This paper contends that African-centered models of psychopathology represent a heretical challenge to orthodox North American Mental Health. Heresy is the defiant rejection of ideology from a smaller community within the orthodoxy. African-centered models of psychopathology use much of the same language and ideas about the diagnostic process as Western psychiatry and clinical psychology but explicitly reject the ideological foundations of illness definition. The nature of the heretical critique is discussed, and implications for the future of this school of thought (...) are offered. (shrink)

Liquor stores have been repeatedly shown to be disproportionately prevalent in Black neighborhoods and therefore constitute a disproportionate health risk. This paper examines the ways in which liquor stores jeopardize Black lives through social and material conditions that are broader than health risk. Embodying and perpetuating dysfunctional markets, liquor stores relegate Black consumers to an overabundance of inexpensive and potent alcoholic beverages sold from heavily securitized storefronts and provoke conflicted and oppositional relationships. Liquor stores exist in a state of antibiosis (...) with Black communities, an antagonistic relationship in which liquor stores gain but communities are adversely affected. (shrink)

Our study considers the governance, ethics and operational challenges associated with the acquisition, manipulation and commodification of ‘big data’ in the financial services sector. To the best of our knowledge, there are no published studies describing empirical research undertaken within companies in this sector to understand how they are responding to such challenges: our field-based research is a significant initial contribution in this respect. We describe the results of a micro-ethnographic study undertaken in a small-to-medium-sized company developing disruptive, technology-related platforms (...) and services in the banking and retail sectors based on big data and associated analytics: these are used to derive commercially valuable insights from personal customer data in exchange for cash back and targeted rewards. The company was found to employ a multi-level innovation governance approach, underpinned by an ethical strategy based on a principle of mutual benefit. Opt-in and informed consent for using data for specific purposes was supported by principles of data minimisation and anonymisation, with unrestricted use of secondary, anonymised and aggregated data to develop insights. Governance, which included contextual data protection legislation, payment-card industry data usage standards and internal corporate controls, presented as bespoke organisational practices relating to data security and privacy. These in total set the governance and ethics frame for big data innovation at the company within which it has had to be both adaptive and responsive under conditions of normative and regulatory uncertainty. (shrink)

Miracle and Machine is a sort of "reader's guide" to Jacques Derrida's 1994 essay "faith and knowledge," his most important work on the nature of religion in general and on the unprecedented forms it is taking today through science and the ...

Plato's Animals examines the crucial role played by animal images, metaphors, allusions, and analogies in Plato's Dialogues. These fourteen lively essays demonstrate that the gadflies, snakes, stingrays, swans, dogs, horses, and other animals that populate Plato's work are not just rhetorical embellishments. Animals are central to Plato's understanding of the hierarchy between animals, humans, and gods and are crucial to his ideas about education, sexuality, politics, aesthetics, the afterlife, the nature of the soul, and philosophy itself. The volume includes a (...) comprehensive annotated index to Plato’s bestiary in both Greek and English. (shrink)

Beginning with a reading of Plato's Statesman, this work interrogates the relationship between life and being in Plato's thought. It argues that in his later dialogues Plato discovers--or invents--a form of true or real life that transcends all merely biological life and everything that is commonly called life.

Taking on the Tradition focuses on how the work of Jacques Derrida has helped us rethink and rework the themes of tradition, legacy, and inheritance in the Western philosophical tradition. It concentrates not only on such themes in the work of Derrida but also on his own gestures with regard to these themes—that is, on the performativity of Derrida’s texts. The book thus uses Derrida’s understanding of speech act theory to reread his own work. The book consists in a series (...) of close readings of Derrida’s texts to demonstrate that the claims he makes in his work cannot be fully understood without considering the way he makes those claims. The book considers Derrida’s relation to the Greek philosophical tradition and to his immediate predecessors in the French philosophical tradition, as well as his own legacy within the contemporary scene. Part I examines Derrida’s analyses of Plato and Aristotle on the themes of writing and metaphor. Part II looks at themes of donation, inheritance, pedagogy, and influence in relation to Derrida’s readings of the works of Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and Jean-Pierre Vernant. Part III considers the promises and legacies of Derrida’s work on autobiography, friendship, and hospitality, themes Derrida has recently taken up in his readings of Martin Heidegger, Maurice Blanchot, and Emmanuel Levinas. In the Conclusion, the author analyzes what Derrida has recently called a “messianicity without messianism” and shows how Derrida develops two different notions of the future and of legacy: one that always determines a horizon for the donation and reception of any legacy or tradition, and one that leaves open a radically unknown and unknowable future for that legacy and tradition. (shrink)

This essay analyzes Derrida’s questioning of the relationship between “Theory and Practice” in his recently published seminar of 1976–1977 of this same title. It traces Derrida’s reading of this relationship in Marx and Marxism, beginning with various interpretations of the famous line from Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach,” “Philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; what is important is to transform it.” The essay tries to argue that Derrida’s reading of theory and practice in Marx should be used in (...) the end to reread Derrida himself and so rethink the relationship between theory and practice in deconstruction and, especially, in pedagogy. After tracking the places where Derrida’s seminar, first presented in Paris to help prepare students for the 1977 agrégation exam in philosophy on the theme of “Theory and Practice,” repeated, overlapped with, or anticipated many prior and subsequent treatments of similar themes in Derrida’s published works, the essay concludes that no seminar—and Derrida’s seminars are exemplary in this regard—can be restricted to the time in which they are given but are always, like Derrida’s “specters of Marx,” non-contemporaneous with themselves, in a word, “out of joint.”. (shrink)

This essay examines the critical role played by comedy and laughter in Plato. It begins by taking seriously Plato's critique of comedy and his concerns about the negative effects of laughter in dialogues such as Republic and Laws. It then shows how Plato, rather than simply rejecting comedy and censuring laughter, attempts to put these into the service of philosophy by rethinking them in philosophical terms. Accordingly, the laughable or the ridiculous is understood not just in relation to the ugly (...) or the ignoble, as it is in Homer, but in relation of blindness, ignorance, and falsity. By taking up such a philosophical perspective, one can then distinguish what truly is laughable from what merely appears so. It is in this way that Plato is able to explain why Socrates appeared so ridiculous to the multitude but was known to be anything but to those who were able to see him with philosophical eyes, that is, those who were able to attend to what I call the spectacle of laughter. The paper concludes... (shrink)

This essay demonstrates that in his 1999–2000 Death Penalty Seminar Jacques Derrida pursues the deconstruction of political theology that he had been pursuing in a more or less explicit fashion for more than two decades. Derrida's interest in the theme of the death penalty can be traced back in large part, it is argued, to the theological and essentially Judeo-Christian origins that Derrida finds in discourses both for and against the death penalty. This emphasis on the theological origins of the (...) death penalty helps explain why Derrida spends much more time questioning the principles, rhetoric, and images of abolitionist discourses than pro–death penalty discourses. For Derrida, this essay concludes, a critique or deconstruction of discourses surrounding the death penalty is never more critical than in a putatively postreligious, secular age. In the end, Derrida hopes to provide what may be the very first philosophical abolitionist discourse, one that argues against the death penalty without relying on the language, tropes, symbols, and images of Judeo-Christian theology. (shrink)

Derrida à Montréal n'est pas le titre d'une pièce de théâtre, mais celui d'un essai qui suit, en trois actes, trois événements singuliers qui ont eu lieu à Montréal et auxquels Jacques Derrida a participé en 1971, en 1979 et en 1997. Au "Premier Acte", Michael Naas relit de près la première communication du philosophe, "Signature événement contexte", un texte qui prend très au sérieux - et les critique tout à la fois - la théorie des speech acts de John (...) L. Austin et les questions du contexte, de la présence, de l'écriture, de l'événement et de la signature qui lui sont liées. Au "Deuxième Acte", on retrouve Derrida traitant de ces mêmes questions, mais d'un point de vue politique où il s'intéresse aux "Déclarations d'Indépendance". Enfin, au "Troisième Acte", Derrida poursuit cette discussion ininterrompue qui se concentre, une fois de plus, sur ces mêmes aspects, mais à la lumière de la notion d'événement. C'est comme si Montréal avait chaque fois été la scène rêvée où Derrida avait pu explorer ces questions pour lui cruciales."--Page 4 de la couverture. (shrink)

During the final decade of his life, Jacques Derrida came to use the trope of autoimmunity with greater and greater frequency. Indeed it today appears that autoimmunity was to have been the last iteration of what for more than forty years Derrida called deconstruction. This essay looks at the consequences of this terminological shift for our understanding not only of Derrida's final works (such as Rogues) but of his entire corpus. By taking up a term from the biological sciences that (...) describes the process by which an organism turns in quasi-suicidal fashion against its own self-protection, Derrida was able to rethink the very notion of life otherwise and demonstrate the way in which every sovereign identity, from the self to the nation-state to, most provocatively, God, is open to a process that both threatens to destroy it and gives it its only chance of living on. (shrink)

The End of the World and Other Teachable Moments follows the remarkable itinerary of Jacques Derrida’s final seminar, “The Beast and the Sovereign”, as the explicit themes of the seminar—namely, sovereignty and the question of the animal—come to be supplemented and interrupted by questions of death, mourning, survival, the archive, and, especially, the end of the world. The book begins with Derrida’s analyses, in the first year of the seminar, of the question of the animal in the context of his (...) other published works on the same subject. It then follows Derrida through the second year of the seminar, presented in Paris from December 2002 to March 2003, as a very different tone begins to make itself heard, one that wavers between melancholy and an extraordinary lucidity with regard to the end. Focusing the entire year on just two works, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Martin Heidegger’s seminar of 1929–30, “The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics,” the seminar comes to be dominated by questions of the end of the world and of an originary violence that at once gives rise to and effaces all things. The End of the World and Other Teachable Moments follows Derrida as he responds from week to week to these emerging questions, as well as to important events unfolding around him, both world events—the aftermath of 9/11, the American invasion of Iraq—and more personal ones, from the death of Maurice Blanchot to intimations of his own death less than two years away. All this, the book concludes, makes this final seminar an absolutely unique work in Derrida’s corpus, one that both speaks of death as the end of the world and itself now testifies to that end—just one, though hardly the least, of its many teachable moments. (shrink)

This essay celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of Research in Phenomenology by reimagining or rethinking the speech act that would have launched or inaugurated the journal back in 1971. It does this by rereading Derrida’s signature text on speech act theory, “Signature Event Context,” a text first presented by Derrida in the very year of the journal’s founding. The essay takes Derrida’s theses regarding the speech act’s fundamental relationship to writing, absence, death, and testimony in order to reread some of the (...) first issues of Research in Phenomenology, including the memorial essays contained within them. The essay concludes by suggesting that Research in Phenomenology has done as much as any journal over the last half century to live up to the promise of that original speech act. (shrink)

This essay traces the history of Jacques Derrida's engagement with the question of the animal and the methodology Derrida follows in his 2008 The Animal That Therefore I Am . As Derrida demonstrates, the history of philosophy is marked from its inception by an attempt to draw a single, indivisible line between humans and all other animals by attributing some capacity to humans (e.g., language, culture, mourning, a relationship to death) and denying it to animals. Derrida thus begins by questioning (...) the supposed fact that animals do not have such and such a capacity or attribute but then quickly turns to questioning the principle by which philosophers have claimed that humans do . In all his work on the animal, therefore, Derrida questions the confidence with which humans attribute certain capacities to themselves while denying them to animals, all in the name of a pervasive and yet repressed violence against the animal world. (shrink)

This essay traces the history of Jacques Derrida's engagement with the question of the animal and the methodology Derrida follows in his 2008 The Animal That Therefore I Am . As Derrida demonstrates, the history of philosophy is marked from its inception by an attempt to draw a single, indivisible line between humans and all other animals by attributing some capacity to humans and denying it to animals. Derrida thus begins by questioning the supposed fact that animals do not have (...) such and such a capacity or attribute but then quickly turns to questioning the principle by which philosophers have claimed that humans do . In all his work on the animal, therefore, Derrida questions the confidence with which humans attribute certain capacities to themselves while denying them to animals, all in the name of a pervasive and yet repressed violence against the animal world. (shrink)

_Rogues_, published in France under the title _Voyous_, comprises two major lectures that Derrida delivered in 2002 investigating the foundations of the sovereignty of the nation-state. The term "_État voyou_" is the French equivalent of "rogue state," and it is this outlaw designation of certain countries by the leading global powers that Derrida rigorously and exhaustively examines. Derrida examines the history of the concept of sovereignty, engaging with the work of Bodin, Hobbes, Rousseau, Schmitt, and others. Against this background, he (...) delineates his understanding of "democracy to come," which he distinguishes clearly from any kind of regulating ideal or teleological horizon. The idea that democracy will always remain in the future is not a temporal notion. Rather, the phrase would name the coming of the unforeseeable other, the structure of an event beyond calculation and program. Derrida thus aligns this understanding of democracy with the logic he has worked out elsewhere. But it is not just political philosophy that is brought under deconstructive scrutiny here: Derrida provides unflinching and hard-hitting assessments of current political realities, and these essays are highly engaged with events of the post-9/11 world. (shrink)

Jacques Derrida has written much in recent years on the topic of mourning. This essay takes Derrida's insights into mourning in general and collective mourning in particular in order to ask about the relationship between mourning and politics. Taking a lead from a recent work of Derrida's on Jean-François Lyotard, the essay develops its argument through two examples, one from ancient Greece and one from twentiethcentury America: the role mourning plays in the constitution and maintenance of the state in Plato's (...) Laws and the controversy surrounding the consecration of the tomb of the Unknown Soldier of Vietnam in Arlington National Cemetery. This latter example provides the occasion for questioning the possibilities of mourning the unknown or the unidentifiable and for addressing some of the ways in which the United States has mourned or failed to mourn, remembered or failed to remember, in the wake of September 11. (shrink)

A major desconstructive reading of Homer's Iliad by the well-known translator of Derrida and Lyotard.

This volume contains the speech given by Derrida at Emmanuel Levinas's funeral on December 27, 1995, and his contribution to a colloquium organized to mark the first anniversary of Levinas's death. For both thinkers, the word _adieu_ names a fundamental characteristic of human being: the salutation or benediction prior to all constative language and that given at the moment of separation, sometimes forever, as at the moment of death, it is also the _a-dieu_, for God or to God before and (...) in any relation to the other. In this book, Derrida extends his work on Levinas in previously unexplored directions via a radical rereading of _Totality and Infinity_ and other texts, including the lesser-known talmudic readings. He argues that Levinas, especially in _Totality and Infinity,_ bequeaths to us an "immense treatise of hospitality," a meditation on the welcome offered to the other. The conjunction of an ethics of pure prescription with the idea of an infinite and absolute hospitality confronts us with the most pressing political, juridical, and institutional concerns of our time. What, then, is an ethics and what is a politics of hospitality? And what, if it ever _is,_ would be a hospitality surpassing any ethics and any politics we know? As always, Derrida raises these questions in the most explicit of terms, moving back and forth between philosophical argument and the political discussion of immigration laws, peace, the state of Israel, xenophobia—reminding us with every move that thinking is not a matter of neutralizing abstraction, but a gesture of hospitality for what happens and still may happen. (shrink)

In this brilliant essay, Jacques Derrida explores issues of vision, blindness, self-representation, and their relation to drawing, while offering detailed readings of an extraordinary collection of images. Selected by Derrida from the prints and drawings department of the Louvre, the works depict blindness—fictional, historical, and biblical. From Old and New Testament scenes to the myth of Perseus and the Gorgon and the blinding of Polyphemus, Derrida uncovers in these images rich, provocative layers of interpretation. For Derrida drawing is itself blind; (...) as an act rooted in memory and anticipation, drawing necessarily replaces one kind of seeing with another. Ultimately, he explains, the very lines which compose any drawing are themselves never fully visible to the viewer since they exist only in a tenuous state of multiple identities: as marks on a page, as indicators of a contour. Lacking a "pure" identity, the lines of a drawing summon the supplement of the word, of verbal discourse, and, in doing so, obscure the visual experience. Consequently, Derrida demonstrates, the very act of depicting a blind person undertakes multiple enactments and statements of blindness and sight. _Memoirs of the Blind_ is both a sophisticated philosophical argument and a series of detailed readings. Derrida provides compelling insights into famous and lesser known works, interweaving analyses of texts—including Diderot's _Lettres sur les aveugles_, the notion of mnemonic art in Baudelaire's _The Painter of Modern _ _Life_, and Merleau-Ponty's _The Visible and the _ _Invisible_. Along with engaging meditations on the history and philosophy of art, Derrida reveals the ways viewers approach philosophical ideas through art, and the ways art enriches philosophical reflection. An exploration of sight, representation, and art, _Memoirs of the Blind_ extends and deepens the meditation on vision and painting presented in _Truth and _ _Painting_. Readers of Derrida, both new and familiar, will profit from this powerful contribution to the study of the visual arts. (shrink)

Jacques Derrida is, in the words of the_ New York Times_, "perhaps the world's most famous philosopher—if not the only famous philosopher." He often provokes controversy as soon as his name is mentioned. But he also inspires the respect that comes from an illustrious career, and, among many who were his colleagues and peers, he inspired friendship. _The Work of Mourning_ is a collection that honors those friendships in the wake of passing. Gathered here are texts—letters of condolence, memorial essays, (...) eulogies, funeral orations—written after the deaths of well-known figures: Roland Barthes, Paul de Man, Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Edmond Jabès, Louis Marin, Sarah Kofman, Gilles Deleuze, Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-François Lyotard, Max Loreau, Jean-Marie Benoist, Joseph Riddel, and Michel Servière. With his words, Derrida bears witness to the singularity of a friendship and to the absolute uniqueness of each relationship. In each case, he is acutely aware of the questions of tact, taste, and ethical responsibility involved in speaking of the dead—the risks of using the occasion for one's own purposes, political calculation, personal vendetta, and the expiation of guilt. More than a collection of memorial addresses, this volume sheds light not only on Derrida's relation to some of the most prominent French thinkers of the past quarter century but also on some of the most important themes of Derrida's entire oeuvre-mourning, the "gift of death," time, memory, and friendship itself. "In his rapt attention to his subjects' work and their influence upon him, the book also offers a hesitant and tangential retelling of Derrida's own life in French philosophical history. There are illuminating and playful anecdotes—how Lyotard led Derrida to begin using a word-processor; how Paul de Man talked knowledgeably of jazz with Derrida's son. Anyone who still thinks that Derrida is a facetious punster will find such resentful prejudice unable to survive a reading of this beautiful work."—Steven Poole, _Guardian_ "Strikingly _simpa_ meditations on friendship, on shared vocations and avocations and on philosophy and history."—_Publishers Weekly _. (shrink)

Jacques Derrida is, in the words of the_ New York Times_, "perhaps the world's most famous philosopher—if not the only famous philosopher." He often provokes controversy as soon as his name is mentioned. But he also inspires the respect that comes from an illustrious career, and, among many who were his colleagues and peers, he inspired friendship. _The Work of Mourning_ is a collection that honors those friendships in the wake of passing. Gathered here are texts—letters of condolence, memorial essays, (...) eulogies, funeral orations—written after the deaths of well-known figures: Roland Barthes, Paul de Man, Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Edmond Jabès, Louis Marin, Sarah Kofman, Gilles Deleuze, Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-François Lyotard, Max Loreau, Jean-Marie Benoist, Joseph Riddel, and Michel Servière. With his words, Derrida bears witness to the singularity of a friendship and to the absolute uniqueness of each relationship. In each case, he is acutely aware of the questions of tact, taste, and ethical responsibility involved in speaking of the dead—the risks of using the occasion for one's own purposes, political calculation, personal vendetta, and the expiation of guilt. More than a collection of memorial addresses, this volume sheds light not only on Derrida's relation to some of the most prominent French thinkers of the past quarter century but also on some of the most important themes of Derrida's entire oeuvre-mourning, the "gift of death," time, memory, and friendship itself. "In his rapt attention to his subjects' work and their influence upon him, the book also offers a hesitant and tangential retelling of Derrida's own life in French philosophical history. There are illuminating and playful anecdotes—how Lyotard led Derrida to begin using a word-processor; how Paul de Man talked knowledgeably of jazz with Derrida's son. Anyone who still thinks that Derrida is a facetious punster will find such resentful prejudice unable to survive a reading of this beautiful work."—Steven Poole, _Guardian_ "Strikingly _simpa_ meditations on friendship, on shared vocations and avocations and on philosophy and history."—_Publishers Weekly _. (shrink)

The word floruit is typically used to designate the year around which a thinker or writer is thought to have ‘flourished’. Traditionally, that age is set at forty. In this paper, I ask whether texts too might be assigned a time of flourishing, a floruit – or perhaps more than one – that would no longer be attached to the life of the author but to the unique time of the trace or the archive, a flourishing that might best be (...) thought in terms of what Derrida called survivance or living-on. I develop this notion of a flourishing beyond the life of the author, indeed beyond the human altogether, by returning to Glas, a text that was published forty years ago and that is soon to undergo – or at least this is my hope – a new infusion of critical interest and a new flourishing. I argue that by returning to Glas and its seminal analyses of Hegel and Genet on the themes of life, death, blood, spirit, glory, the death penalty, the proper of man, and so on, we will be better able to understand and take the measure of Derrida's return to these same themes in his final seminars a quarter of a century later. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 45, Issue 2, pp 191 - 213 With the recent publication of Jacques Derrida’s seminar of 1964–65, Heidegger: The Question of Being and History, it has become abundantly clear that when the full history of Derrida’s half-century-long engagement with Heidegger is finally written a special place will have to be reserved for the question of history itself, and especially the question of history or historicity in its irreducible relationship to language and to violence. In this essay, I (...) look at just a few key passages from “Violence and Metaphysics,” first published in 1964, and Derrida’s seminar on Heidegger from that same year in order to try to isolate what appears to be an important transitional moment in Derrida’s rethinking of the questions of language, violence, and history, in large part, it seems, thanks to, or accompanied by, Heidegger. Indeed, while Derrida’s engagement with Heidegger over the next four decades will go on to include questions of technology, the animal, species difference, sexual difference, and so on, the relationship between language, history, and violence that came to draw his attention in the early 1960s and that would be crucial to what Derrida will go on to call deconstruction will continue to haunt him, as I will suggest in conclusion, right up to his very last seminar, The Beast and the Sovereign, in 2002–2003. (shrink)

This chapter will make ample use of Derrida's self‐analysis in “We Other Greeks,” especially as concerns the important role played by what might be called “the question of inclusion and exclusion” in Derrida's work on the Greeks. But it will then go on to make a claim that Derrida would have no doubt hesitated to grant, namely, that among all of Derrida's engagements with the Ancient Philosophy a single figure, Plato, and a single dialogue of Plato's, the Phaedrus, indeed a (...) single scene within that dialogue–Socrates’ critique of writing – played a central and unparalleled role in Derrida's work from the beginning right up until the end. The chapter shows this by looking not so much at the essay in which Derrida treats this scene in detail, his essay “Plato's Pharmacy,” but at Derrida's other works from around the same time and then at some of his very last publications. (shrink)

Class Acts examines two often neglected aspects of Jacques Derrida's work as a philosopher, his public presentations at lectures and conferences and his teaching, along with the question of the "speech act" that links them. What, Michael Naas asks, is one doing when one speaks in public in these ways? The book follows Derrida's itinerary with regard to speech act theory across three public lectures, from 1971 to 1997, all given, for reasons the book seeks to explain, in Montreal. In (...) these lectures, Derrida elaborated his critique of J. L. Austin and his own subsequent redefinition of speech act theory. The book then gives an overview of Derrida's teaching career and his famous "seminar" presentations, along with his own explicit reflections on pedagogy and educational institutions beginning in the mid-1970s. Naas then shows through a reading of three recently published seminars-on life death, theory and practice, and forgiveness-just how Derrida the teacher interrogated and deployed speech act theory in his seminars. Whether in a conference hall or a classroom, Naas demonstrates, Derrida was always interested in the way spoken or written words might do more than simply communicate some meaning or intent but might give rise to something like an event. Class Acts bears witness to the possibility of such events in Derrida's work as a pedagogue and a public intellectual. (shrink)

This essay attempts to lay out the three principal theses of Jacques Derrida’s 1994-1995 “Faith and Knowledge,‘ Derrida’s most sustained but also most challenging work on the nature of religion and the relationship between religion and science. After demonstrating through these three theses that religion and science not only share a common source-or have a common genesis-but are in what Derrida calls an autoimmune relationship to one another, the essay puts these theses to the test by reading a brief passage (...) near the middle of the essay where Derrida recounts the genesis of “Faith and Knowledge‘ itself Derrida’s seemingly anecdotal recounting of this genesis is thus shown to reflect the three theses of “Faith and Knowledge,‘ the way in which, in a word, the breath of creation, or the miracle of religion, is always doubled, supplemented, and thus contaminated by the machine of science and tele-technology. (shrink)

This essay takes as its point of departure Jacques Derrida’s analysis of the phantasm of a mother tongue in his recently published seminar from 1995–1996 on hospitality (Hospitalité I, Éditions du Seuil, 2021). The essay begins by showing that Derrida’s analysis of this phantasm is per­fectly consistent with several of his most important works of the 1960s (from Of Grammatology to Voice and Phenomenon) on the auto-affection of speech and the phantasm of self-presence to which it gives rise. But the (...) essay then demonstrates how those earlier analyses of language and voice are supplemented in Hospitalité by important reflections on what were then very new teletechnologies—including the cell or mobile phone—that do not, as we might have thought, deflate the phantasm of self-presence and of a natural mother tongue but actually lend themselves to it. What these teletechnologies thus end up underscoring, according to Derrida, is the original exappropriation at the heart of all language, including the so-called mother tongue. (shrink)

“Prière à desceller d’une ligne de vie”: This is Jacques Derrida’s shortest published work—a one-line poem published back in 1986. In this essay I attempt to read this one-line poem through several texts of Derrida from the same period, including “Shibboleth” and “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials.” The essay is an attempt to bear witness to the extraordinary life and work of Derrida through a reading of this single line about life and work, living speech and the dead letter, life (...) and living on, the destiny inscribed in a lifeline and the future of a lifeline in prayer. (shrink)

This chapter illustrates how Derrida looks upon America, and describes Derrida's life in America. It considers Derrida's influence on America, especially in deconstruction, a term often associated with him. It also provides a description of Derrida's “America” and “Europe”.

During those first few days, those first few weeks, truth be told, still today, something in me has wanted simply to echo the sentiments of others. That’s because I myself didn’t know exactly what to say and, truth be told, I still don’t know today. But it’s also because others, including and especially some of the people here today, beginning with my co-panelists and, perhaps especially, early on, Leigh Johnson, knew at the time just what had to be said and (...) so expressed so well the sentiments that we all—that I at least—just wanted to echo. Just to echo, that’s what I wanted to do, because by echoing the sentiments of others I would be able to protect myself just a bit longer, I thought, though also, I self-justified, by echoing others I would be able to give back in some way to Pleshette herself, who showed us in her work that Echo does not simply repeat but initiates even when it looks or sounds as if she is not, Echo who gives back even when it sounds as if she has nothing to give, Echo who not only has her own Narcissus but her own narcissism—which Pleshette would have been the first to tell us is not only not a bad thing but a necessary one, and perhaps just what is needed for a new thinking of empathy, of mourning, and, perhaps, as I will try to say, of the ephemeral. (shrink)

In Plato’s later dialogues, and particularly in the Sophist, there is a general reinterpretation and rehabilitation of the name (onoma) in philosophy. No longer understood rather vaguely as one of potentially dangerous and deceptive elements of everyday language or of poetic language, the word onoma is recast in the Sophist and related dialogues into one of the essential elements of a philosophical language that aims to make claims or propositions about the way thingsare. Onoma, now understood as name, is thus (...) coupled with rhema, or verb, to form the two essential elements of any logos, that is, any claim, statement, orproposition. This paper follows Plato’s gradual rehabilitation and reinscription of the name from early dialogues through late ones in order to demonstrate thenew role Plato fashions for language in these later works. (shrink)

In Plato’s later dialogues, and particularly in the Sophist, there is a general reinterpretation and rehabilitation of the name (onoma) in philosophy. No longer understood rather vaguely as one of potentially dangerous and deceptive elements of everyday language or of poetic language, the word onoma is recast in the Sophist and related dialogues into one of the essential elements of a philosophical language that aims to make claims or propositions about the way thingsare. Onoma, now understood as name, is thus (...) coupled with rhema, or verb, to form the two essential elements of any logos, that is, any claim, statement, orproposition. This paper follows Plato’s gradual rehabilitation and reinscription of the name from early dialogues through late ones in order to demonstrate thenew role Plato fashions for language in these later works. (shrink)

During his 2000–2001 seminar on the death penalty, Jacques Derrida argues that Kant is the most ‘rigorous’ philosophical proponent of the death penalty and, thus, the thinker who poses the most serious objections to the kind of philosophical abolitionism that Derrida is trying to develop in his seminar. For Kant, the death penalty is the logical result of the fundamental principle of criminal law, namely, talionic law or the right of retaliation as a principle of pure, disinterested reason. In this (...) paper, I demonstrate how Derrida attempts to undermine Kant’s defence of the death penalty by demonstrating both its internal contradictions and its strange affinities with the law of primitive peoples. I argue that Derrida’s repeated returns throughout the seminar to Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals suggest that Kant’s seemingly rational defence of the death penalty is ultimately motivated by interests that belie the supposed disinterestedness of modern law and by a notion of natural justice that at once subtends and subverts all criminal law. (shrink)

This essay focuses on Derrida’s 1975-1976 seminar Life Death and the dual notion of “program” that informs it. In this seminar, Derrida juxtaposes a reading of the notion of “program” used by French biologist François Jacob in his depiction of the workings of DNA with reflections on the “program” of the agrégation exam that had set as its topic for that year “Life and Death.” The paper thus begins by looking at the critical role played by the agrégation exam in (...) the production or reproduction of philosophy as a discipline in France. It then analyzes Derrida’s reading of Jacob’s La logique du vivant in terms of two supposedly distinct programs, the putatively inflexible program of DNA, a program shared by all living beings, and the freer, more flexible program of human culture and institutions, including pedagogical institutions such as the agrégation. The result, I argue, is a complete rethinking of the forms of production or reproduction at stake in both genetics and education. (shrink)

In ‘Reading and Its Discontents’, Anne Emmanuelle Berger makes a plea for the specificity of reading literature. Unlike other kinds of reading, the reading of literature has the unique ability to ‘keep the wound open’. As such, it can never be reduced, as some have recently tried, to just another form of culture production or to some politically motivated pedagogical therapeutics. It is also a type of reading, this essay will argue, that cannot be reduced to the kind of silent (...) reading that, as Derrida demonstrated in ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, has been the model and telos of reading since Plato. After a brief look at the controversy surrounding the history of silent reading, this essay looks at the question of reading in Plato and, especially, at the surprising number of references in the dialogues to Socrates as a reader. It then turns to Derrida’s reading of Plato in ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, first to Derrida’s critique of the Platonic model of reading and writing in the dialogues and then to the deployment of a new kind of philosophical reading and writing in Derrida’s own work, a reading that, as Berger herself suggests, is always also a writing, a reading that is itself then always double, at once silent and aloud. (shrink)

Though Derrida had often appealed to the notion of le reste, in works ranging from Glas to Shibbloth to Cinders, it was not until his 2002 essay Reste – le maître that he would devote an entire work to the topic. In this essay, I look at a few of Derrida's early attempts to think le reste, particularly in relationship to poetry in ‘Che cos'è la poesia?’ before concentrating on Reste – le maître. I show that it is only in (...) this latter work that Derrida develops a full ‘theory’ of le reste as a ‘quasi-transcendental’ along the lines of différance or, indeed – and Derrida himself makes the comparison – the ‘Good beyond being’ in Plato and Plotinus. But it is also in this latter text that Derrida uses the notion of the reste to suggest a relationship, an analogy, between the logic of sacrifice and mastery in Western onto-theology and the logic of sacrifice and mastery in the Brahmin culture of India. As such, I suggest in conclusion, le reste is perhaps the most suggestive and the most powerful notion in all of Derrida's work for thinking today the relationship between deconstruction and the rest of the world. (shrink)

Water, hydōr: it is the first word of ancient Greek philosophy, the word used by Thales, the first philosopher, to describe the material principle subtending all things. By the time of Plato, philosophers were proposing other kinds of non-material principles to explain diverse phenomena, principles like soul, mind, or ideas. But Plato would continue to be interested in—even fascinated by—water, water in every imaginable form, at once pure and impure, transparent and troubled, drinkable and undrinkable, flowing and still, fresh and (...) salt, shallow and deep. In this paper, I look at Plato’s fascination with and fundamental ambivalence toward water, his understanding of water as both a political question and a philosophical problem. I suggest by the end of the paper, using the work of Jacques Derrida in “Plato’s Pharmacy” to guide my argument, that, for Plato, water was at once the greatest danger for philosophy and its most powerful resource. (shrink)

This essay returns to Of Grammatology, Derrida’s seminal work of 1967, in order to demonstrate the key role played by the category of interiority in that work and in deconstruction more generally. The essay show how Derrida traces the values associated with interiority in his readings of Plato, Rousseau, and Levi-Strauss in order to argue that the opposition between interiority and exteriority is not one philosophical opposition among others but the single most powerful and persistent opposition in Western philosophy, organizing (...) everything from the relationship between speech and writing to that between presence and absence, essence and accident, even life and death. We thus come to see through a reading of this early work of Derrida’s that deconstruction will have been from its very inception a deconstruction of any claims to an inside that would come before or exclude its outside, that is, a deconstruction of every phantasm of interiority. (shrink)

Written in the days immediately following the death of Jacques Derrida on 9 October 2004, this essay attempts to bear witness tothe memory of Jacques Derrida as a writer and thinker and, even more personally, a mentor and friend. Written out of gratitude and affection, but also out of an almost overwhelming emotion, the essay is offered here, not without trepidation, in the hope that, in some small measure, the author’s emotion, affection, and genuine gratitude for the life and work (...) of Jacques Derrida may be shared. (shrink)

In the three essays that make up this stimulating and often startling book, Jacques Derrida argues against the notion that the basic ideas of psychoanalysis have been thoroughly worked through, argued, and assimilated. The continuing interest in psychoanalysis is here examined in the various "resistances" to analysis—conceived not only as a phenomenon theorized at the heart of psychoanalysis, but as psychoanalysis's resistance to itself, an insusceptibility to analysis that has to do with the structure of analysis itself. Derrida not only (...) shows how the interest of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic writing can be renewed today, but these essays afford him the opportunity to revisit and reassess a subject he first confronted in 1966. They also serve to clarify Derrida's thinking about the subjects of the essays—Freud, Lacan, and Foucault—a thinking that, especially with regard to the last two, has been greatly distorted and misunderstood. The first essay, on Freud, is a tour de force of close reading of Freud's texts as philosophical reflection. By means of the fine distinctions Derrida makes in this analytical reading, particularly of _The Interpretation of Dreams,_ he opens up the realm of analysis into new and unpredictable forms—such as meeting with an interdiction. Following the essay that might be dubbed Derrida's "return to Freud," the next is devoted to Lacan, the figure for whom that phrase was something of a slogan. In this essay and the next, on Foucault, Derrida reencounters two thinkers to whom he had earlier devoted important essays, which precipitated stormy discussions and numerous divisions within the intellectual milieus influenced by their writings. In this essay, which skillfully integrates the concept of resistance into larger questions, Derrida asks in effect: What is the origin and nature of the text that constitutes Lacanian psychoanalysis, considering its existence as an archive, as teachings, as seminars, transcripts, quotations, etc.? Derrida's third essay may be called not simply a criticism but an appreciation of Foucault's work: an appreciation not only in the psychological and rhetorical sense, but also in the sense that it elevates Foucault's thought by giving back to it ranges and nuances lost through its reduction by his readers, his own texts, and its formulaic packaging. (shrink)

Background Interest in biobanking for collection of specimens for non-communicable diseases research has grown in recent times. This paper explores the perspectives of Nigerians on donation of specimen for the biobanking research. Methods We conducted 16 Focus Group Discussions (FGD) with individuals from different ethnic, age and socio-economic groups in Kano (North), Enugu (Southeast), Oyo States (Southwest) and Abuja, the Federal Capital Territory (Central) of Nigeria. We used topic guides and prompt statements to explore the knowledge and understanding of interviewees (...) to general issues about biobanking of biospecimens, their use and specifically about role of biobanking in non-communicable diseases research. Results A total of 123 individuals participated in 16 focus group discussions in 2011. Our participants had limited knowledge of the concept of biobanking but accepted it once they were educated about it and saw it as a worthwhile venture. Half of our study participants supported use of broad consent, a quarter supported restricted consent while the remaining quarter were in favour of tiered consent. Most discussants support shipment of their samples to other countries for further research, but they prefer those collaborations to be done only with competent, ethical researchers and they would like to receive feedback about such projects. The majority preferred health care as a benefit from participation, particularly for any unexpected condition that may be discovered during the course of the research instead of financial compensation. Participants emphasized the need to ensure that donated samples were not used for research that contradicts their religious beliefs. Conclusions Our study demonstrates that our participants accepted biobanking once they understand it but there were different attitudes to elements of biobanking such as type of consent. Our study highlights the need to carefully document population attitudes to elements of modern scientific research and the consenting process. (shrink)

This study investigated poultry farmers’ perceptions, preferences, and use of commercially compounded and self-compounded feeds in the Oyo Area of Oyo State, Nigeria. Data were collected from 120 poultry farmers through a structured interview schedule. The study concluded that poultry farmers prefer and use self-compounded feeds (SCF) instead of commercially compounded feeds (CCF) because (a) self-compounded feeds are of better quality than commercially compounded feeds, (b) there are no quality control measures in the poultry feed industry in the Oyo Area, (...) (c) commercially compounded feeds cost more than self-compounded feeds, and (d) farmers choose feed based on the perceived quality of the feed, their technical ability to produce feed by themselves, the cost of CCF, the storability of feed, and the cost and availability of transportation. Based on these findings, it is recommended that interested public and private agencies should organize annual extension workshops and training for poultry farmers in the study area on (a) feed formulation; (b) feed ingredient mixing and compounding; (c) selection of ingredients, mixtures, and additives; and (d) the establishment, operation, and maintenance of feed mills. Farmers should be encouraged to form feed mill cooperative societies. The performance of the Standards Organization of Nigeria (SON) should be monitored and evaluated to ensure its effective oversight of quality standards for agricultural products and inputs such as feeds and feed ingredients. (shrink)

Publication date: 22 December 2020 Source: International Letters of Social and Humanistic Sciences Vol. 89 Author: Temitope A. Ogunweide The study sought to assess the social context of solid waste disposal pattern of residents in Ibadan metropolis, in order to assess the Solid waste disposal patterns of people in Ibadan metropolis, Oyo State, Nigeria. Specifically, the study identified solid waste disposal habits of residents, frequency of clearing the dumpsters, accessibility of waste dumpsters to people determines the waste disposal pattern of (...) people; and analyze the willingness of people in Ibadan to pay for improved service. Solid waste management has been part of human activities right from time. Efforts by Oyo State Government is seen in the collection of dirt that have been placed on the medians. Waste generation is an unavoidable product of man activities, however, sustainable management of such waste is a challenge faced in many countries today. Nigeria, a developing country in Africa, has been in a quandary of how to efficiently manage the municipal solid waste its population generates. Many states in the country lack adequate plans and infrastructure required for efficient and sustainable management of municipal solid waste. For Ibadan, the largest city in Nigeria, the problem is further compounded by its rather large and still increasing population. In this research, Ibadan metropolis is taken as a case study; the rate of solid waste handling in households as regards solid waste management from household collection to final disposal are focused upon. The study found out that 45.6% drop their refuse in the dumpsters as 18.8% burns their refuse, 17.7% of the respondents drops their waste on the median, 12% in the drainage while 6% opts to drop their waste in the streams. On the effectiveness of the Private operators collecting waste from the respondents, the study found out that 7.6% effective, 37.5% of the respondents says the operators waste collection is poor, 7% says it is abysmal while 43.5% said it is not applicable to them because they do not have storage containers in their houses and as a result did not subscribe to their service. Many countries, particularly the developed ones, have employed options in the waste management hierarchy for sustainable management of their municipal solid waste and the blend of options employed is usually highly dependent on local factors. Following the waste management hierarchy, possible options for sustainable municipal solid waste management in Ibadan are discussed. It is concluded that waste reduction, reuse, and recycling are potential management options for the state. Landfilling will remain an important option for final disposal but reliance on this method could be significantly reduced if management options are exploited to the maximum in a sustainable solid waste management structure in Ibadan metropolis. Key Words: Waste handling, Ibadan Metropolis, Landfill, Municipal Solid Waste Word Count: 435. (shrink)