Was Derrida a mama’s boy? Was he not hiding or indeed manifesting, ostensibly displaying even, mommy issues? Let us posit that Derrida had a substantial, perhaps an inordinate amount of things to say about mothers in general, about surrogate mothers too, and about his own mother in particular. Derrida did confess having taken the side of his mother. Yet, what I really want to ask is whether, from Plato to Nancy and, more obviously, from Rousseau to Freud and beyond, mothers (...) can, in fact, be confined to bounded registers of life, of Derrida’s life and, more formally, to the biographical and autobiographical (as ‘Circumfession’ and before it Spurs and The Ear of the Other might suggest). Or even to the psychoanalytical (as The Post Card and, in it, the famous fort/da scene would certainly indicate). A concern — shall I already call it a solicitude — for mothers, on Derrida’s part, might raise a distinct set of questions. (shrink)

This article, inspired by the Derridean thinking of hospitality, attempts to reflect upon the conditions of peace and hospitality, taking a reading of Kant's ‘Toward Perpetual Peace’ as its guiding thread. It endeavours to show that the peace that inhospitable nations maintain between themselves is necessarily illusory, as they continue to amass the restrictive conditions of their hospitality. The hypothesis is proposed that the guiding thread that links the elements of the hyperbolic ethics that Derrida deploys in his ‘questions of (...) responsibility’ seminars indeed concerns this unconditional condition of peace, of which hospitality is the first law. (shrink)

This essay traces the figure of the ‘leap’ in the second year of Derrida’s Beast and the Sovereign seminar, where it crosses in a significant way the central concern with Walten in Heidegger’s thought. A key question for the reading is about the impulse, drive or push behind all these leaps. Precipitated out is a notion that names what is neither subject nor object, action nor passion, but de la poussance, a noun forged on the model of those third-voice substantives (...) like différance, aimance, and arrivance that Derrida deployed all across his work. (shrink)

Taking its point of departure in a childhood memory of Derrida around raising silkworms, this essay explores the urgency invoked in the same memory of ‘conjuring green’. Following the polysemy of the French verb ( conjurer means to ‘ward off’, ‘cause (a spirit or ghost) to appear’, ‘implore’, and literally, ‘swear together’), the conjured green binds the child and later the writer surreptitiously to both the community and language of Islam, in which the colour green evokes the gardens of paradise, (...) and the infinitely differentiated proliferation of plants whose anthology encroaches upon and undermines any ontology. Along the meandering lines of Derrida’s meditation on the conjured, warded-off, mourned and celebrated green, the Qur’anic Muslim’s joy and radiance whose roots are the same as those for ‘vividness’ and ‘flourishing’, are grafted onto Hildegard von Bingen’s viriditas, the greening power or force which the German mystic Hildegard von Bingen understood as the living soul of creation; and Darwin’s discovery of the movement of plans as ‘circumnutation’, a Derridian term avant la lettre, that captures the dynamic of plants in Derrida’s Glas. (shrink)

Although Derrida himself rejected the Saussurian notion of ‘signifier’ and replaced it with ‘trace’ or ‘mark’ this essay argues for the continued relevance of ‘signifier’ for and to the Derridean project of ‘deconstructing’. A radical reading of ‘signifier’ as undertook by Derrida himself in Of Grammatology can help demonstrate the power of certain Derridean readings such as that, in Of Spirit, which seeks to problematise the Heideggerian approach to questioning as ‘the piety of thought’. By exposing certain connotations of the (...) German word, Zusage – ‘speaking to’ – the essay seeks to bring out the affective dimension in Derrida's deconstructive reading of Heidegger and more generally in the deconstructive project. (shrink)