Derrida: Value Theory

In the present article, the first section recapitulates my “figuration” philosophy of dance, the “dancing-with” interpretive method derived therefrom, and my previous application of figuration to salsa dance as a decolonizing gestural discourse. The second section deepens and modifies this analysis through a reinterpretation of Argentinian philosopher Ernesto Laclau’s concept of hegemony and his dance-resonant interpretations of Derrida. And the final section offers a template for this hegemonic dancing-with in the Birmingham, Alabama Latin dance troupe, Corazon de Alabama (Heart of (...) Alabama), as a new strategy for decolonizing and reconstructing social justice. (shrink)

Is justice (merely) an expression of particular values or is it to be understood as a (universal) cross-cultural standard of validity? Following the ideas of Jacques Derrida, this book provides a new answer to this question: Justice is to be explained as a process of deconstruction. To arrive at this conclusion, I proceed from a critical discussion of Martin Heidegger's approach to social philosophy in Being and Time which I connect with a detailed analysis of the implications of Derrida's writings (...) on practical philosophy aspiring to provide a variety of insights, both critical and constructive, into the cultural and normative foundations of democracy. Thematically, the book bridges the frontiers between the philosophy of law, cultural and social philosophy, ethics and political theory, focusing on fundamental questions of the constitution of normativity, responsibility and justification. In this way, my reading of Heidegger and Derrida aims to shed light on the nature of the political problems that concern our societies today. The file contains the table of contents and the first two (introductory) chapters, the introductions of the remaining chapters, as well as the concluding remarks (in German). (shrink)

There are many people who think that deconstruction has run its course, has had its day, and that it is now time to return to the important business of philosophy, or perhaps to serious ethical, social and political questions. Derrida's work, it is said, leads nowhere but a sterile philosophy of difference that in its de-politicized, de-historicized abstractness is a form of conservatism little better than the kinds of identity thinking to which it seems to be so radically opposed. In (...) short, we must go ‘beyond’ deconstruction. (shrink)

Two waves mark the appropriation of Derrida in English: an earlier, literary and a later, philosophical reception. Both readings neglect the relation between deconstruction and ethics, leaving unanswered the question: "why bother with deconstruction?". Critchley's book, written in an elegant, concise, clear and yet--despite its scholarly rigor--pleasant style, admittedly locates itself at the origin of a third way of reception, "one in which ethical--not to mention political--questions are uppermost".

This essay first examines the issue of intersubjectivity in terms of the paradigmatic relationship between I and You. From a grammatical standpoint this relationship seems asymmetrical as well as necessarily performative: I implies the speech act of the speaker. You exists only as I's interlocutor. This helps us understand the very different status of what is called the 3rd person--and which would more accurately be called a nonperson, as Benveniste explains. This nonperson marks the position of a Third Party. I (...) propose to show that the same Third Party--whether a living being or a thing--is also involved in the traditional ceremonial gift-exchange relationship discussed by Marcel Mauss. The relationship between the partners in gift-exchange is mediated by the being or the thing given, which is for the recipient a token and substitute of the giver. What this involves is the reciprocal public recognition of the partners. In modern societies this function is performed by the law and by the institutions of the arbiter-State as they emerged in the formation of the Greek city. (shrink)

Žižek! Directed by Astra Taylor. Zeitgeist Films, 2005, 71mins Derrida Directed by Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman. Zeitgeist Films, 2002, 84mins.

This essay addresses Jacques Derrida’s theory of metaphor, as it has been handed to literary theory and continental philosophy. Our aim is to reassess the relationship between metaphor and metaphysics, using two distinct critical lenses. We will contrast Derrida’s influential position to an anachronistic author – Giambattista Vico (1668–1744). Vico initiated what is now (retrospectively) called the romantic theory of metaphor, but the details of his theory are missing from current discussions. For this reason, Vico’s view is given closer attention. (...) Two new concepts are introduced: mute metaphor and heroic metaphor. These terms help specify precisely how metaphor can be conceived as a process of consciousness rather than a grammatical rule or grammatical exception. Finally, it is suggested that Vico’s theory is preferable to Derrida’s. Vico’s vision of metaphorical language is more fruitful and less problematic than Derrida’s, both methodologically and terminologically. The romanticism espoused by Vico also suggests itself to new modes of contemporary research concerning the purpose and function of metaphor within language. (shrink)

ABSTRACT One of Derrida's most significant insights concerns the irreducibility yet interdependence of unconditioned ideal and conditioned actuality. First, relying especially on the concept of hospitality, I argue that this insight allows for the development of a powerful account of ethical and political action. Second, I show the usefulness of this account for feminist critical practice, especially with regard to the ideal of inclusion and the concept of “woman.” Third, and finally, I explore how this insight could guide feminist action (...) in relation to two specific situations: feminism's relations to transgender issues and to reproductive freedom. (shrink)

This essay makes an appraisal of the political articulations of the late Jacques Derrida in his “Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides” interview as a starting point for evaluating him as a political philosopher. Derrida having claimed in the past that he was convinced of Marxism, a critical comparison serves to illustrate where his radical-sounding pronouncements stand in relation to the Marxist perspective. Derrida turns out to be unremarkable, expounding an ambiguous and eclectic pre-Marxist prophetism.

This article investigates the work of mourning following the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington on September 11, 2001. Combining discussions of mourning, kitsch and sentimentality, I examine the perverse transformation of grief into patriotic nationalism. Linking Freud’s description of mourning as work with Derrida’s articulation of grief as ‘a work working at its own unproductivity’, I explore how grief has been paired with icons of American nostalgia, such as Norman Rockwell, as well as kitschy souvenirs from Ground Zero (...) vendors, and, through this pairing, been transformed into a motive force for war. A central part of this operation, I argue, is the process of identification with the traumatic event. Identification, what Freud describes as a ‘binding force’, takes place across diverse fields - from White House speeches, to kitsch memorabilia made available immediately following the attacks. Identification with the event enables identification with the nation - an operation immediately reifying the official rhetoric of ‘Us against Them’ propounded by President Bush and his advisers. As grief over 9/11 is transformed into a perpetual rationale for war, that day becomes a new origin conveniently obliterating all that came before regarding the history of US nation-building and its own brand of terrorism. (shrink)

In 1990-1991 Jacques Derrida taught a seminar in Paris involving the scientific-philosophical notebooks of the German Romantic writer and thinker Novalis. The present article offers an account of that seminar, which was entitled, "The Rhetoric of Cannibalism.".

This article looks at some main stages of contemporary thought about freedom and responsibility and outlines an account of important stages of 20th century philosophy as well. Whereas the early Sartre particularly coined the notion of infinite freedom, his later writings, Levinas and Derrida discovered the conception of infinite responsibility. The article draws attention to the questions which arise out of these understandings of both responsibility and freedom and asks whether these issues can be answered from a purely secular point (...) of view. The last part is devoted to the role of God in current philosophical considerations about responsibility and freedom. (shrink)

In the large and complex landscape of pedagogy, the focus seems to have turned away from the concept of teaching and towards a stronger emphasis on learning, probably supported by neo‐liberal ideology. The teacher is presented more as part of the force of production than as an autonomous performer of a mandate given to him/her by society. He/she is supposed to supply knowledge that is considered useful to a society geared to production and consumption. During the past few decades, enlightenment (...) as a legitimising concept for education has been challenged from different angles, both by a self‐critique from within and from external forces. One angle of approach is the questioning of the relationship between the state and education, by way of a critique of modernity. Another approach comes from a critique of knowledge, which has lost most of its universal implications and is left with more pragmatic and utilitarian considerations. Into this landscape of lost legitimisation, I will make an attempt to visualise an impossible/possible position for teaching, featuring ancient, contemporary and phantom‐like figures. I am suggesting the concept of transformation as an alternative to development or improvement, which I find to be concepts with a close link to modernity and its linearity. By a careful and conscious use of the word transformation, taking Derrida's intensified focus of language into account, a possible active position might be intimated in spite of the fundamental critique, which has been directed at pedagogy and its imperialistic implications from different angles. (shrink)

Paul Smeyers’ keynote address to the PESA 2007 Conference, ‘The Entrepreneurial Self and Informal Education: On government intervention and the discourse of experts’ provides a timely call for questioning the governing of the family. This paper draws upon Smeyers’ key concerns to explore both historical and contemporary trends in clustering government agencies, under the guidance of child development experts. The guidance of two expert groups is problematised, with particular attention to an absence of commitment to Māori perspectives of education and (...) child‐rearing. Such an absence reflects, in New Zealand, a dangerous undermining of the historic treaty between the British and Māori. The paper then challenges, with brief reference to Jacques Derrida's discussions on autobiography and Freud's Legacy, the identity of expert groups advocating early intervention in the lives of families measured as a burden on economic and social progress. The paper posits that perhaps it is the developmental expert that requires some form of early intervention. (shrink)

This essay explores the treatment of violence in Derrida's ethico-political work, stressing the underlying continuity of Derrida's thinking of politics, from his first reading of Levinas to one of the last notions he developed, autoimmunity. Haddad analyzes the use to which the idea of a “lesser violence” has been put, arguing that it is incompatible with Derrida's other claims.

The topic of the relation between literature and democracy in Derrida's thinking is introduced, focusing especially on the problem of the secret, which has loomed large in Derrida's late discussions of both literature and democracy.

This essay explores the practice of hospitality as a resource for thinking about ethics post-critically. How might the practice of hospitality — rooted in the conviction that our lives are fundamentally constituted by receiving and giving — challenge a modern, critical ethic centered in the autonomous self?

This paper attempts to integrate discourse theories, mainly the theory of hegemony by Essex School, and Tartu–Moscow School’s cultural semiotics, andsets for itself the modest task to point to the applicability of semiotic approach in political analysis. The so-called post-foundationalist view, that is common for discourse theories, is primarily characterized by the rejection of essentialist notions of ground for the social, and the inauguration of cultural and discursive characteristics (such as asymmetry and entropy; explosion; antagonism; insurmountable tension between organization and (...) disorganization, regularity and irregularity, etc.) into the wider social scientific paradigm. Customarily, those characteristics have been attributed to contingent or peripheral events and phenomena that by nature do not belong to the social structure proper. Grounds for such ‘groundless’ contingencies are found in philosophy (Marchart), or for instance from the psychoanalytic notion of affect (Laclau). Many discourse theorists proceed here from Derrida’s position that in the process of signification there is an overabundance of meaning which renders final closure impossible (Howarth; Glynos). However, it seems that despite placing communication at the heart of their conceptions of discourse, the communicative character of constructing power relations remains undertheorized in those conceptions. This article attempts to approach the above mentioned problem by way of the concepts of communication and autocommunication (Lotman). The outcomes stemming from the latter are unavoidable, since the result of any possible research (text) itself belongs to culture or a larger discourse and opera tes as the organizing function of the latter. Hence, research practice and its results always need to be looked at as mutually affecting each other. (shrink)

In 1964, Jacques Derrida’s long essay “Violence and Metaphysics” opened a dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas that would not be interrupted until Derrida’srecent death. Published only three years after the appearance of Totality and Infinity and at a moment when Derrida’s own early texts were still in the course of elaboration, this text right away recognizes the legitimacy and the import of Levinas’s philosophical project. Derrida pays homage to the Levinasian attempt to interrogate the whole of the western philosophical tradition beginning (...) from its Greek origin — which should not be understood as an empirical place but as a system of categories and fundamental concepts, elaborated for the first time in Greece and structuring the entire philosophical discourse. According to Levinas, these concepts are dominated by “the supremacy of the One and the Same” making the long history of philosophy a history that takes place in the shadow of Parmenides, who would still command — all the more surely from afar — the phenomenology of Husserl and the ontology of Heidegger. The reservations that Derrida expresses in “Violence and Metaphysics” concern more Levinas’s discursive strategy than his intentions. He does not contest the desire to open philosophy to another origin than the Greek origin, no more than the necessity of making resonate in philosophical discourse the call of an alterity capable of contesting the supremacy of the One and the Same. His reservations are situated, rather, at the level of the strategy to follow in order to render this opening finally effective. (shrink)

Bioethics tends to be dominated by discourses concerned with the ethical dimension of medical practice, the organization of medical care, and the integrity of biomedical research involving human subjects and animal testing. Jacques Derrida has explored the fundamental question of the “limit” that identifies and differentiates the human animal from the nonhuman animal. However, to date his work has not received any reception in the field of biomedical ethics. In this paper, I examine what Derrida’s thought about this limit might (...) mean for the use/misuse/abuse of animals in contemporary biomedical research. For this, I review Derrida’s analysis and examine what it implies for scientific responsibility, introducing what I have coined the “Incompleteness Theorem of Bioethics.”. (shrink)

Through an attentive reading of his essay, “Psychoanalysis Searches the States of Its Soul,” it is possible to pursue Derrida's thinking about psychoanalysis and cruelty in terms of the distinction he makes between Nietzsche and Freud, whereby the latter maintains an “opposable term” to cruelty. This article explores the status and significance of such an “opposable term” as one possible source of a Freudian future beyond Freud, and in a postscript carries its reading into the question of the “side of (...) life” and of death in Derrida's H.C. for Life. (shrink)

I address the question of the origins and historical meaning of art. Analyzing suggestions from Marx, Derrida, Winnicott, and Todorov, I claim that art doesn’t simply represent conscious, historical events but is also the continuing presentation of the prehistorical break-up of our “original” human family. Indeed,perpetuating yet distancing this archaic scene of community and violence in tension, art performs this mediation not just in history but also as history, as a secretive historiography of splitting and meaning-making. To this end, I (...) analyze some tribal tattooing and scarring practices. Literally carving a world of metaphorical significance out of our disidentification with mother nature and with each other in turn, art speaks hieroglyphically of persistent primitive loss. (shrink)

Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism is central to the project of decoloniality. It is a critical reflection on the European civilization project that gives expression to the disenchantment with European modernity that began to be felt in many places after the Second World War. This essay describes the overcoming of Cartesian reason through the “decolonial gift,” which makes possible an opening toward transmodernity, an alternate response or pathway in view of the declining geo-political and epistemological significance of Europe and the (...) United States. (shrink)

The epigraph from Adieu. À Emmanuel Levinas for this issue is here throughout the linchpin, the Triebfeder or the spring, the feather of impulse, of drive or of desire, out of which this paper attempts to formulate the relation, “in Derrida,” of desire and obligation, sexual pleasure and moral law, Emmanuel Levinas and Immanuel Kant, the letters b + l (and thus the words and things called éblouissement [dazzlement], obligation, oblivion, obliquity, bells and cloches, Mallarmean alarms), mourning and melancholy, but (...) and butt, rams (béliers) and rebellion, rebellion and oblivion, good conscience and good unconsciousness, and, ultimately, non-reading and reading. (shrink)

At a central point in his much-discussed book Real Presences, George Steiner writes of the “mountebank’s virtuosity... of a Hitler,” that realises “a counter-logos which conceptualizes and then enacts the deconstruction of the human.” It was clear to Steiner’s American readers what was meant by this transposition of the term ‘deconstruction’ from the field of aesthetics and philosophy, of literary and cultural criticism, to the context of political and ideological struggle against fascism and totalitarianism in general. Steiner discusses this in (...) another context, but again with all the pathos of confession at his disposal: “I believe that the eclipse of the humanities, in their primary sense and presentness, in today’s culture and society, implicates that of the human.” This creed closes Steiner’s discussion of the “liberals” who are treated with contempt because they preach tolerance in the face of the triumphal procession of deconstruction in the humanities. According to Steiner, such a policy of appeasement once again misjudges the degree of threat to which our social order is exposed: what starts in the humanities ends in society as the nihilistic corruption of binding human values. With the establishment of deconstruction in literary studies at elite American universities, the Occident succumbs to the powers of disintegration and ‘brutalization’ for the second time in the twentieth century—Yale of the seventies and eighties repeats Munich of 1938. (shrink)

This essay argues that, in the first Critique, the need for unity leads Kant to re-inscribe the subject in a situation of multiplicity and undecidability. The result, however, is not a relativization that negates the meaning of the subject’s existence, but rather a contextualization that makes meaning possible. This reading clarifies some of the connections between Kant and contemporary postmodernism, especially the work of Jacques Derrida.

This article examines the development of the concept of the value chain from the linear to the virtual conception of the chain, through the evolution of the literature from Michael Porter’s writings of the mid 1990s to the theorists of e-business and e-commerce in the later 1990s I argue that Porter’s account employs white metaphors and that writings on the virtual value chain both extend the white metaphors of Porter’s linear chain, and suggest a pronouncedly metaphysical system of thought — (...) one which has correlates in areas of thought, including Renaissance Neo-Platonism, cybernetics and the discourse of cyberspace. I suggest that this offers a model of the advance of metaphor — of its usure, as described by Derrida in his White Mythology — and that this model can be synthesised with the views of Ricoeur about the evolution of metaphor towards symbolism. When we apply these ideas of Derrida and Ricoeur to the development of the White Metaphor of the linear chain towards a progressive symbolism, we can see a correlation between the complex causality inferred as a feature of the virtual chain and the cosmological affinities of Renaissance notions of causation. (shrink)

Adorning the cover of Mourning Becomes the Law is a replica of Gathering the Ashes of Phocion, a painting by Nicholas Poussin. An Athenian beyond reproach, Phocion had been put to death by tyrants who had taken control of the city, his ashes left on the pyre. In the darkened foreground, Phocion’s wife gathers her husband’s ashes on her hands and knees while her female attendant shields her from the view of the city, which rises up behind them. With its (...) glittering architecture and recreating citizens, the city seems impervious to this scene of mourning. Yet, Rose warns, there is not an unmediated opposition of individual love and worldly injustice here; rather, this act by Phocion’s wife is a finite act of justice that will have its bearing on the political life of the city. Mourning, “which draws on transcendent but representable justice”, becomes the law. Mourning Becomes the Law is the philosophical counterpart to Love’s Work, a memoir in which Rose reflects on the deaths of loved ones and, ultimately, her own impending death from cancer. Yet, while death haunts Love’s Work, she does not succumb to melancholia, but, rather, reaffirms her commitment to “staying in the fray.” In Mourning Becomes the Law, her final work, Rose again grapples with the meaning of death, but this time only as part of a broader theme that has preoccupied her for many years, namely, the nihilistic implications of postmodernism. Rose seeks to reveal the incoherence of postmodernism’s search for a “new ethics” that is divorced from the metaphysical inquiries of the tradition. By tearing ethics from metaphysics to give “the other” its absolute due, she argues, postmodernism has deprived itself of the resources necessary for an ethical project, and has thus “condemned itself to impotence and failure.” These resources, which are only to be found “in the politics which has been disowned, and in the theology which has been more thoroughly suppressed,” are drawn upon by Rose herself, who would “renew and reinvent” classical reflection “on the analogies between the soul, the city and the sacred”. (shrink)