Special Issue: Jacques Derrida
               Edited by Eyal Amiran, Paula Geyh,
                     and Arkady Plotnitsky

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Eyal Amiran, We, the Future of Jacques Derrida

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                         Articles


Jan Mieszkowski, Derrida, Hegel, and the Language of 
Finitude

Michael Marder, Sure Thing? On Things and Objects in the 
Philosophy of Jacques Derrida

Megan Kerr, Passions: A Tangential Offering

A.J.P. Thomson, What's to Become of "Democracy 
to Come"?

Vivian Halloran, Working to Mourn: Remembering 
Derrida Through (Re)reading

David Wills, Full Dorsal: Derrida's Politics of 
Friendship


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                         Works


Bob Perelman, Indirect Address: A Ghost Story

Gerard Titus-Carmel, Fond Perdu (HTML Version Only)


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                         Reviews
 
R. John Williams, Theory and the Democracy to Come. 
A review of Jacques Derrida, _Rogues: Two Essays on 
Reason_. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. 
Stanford: Stanford UP, 2001.

Chad Wickman, A Time for Enlightenment. A review of 
Giovanna Borradori, _Philosophy in a Time of Terror: 
Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida_. 
Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003.

Robert Oventile, Saint Paul: Friend of Derrida? A 
review of Theodore W. Jennings, Jr., _Reading Derrida
/Thinking Paul: On Justice_. Stanford: 
Stanford UP, 2005. 

Mario Ortiz-Robles, Being Jacques Derrida. A review 
of Jacques Derrida, _Without Alibi_. Ed. and trans. 
Peggy Kamuf. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002. 



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                  Notices (HTML Version Only)


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                  Notes on Contributors


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                         Abstracts

Vivian Nun Halloran, Performative Mourning: 
Remembering Derrida Through (Re)reading

    o 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


Megan Kerr, Passions: A Tangential Offering

    o 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 khora 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 repondre," 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

Michael Marder, Sure Thing? On Things and Objects in the 
Philosophy of Jacques Derrida

     o 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

Jan Mieszkowski, Derrida, Hegel, and the Language of 
Finitude

     o 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 

Alex Thomson, What's to Become of "Democracy to Come"?

     o 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 
wpolitics 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 

David Wills, Full Dorsal: Derrida's Politics of Friendship

      o 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