The idea that language is metaphoric in nature has often been suggested or stated since Vico and Rousseau. Derrida, too, often writes about metaphor and the impression he gives is that he is arguing for the metaphoric nature of both thought, whether philosophic or not, and language. Interpreters like de Man or Culler have helped to spread this impression. If it is correct, Derrida shares a pan-metaphoric view of language and whatever can be made with it. It is useful to (...) refer to Derrida's view because in my opinion he has been very good at saying what language is, even if he has been very much in the wrong in seeing no distinction between language and language use. Let us consider first what he has been good at. (shrink)

Divided into eight sections, each with introductory essays, the selections offer rich and detailed insights into a diverse multinational philosophical landscape. Revealed in this pathbreaking work is the way in which traditional philosophical issues related to ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology, for instance, take on specific forms in Africa's postcolonial struggles. Much of its moral, political, and social philosophy is concerned with the turbulent processes of embracing modern identities while protecting ancient cultures.

Jeffrey Tulis’s The Rhetorical Presidency is deceptively titled. It is not about rhetoric or political symbolism or even about the American presidency as such, as were many postmodern studies produced in the Reagan era. Rather, Tulis re‐situates rhetoric: a minor theme in a story about the presidency becomes an important avenue into profound questions of political order and republican governance. Like Tulis, I approach my thesis obliquely; I distinguish his from other, seemingly similar, works to underscore what I see as (...) the book’s lasting legacy: its explication of the double binds and central paradoxes of republican governance , and its articulation of the role of rhetoric in institutional transformation. (shrink)

Despite frequent valorizations of music in the west, the art has also been perceived as a threat to philosophy and theology, ostensibly on the grounds of its potential for danger to the polis, temptation to impiety, coercion, or lack of objective content. Accompanying these doubts is a longstanding anxiety concerning music's relation with inarticulation or silence. Debates over the definition and ontology of music persist today in both analytic and continental traditions, with neither approach succeeding in forging consensus. Musical Platonism (...) is today's uneasy default position in the academy. However, recent reassessments of speech acts and of the Derridean world as phantasm can return music to its structural constitution in différance – to an alternation between sound and silence. This redefinition of music and its parallel with language can contextualize Derrida's most extended engagement with the topic, his interview with Ornette Coleman. (shrink)

The present study provides an ethnomethodologically informed respecification of intention in the context of architectural education. The analyses focus on the ways in which participants deal with the relation between formulations of intention and designed objects. Claimed mismatches between stated intention and design make relevant instructional sequences elaborating alternative ways of understanding the design and possible routes by which articulated intentions could have been realized. The practice of topicalizing intentions appears to be a technique by which aspects of architectural competence (...) are made visible and instructed. In particular, the practice makes otherwise unattended aspects of the design process accountably available for assessment and remark. Furthermore, the complexities of architectural consequence in relation to individual design decisions are addressed as an instructional matter. The study expands existing work on intention ascription and avowal by examining a setting where participants deal with the intentional status of designed objects. It is argued that the analyzed assessment sequences are shaped and organized with reference to the particularities of architectural knowledge as well as to the educational character of the activity. Their basic logic, however, is grounded in ordinary understandings of action and intentionality. (shrink)

Presently, Australian art histories do not adequately account for the existence of Aboriginal art. They tend to re-present and accentuate European constructions of difference, otherness and isolation, rather than explore sites of intersection or look for similarities. A radical readjustment of perspective is needed in order to address this imbalance. This article suggests that although Smith’s writing on Aboriginal art does not provide a suitable basis for this revision, his evaluation of European visual culture during the early exploration of the (...) Pacific might form a useful starting point for an art historical reassessment of the relationship between Aboriginal and Australian art. (shrink)

In Letter 5.8 Pliny shows that in the post-Domitianic era historia has become an impossible genre, both as a vehicle for conventional moral wisdom and because of the authoritative narrative voice it necessitates. The letter's literary strategies of deferral express these problems even as its content appears to argue positively the merits of historia and compare it with those of oratio. Pliny emphasizes the insufficiency of the narrative “I”, suggesting instead the importance of dialogue as the means both toward the (...) ethical reconstruction of post-tyrannical discourse and the literary fame for which Pliny also hopes. (shrink)

This thesis examines the ways in which contemporary cinema from a range of different countries, incorporating a variety of styles and genres, explores the relationship to the past of people living in the present who are affected by traumatic national histories. These films, which I’ve grouped under the term ‘temporal gateway’, focus on the ways in which characters’ experiences of temporality are fragmented, and cause and effect relationships are loosened as a result of their situations. Rather than a recreation of (...) historical events, these films are concerned with questions of how to remember the past without being defined and trapped by it: often exploring past events at a remove through techniques of flashback and mise-en-abyme. This thesis argues that a fuller understanding of how relationships to the past are represented in what have traditionally been seen as different ‘national’ cinemas is enabled by the hybridity and indeterminacy of the temporal gateway films, which don’t fit neatly into existing categories discussed and defined in memory studies. This thesis employs an interdisciplinary approach in order to draw out the features of the temporal gateway film, demonstrating how the central protagonist, the character whose life is in limbo, personifies the experience of living through the past in the present. This experience relates to the specifics of a post-trauma society but also to a wider encounter with disrupted temporality as a feature of contemporary life. I demonstrate how these films construct a new way of transmitting the experience of living with the past, through detailed analysis of approximately fourteen films from Europe, Latin America and the Middle East, including a detailed study of Lucrecia Martel’s work. This formal analysis is developed through the perspective of the historical, political and institutional to show how the films transcend a variety of existing definitions in films studies, to blur boundaries of categorisation. (shrink)

Malone Dies marks the point where Samuel Beckett foremost turns to “metaphysical destruction” of “untrue self,” and Derrida’s critique of the notion of “self-presence” of the subject. In this article, I examine Beckett’s literary absurdities to his readers’ concerns of “abuse” through them. For this investigation Malone Dies posits a stream of conflicting “linguistic nihilism” to the concerns of deconstructing “untrue self,” arguably, which will reflect how abuse of Beckettian readers is stimulated. In this context, abuse is specific forms of (...) emotional tensions aroused by the readers encounter with the Beckettian intersubjectivity. In particular, the existential model of abuse will be analysed as a part of beyond “self-deconstruction” autonomy. (shrink)