Abstracts
Volume 15, Number 3May, 2005
- Abstract: This essay argues that because he recognized that the death of a friend brought about the end of reciprocity inherent within friendship, Derrida turns to (re)reading his dead friends' texts to publicly perform the work of mourning in The Work of Mourning and The Gift of Death. The essay analyzes Derrida's performative (re)readings of Barthes's, de Man's, and Louis Marin's texts about death and mourning to trace how much their collective thoughts on these themes shaped Derrida's own thinking about the debt of mourning that friends owe one another.-- vnh
- Abstract: I read Derrida's "Passions: An Oblique Offering" in translation: enacting and defending this sentence creates a challenge to the new orthodoxies that there are no binaries in Derrida's work, that the undecidable must remain so, that translating meaning is impossible, and that his secret is unknowable. In so doing, the sentence becomes a declaration of heresy and of love. Using "What Is A 'Relevant' Translation" and Richard Cytowic's work on neuropsychology, this paper invokes passion and the khôra to refute Derrida's theorizations of friendship, duty, politeness, morality, and invitations. These codes, it argues, are derivative hypotheses; the passions are chronologically and neurologically anterior, rather than in opposition. The problem of "comment répondre," which seems to invite a similar refutation, returns to issues of translation: "how to respond" or "how to answer?" Drawing on the code/passions relationship, the signified and meaning are separated with meaning as the passions anterior to the code which are never fully translated by the code/signified. This proposes that Derrida's "secret" is meaning, and that the more expotential meanings are opened up, the more the secret impassions us, for that is the point at which we can insert ourselves into the text. Translation is possible as a "reincarnation" of meaning which opens up such possibilities. --mk
- Abstract: If there is anything that silently underlies the whole corpus of Derrida's writings and, at the same time, tacitly dialogues with the Western philosophical tradition, it is the notion of the thing. But what is "thinghood" in Derridian philosophy? How does it differ from subjectivity on one hand and objectivity on the other? Under what conditions does it pass into and occupy the places of both subjects and objects? This paper takes up such questions, paying particular attention to the role "the thing" plays in ethics, aesthetics, and political economy.--mm
- Abstract: This article explores Jacques Derrida's far-reaching challenge to the notion that introspection is the grounds of self-determination. Beginning with the claim of Hegel's philosophy to anticipate any readings--or misreadings--with which we confront it, I focus on Derrida's unique understanding of linguistic positing as both the ultimate dynamic of performance and the most systematic critique of any claim for the power of language to act. In Hegel's Aesthetics, the self's discursive nature is distinguished not by its auto-interpretive or auto-generative capacities, but by its failure to establish itself as the foundation of its own operations. From the perspective of what Derrida will describe as the experience of linguistic finitude, we find that similar problems arise in Aristotle--where reference to negation cannot be subsumed under a theory of something and nothing--and in Benjamin--for whom denomination ironically fails to serve as a comprehensive theory of what language can claim, i.e., name, as its own. From "White Mythology" to his latest texts, Derrida thus demands that we conceptualize verbal events less in terms of agents who act and more with reference to modalities of expression that are impossible to assimilate to traditional propositional logic. Revealing language to be a dynamic whose irreducibly limited resources are not unfailingly devoted to its own self-fashioning, Derrida's oeuvre provides a vantage point from which to assess the ideological pitfalls of any theoretical project that would base its critical authority on its ability to account for its own self-reflexivity.--jm
- Abstract: Does thinking a politics of the future depend on there being a future for democracy? In Voyous (2003), Derrida remarks that the enemies of democracy will often present themselves as its friends. If in the wake of Politics of Friendship (1994) and numerous other texts we are to understand the politics of deconstruction in terms of democracy-to-come, the suspicion with which we ought always to greet the self-proclaimed democrat needs to be turned on Derrida himself. In recent writings, Derrida stresses what he calls democracy's autoimmunity: its tendency to destroy its own forms of protection against the worst. This essay considers whether this account of democracy's suicidal tendencies marks a significant change or a minor clarification of Derrida's previous discussions of "democracy to come." Any answer must hinge on the equivocal status in those earlier works of the word "democracy": it is the name of both a particular political regime and something like a quasi-transcendental condition of possibility for there to be politics at all. In the post-Cold War context, to stress the fact that democracy must always remain "to come" served to defer any possible democratic triumphalism. But as Derrida notes in Politics of Friendship, democracy is only one of the possible names under which we might seek to prepare a space for the invention of another politics. Voyous and other late texts suggest that Derrida's own negotiation with democracy hardened: democracy's potential for self-destruction becomes both its most terrifying and its most valuable feature.--at
- Abstract: An analysis of Politics of Friendship develops what Derrida emphasizes concerning the non-reciprocity of friendship in order to argue for an amical, ethical, and political relation that would no longer presume the priority of the face-to-face, and that would perhaps not even be determined by the purely human: “to think and live a politics, a friendship, a justice which begin by breaking with their naturalness or their homogeneity, with their alleged place of origin.” What seems more fundamental to friendship than “facing” is the fact of “turning,” a type of choreography of friendship (and erotics, for the rigor of the distinction between love and friendship also comes under examination) that implies and ultimately figures a turning of one’s back, less in a movement of abandonment than in a form of exposure or vulnerability that de-emphasizes the Schmittian reduction of the political to the question of the enemy. The aim of such an analysis, which cannot be separated from the functioning of the textual corpus and the exegetico-rhetorical effects of a practice of deconstruction, is to begin to think love and friendship, erotics and politics in what might be called their biotechnological becoming, to think the radically inconceivable otherness of the other as what comes behind one’s back, unable to be known.--dw
Vivian Nun Halloran, Performative Mourning: Remembering Derrida Through (Re)reading
Megan Kerr, Passions: A Tangential Offering
Michael Marder, Sure Thing? On Things and Objects in the Philosophy of Jacques Derrida
Jan Mieszkowski, Derrida, Hegel, and the Language of Finitude
Alex Thomson, What's to Become of "Democracy to Come"?
David Wills, Full Dorsal: Derrida's Politics of Friendship
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