Derrida: Ethics

In this paper, I engage with the motif of “the pluriverse” such as it has increasingly been used in the past few years in several strands of critical humanities pertaining to the so-called “ontological turn”: science and technology studies (Bruno Latour, Isabelle Stengers), critical geography and political ontology (Mario Blaser), cultural anthropology (Marisol de la Cadena, Arturo Escobar, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro), decolonial thought (Walter Mignolo), or posthuman feminism (Donna Haraway). These various iterations of the figure of the pluriverse constitute (...) a loose network of textual traces, a supposedly new scene for ‘humanities’, organized around what is understood as a pluralistic ontology. In political terms, the discourse of the pluriverse presents itself as a strategic response to the violence of universalism. It advocates for a multiversal ethics, a pluriversal cosmopolitics based on interspecies and multi-natural kinships, and more aware of the multiplicity of worlds and world-making practices that make up the post-globalization scene. Based on readings of Bruno Latour, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Arturo Escobar and Marisol de la Cadena among others, I argue that the notion of pluriversality remains self-contradictory and self-defeating as long as it relies on an ontological representation of world/worlds in the form of copresence. Drawing on Derrida’s deconstruction of the concept of world (cosmos, mundus) in his late writings, I propose to think an exorbitant plurality, before the pluriverse and before being. Beyond ontological pluralism, Derrida’s “infinity of untranslatable worlds” also signifies an irreducible interruption, the end of the world, of any “world-in-common”, thus raising the stakes for the ethical demand towards the other. (shrink)

This essay examines Étienne Balibar's readings of Jacques Derrida and deconstruction. The text is framed as a review of two books by Balibar: 'Equaliberty' and 'Violence and Civility'. After describing the context of those readings, I propose a broader reflection on the ambiguous relationship between 'post-Marxism' and 'deconstruction', focusing on concepts such as 'violence', 'cruelty', 'sovereignty' and 'property'. I also raise methodological questions related to the 'use' of deconstructive notions in political theory debates.

Given previously successful interventions that already have shaken up the convention, it is puzzling that the feminist critique of bioethics should be slow to embrace the exciting new developments that have emerged in philosophy and critical cultural studies over the last fifteen years or so. Both in the arenas of poststructuralism and postmodernism and in the powerful revival of phenomenological thought, in which the stress on embodiment is highly appropriate to bioethics, there is much that might augment the adequacy of (...) our approach. Many of these resources have been developed productively by feminist thinkers to reflect not simply the differential lived experience of women, but also to mobilize a specifically feminist slant to theory itself. The encouragement to read Derrida, Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, or Deleuze results not in a turn back to the masculinist masters, but to a fuller appreciation of just how distinctive a feminist reworking can be. The most exciting feminist theorists are less concerned with an “authentic” representation of an existing oeuvre than in showing how it can be extended, distorted if necessary, and applied to areas far beyond its originally intended scope. In turning to the problem of heart transplantation, I hope to demonstrate such a move at work in a specific material context. (shrink)

In recent years, there have been reports about increased religious discrimination in schools. As a way of acknowledging the importance of religion and faith communities in the public sphere and to propose a solution to the exclusion of religious citizens, the political philosopher Jürgen Habermas suggests an act of translation for which both secular and religious citizens are mutually responsible. What gets lost in Habermas's translation, this paper argues, is the condition that makes translation both necessary and possible. Drawing on (...) Walter Benjamin's notion of the mysterious untranslatable and the task of the translator, the paper approaches translation as an ethical process involving risk, asymmetry and uncertainty. Not knowing where this risk will lead, the paper takes the ethical ambivalence at play in Jacques Derrida's notion of the untranslatable and explores this in relation to religious difference in education. It argues that the untranslatable needs to be acknowledged in terms of a respect for difference and a limit to narration, if students with religious convictions are not to be further violated in schools. (shrink)

In his Faith and Knowledge Derrida deconstructs the opposition between religion and knowledge. Paradoxically, on the one hand he calls faith the common source of both religion and knowledge, while on the other hand he is criticizing every religious tradition, taking his starting point in the tradition of enlightenment. This article critically discusses Derrida's thoughts on religion and tracks the force of faith that is at work in his deconstructive strategies. The last section discusses the contrary effects these deconstructive strategies (...) may bring about with regard to tolerance and justice. (shrink)

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)

What’s in a name after Derrida? What’s in a name after all? What is a name such that it always already remains, after all is said and done? And who or what is itthat one calls name, names, or by name? Is it possible not to have a name of one’s own? Or to have another? The same as another? Is it possible to call and recall, in the name of memory and remembrance, indifference or convention, one name for another, (...) one name for the other? Can the name be, as it were, avoided? Could anyone respond responsibly yet decline or resist, not so much that names wound, nor to protect oneself from being called names, but instead neither to call nor respond to the name, as it were, to the very same name one is called? To protest against the name, to refuse the name to the point of abandoning this and that name? To invent oneself beyond the name, beyond all names, in the name of the name? “For in order to live oneself truly,” Derrida writes, “it is necessary to elude the law of the name, the familial law made for survival and constantly recalling me to death.” What is called naming? One could say that the name is, to life, at once insult and injury. Or that calling names—mourning. (shrink)

In the following paper I shall outline a number of preliminary ideas concerning the relationship between the Holocaust and certain themes which emerge in the work of Emmanuel Levinas. As this relationship is distinctly twofold, my analysis will include both a textual and a rather more speculative component. That is to say, while I shall argue that reading Levinas specifically as a post-Holocaust thinker clarifies a number of his philosophical and rhetorical motifs, so, in turn, does this challenging body of (...) work offer a means by which to re-think both the horror and ethical significance of the Holocaust itself. During the course of my argument I shall additionally refer to the writings of Primo Levi, Jacques Derrida and Martin Heidegger through whom I hope also to establish the central role guilt and confession play in Levinas’s own thinking. (shrink)

O presente artigo pretende-se uma abordagem introdutória do pensamento de Jacques Derrida, em seu aspecto ético e político. Procuramos relacionar sua filosofia com as de Emmanuel Lévinas e de Michel Foucault. Apresentamos e analisamos noções como hospitalidade, acolhimento, cosmopolitismo, dentre outras, articulando-as em torno da questão filosófica da alteridade, da relação com outrem. Pretendemos mostrar como a ética elaborada em Derrida, desde de sua leitura de Lévinas e pensada a partir do acontecimento da desconstrução, se dá enquanto experiência do radicalmente (...) outro, isto é, de um outro que já não se refere a uma identidade. (shrink)

Within recent years, we have witnessed an alarming increase in so-called school-shootings, where one or more students enter their school and purposely start shooting other students or staff. Earlier, the phenomenon was primarily American, but lately school-shootings have also been seen in Canada, Europe, and Australia. School-shootings have become an increasing problem and the phenomenon calls for more thorough investigation. In this article, we analyse the actions of teachers, more specifically the ones where teachers give their lives to save students. (...) This unselfish act is analysed in the light of Jacques Derrida’s ethical discussions around ‘the gift of death’, and is displayed as an absolute responsibility. Moreover, the sacrificial actions displayed by teachers are viewed as acts of primitive leadership, which take us back to the romanticism and heroism of leadership. Unlike the everyday management of organisations, crises call for extraordinary leadership; for sacrifice and responsibility. (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)

Athens in Paris explores the ways in which the writings of the ancient Greeks played a decisive part in shaping the intellectual projects of structuralism and post-structuralism - arguably the most significant currents of thought of the post-war era. Miriam Leonard argues that thinkers in post-war France turned to the example of Athenian democracy in their debates over the role of political subjectivity and ethical choice in the life of the modern citizen. The authors she investigates, who include Lacan, Derrida, (...) Foucault, and Vernant, have had an incalculable influence on the direction of classical studies over the last thirty years, but classicists have yet to give due attention to the crucial role of the ancient world in the development of their philosophy. (shrink)

Suggesting that phenomenology results in an “imperialism of the same” that considers the other only in terms of their effect upon the subject rather than in their genuine alterity, Levinas initiates a line of thought that can still be discerned in the work of Foucault, Derrida and Claude Lefort. However, this paper argues that Merleau-Ponty’s work is capable of avoiding this line of criticism, and that his position is an important alternative to the more dominant Derridean and Levinasian conceptions of (...) alterity. Moreover, this essay will also extricate Merleau-Ponty from Levinas’ claim that his philosophy is “sustained by an unaccountable affection”. Rather than ignoring the alterity of the other, and also without presupposing some primordial affectionate bond with the other, Merleau-Ponty explicates an interesting conception of what responsibility towards the ‘otherness of the other’ should consist in. Basically, he insists upon the way in which self and other are always already intertwined together (or reversible), and suggests that respecting the alterity of the other should involve the imperative to further immerse oneself in this transformative bond – to transform what we think of as self, and also what we think of as ‘other’. (shrink)

For philosophers such as Kant, the imagination is the starting point for all thought. For others, such as Wittgenstein, what is important is only how the word 'imagination' is used. In spite of the attention the imagination has received from major philosophers, remarkably little has been written about the radically different interpretations they have made of it. _The HypoCritical Imagination: Between Kant and Levinas_ is an outstanding contribution to this vaccuum. Focusing on Kant and Levinas, John Llewelyn takes us on (...) a dazzling tour of the philosophical imagination. He shows us that despite the different treatments they accord to the imagination, there is much to be gained from comparing these two key thinkers. From Kant, Llewelyn shows how the imagination is the common root of all understanding. He contrasts this with the thought of Emmanuel Levinas, for whom the imagination plays an ambivalent role both as necessary for and a threat to recognition of the other. John Llewelyn also introduces the importance of the work of Heidegger Schelling, Hegel, Arendt and Derrida on the imagination and what this work can tell us about the relationship between the imagination and ethics, aesthetics and literature. _The HypoCritical Imagination: Between Kant and Levinas_ is a brilliant reading of a neglected but important philosophical theme and is essential reading for those in contemporary philosophy, art theory and literature. (shrink)

One of the most pressing concerns for contemporary society is the issue of violence and the factors that promote it. In ____Altared Ground: Levinas, History and Violence__ Brian Schroeder stages an engagement between Emmanuel Levinas, one of the leading figures in 20th century Continental philosophy, and Plato, Hegel, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida and others in the history of ideas. Not merely an exposition of Levinas' original and complex thinking, Brian Schroeder seeks to re-read the history of Western philosophy and religion (...) by going beyond Levinas' alternatives to traditional theories of the self in order to suggest a notion of subjectivity that is not grounded in violence. (shrink)

The paper discusses the problem of self-sacrifice as posed by Derrida in Foi et Savior and by Schiller in the Theosophie des Julius. Whereas Derrida understands self-sacrifice as an act of violence against oneself in order not to subject others to violence, Schiller rightly insists that one must distinguish between egotistical and altruistic self-sacrifice. But even this doesn’t go far enough: Altruistic self-sacrifice is different from suffering death as the consequence of an entirely unselfish love. Whoever loses his life out (...) of love does not give it up for others, whether selfishly or unselfishly. He loves the other—to death. Such a death is not a (self-)sacrifice. It results from a passion of love, not an act of violence against oneself. (shrink)

This major discussion takes a look at some of the most important ethical issues confronting us today by some of the world’s leading thinkers. Including essays from leading thinkers, such as Jurgen Habermas, Alasdair MacIntyre, Julia Kristeva and Paul Ricoeur, the book’s highlight – an interview with Jacques Derrida - presents the most accessible insight into his thinking on ethics and politics for many years. Exploring topics ranging from history, memory, revisionism, and the self and responsibility to democracy, multiculturalism, feminism (...) and the future of politics, the essays are grouped into five thematic sections: * hermeneutics * deconstruction * critical theory * psychoanalysis * applied ethics. Each section considers the challenges posed by ethics and how critical thinking has transformed philosophy today. Questioning Ethics affords an unsurpassed overview of the state of ethical thinking today by some of the world’s foremost philosophers. (shrink)

A spirited reading of Derrida’s view of ethics as transcendental and performative.

An innovative study of deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and genealogy, relating the ethical to the problematic of the text as a post or a sending in the work of Derrida, Lyotard, Lacan, Kristeva, and Foucault, and phrasing the ethical as the questions of how to read and write after.

One of the world's most famous philosophers, Jacques Derrida, explores difficult questions in this important and engaging book. Is it still possible to uphold international hospitality and justice in the face of increasing nationalism and civil strife in so many countries? Drawing on examples of treatment of minority groups in Europe, he skilfully and accessibly probes the thinking that underlies much of the practice, and rhetoric, that informs cosmopolitanism. What have duties and rights to do with hospitality? Should hospitality be (...) grounded on a private or public ethic, or even a religious one? This fascinating book will be illuminating reading for all. (shrink)

This PhD project engages the fields of contemporary art, performance studies and performance philosophy. It explores participation and the relation of ethics to politics, through performance art works in public places. The research developed through a series of performances by the researcher, the researcher’s participation in performances of others, and in the writing of this exegesis. The project engages a reference field occurring among selected texts of the ‘ethics as first philosophy’ of contemporary philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, selected texts of Jacques (...) Derrida, selected passages of David Wills’s Dorsality, performance works of Ant Hampton and Glen Neath, Martin Nachbar and others, and writings on performance of André Lepecki, Brian Massumi, Alan Read, Liza Kharoubi and others. Following the introduction of the project in Chapter One of the exegesis, Chapter Two explores becoming and belonging within performance practices in relation to locale and the there, prosthetics, and recording. It proposes a choreographic engagement with passing, attending and tethering, where it proposes these as something like the ‘quasitranscendental’ structures Rodolph Gasché proposes–as conditions of possibility of classes or categories, and conditions of impossibility of the closure of such classes and categories. In relation to this it invents the neologism 'attendeer' as a relation of attention to passivity. The engagement with tethering recalls an audio-recorded voice saying, ‘Bear in mind that you are tethered’, in Hampton and Neath’s performance The Bench or Hello for Dummies. The project’s engagement with choreography references David Wills’s writing in Dorsality¬ of a ‘technology in the back’ (2008: 12), a technology in the human animal that is behind, prior to, and undoing of, conceptual perspective. Chapter Three explores modes of resemblance within the performance practices in relation to Levinas’s proposition in ‘Reality and Its Shadow’ of a passive participation in ‘the image’ which suspends conceptuality, as no longer the participation of a subject or substantive. It proposes that at times performances, through their minimal differences with life in general in a locale, open an engagement with ‘the image’. Chapter Four considers this project’s methodology through an exploration of Levinas’s ‘The Trace of the Other’, and Wills’s writing of dorsality as modes of ‘bending back’. In relation to this it considers the project as practice-led research. Exploring relations on footpaths of passers-by and attendeers in my performance practice, Chapter Four begins an exploration of responsibility and relations of ethics to politics, engaging writings on performance of André Lepecki, Liza Kharoubi, Alan Read, and writings on politics of Simon Critchley. Chapter Five engages my performance practice in relation to Levinas’s writing of ethics as diachronic time¬–‘a saying prior to anything said’–and juxtaposes aspects of Levinas’s engagement aspects of Jean-Luc Nancy’s engagement with Listening. Chapter Five explores relations of saying, seriality and interruption, and considers Levinas’s proposition of ingratitude in relation to the possibility or impossibility of the movement of a work that is not a restitution to the same. ‘Figuring Diachrony: Ethics before the voice’ relates performance practice to the possibility or impossibility of figuring the trace of ethics. (shrink)

This essay explores the challenge ofarticulating ethical discourse in an age cognisant of perspective, intentionally, through Jacques Derrida’s admiration for Nelson Mandela in ‘The Laws of Reflection: Nelson Mandela, In Admiration.’ For Derrida, Mandela affirms anoriginary trace of human dignity, yet performatively reconceived through perspectival testimony and conscience, drawing from heterogeneous headings in Tribal lore and European law. Mandela exemplifies admiration for those legal traditions endorsing human rights and dignity, yet his testimony is a performance of ethical imagination invoking the (...) spectre of ‘justice to come,’ which will always contest legal conventions and implicit circumscriptions of human dignity. Using additional works from Derrida, I propose that the challenge ofarticulating ethical values with traction, while affirming difference within an age cognisant of perspective, has exemplary focus in Derrida’s Mandela, with his spectral reflection of human dignity and difference. This ‘spectral reflection’ is a haunting silhouette of what is yet to come in the law, passing through mandela as through a mirror—from invisibility to visibility and vice versa. In ‘The Laws of Reflection,’Mandela is a metonym for anethicity of ethics (Derrida) that risks imaginative responsibility for an incalculable future, which, in the name of justice, calls into question any legal or ethical convention. This may have particular significance for articulating ethics in theological discourse. (shrink)

This article explores the role of disgust in Kant’s aesthetic philosophy, Derrida’s deconstruction of Kant’s third Critique in his article 'Economimesis,' and the figure of vomit in two films by David Lynch in order to argue for the ethical possibilities of not giving ground relative to one’s disgust—what I term an ethics of the worse than the worst.

El objetivo de este artículo es mostrar cómo Derrida ha concebido el exceso del concepto kierkegaardiano de muerte, especialmente en relación con “la muerte del otro” en oposición a la propia muerte. A pesar de las críticas que Lévinas dirige a lo religioso en Temor y temblor, en cuanto implica una suspensión de la ética, Derrida descubre en Kierkegaard una ética más exigente, una ética que suspende la ética: la ética del superviviente. Kierkegaard llevó a cabo, según Derrida, “un doblete (...) no dogmático del dogma, uno que repite la posibilidad de la religión sin religión”. La tesis que aquí se defiende es que esta ética del deber absoluto que Derrida descubre en Temor y temblor, en oposición a las éticas que dan sentido a la vida a pesar de la muerte, se resuelve en torno al tema central de la muerte del otro. Se mostrará cómo esta ética que defiende Derrida se corresponde con la “ética segunda” que Kierkegaard señala en Temor y temblor y desarrolla en Las obras del amor, especialmente en la articulación del deber absoluto de “amar a los muertos”. (shrink)

Using the occasion provided by a review of "Deconstruction and Pragmatism" (ed. Chantal Mouffe, Routledge: 1996), the article situates the differences between the political dimension of Rortyesque pragmatism and Derridean deconstruction, foregrounding where Derrida's thinking generates an understanding of democracy beyond the modern distinctions between liberalism and its others. Welcoming, but also disagreeing with the overall orientation of the book, it then argues that the political dimension to deconstruction is also underestimated by its own sympathizers for lack of an articulation (...) between the ethical and the political, the indeterminate and determination, an articulation increasingly, if ambivalently, present in Derrida's work. (shrink)

Focusing particularly on the role of the clock in social life, this article explores the conventions we use to “tell the time.” I argue that although clock time generally appears to be an all-encompassing tool for social coordination, it is actually failing to coordinate us with some of the most pressing ecological changes currently taking place. Utilizing philosophical approaches to performativity to explore what might be going wrong, I then draw on Derrida’s and Haraway’s understandings of social change in order (...) to suggest a fairly unconventional, but perhaps more accurate, mode of reckoning time in the context of climate change, resource depletion, and mass extinctions. (shrink)

Emmanuel Levinas's Totality and Infinity (1961) is explicitly con cerned with the suppression of the voice of the Other by the synoptic totalizations of the voice of western philosophy. Levinas contests this emergence of Being and the systems of totality it indicates with the irruption of the face of the other, which signifies through contact and sensibility the presence of infinity within the human situation. Derrida's reading of this fundamental testing of western ontology rests on the accusation that western philosophy (...) already has a term for this: empiricism. That is, Derrida exposes an alien voice within Levinas's exposure of the voice alienated from ontological formulations. In the later Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (1974) Levinas implic itly recognizes the truth of Derrida's demonstration of a residual con ceptualism, and shifts from the thematization of infinite exteriority given by the Other, alterity and the face-to-face relation, to the search for a signifyingness that will breach the noema's identificational closure, that is, to the direct and exposed gesture of saying. Both the limit terms of Totality and Infinity and the response they produced in Derrida have become the starting-point of Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence: the testimony that is irreducible to a thematizing knowledge. What saves this saying from becoming in its turn another theme is that, in addition to its acting in the text, it acts upon and as HISTORY OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES Vol. 10 No. 3 © 1997 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi) [0952-6951(199708)10:3] the text. The vocabulary, form of composition and mode of address of Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence strain against their inherited limits. And the work this obliges the reader to undergo is, of course, an ethical necessity, given the work's message. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to establish a proper context for reading Jacques Derrida's The Gift of Death, which, I contend, can only be understood fully against the backdrop of "Violence and Metaphysics." The later work cannot be fully understood unless the reader appreciates the fact that Derrida returns to "a certain Abraham" not only in the name of Kierkegaard but also in the name of Levinas himself. The hypothesis of the reading that follows therefore would be that Derrida (...) writes The Gift of Death not as an attempt to re-present Kierkegaard's Abraham either rightly or wrongly but as an effort to do with Kierkegaard's Abraham what is possible with his thought in a broadly Levinasian/Derridean framework. That the reading he provides of the Abraham story would not be recognizable to Kierkegaard is not the principal point of Derrida's effort; his aim is to demonstrate that Levinas should not have been so hasty to dismiss Kierkegaard but could have recovered his interpretation of Abraham for purposes that Derrida and Levinas both share. (shrink)

Fazendo emergir elementos susceptíveis de desconstruir o filme Vertigo de Alfred Hitchcock e, assim, operar uma hermenêutica do testemunho, procuraremos demonstrar como a metafísica do "tempo do projecto" e a atitude filosófica do "catastrofismo esclarecido" propostas por Jean-Pierre Dupuy, integram-se e sustentam-se na lógica do testemunho. Este trabalho apresenta-se como um triplo pretexto: num primeiro momento, a insustentabilidade do niilismo uma vez que, se o desejo mimético pode ser "niilizante", ele também é condição da possibilidade do luto e, portanto, de (...) (re-)criação e do testemunho; num segundo momento, o de mostrar a compatibilidade da desconstrução de Jacques Derrida com a hermenêutica do testemunho esboçada por Paul Ricœur, podendo ser a primeira o momento da conversão impulsionador da (re-)criação do sentido, necessário à concretização da segunda; num terceiro momento, o de considerarmos a hipótese do tempo do projecto e do testemunho, enquanto excedente do tempo da catástrofe e do niilismo, serem uma brecha para entrevermos o recuo, o adiar, a economia do desvio diferencial da crueldade humana e da violência. Making emerge elements that can help us deconstruct the film Vertigo of Alfred Hitchcock and, therefore, operate a hermeneutic of testimony, we will try to demonstrate how the metaphysics of the "Time of Project" and the philosophical attitude of the "enlightened catastrophism" proposed by Jean-Pierre Dupuy can be integrated and sustained in the logic of testimony. This work presents itself as a triple pretext: in a first moment, the unsustainability of the nihilism, once that, if the mimetic desire may be "nihilist", it is also a condition for the possibility of mourning and, therefore, for the possibility of (re-)creation and testimony; in a second moment, to show the compatibility of deconstruction of Jacques Derrida with the hermeneutics of testimony outlined by Paul Ricœur, being the first probably the moment of the catalyst conversion of (re-)creation of the meaning, necessary for the implementation of the second; in a third moment, to consider the hypothesis of the time of project and testimony, while the surplus of the time of the disaster and nihilism, be a breakthrough for us to see the retreat, the delay, the economy of the differential deviation of human cruelty and violence. (shrink)

This essay addresses the implications of German Idealism and Romanticism, and in particular the philosophy of Schelling as it is informed by Kant and Goethe, for contemporary environmental philosophy. Schelling's philosophy posits a nature imbued with freedom which gives rise to human beings, which means that any ethics, insofar as ethics is predicated upon freedom, will be an 'environmental ethic'. At the same time, Schelling's organismic view of nature is distinctive in positing a fundamental gap between nature and human beings. (...) Without this absolute alterity, there could be no real ethical relationship between human beings and nature. I conclude by briefly gesturing toward Schelling's role in the development of an ethics of alterity in continental philosophy through Heidegger, Derrida, and Levinas. (shrink)

The global financial crisis of 2008 brought the risk involved in the international banking business to everybody’s attention. It made clear that risk, despite the claims of banks, cannot be hedged away. The risk inherent in the banking business has been realised. It was realised to a larger extent and in different dimensions than assumed by risk management, quantitatively and qualitatively, and it had more severe effects than imagined before. This paper takes this event as an opportunity to reconsider the (...) term ‘risk’ itself from an unusual perspective. Aspects from the philosophy of Jacques Derrida, his considerations of the event, the im-possible or the horizon are used to interrogate the term ‘risk’ and to propose a ‘risk to come’. (shrink)

This paper explores the meaning of the ethical command “You Shall Not Kill” subliminally included in the main exhibition of The Kigali Memorial Centre, Rwanda. The Centre was opened on the 10th Anniversary of the Rwandan Genocide, in April 2004 and contains a permanent exhibition of the Rwandan genocide and an exhibition of other genocides around the world. In order to achieve this aim, this paper takes as a point of departure, Emmanuel Levinas’s interpretation of the 6th Commandment. This well-known (...) interpretation is then read through the prism of Jacques Derrida’s critique of Levinas’s early work in Violence and Metaphysics. The aim of this reading is to understand the subliminal message of the Memorial Centre as enounced not by the victimized Tutsi curators or by the Rwandan people in general, but by human beings unavoidable need to reach out towards the other, not in an effort for dialogue (forthat is always a form of violence), but in an effort to keep the future open, an opening without fulfillment. (shrink)

Cet essai dénonce comme fascisantes certaines tendances de la pensée des philosophes déconstructivistes. Selon l'auteur, ils ont fait l'apologie d'un nouveau nihilisme qui a eu pour résultat des phénomènes paradoxaux tels que la sympathie envers l'islamisme radical, le détournement des arts ou la naturalisation de la crise des institutions.

A principle aim of this paper is to convince friends and critics of deconstruction that they have overlooked two crucial aspects of Derrida's work, namely, his rearticulation of the concept of experience and his account of the experience of undecidability as an ordeal. This is important because sensitivity to Derrida's emphasis on the ordeal of undecidability and his rearticulation of the concept of experience-a rearticulation that is already under way in his early engagement with Husserl and continued in later work-necessitates (...) a rethinking of what the `experience of undecidability' entails. Rather than signaling a withdrawal from politics or a normatively impotent ethics of `mere openness to the other,' Derrida's account of the experience of undecidability not only points to a fundamental aspect of our basic ethical experience but also leads to a number of ethico-political demands, which I summarize as the demand to maintain an ethos of interruption. (shrink)

Abstract A principle aim of this paper is to convince friends and critics of deconstruction that they have overlooked two crucial aspects of Derrida's work, namely, his rearticulation of the concept of experience and his account of the experience of undecidability as an ordeal. This is important because sensitivity to Derrida's emphasis on the ordeal of undecidability and his rearticulation of the concept of experience-a rearticulation that is already under way in his early engagement with Husserl and continued in later (...) work-necessitates a rethinking of what the `experience of undecidability' entails. Rather than signaling a withdrawal from politics or a normatively impotent ethics of `mere openness to the other,' Derrida's account of the experience of undecidability not only points to a fundamental aspect of our basic ethical experience but also leads to a number of ethico-political demands, which I summarize as the demand to maintain an ethos of interruption. (shrink)

This article analyzes the role played by Immanuel Kant's defense of the death penalty, in the first and the second years of Jacques Derrida's Death Penalty Seminars, delivered from 1999 to 2001. Regarding the first year, the initial part of this article charts how Derrida introduces Kant's writings that purport to elaborate the categorical imperative of the death penalty, not by Kant's primary arguments but rather precisely through Kant's concession of an exception to this categorical imperative, concerning the impunity of (...) a mother's infanticide. Derrida's lectures juxtapose Kant's philosophy of the death penalty with Victor Hugo's claim for the inviolability of life, and in doing so, the sessions introduce other examples of the applicability of the death penalty to mothers who have killed their children. What is at stake is the status of philosophy relative to the death penalty. Concerning the second year, the latter part of this article isolates the logic of Kant's categorical imperative, as deconstructed by Derrida, through recourse to the additions that Kant was obliged to append to his initial argument—those involving precisely sex crimes. The article follows how Derrida thoroughly takes apart both the simplicity of Kant's categorical imperative of the death penalty by means of the complications that are its abyssal foundation and the phallogocentrism of Freud's sexual oppositions through the extraction of insights into another thinking of sexual difference that Freud's categories foreclosed. (shrink)

In his seminars on the death penalty, Derrida consistently describes Kant's arguments in favor of capital punishment as “rigorous” and explicitly relates that rigor to the mechanisms of execution and the subsequent rigor mortis of the corpse. ‘Rigor’ has also often been a contested term in descriptions of deconstruction: different commentators have either deplored or celebrated the presence or the absence of rigor in Derrida's work. Derrida himself uses the term a good deal throughout his career, usually in a positive (...) sense, although he also at least once, in passing, suggests the need to question the rigor of the concept of rigor itself. In this paper, I will outline the place of Kant in the Death Penalty Seminars and suggest that it is the very rigor attributed to Kant that makes him (rather than some other writers—whether supporters or opponents of the death penalty—whose arguments seem less rigorous to Derrida) an exemplary object for deconstructive attention, not for the first time in Derrida's work. Broadening the focus beyond the texts Derrida explicitly analyzes, I suggest that this kind of attention can also be fruitfully brought to bear on some more general arguments in Kant about right and justice. In conclusion, I suggest some implications of this situation for the still difficult issue of the more general relation between deconstruction and critique in the Kantian sense. (shrink)