For years now, autonomy has been discussed as one of the central values in health care. Understood as self-realization, it is opposed to paternalism which is conceived as an intolerable occurrence of heteronomy. Although different concepts have been developed to nuance this opposition, when it comes to health care discourse, heteronomy is still the enemy of autonomy. In our article, we defend the thesis that autonomy is only achievable as heteronomy. We are not arguing for an expansion of the meaning (...) of autonomy, but are attempting to conduct an analysis which lays bare the ‘disrupting’ attendance of heteronomy within the principle of autonomy. Autonomy does not begin where heteronomy ends, but can only begin if heteronomy is already involved. To emphasize this, we prefer to elaborate a new concept: ‘oughtonomy’. This concept is inspired by Jacques Derrida’s distinction between ‘difference’ and ‘differance’. We will develop the concept of oughtonomy from a deconstructive reading of Kant’s idea of autonomy, inspired by philosophers such as Jacob Rogozinski, Jean-Luc Nancy and others. In addition to a first exploration of this concept, this article also discusses the possible consequences of oughtonomy for current debates concerning health care. Our quest for a new understanding of autonomy is motivated by the concern that, although the accent on autonomy as self-realization and independence has many advantages, we should also bear in mind the countless disadvantages. (shrink)

본 논문은 라캉에 대한 데리다의 독해를 통해 정신분석에 대한 데리다의 입장을 해명하는 것을 목표로 한다. 먼저 데리다는 포우의 「도둑맞은 편지」에 대한 라캉의 독해에서 그의 사유가 팔루스중심주의에 기반하고 있다고 주장하는데, 이는 편지에 대한 규정이나 그것의 목적지로 향한 운동 등이 보여주듯이 그의 사상은 고정된 구조와 고정된 의미를 전제로 하기 때문이다. 이런 한에서 편지는 관념적 위상을 갖는다. 그런데 데리다는 이렇게 고정된 의미나 고정된 방향성의 관념이 플라톤이래로 서양형이상학의 주괸 관심사였음을 명확히 한다. 그는 현전성에 기반한 이런 소설 해석을 해체하고 작품의 이해를 다양화하기 위해서 단일한 구조로 (...) 이해된 소설의 구조를 포의 뒤팽삼부작 속에서 복잡화한다. 이렇게 함으로써 데리다는 라캉과 달리 작품의 해석이 안정된 구조위에서 이뤄지는 것이 아니라 통제할 수 없이 다양화됨을 밝힌다. 해석의 다양화와 관련해서, 데리다는 그의 비판을 라캉의 포 독해에서 정신분석 자체로 까지 확대한다. 데리다의 관점에서 볼 때, 정신분석에는 다양한 저항이 있는데, 우선 욕망의 기표의 운동에 있어 팔루스로의 회귀를 막는 저항이 있으며, 또한 반복강박과 같은 정신적 외상을 극복하고자 하는 정신분석의 시도에 대한 저항도 있다. 결론적으로 해체론적 관점에서 우리는 이런 저항을 통해서 철학과 정신분석의 관계를 해명하고자 한다. (shrink)

The first truly introductory text on Lyotard, this book situates Lyotard's interventions in the postmodern debate in the wider context of his rethinking of the politics of representation. Bill Readings examines Lyotard's relationship to structuralism, Marxism and semiotics, and contrasts his work with the literary deconstruction of Paul de Man; he positions Lyotard's work so as to draw out the implications of poststructurlaism's attention to _difference_ in reading. Lyotard's willingness to question the political and examine the relationship between art (...) and politics is shown to undermine the charge that deconstruction abdicates political and social articulation. (shrink)

The possibility of a Derridian theory of the university lies not in the discussion of the “as if” in “The University without Condition” but, rather, in a theoretical crack that Derrida's book promised to elucidate—between the “as if” and the “perhaps,” the performative and the event, transcendence and immanence. Moreover, we see a kind of rupture between this book and numerous texts from the 1970s and 80s, which are collected and published under the title of Right to Philosophy. Here lies (...) a real philosophical stake. We see between the early Derrida and the later Derrida not only an ethico-political turn but also, so to speak, a radical transition from the problematic of institution or case law (jurisprudence) to the axiomatic of law (loi) by aggravation of the transcendental. (shrink)

The aim of my paper is to focus upon those aspects of Derrida's relation to language and textual interpretation that have not been adequately dealt with by either proponents of deconstruction, who take Derrida to have effected a total revolution in the way in which we must read texts, or those critics who view deconstruction as having subverted all possible criteria for a valid interpretation leading, thus, to an anarchical textual ‘freeplay’. This inadequate approach by both proponents and critics is (...) the result of a failure to consider Derrida's deconstructive approach as enacting a process of ‘double reading.’ This ‘double reading’ commences with an initial stage or level which seeks to reconstruct a text's authorial intention or its vouloir dire. This initial level then prepares the text, through the identification of authorial or textual intention, for the second stage or level. At this second stage or level, which is the passage to deconstructive reading per se, the blind spots and aporias of the text are set forth. Through this focus upon the process of deconstructive reading as ‘doubling reading,’ it becomes evident that deconstruction is not as revolutionary as proponents or critics have assumed. For, Derrida's initial reading, or the ‘doubling’ of a text's authorial or textual intention is firmly set within a traditional interpretative form. (shrink)

The surge of interest in Jean-Francois Lyotard's writings has pushed him into the centre of debate on the postmodern.

In this article, we analyse one of the most famous recent thought‐experiments in philosophy, namely Donald Davidson's Swampman. Engaging recent commentators on Davidson's Swampman as well as analysing the spatio‐temporal conditions of the thought‐experiment, we will show how the ‘experiment’ inevitably fails. For it doesn't take seriously some of its own defining characteristics: crucially, Swampman's creation of a sudden in a place distinct from Davidson's. Instead of denigrating philosophical thought‐experiments per se, our analysis points towards considering thought‐experiments in a different (...) sense: imaginary scenarios helpfully self‐deconstructing rather than constituting substantive philosophical resources. (shrink)

This article investigates discourses of Sweden’s success in gender mainstreaming. Using the theoretical concept of myth, discourse analysis is performed on different categories of texts. The aim is to analyse how this discourse of success is constructed and to increase the understanding of its components. The themes identified in the reading include adaptation, integration, volume and initiatives. In conclusion, it is argued that a conflation of gender mainstreaming with gender equality has been a vital part of the construction of (...) Sweden as the best case of gender mainstreaming. (shrink)

Derrida’s recently published Life Death seminars have again highlighted the importance of values within the ongoing philosophical conversation about overcoming metaphysics. The seminars further indirectly raise a matter of great importance for constitutional theory. Values have become central to constitutional discourse since the mid-twentieth century despite critique due to their supposedly subjective nature, the potential conflict between them, and the legal uncertainty that they bring about. This essay enquires into the origin, logic, structure, and operation of (constitutional) values. It does (...) so through a close reading of the texts of Heidegger and Derrida in which Nietzsche’s call for a revaluation of values takes on a central role, along with a reflection on the relation between life and Being, as well as between life and death. A close reading of these texts in turn makes possible an unorthodox reading of Schmitt’s newly translated text on constitutional values in The Tyranny of Values, which finally opens the possibility of a move beyond such values and thus beyond metaphysics. (shrink)

Written in the aftermath of the deaths of the French philosophers Jacques Derrida (19302004) and Paul Ricoeur (19132005), this book is an important and ...

This article will argue that ‘A-religion’ , Jean-Luc Nancy’s reading of Claire Denis’sBeau travail , can be understood in the context of concerns he explores elsewherein his philosophical work.1I will be focusing here on the ways in which his thinking ofquestions of community and Christianity and Dis-Enclosure respectively) can be seen to influence anddirect his reading of Denis’s film. Beau travail, this article will argue, comes to represent forNancy a point of intersection between two main issues: the demand (...) of community on theone hand and the deconstruction of Christianity on the other, that is, broadly speaking, thepolitical on the one hand and the theological on the other. (shrink)

Introduction: 1980s “New Enlightenment” and 1990s Deconstruction Jacques Derrida's Writing and Difference, a collection of essays originally published in the 1960s, was translated into Chinese and introduced to the Chinese-speaking intellectual world in 2001. That year, Derrida visited China for the first and last time before he passed away in 2004. He never had a chance to review his trip to China. However, prior to his trip, during an interview with Zhang Ning, the Chinese translator of Writing and Difference, Derrida (...) expressed that imaginative reference to China had always “occupied an extremely important place” in his…. (shrink)

The central argument of this article lies in the intent to think, from a reading of The Invention of Morel, about the subversion possibilities, simultaneously discursive and operational, of certain structures of capitalism, carried out by discrete elements of society, regardless of their social standing. Discussing Morel himself and his invention, I postulate the hypothesis that Morel is subversive because he is perverse. As a preamble to this discussion, and in an attempt to turn it into a critique of (...) current times, a reading of Slavoj Žižek’s 2009 article entitled “Censorship Today: Violence, or Ecology as a New Opium for the Masses” will be undertaken. Through a comparative analysis of the rational underlying the four antagonisms which, in Žižek’s opinion, will prevent the indefinite reproduction of the current “naturalization” of capitalism in the global world, and Morel and his invention, one concludes the latter’s obscene perversity causes, through exaggeration, potentially destructive effects of the very mechanisms and capitalist subsystems which generated them, thus deconstructing their significant codes. (shrink)

Taking the question of phenomenality as its guiding thread, this paper attempts to shed light on the relationship between Heidegger's turn and Derrida's 1964/65 seminar on Heidegger. I argue that deconstruction can be understood as a performative attempt to take into account Heidegger's thinking of originary semblance or errancy, which already announces itself in Sein und Zeit and is a central figure of what the later Heidegger calls ‘the turn’. Instead of trying to grasp this errancy or this différance phenomenologically, (...) Derrida takes up the necessity to read and repeat what is already given, what already appears, and thereby undermines, through his reading of Heidegger's Crossing Out of the Word ‘Sein’, the phenomeno-fundamental ontological approach of Sein und Zeit, or rather: shows that it is always already undermined. (shrink)

ResumenEn este artículo se lleva a cabo una reconstrucción de la deconstrucción que realiza Paul de Man de la célebre distinción kantiana entre la filosofía transcendental y la metafísica, tal y como ésta es expuesta en la Crítica del Juicio. En lugar de considerar que pertenecen a dos esferas separadas, en el artículo se muestra cómo, según de Man, se da una transición entre ellas que sólo se puede explicar bajo la forma de un cortocircuito tropológico o lingüístico que Kant (...) mismo realiza, pero de manera inconsciente. También se pone de relieve que la noción kantiana de lo sublime, escondida bajo la categoría de lo esct Ttético, cumple la función ideológica de reprimir la constitución inherentemente lingüística de todo conocimiento.Palabras clave Crítica, deconstrucción, estética, ideologÍaThis article carefully reconstructs Paul de Man’s deconstruction of Kant’s distinction between transcendental philosophy and metaphysics, as the latter appears in The Critique of Judgment. Instead of posing these two as belonging to two separate spheres, the paper shows how, according to de Man, there is a transition between them that can only be accounted for in terms of a tropological or linguistic trick that Kant himself realizes, yet unaware of it. The paper also discusses that Kant’s notion of the sublime has an ideological function disguised under the category of the aesthetic, and which amounts to a denial of the inherently linguistic constitution of all knowledge.Key wordsCritique, deconstruction, aesthetics, ideology. (shrink)

Derrida, with the deconstruction philosophy, shook all movements, stances, remembering and forgetting, and changed the flow of the river of perception and thought with a deep and comprehensive operation of reasoning and perception. He has resurrected the understanding of fluidity, movement and process, which has been coming since Heraclitus and renewed in Nietzsche in its own way by formatting these concepts. It has changed the method of meaning and signification, redefining it as an event, an action. He used "writing" against (...) the upper philosophy movement that fiddled with his country. He displaced the language, the word from its place, and wreak havoc in response to the glances that do not spare his own language. He rejected domination, embracing the free meaning. He deciphered the "great game" within the tradition of European language and philosophy. The state and its philosophy that imposes its "structure" realizes its gradual dismantling. Here, the reality is that meaning appears as an action which is the deconstruction movement itself. His “writing” is the proof of the French language and way of thinking which he “he lived in”. The new crisis results from philosophy of life rather than the language of Europe. Deconstruction has been a letter which found the recipient of the philosophy of the new century. Therefore philosophy needs to reevaluate the situation in the field of language and writing. Deconstruction has deciphered the "great language game" of which it is a part, before the eyes of the world. (shrink)

Derrida argued at great length early on in his career that texts live on in the absence of their author. The question remains, however, of precisely how this survival takes place. In this paper I argue that the life of Derrida’s own œuvre is sustained through his particular practice of self‐inheritance. I justify this claim by focusing on one moment in the text Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, in which Derrida inherits from himself through self‐citation. In citing himself while at (...) the same time modifying his citation, Derrida sets into motion a deconstruction of his own text that he does not seem to anticipate. It is this movement of deconstruction that enables Derrida’s text to live on. (shrink)

Investigates, by way of Derrida's engagements with Kant, how the foundations of modern constitutionalism can be differently conceived to address some of the challenges of the twenty-first century.

This article undertakes a deconstructive reading of astrobiology’s search for extraterrestrial life. Taking its lead from Derrida’s ‘White Mythology’, it explores ‘metaphor in the text of astrobiology’—and includes within the astrobiological ‘text’ not only scientific publications and work on astrobiology in the philosophy of science, but also ‘life detection technologies’. I situate astrobiology in the tradition of a metaphysical analogy that goes back through the enlightenment and early modern astronomy to the ancient Atomists’ notion of the ‘plurality of (...) worlds’. This analogy, which constitutes an identification of life with being and therefore serves as the conceptual basis for the notion that life must exist on other worlds, experiences a mutation in the middle of the twentieth century when molecular biology refigures life in terms of a scriptural metaphor as text. The result is an aporia whose logic Derrida formalised in ‘White Mythology’. (shrink)

In Occasional Deconstructions, Julian Wolfreys challenges the notion that deconstruction is a critical methodology, offering instead a number of reintroductions or reorientations to the texts of Jacques Derrida and the idea or possibility of deconstructions. Proceeding from specific readings of various texts (both film and literary), as well as mobilizing a number of issues from Derrida's recent work surrounding questions of ethics, politics, and identity, Wolfreys considers the role of deconstruction in broader academic and institutional contexts, and questions whether, in (...) fact, deconstruction can be called upon to function as theory at all. In this book, Wolfreys suggests that the patient, necessary work of reading, in which response and responsibility to the other has a chance to manifest itself, is necessary to the always political and ethical tracing of the material and the historical. He also contends that reading should be an encounter that gives place to an acknowledgment of the other, and that this singular act by which one is introduced to the other can never be programmed. (shrink)

Countering the common assumption in affect theory that deconstruction is incompatible with studies of affect, this essay theorises a deconstructive approach to reading for affect in texts and examines the role affect has always played in deconstructive reading. It reads Derrida alongside Deleuze who has been influential in affect theory in order to explicate what deconstruction adds to existing poststructural theories of affect: namely, how affect functions at the scene of reading, shaping the reading (...) itself and coming into view through textual forms. In its second half, the essay turns to Cixous' ‘Savoir,’ demonstrating through a reading of that text what a deconstructive reading of affect looks like in practice and exploring the ethics of such an approach. (shrink)

Can deconstruction be accomplished not through the close reading of just one discourse, but through its combination with another? This paper aims at exploring this second way of performing deconstruction through a particular case study: Marxism and psychoanalysis. In the body of the essay, the history of Freudo-Marxism is divided into two parts, depending on which psychoanalyst stands as point of reference: Freud or Lacan. We proceed by studying the four main strategies by virtue of which a genuine combination (...) between Marxism and psychoanalysis has been historically attempted: separation (Reich), domination (Marcuse), contradiction (Althusser) and, finally, deconstruction (Laclau). (shrink)

Several deconstructive readings of Kierkegaard from the early 1980’s and 1990’s begin with a critique of the role the aesthetic plays in The Point of View for My Work as an Author in order to trouble the entire (ostensive) hierarchy of religious-ethical-aesthetic. These readings suggest that there is no way to discern with certainty whether the signature “Kierkegaard” (here and elsewhere) indeed refers to the factical author, or is just another playful aesthetic pose. From this point, they go on (...) to challenge the received view that the first authorship as a whole should be understood as fundamentally religious rather than aesthetic. I argue that this is a largely unsuccessful move, because these readers do not do full justice to Kierkegaard’s understanding of the transfiguration (or appropriation) of the lower stages of existence into the higher, in the balancing of the self. Re-reading the autobiographical texts with this in mind shows that the authorship is indeed a religious enterprise, even granting the questionable status of The Point of View. I conclude by arguing that On My Work as an Author represents a more successful autobiographical transfiguration of the aesthetic within the ethical-religious stages – and hence a more complete balancing of his own self – and that this work should also be understood as an act of witnessing. Indeed, for Kierkegaard to witness in a way other than through his writing would be a kind of despair, insofar as he would be willing to be someone other than himself. (shrink)

_Deconstruction: Theory and Practice_ has been acclaimed as by far the most readable, concise and authoritative guide to this topic. Without oversimplifying or glossing over the challenges, Norris makes deconstruction more accessible to the reader. The volume focuses on the works of Jacques Derrida which caused this seismic shift in critical thought, as well as the work of North American critics Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman, J. Hillis Miller and Harold Bloom. In this third, revised edition, Norris builds on his (...) 1991 Afterword with an entirely new Postscript, reflecting upon recent critical debate. The Postscript includes an extensive list of recommended reading, complementing what was already one of the most useful bibliographies available. (shrink)

In this essay I set out to place Derrida's work – especially his earlier books and essays – in the context of related or contrasting developments in analytic philosophy of science over the past half-century. Along the way I challenge the various misconceptions that have grown up around that work, not only amongst its routine detractors in the analytic camp but also amongst some of its less philosophically informed disciples. In particular I focus on the interlinked issues of realism versus (...) anti-realism and the scope and limits of classical logic, both of which receive a detailed, rigorous and sustained treatment in his deconstructive readings of Husserl, Austin and others. Contrary to Derrida's reputation as a exponent of anti-realism in its far-gone ‘textualist’ form and as one who merely plays perverse though ingenious games with logic I show that those readings presuppose both a basically realist conception of their subject-matter and a strong commitment to the protocols of bivalent logic. These he applies with the utmost care and precision right up to the point – unreachable except by way of that procedure – where they encounter certain problems or anomalies that cannot be resolved except by switching to a different logic. Philosophy of science in the analytic mainstream might benefit greatly from a closer acquaintance with Derrida's thinking on these topics, as it might from a knowledge of his likewise rigorous thinking-through of the antinomy between structure and genesis as it bears upon issues in the history of scientific thought. (shrink)

Here I pursue a deconstructive reading of astrobiology, the emerging science dedicated to a double quest: solving the mystery of life's origin and discovering life beyond Earth. Astrobiology, I argue, is organized as a response to the aporetic formulation assumed by the origin of life in modern molecular biology, where (as Derrida's argues in Life Death) it becomes the origin of textuality. Because all Earth life shares a single genetic code, astrobiologists are seeking a second; hoping that a (...) sort of multi-planetary comparative genomics may reveal the secret to life's origin. But the aporia repeats in the figure of the biosignature, the trace of life. (shrink)

Deconstruction and the Visual Arts brings together a series of new essays by scholars of aesthetics, art history and criticism, film, television and architecture. Working with the ideas of French philosopher Jacques Derrida, the essays explore the full range of his analyses. They are modelled on the variety of critical approaches that he has encouraged, from critiques of the foundations of our thinking and disciplinary demarcation, to creative and experimental readings of visual 'texts'. Representing some of the most innovative thinking (...) in the various arts disciplines, these contributions offer important challenges to existing disciplinary orthodoxies. Also included in this volume is a long interview with Derrida, published here for the first time. (shrink)

This essay presents a critical interpretation of Derrida’s deconstructive reading of Walter Benjamin’s text, "Critique of Violence." It examines the relationship between deconstruction and justice, and the parallel Derrida draws between deconstructive reading and Benjamin’s account of pure violence. I argue that Derrida blurs Benjamin’s distinction between the political general strike and the proletarian general strike. As a consequence, Derrida criticises Benjamin’s metaphysical complicity with the violence that lead to the Holocaust. Derrida’s deconstructive reading (...) of Benjamin, I conclude, underplays its Marxist dimensions, privileging the theological and textual dimensions of Benjamin’s thought over the political and historical. (shrink)

This article explores the relationship between textuality and materiality through a reading of the work of Derrida alongside that of the experimental poet Christian Bök. Bök’s poetry exemplifies how a playful manipulation of the materiality of a text can differentially enact what might be thought of as a textuality of matter, and, in doing so, it enacts an eco-deconstructive reading of itself that draws attention to the wider eco-deconstructive nature of language. In its self-reflexive absorption with (...) the materiality of its own form, this poetry fixes its gaze inwards, revelling in the difficulty of its linguistic structures and the proliferation and frustration of meaning that they make possible. But it is precisely at the points of these inward turns that this poetry also reveals itself to be most intimately connected with other material realities. It is at the moments in which language appears most singularly itself—where the differentiality of its structures appears most particular and peculiar to it—this poetry suggests, that its differentiality replicates, touches, transforms and differs from itself in the equally differential movements of other material forms of existence. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction: The End(s) of Deconstruction Metaphysics‐in‐Deconstruction: A Witness Report Deconstruction in Education—Education‐Indeconstruction Openings, Closures, and In(Ter)Ventions Doing and Undoing Philosophy of Education Notes References.

BRADLEY SK and CARTER B. Nursing Inquiry 2011; 18: 303–312 Deconstructing child and adolescent mental health: questioning the ‘taken‐for‐granted’…We present a critical deconstructive reading, seeking to problematise ‘taken‐for‐granted’ assumptions in child and adolescent mental health (CAMH). The start point for this critical reading is conventional ‘history‐telling’ within CAMH. The aim is not to take issue with the detail in such histories but to critically examine the texts, so as to highlight constructions that structure the presentation of conventional (...) histories and possible purposes that such constructions may serve. The argument is that such conventional histories leave key questions not just unanswered, but unconsidered – a tendency that can be seen throughout the CAMH literature more generally. Therefore, we then pursue critical discussion of how ‘taken‐for‐granted’ constructions of CAMH enabled psychiatry to successfully expand its power and influence to establish hegemony over ‘problem children’. We do not claim any closure to this critical reading; that is, we do not claim that our critical deconstructive reading is the only reading possible. Similarly, it is not presented in any sense as ‘final word’. Rather our hope for this work is that it might stimulate readers to question the ‘taken‐for‐granteds’ that we present, and indeed others that they might identify themselves. In so doing, it is our hope that creative dialogue might ensue. (shrink)

The thesis investigates the connection between deconstruction and creativity with regard to three aesthetic fields, namely jazz music, photography, and architecture. The thesis consists of three chapters. Chapter 1 focuses on deconstruction and jazz music. First, the analysis draws a comparison between the linguistic sign and the musical sign in the light of Derrida's analysis of signifier and signified. This supports an investigation of the supplementary character of writing in the specific case of jazz music. Second, the analysis draws an (...) analogy between the deconstructive reading of texts and jazz improvisation to show the relevance that creativity has for both. This is followed by an examination of the similarities between Derrida's notion of différance and the musical figure of syncopation. The analysis is completed by an argument that the jazz event of the jam session is an encounter and creative 'dialogue', with features similar to Derrida's conception of hospitality. Chapter 2 focuses on deconstruction and photography. First, the discussion explores the correlation between truth and photography. It will be argued that deconstruction challenges the logocentric organisation of photographs based on the prominence of what is immediately visible in images and fosters a more creative interpretation, which is based on the play between concealment and unconcealment within photographs. Second, it investigates the implications of Derrida's analysis of temporality for photography. This supports an investigation into how Derrida's notion of responsibility and the future to come can be applied to photography. Chapter 3 focuses on deconstruction and architecture. First, the analysis establishes the links between architecture and language by outlining the creative and transformative outcome that the correlation between function and meaning in the light of deconstruction produces. Second, the investigation examines Bernard Tschumi's idea of architecture as event in Parc de La Villette. Tschumi's work is an example of how the deconstructive approach adopted by architects fosters creativity in users. Finally, the analysis focuses on the transformative and creative character of portable architecture by investigating the correlation between the creative character of deconstructive concepts such as freeplay, parergon, and the axiom of incompleteness, and the transformative features of tents. (shrink)

In this article I argue that an adequate response to climate change requires an overcoming of the metaphysics of presence that is structuring our relationship with the weather. I trace the links between this metaphysics and the dominant way that the topic of climate change is being narrated, which is structured around the transition from diagnosis to cure, from the scientific reading to the technological writing of the weather. Against this narrative I develop a rather different account of the (...) current ecopolitical moment. I first argue that an understanding of anthropogenic climate change must be grounded in a biosemiotic analysis of the evolving metabolism between society and nature, one that is alert to the way that metabolism involves a folded relation between inside and outside, and that recognizes the constant deferral of biosemiotic meaning in ecological systems. I then use a deconstructive reading of climate technics to problematize the distinction between the diagnosis and solution of climate change, and expose modern scientific practices of reading the climate as already containing within themselves a notion of weather’s technological writability. Exploring the notion that previous transformations of the metabolic regime of society have always involved transformations of notions of the human, I conclude by sketching out a different way of reading and writing the weather, one that takes place in the ‘opening’ of climate change, that problematizes the idea of the human as the end of nature, and that thereby implies a more radical version of climate responsibility. (shrink)

Abstract:In this article, I argue that even if one can justify the initial impetus to want to deconstruct a literary or philosophical text, this does not make it possible in practice. To this end, I engage with relevant aspects of Jacques Derrida's thought, examining the motivations and purpose behind wanting to carry out a deconstruction, to then offer a pragmatic critique of the idea one might ever be able to do so. I base my argument on various factors, including deconstruction's (...) nonmethodological nature and the challenges involved in adjudicating a given deconstructive reading a success or failure, among other considerations. (shrink)

"There is no rigorous and effective deconstruction without the faithful memory of philosophies and literatures, without the respectful and competent reading of texts of the past, as well as singular works of our own time. Deconstruction is also a certain thinking about tradition and context. Mark Taylor evokes this with great clarity in the course of a remarkable introduction. He reconstitutes a set of premises without which no deconstruction could have seen the light of day." – _Jacques Derrida __"This (...) invaluable philosophical sampler brings together many of the threads out of which deconstruction is woven. taylor's anthology does not make deconstruction easy; much more usefully, it provides a meticulous guide to the sources – and significance – of the difficulties. – Barbara E. Johnson _"The book will be of great value as a set of readings with authoritative explanation for all those interested in the current relations of literature and philosophy. It is the best book of its kind I know. – _J. Hillis Miller, Yale University_. (shrink)

"Phenomenology or Deconstruction? challenges traditional understandings of the relationship between phenomenology and deconstruction through new readings of the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Paul Ricoeur and Jean-Luc Nancy. A constant dialogue with Jacques Derrida's engagement with phenomenological themes provides the impetus to establishing a new understanding of 'being' and 'presence' that exposes significant blindspots inherent in traditional readings of both phenomenology and deconstruction." "This new reading of being and presence fundamentally re-draws our understanding of the relation of deconstruction and phenomenology, (...) and provides the first sustained discussion of the possibilities and problems for any future 'deconstructive phenomenology.'" --Book Jacket. (shrink)

Based on a reading of the opening of The Animal That Therefore I Am, this essay exposes the genealogy and structure of the articulation of two motifs of Jacques Derrida’s thought: the promise and animality. Following a confrontation between Heidegger’s and Nietzsche’s conceptions of the human, we will show that, for deconstruction, the possibility to promise, or the possibility of having an “avenir,” is characteristic of an “animal” structure of experience. The anthropological specificity is not pertinent in this context: (...) if animality names the structure of experience in general, and if humanity is reinscribed into it, then this reconfiguration is not a matter of classes, but of structure. Therefore, the promise of deconstruction is an implication of the structure of experience of finite living beings: experience is open, historic, insofar as it is animal. Finally, we will show why the affirmation of this articulation coincides with that of deconstruction’s “categorical imperative.”. (shrink)

The book Chronicle of Separation is an attempt to write on Derrida, to Derrida and from Derrida on the basis of a pathetic experience, which, in various ways, describes and enacts the pathetic experience of deconstruction itself. The book tackles the weight of emotions that is at the heart of deconstructive reading, treating deconstruction's weak, fragile and parasitic mode of thinking as a deconstruction of emotion, on emotion and as emotion. Chronicle of Separation examines these themes beginning with (...) a descriptive and an analytic reading of Derrida's Memoirs: For Paul de Man and The Post Card, as embodiments of deconstruction's melancholic friendship which inscribes its disillusioned love in what it calls the 'postal condition'. The book then moves on to a feminization of Derrida, experimenting in different modes of writing. It firstly discusses Fred Zinneman's film Julia about a mournful friendship between women. Then it performs a deconstructive meditation on the anorexic person suggesting that anorexia constitutes a paradoxical embodiment of deconstruction. The concluding chapter presents a complete incorporation of Derrida into a fictional text that re-writes the biblical Book of Ruth. (shrink)

This book disentangles two terms that were conflated in the initial Anglo-American appropriation of French theory: deconstruction and poststructuralism. Focusing on Sartre, Derrida, Foucault, and Baudrillard (but also considering Levinas, Blanchot, de Man, and others), it traces the turn from a deconstruction inflected by phenomenology to a poststructuralism formed by the rejection of models based on consciousness in favor of ones based on language and structure. The book provides a wide-ranging and complex genealogy of French theory from the 1940s onward, (...) placing particular emphasis on the largely neglected early work of the theorists involved and on deconstruction’s continuing relevance. The author argues that deconstruction is a form of radical, antiscientific modernity: an interdisciplinary reconfiguration of philosophy as it confronted the positivism of the human sciences in the 1960s. By contrast, poststructuralism is a type of postmodern theory inflected by changes in technology and the mode of information. Inasmuch as poststructuralism is founded upon its “constitutive loss” of phenomenology (in Judith Butler’s phrase), the author is also concerned with the ways phenomenology (particularly Sartre’s forgotten but seminal Being and Nothingness) is remembered, repeated in different ways, and never quite worked through in its theoretical successors. Thus the book also exemplifies a way of reading intellectual history that is not only concerned with the transmission of concepts, but also with the processes of transference, mourning, and disavowal that inform the relationships between bodies of thought. (shrink)

There has been a significant increase in studies devoted to Søren Kierkegaard’s Works of Love in contemporary Kierkegaard research. There are several good reasons why this is so. The single theme that dominates, though, is the relation between preferential love and neighborly love. Are they reconcilable or not? The present paper recasts this discussion by situating Works of Love in the trajectory of deconstructive readings of community from Jean-Luc Nancy and onwards. It is divided into three sections. It is (...) first shown that a deconstructive take on preferential and neighborly love indicates how any community has a place for love as its condition of (im)possibility. The opening of this place is then located in the Christian love-commandment. Finally, the expanse of this place is found in the spreading-out of the promise of love. The paper is conceived as a step towards letting love find its place in the analytics of being-there—as the phenomenon which opens the “there” without losing its “with.” The paper concludes with a postscript that points towards this broader context. (shrink)