of allegiance was far-reaching. There is good reason to doubt whether Habermas portrayed Derrida’s writings accurately and whether he situated them in the appropriate cultural and political contexts. Instead of tracing, point for point, the specific problems within Habermas’s account and the critical responses they elicited, it is more illuminating to remain at a certain remove from the debate. This will allow us to identify the common points of departure that Habermas’s and Derrida’s projects share and to indicate the way in which they challenge each other in systematically fruitful ways. (shrink)

This paper concerns Jacques Derrida's reading of S0ren Kierkegaard's interpretation of the biblical story of Abraham's sacrifice. Abraham's decision to listen to God's command and sacrifice to Him his beloved son is based on his personal faith which conflicts with general morality. On the basis of this story, Derrida argues that we often witness similar conflicts between religion and morality, demonstrating that responsibility is ultimately based on something irresponsible, i.e. something secret. The paper finally discusses Derrida's logic of ultimates.

En rapport with Jürgen Habermas, this paper argues for an environmental ethics that formalistically links the “good-for-nature” to the communicatively conceived “good-for-humanity.” This orientation guards against the possibility of humanity’s “knowledge-constitutive interest” in the instrumentalization of the environment being pressed forth as a project of limitless domination and mastery. Such an ethics is nonetheless well supplemented with Axel Honneth’s idea of an “indirect” recognitional attitude toward the world of objects, which accommodates the impulse of “care” for nature without succumbing to (...) the aporias of a naturalistic ethic. The essay contends that the categorical resources needed to avert the slide toward naturalism are dissolved in the antifoundationalist “critiques of nature” advanced by Steven Vogel and Jacques Derrida. (shrink)

This essay is an exploration of the relationship between Agamben’s 1995 text, Homo Sacer, and Derrida’s 1992 “Force of Law” essay. Agamben attempts to show that the camp, as the topological space of the state of exception, has become the biopolitical paradigm for modernity. He draws this conclusion on the basis of a distinction, which he finds in an essay by Walter Benjamin, between categories of life, with the “pro-tagonist” of the work being what he calls homo sacer, orbare life—life (...) that is stripped of its humanity and value. Five years earlier, in 1990, Derrida had given a lecture at UCLA in which he had analyzed the very same essay by Benjamin and had highlighted the distinction between “base life” and “just life.” The implications of his analysis show a discomforting prox-imity between Benjaminian messianism and the Nazi “final solution,” a conclusion that Agamben dismisses entirely. Inthis paper, however, I demonstrate that the structures of the two works are quite similar in many important ways. I argue that, though the broad scope of Agamben’s work is original in many respects, and I would not wish to reduce Agamben’s work to Derridean repetitions, he nevertheless utilizes much more of Derrida’s analysis, specifically with respect to the categori-zation of life, than he would like the reader to believe. (shrink)

This article examines the presuppositions underlying Derrida's criticisms of Husserl's theory of expression, and philosophy of language generally. I argue that Derrida's claim that indication (and so the sign-function) is present at the heart of phenomenological "expression" is based on an unwarranted substitution of a Hegelian structure of reflection for Husserl's own phenomenological concept of reflection and evidence. I then criticize a different sort of unclarity in Husserl's analysis of the noetic and noematic relations between "expressive" (linguistic) and "preexpressive" sense. (...) The positions of John Caputo, Claude Evans, and Robert Sokolowski on these issues are discussed and evaluated. (shrink)

Sense and Affect exposes the limits of important recent strands in continental philosophy. It questions the necessity of a certain language of violence, otherness, disruption and pathos saturating Jacques Derrida's texts and the texts of those having a proximity to Derrida's deconstructionist project. This book establishes a connection between such affective terminology and a common, if heterogeneously expressed, theoretical inadequacy binding Derrida and writers such as Lyotard, Foucault, Caputo and Nancy. Their failure to penetrate a presumed irreducibility of suffering in (...) the world is shown to be linked to their dependence on the assumption of an irreducible tension at the origin of meaning. This book develops a fresh method of thought thoroughly unraveling the presuppositions of deconstructive orientations and uncovering a finer silt of the world than is seen via such discourses. (shrink)

Jean-Luc Nancy would appear to have avoided the aura of conceptual determinativeness plaguing John Caputo's reading of Derrida. His rendering of the interweaving of experience is vigilant at depriving us of the ability to capture and possess a temporary presence in the event itself. In 'Elliptical Sense' (Research in Phenomenology,pp.175-190) and `Differance' (Sense of the World, pp.34-36) he thinks Derrida's quasi-transcendental as a being-singular-plural. But is Nancy's differential communication of events understanding itself as Derridean differance? Nancy himself reminds (Ellipsis34) that (...) while there is a great proximity between his work and Derrida, it is not a complicity. What might Nancy not be apprehending of Derrida's thought? (shrink)

One may locate in Geoffrey Bennington's reading of Derrida a formalization of deconstructive terms reminiscent of Caputo's thematizing of the moment of the sign. In Bennington's hands, Derrida's differance seems to be thought as a conceptual form programmatically configuring subjective, or `actual', events. Bennington reads Derrida's possible-impossible hinge, the `perhaps', as pertaining to definitive events which either conform to convention or break away from those norms. Bennington's quasi-transcendental, in thinking itself via the pure structurality of internal relation, unknowingly succumbs to (...) a deconstructive destabilization before it can even think the first instance of its own `contingently realized' form. An internally unitary principle or form, even if thought only in the instant of its contingent application to an empirical event, cannot justify its momentary identicality, and so the supposed determinativeness of the event as the `as such' of its internal structure is revealed as a phantasm repressing a more intimate effect. (shrink)

It has been said that we can't look the other in the eye in guilt. We don't have to be accused by another to feel we have failed her or him. The other need not be disappointed in us, nor even be aware of our failure at all. Guilt as self-blame would be the realization of our failure to behave in the way we expected of ourself, the hurt and disappointment we feel when we are not quite what we thought (...) we were. It would originate in a being-other-than what we expected, the sense of missed opportunity, of a mourning of a better fork in the road not taken. Guilt would register a sense of seeming self-regression or decadence in the momentum of one's experience. What, preliminarily, might we comment concerning the structure we've just sketched of a `twinge' of guilt, the feeling of ìetting oneself down? Let us at first locate the peculiar edge of guilt, as we have described it above, as its`I ought to have, should have, could have' way of thinking, our awareness that we failed to do what we were capable of, what we assumed we would. The proximity between that which one expected of oneself and one's apparent failure to live up to that standard would mark guilt as a gnawing, teasing puzzlement or surprise. Our falling away from another we care for could then be spoken of as an alienation of oneself from oneself. When we feel we have failed another, we mourn our mysterious dislocation from a competence or value which we associated ourselves with. It follows from this that any thinking of guilt as a `should have, could have' blamefulness deals in a notion of dislocation and distance, of a mysterious discrepancy within intended meaning, separating who we were from who we are in its teasing gnawing abyss. Guilt and sadness would seem to represent a plunge into the darkness of separation. As we have seen, for Derrida there would be guilt as an always implied within-trace effect determined by the origin of every event as other than itself in the instant of being itself. This within-trace sense of mourning would be an irreducible quasi-transcendental condition of experience. One disturbs and disappoints oneself in a certain sense at every moment. Then there would also be for Derrida the possibility of guilt, sadness and mourning as a momentum of between-trace relation marking our stumbling into experience marked by a sparse density of change. (shrink)

A prevalent interpretation of Heidegger today is what I will call for the sake of convenience, the Levinasian reading. According to this perspective, Heidegger's Being as Ontological Difference grapples with the contradiction between the subjectivism of representationality and the absolute other to representation. But the concept of Being as Ontological difference risks risks being mistaken for a Kantian unconditioned ground of possibility. Derrida argues that the Levinas reading mistakes the ontic for the ontological. Being is not a concept, the ontological (...) difference is not the difference between the subjective and the empirical, but difference WITHIN the subjective and the empirical. (shrink)

Common to different versions of social constructionism is the definition of discourse as taking place between persons. Experiences which take place in the absence of immediate others, such as thinking to oneself or reading a text, are treated as secondary phenomena, as introjected versions of social utterance-gestures. This article asserts that representative constructionist articulations of between-person relationality rest on abstractions masking a more primary locus of sociality. I offer an alternative formulation of the social as the embodiment of sensate experience, (...) borrowing from Merleau-Ponty's and Gendlin's accounts. Sensate experience is already radically relational before and beyond any notion of sociality as between-person voices-gestures, generating more intimate and mobile possibilities of interpersonal understanding than is offered via discursive readings of terms like social, language and embodiment. -/- Note; Although this paper pertains to social constructionist positions, my central criticism of these approaches applies as well to Deleuze's bio-political notion of sociality. While constructionists restrict their focus to inter-personal communication, Deleuze broadens the notion of language to include the living and material world, which includes the body. This places the site of otherness and sociality within intentionality itself via its entanglement with affect. Nevertheless, Deleuze's treatment of affective-intentional dynamics, rather than dismantling social constructionism's between-person abstractions, manages to import them into bodily process. (shrink)

During the last ten years of his life, Antonin Artaud shows more and more intensively a multi-faceted and caustic refusal for traditional literature and the ordinary practice of writing. But above all, he shows a stylistic impatience for the alphabetic use of the word and the language. By the intention of creating an inhuman language, which could be understood also by the illiterate people, Artaud wants to undermine the significant use of the word, so that he can achieve a non-representative (...) language, a language that could make real. In this perspective, the aim of our work consists in an inquiry of the expressive forms through which Artaud’s last literary production shows the refusal of canonical literature: especially, we attempt to work about the use of glossolalias, drawings and pictograms included in several Cahiers which Artaud draws up during his confinement in the Rodez’s madhouse, as well as in some of the letters that he writes since 1943. (shrink)

The reflection elaborated in these pages, fleeing all submission to the now abused rhetoric of the prevailing economism, traces in the works of René Girard - the most serious pretender to the legacy of the masters of suspicion - and Jacques Derrida - the last great philosopher of the twentieth century - the constituent elements of a critical paradigm with which to interpret the present time. The volume investigates the multiple correspondences between the different legacies of deconstruction and the most (...) recent developments of mimetic theory through the articulated reconstruction of the reflections, still little known in Italy, of some of the most brilliant contemporary exponents of those traditions. Formulating the features of an ontology of actuality hinged on the notions of mimesis and trace, the author proposes a philosophical diagnosis that recognizes in our time an age in the grip of panic. (shrink)

This article maps, across a wide range of works, the coordinates of Derrida's thinking of democracy and its relevance to a series of crucial concepts, from difference to autoimmunity. Distinguishing Derrida's idea of a “democracy to come” from the Kantian ideal, Bennington links it to Aristotle's insistence upon multiplicity and to a thinking of deviance and perversion, an appropriately deconstructive logic for thinking an absence of telos in democracy to come.

Traditional accounts of the feminist history of philosophy have viewed reason as associated with masculinity and subsequent debates have been framed by this assumption. Yet recent debates in deconstruction have shown that gender has never been a stable matter. In the history of philosophy 'female' and 'woman' are full of ambiguity. What does deconstruction have to offer feminist criticism of the history of philosophy? _Yielding Gender_ explores this question by examining three crucial areas; the issue of gender as 'troubled'; deconstruction; (...) and feminist criticism of the history of philosophy. The first part of the book discusses the work of Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, and contemporary French feminist philosophy including key figures such as Luce Irigiray. Particular attention is given to the possibilities offered by deconstruction for understanding the history of philosophy. The second part considers and then challenges feminist interpretations of some key figures in the history of philosophy. Penelope Deutscher sketches how Rousseau, St. Augustine and Simone de Beauvoir have described gender and argues that their readings of gender are in fact empowered by gender's own contradiction and instability rather than limited by it. (shrink)

The reputation and influence of Emmanuel Levinas has grown powerfully. Well known in France in his lifetime, he has since his death become widely regarded as a major European moral philosopher profoundly shaped by his Jewish background. A pupil of Husserl and Heidegger, Levinas pioneered new forms of exegesis with his post-modern readings of the Talmud, and as an ethicist brought together religious and non-religious, Jewish and non-Jewish traditions of contemporary thought. Richard A. Cohen has written a book which uses (...) Levinas' work as its base but goes on to explore broader questions of interpretation in the context of text-based ethical thinking. Levinas' reorientation of philosophy is considered in critical contrast to alternative contemporary approaches such as those found in modern science, psychology, Nietzsche, Freud, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida and Ricoeur. Cohen explores a manner of philosophizing which he terms 'ethical exegesis'. (shrink)

One of the most significant contemporary thinkers in continental philosophy, Jacques Derrida’s work continues to attract heated commentary among philosophers, literary critics, social and cultural theorists, architects and artists. This major new work by world renowned Derrida scholar and translator, Geoffrey Bennington, presents incisive new readings of both Derrida and interpretations of his work. Part one sets out Derrida’s work as a whole and examines its relevance to, and ‘interruption’ of, the traditional domains of ethics, politics and literature. The second (...) part of the book presents compelling insights into some important motifs in Derrida’s work, such as death, friendship, psychoanalysis, time and endings. The final section introduces trenchant appraisals of other influential accounts of Derrida’s work. This influential and original contribution to the literature on Derrida is marked by a commitment to clarity and accuracy, but also by a refusal to simplify Derrida’s often difficult thought. (shrink)

Andrew Bowie's book is the first introduction in English to present F W J Schelling as a major European philospher in his own right. _Schelling and Modern European Philosophy_, surveys the whole of Schelling's philosophical career, lucidly reconstructing his key arguments, particularly those against Hegel, and relating them to contemporary philosophical discussion. Dr Bowie traces how central ideas and conceptual strategies in the work of philosophers as diverse as Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida and Davidson relate closely to Schelling's often misunderstood philosophy (...) and focuses on Schelling's work as an alternative to, and critique of aspects of Hegel's thinking. (shrink)

This collection in the area of continental philosophy of language, aesthetics, and semiotics includes articles and book selections from Derrida, Ricouer, McCumber, Oliver, Sheshradi-Krooks, Lacan, and Kristeva. This collection is available in the University of Guelph bookstore.

Critical evaluation of Heidegger on philosophy & politics (with particular emphasis on the Heidelberg Conference featuring Gadamer, Derrida and Lacoue- Labarthe).

Abstract: This Thesis is to examine Jacques Derrida’s idea of trace, différance, and supplement; to examine whether or not they have a structure of open. By closely reading Derrida’s Speech and Phenomena, “Violence and Metaphysics”, Of Grammatology, and “Différance,” I will discuss this question in two levels of inquiry: one is on the microscopic scope and the other one is on the large-scale scope. In the microscopic scope, Derrida’s trace, différance, and supplement can be regarded as open, because trace, différance, (...) and supplement contain the fundamental difference within themselves and they are never in the status of purity and / or plenitude. In this sense, they are open to the difference in relation to themselves. In this scope, Derrida’s critical reading of Edmund Husserl’s “ideal meaning” and “ideal impression” of time shows that the original truth of the “ideal meaning” and sense is never fully ideal, and it is lacking such “ideality” even from the very beginning. Moreover, Derrida’s critique of Emmanuel Levinas’s “absolute Other” and “infinity” demonstrates that trace, différance, and supplement never let the other remain beyond, keeping it instead in the closure of the subject deciding to accept the responsibility beyond calculation. In short, under Derrida’s examinations, Husserl’s phenomenology and Levinas’s philosophy of the Other are in the domain of closure, unlike to where Derrida sees himself, in the open. Indeed, in the microscopic scope, Derrida’s philosophy is open. However, in the large-scale scope, when the web of trace, différance, and supplement is prevailing and encompassing everything even its own “exit,” the “open” thus covers and denies other modes of thinking, that is to say, conceals the possibility of going out of this mode of thinking. In this scope, the structure of différance is closed. (shrink)

Khurana distinguishes different ways in which Derrida’s deconstruction can be understood as an attempt at transforming the transcendental question. Derrida’s essay “Cogito and the History of Madness” might lead us to the assumption that Derrida’s primary interest lies in a move of radicalization: in identifying conditions that are even more fundamental or basic than the conditions of the acts of our theoretical and practical cognition that transcendental philosophy has highlighted. He suggests, however, that instead of a mere radicalization, Derrida’s decisive (...) move in the transformation of the transcendental question resides rather in complicating the way we understand these conditions of possibility: (i) in an attempt to reveal conditions of the possibility of a certain type of act as being simultaneously the conditions of the impossibility of the purity of this act (a project that is sometimes termed “quasi-transcendental”); and (ii) an attempt to complicate the distinction between empirical and transcendental conditions (an investigation that is sometimes called “ultra-transcendental”). (shrink)

In Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing (Malabou 2010), Catherine Malabou looks back over her earlier intellectual trajectory and attempts to clarify the precise relationship between her own philosophical investigations and the crucial sources on which she has principally drawn, namely Hegelian dialectic, Heidegger’s ‘destruction’ of the history of ontology, and Derrida’s project of deconstruction. In this process, she also undertakes to take a step beyond the complex constellation of these three sources, arguing for a philosophy of plasticity which can (...) at once take up and transform the practices of dialectic, destruction, and deconstruction in what she describes as a ‘plastic reading’. (shrink)

Der Beitrag zeichnet die Selbstbeschreibung der Theorie Luhmanns als »Supertheorie« nach und macht an ihr kenntlich, inwiefern die Verwiesenheit der Theorie auf andere Beschreibungen und die Uneinholbarkeit der Theorie für sich selbst unterbelichtet und unzureichend entfaltet bleiben (1). Luhmanns Konzeption wird daher Derridas Quasi-Konzept des »theoretical jetty«, des theoretischen Entwurfs, zur Seite gestellt, das es ermöglicht, den Aporien der Selbstbezüglichkeit der Theorie, den resultierenden Ungreifbarkeiten und der Verwiesenheit auf andere Theorien in anderer Weise Rechnung zu tragen (2). Das erlaubt schließlich (...) Anregungen für eine andersgeartete Theoriekonstruktion: für Möglichkeiten supplementärer statt schlicht totalisierender Theorieverhältnisse, für nicht-thematistische Markierungen der Selbstbezüglichkeit von Theorien und für eine Theoriekonstruktion, die Generalisierung und Respezifikation als Prozeßformen stärker hervorhebt (3). (shrink)

This is an essay on Kant's neglected late tract On a Recently Adopted Prominent Tone in Philosophy (RTP) and Derrida's oblique commentary on this work in his D'un ton apocalyptique adopté naguère en philosophie. The theme of the essay is metaphilosophical and considers issues concerning the nature of critical philosophy, fanaticism (Schwärmerei), and the use of religious tropes in philosophy. I am primarily interested in the ways in which RTP thematises the legitimacy of speaking in an exalted, quasi-religious tone apropos (...) of the authority of Reason as a self-legitimising capacity in philosophical speech. An important additional reason for taking a closer look at this text is because the late Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) took a great interest in this work of Kant’s and, indeed, emphasised, rightly I think, that despite its prima facie rhetorically charged, polemical nature this work—which might at first be taken to be merely a lampoon—is anything but insignificant in Kant’s œuvre. Derrida’s On a Recently Adopted Apocalyptic Tone in Philosophy, originally published in 1983, is an oblique commentary on Kant’s RTP, and aims to expose to view the alleged hidden underpinnings of Kant’s polemic against exaltation or fanaticism (Schwärmerei) in philosophy. Derrida tries to show that Kant’s appeal for tonal moderation in philosophy, for a measured speech, which should rein in exalted modes of speech, is itself not neutral and rather fundamentally biased against an exalted, quasi-religious, manner of thought. It is evident that, as he himself notes early on in RTP, Kant is predisposed towards a more Aristotelian, academic kind of philosophy, which adopts a “proper” tone or pitch in philosophical debate, but Derrida claims that Kant himself raises his voice precisely in lampooning exalted thinkers. I am particularly interested in the extent to which Derrida’s critique manifests a fundamental misapprehension of the Kantian mode of moderating critique. By expounding this misapprehension, Kant’s own reasons for his philippic against religious or quasi-religious talk in philosophy are foregrounded, thus showing the nature of properly critical thought. At the same time, I shall show how Derrida underestimates the self-reflexivity, and hence properly critical, self-authorising mode of thinking, underlying his own oblique references to the adieu as a trope for quasi-transcendental intentionality towards the so-called ‘Other’. (shrink)

This volume of essays by internationally prominent scholars interprets the full range of Heidegger's thought and major critical interpretations of it. It explores such central themes as hermeneutics, facticity and Ereignis, conscience in Being and Time, freedom in the writings of his period of transition from fundamental ontology, and his mature criticisms of metaphysics and ontotheology. The volume also examines Heidegger's interpretations of other authors, the philosophers Aristotle, Kant and Nietzsche and the poets Rilke, Trakl and George. A final group (...) of essays interprets the critical reception of Heidegger's thought, both in the analytic tradition and in France. This rich and wide-ranging collection will appeal to all who are interested in the themes, the development and the context of Heidegger's philosophical thought. (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)

This essay argues that Hans-Georg Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics, Jürgen Habermas's communication theory, and Jacques Derrida's deconstruction all fit together within one philosophical paradigm: metamodernism. Metamodernism, as defined, is opposed to both modernism and radical forms of postmodernism. Within metamodernism, a political conundrum provides the key clue for understanding the relations among Gadamer, Habermas, and Derrida as well as for elaborating the contours of the paradigm. Specifically, the political implications of the three philosophies are intransitive: they seem to shift around rather (...) than being in fixed relations to each other. So, for instance, Gadamer sometimes seems to the political right of both Habermas and Derrida, but then, at different times, he stands between them, and then again, at other times, he seems to be to the left of both. This political paradox suggests that the traditional political categories of liberalism and conservatism do not suitably reflect the critical positions within metamodernism. Gadamer, Habermas, and Derrida are far more concerned with explaining the possibility and techniques of interpretive and social critique, while remaining true to the metamodernist paradigm, rather than fitting themselves into the traditional liberal or conservative political camps. (shrink)

____Ethics of Eros__ sheds light on contemporary feminist discourse by questioning the basic distinctions and categories in feminist theory. Tina Chanter uses the work of Luce Irigaray as the focus for a critique of French and Anglo-American feminism as it is articulated in the debate over essentialism. While these two branches of feminism represent opposing views, Chanter advocates a productive exchange between the two.

Throughout much of the twentieth century, the relationship between analytic and continental philosophy has been one of disinterest, caution or hostility. Recent debates in philosophy have highlighted some of the similarities between the two approaches and even envisaged a post-continental and post-analytic philosophy. Opening with a history of key encounters between philosophers of opposing camps since the late nineteenth century - from Frege and Husserl to Derrida and Searle - the book goes on to explore in detail the main methodological (...) differences between the two approaches. This covers a very wide range of topics, from issues of style and clarity of exposition to formal methods arising from logic and probability theory. The final section of this book presents a balanced critique of the two schools' approaches to key issues such as time, truth, subjectivity, mind and body, language and meaning, and ethics. "Analytic versus Continental" is the first sustained analysis of both approaches to philosophy, examining the limits and possibilities of each. It provides a clear overview of a much-disputed history and, in highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of both traditions, also offers future directions for both continental and analytic philosophy. (shrink)