The article revisits the theory of hegemony of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe and shows how a normative injunction, which according to Laclau is not compatible with the hegemonic logic, is not only possible but a necessary condition for hegemony to function. The article claims that the path to demonstrate this involves rethinking the relationship between the theory of hegemony and Derridean deconstruction. Following criticisms that the theory of hegemony overlooks the aporetic nature of Derridean undecidability that it nevertheless relies (...) upon, the hegemonic logic is submitted to a deconstructive reading, which reveals an internal aporia in it. It is further argued that the unaccounted aporia in the logic of hegemony explains the theory’s inability to satisfactorily account for its essential theoretical underpinning, the radical exclusion. However, the article also demonstrates that the aporia does not destroy hegemonic logic but, instead, supplements it by a normative dimension, by a demand of opening to the other as other. (shrink)

Each thinker, according to Heidegger, essentially thinks one thought. Plato thinks the idea. Descartes thinks the cogito . Spinoza thinks substance. Nietzsche thinks the will to power. If a thinker does not think a thought, then he or she is not a thinker. He or she may be a scholar or a professor, a producer or a consumer, a fan or a fake, but he or she would not be a thinker. Thus, if Heidegger is a thinker, he essentially thinks (...) one thought. What is Heidegger’s one thought? It is neither life nor death, neither me nor you. It is neither technology nor art. It is neither spirit nor language. Heidegger’s one thought is being—or more precisely, the question of the meaning of being. And what is being? Neither presence nor absence--but rather, an ambiguous uncertainty. (shrink)

The article seeks to advance the debate on Islam and secularism, not by thinking of secularism in terms of whether there is or should be state neutrality toward religion, but rather by proposing that we think in terms of a state neutrality that is anchored in pluralism to-come. The latter is not a future pluralism that will one day arrive but is rather characterized by a structural promise of openness to futurity which thus exposes us to absolute surprise simultaneously of (...) the best and the worst in plurality, the one never coming without opening the possibility of the other. The analysis is developed via a critical examination of the presuppositions of Abdullahi A. An-Na‘im’s book, Islam and the Secular State, supplemented with key ideas from Jacques Derrida’s political philosophy. I specifically propose to shift the debate on the question of Islam and state neutrality in two ways. First, I propose that instead of thinking in terms of secularism and its mechanism – civic reason – for sustaining pluralism in heterogeneous societies, we think in terms of a secularity and a civic reason, both of which presuppose a pluralism to-come. Second, I propose that we think not simply in terms of actual pluralism but rather in terms of an autoimmune pluralism. (shrink)

Trust has been widely investigated both theoretically and empirically. Whether thought of as the result of a calculation of costs/benefits, a shared identity, or a leap of faith, there always seems to be an ‘as if’ rhetorical gesture which is ultimately needed to explain how actors move from the base of trust to expectations of trust via suspending judgment on uncertainty and fear of vulnerability to betrayal and exploitation — the actors ultimately act ‘as if’ they do not fear uncertainty (...) and vulnerability to betrayal. Yet this ‘as if’ element has remained seriously under-theorised. Drawing on Derrida's deconstruction, I propose a way of thinking this ‘as if’ element of trust. I thus argue that the decision to trust occurs in a terrain of structural undecidability. The latter is thought of as the possibility condition of trust as well as the subject of trust and a sense of responsibility for this trust. The aporiatic nature of undecidability makes this trust an auto-immune trust which obeys the tripartite logic of ‘without’ which both negates and affirms trust. (shrink)

The quasi-ubiquity of ICT is transforming contemporary politics and seems to deteriorate democracy, for the technologies undermine debates, contest the grounds of reason and truth, and influence people’s votes. Donald Trump’s election and Brexit are good examples of their effects on public opinion. More fundamentally, these technologies cause theoretical problems to the way we traditionally conceive public opinion. Thus, I seek to rethink public opinion beyond conventional approaches. Departing from Deleuze and Guattari’s work, I develop the first steps of a (...) post-representational theory of public opinion as a regime of political truths that has new dimensions of truth production with information and communications technologies. (shrink)

Legitimacy is a concept that has been largely forgotten by the deconstructive discourse on law and politics. This article seeks, on the one hand, to reassess the role of legitimacy in deconstruction and, on the other hand, to bring deconstructive thinking to bear on the concept of legitimacy. By re-reading Derrida’s “Declarations of Independence” through the lenses of his later texts on sovereignty and (counter)signature, it is argued that, rather than being deconstructible, legitimacy is deconstructing any self-founding of law and (...) power. As such, legitimacy functions not as an evaluative concept of law and order but as a constantly insisting demand that facilitates the principles of responsibility and responsiveness. (shrink)

In this essay, I examine Derrida’s deconstruction (or critique) of the death penalty in his first set of lectures (The Death Penalty, Volume 1). The essay has two parts. First, I reconstruct this deconstruction. I show that the deconstruction depends on the difference between the calculable instant and the incalculable instant. Then, in the second part I show how this difference is based on the deconstruction of temporalization Derrida produced in his 1967 Voice and Phenomenon. The deconstruction of temporalization shows (...) that the calculated instant is impossible, and the future, including the instant of my death, remains incalculable. In the essay’s conclusion, I show that the pardon from the death penalty is only a gift of time, only more time or extra time. The pardon can pardon someone from the condemnation to death, but it cannot pardon anyone from the condemnation to die. The pardon can give only a finite survival. (shrink)

In an age where diversity is increasingly accepted as a value as well as a fact, ethico-political cosmopolitanism should propose a notion of global unity that is composed of rather than imposed on difference. Jacques Derrida and Walter Mignolo offer different versions of this view of cosmopolitanism. Derrida’s version is based on his notion of “democracy to come”. He characterizes this notion as an “unconditional” or “quasi-transcendental” injunction. Mignolo castigates this injunction as an “abstract universal”. He offers instead “a critical (...) and dialogic” view of cosmopolitanism that is based more speci cally on the “colonial difference” or “border thinking” of Latin American subaltern groups. I argue that Derrida’s many implicit and explicit references to “voices” suggest a third alternative. This contender avoids certain problems in Derrida’s and Mignolo’s otherwise compelling views of cosmopolitanism. It also retains the universality of Derrida’s unconditional injunction but on the basis of the sort of worldly immanency urged by Mignolo’s border thinking. (shrink)

Jacques Derrida’s and Gilles Deleuze’s philosophies of justice share many similar features. For both, justice involves an overturning of law by extralegal means, made possible by an “undecidability” in the judgment-making process. To distinguish their conceptions of justice, we examine their implicit modes of non-classical reasoning with regard to “otherness,” building from Routley and Routley and Daniel Smith, to conclude that Derrida’s thinking on justice is at least paracomplete (or analetheic) while Deleuze’s is just paraconsistent (or dialetheic).

Commentators agree that Derrida's criteria for an event were stringent: it had to be unique, unpredictable and unanticipatable; it must come as a surprise that defies all conceptualization, comprehension, appropriation. Can any historical occurrence pass such rigorous tests and be considered an event? The question now extends to whether Derrida's writings or life should constitute an event. This article traces Derrida's use of the word ‘event’ or ‘événement’ from ‘Signature Event Context’ and early readings of Nietzsche, Blanchot, and Benjamin through (...) his 2001 paper, ‘The Impossible Possibility of Saying the Event’. Analysis shows that where Derrida appears to concede the independent existence of past events this illusion is created linguistically by supplements, the future anterior tense, and speech acts. His unsuccessful attempt to exemplify ‘events’ that were distinguishable from merely ‘what happens’ assimilates them into the latter category, which he likened to ‘rain’, a banal, minimal catachresis of nothing. The implication is that what we call history resembles a Beckett-like condition of apparent insight that reverts, on reflection, to emptiness. (shrink)

The question of the body spans across the work of Jean-Luc Nancy, from Noli me tangere, to Corpus and Jacques Derrida’s dialogue with Nancy in On Touching. In constant conversation with Christianity (“This is my body” or Dis-Enclosure), corporeality in Nancy can be summarised using the figure of the “exposed body (corps ex-peausé)”: a demonstration of the surface of the skin (peau) and an exposition of the self to the other in the sense of a “staging” (Corpus). In my work, (...) the concept of the “spread body,” situated between Descartes’ “extended body” and Husserl’s “lived body,” is also one of a confrontation with the “This is my body” of Christianity (The Wedding Feast of the Lamb). In confronting one with the other, it is a matter of seeing how my expansion of the body, says something different than, or articulates differently, Jean-Luc Nancy’s exposition of the body, this time drawn from the biological side though nevertheless without ceasing to be intentional. It is certainly a matter of philosophy, but also of ethics, in the possibility of describing such a body, especially in the suffering situation of palliative care (Ethics of the Spread Body). (shrink)

In Parages, Jacques Derrida writes that the ‘Donner – le temps’ seminar ‘led up to’ a study of Maurice Blanchot’s La folie du jour. That study is the improvised fourteenth session of Donner le temps II. Derrida turns to La folie du jour to treat in more explicit terms the structure of the ‘ récit’ which was particularly relevant to his reading of Charles Baudelaire’s récit ‘La fausse monnaie’ earlier in the seminar, but which is almost entirely absent from the (...) sessions included in Donner le temps II. This paper proposes one possible reason for Derrida’s insistence on Blanchot in the seminar and for thinking the gift: La folie du jour’s narrator, which is not someone determinate, but personne (which, in French, can mean either an indeterminate ‘no one’ or a substitutable ‘anyone’ depending on the context). I argue that the aporetic structure of the gift is best expressed when the gift’s subject and object are indeterminable and substitutable, which is the case when the gift is given to or received from an impersonal personne (to or from no one or anyone). (shrink)

This paper seeks to elucidate Jean-Luc Nancy’s and Søren Kierkegaard’s shared understanding of faith by providing a phenomenology of faith. This is accomplished by applying Nancy’s conception of experience to Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, of which this paper thus offers a phenomenological reading in order to analyse the experience of faith its pseudonymous author relates. In doing so, however, we will discover that faith belongs to a realm of experience that is more fundamental than, and thus takes priority over, the (...) lived-experience of classical phenomenology: it is an experience of life as a whole that as such forms the basis on which things are subsequently lived in experience. Faith is therefore held up as the prime example of the phenomenologically primary sense of “experience”: namely, the experience in which a life lived consists, the experience of undergoing life itself; the experience that, as Nancy puts it enigmatically, is existence. Since classical phenomenology fails to think this experience that makes its lived-experiences possible, the paper suggests that phenomenology should turn itself into poetics: namely, a discourse on the creative forms of life that constitute all lived-experiences. To that end, the paper proceeds in four steps: the first step consists in an exposition of the phenomenological framework used ; the second and third steps consist in applications of said framework to Kierkegaard’s understanding of faith; the fourth and final step draws on Nancy to spell out the consequences of the preceding analysis. (shrink)

Jacques Derrida regularly appeals to an affirmative gesture that is ‘prior’ to or more ‘originary’ than the form of the question, and this suggests one way to understand deconstruction's critical force. The ‘Yes, yes’, he says, situates a ‘vigil or beyond of the question’ with respect to an ‘irreducible responsibility’. Some Derrida scholars therefore construe the double affirmation as a source or ground of critique. In this paper, I refute this suggestion. While an originary ‘Yes, yes’ or ‘come’ (viens) does (...) open the fields of (for example) ‘inheritance’, language, or ‘holistic webs’, I argue, it only marks (will have marked) the processes of différance or of trace that make signification possible in general. No thing, as such, is thereby affirmed. This is why the originary affirmation cannot be said to constitute, in itself, the imperative (il la faut) of the logic (la logique) of ethical-political critique. To explain why a certain ethical imperative can be associated with deconstruction, one must determine why one is always already subject to a vigil that opens critique to its own possibility. One must also determine how the affirmative gesture relates to deconstruction's critical force. (shrink)

Bourdieu and Derrida share a focus on the ambiguity of the practice of gift relationships already pointed out by Mauss. From Bourdieu’s perspective, the question of gratuity is epistemically futile, as it veils the objective truth of gift-giving, yet ethically and politically relevant, as it refers to a hypocrisy which can be instrumental to enhancing civic virtue and solidarity. Bourdieu’s “scientific humanism,” however, implausibly reduces this ambiguity to interest maximization, and aims to build a solidaristic democracy by means of the (...) generalization of the hypocrisy of gratuity. In turn, by interpreting gratuity as “unconditionality,” Derrida aims not at dissolving, but at dramatizing the ambiguity of gift relationships by turning it into “madness” and an “impossible possibility”. Whereas I agree with Derrida’s insistence on the salience of the requirement of gratuity, his approach can lead to counterintuitive and hubristic consequences. Instead, I suggest some elements of an alternative way of understanding gratuitous gifts as communicative acts irreducible to an economic calculation or circle. From this standpoint, a gratuitous gift can be constituted by certain forms of recognition, emotions, or convictions without for that becoming an “impossibility”. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore Derrida’s concept of exteriorization in relation to texts generated by machine learning. I first discuss Heidegger’s view of machine creation and then present Derrida’s criticism of Heidegger. I explain the concept of iterability, which is the central notion on which Derrida’s criticism is based. The thesis defended in the paper is that Derrida’s account of iterability provides a helpful framework for understanding the phenomenon of machine learning–generated literature. His account of textuality highlights the incalculability and (...) mechanical elements characteristic of all texts, including machine-generated texts. By applying Derrida’s concept to the phenomenon of machine creation, we can deconstruct the distinction between human and non-human creation. As I propose in the conclusion to this paper, this provides a basis on which to consider potential positive uses of machine learning. (shrink)

This article casts its attention on acts of supplication in institutional settings. The article focuses upon institutions geared towards the provision of care, that is, sites that are designed to provide services to those in need. The article claims that every act of supplication is an act of violence deployed upon the supplicant by his/her interlocutor and the institution more broadly. This is not violence of an overt type; it is tacit and subtle and takes root at the very essence (...) of the supplicant, that is, his/her being. The article draws on Jacques Derrida’s provocative reading of the impossibility of the gift, an analysis that is indebted to Marcel Mauss’ exposition of the gift as obligatory and, thus, an existential nullity. Drawing upon both theorists, the article theorizes the violence of the gift and proceeds to read the violence in/of care/caring. The article explicates the grounding of this violence and how it is written into each request for care. (shrink)

This article investigates the relationship between political revolutions and the evolution of politics. It discusses the circularity within the concept of revolution through Jacques Derrida’s theory of sovereignty as particularly per Rogues – Two Essays on Reason and The Beast and the Sovereign. Derrida’s notions of wheel and ipseity display ontological prerogatives and evolutionary limits of political revolutions possibly coinciding with reversals hard to turn into linear evolutions, excluding rather than reaffirming circularity. Political revolutions show such incapacity to become evolutionary (...) for politics when lacking ontological substance and resting upon formal contingencies such as new techniques. An ‘alturnative’ notion of sovereignty is proposed as a heuristic criterion to gauge political events’ ‘revolutionary’ quality. This undermines the (r)evolutionary nature of political turns, like those associated with the contemporary digitalisation of politics. The Italian Five Stars Movement’s parable is a case in point of digital political turns whose effect is non-evolutionary for politics. (shrink)

This paper argues that in Derrida’s writings twentieth-century philosophy of language takes a materialistic turn, whereby meaning is understood as sensible and material in its origin and not as ideas pre-given in the mind. The work of metaphysics, however, is one of erasing the originary material/metaphorical meaning of signifiers and turns it into abstract idealistic meaning. Derrida is often accused of linguistic idealism on the basis of a misrepresentation of his anthemic catchphrase “there is nothing outside the text,” which seems (...) to imply that he denies the existence of the real-world outside language. This distortion fails to understand the notion of the text and its materialistic underpinnings in the whole project of Derrida. His linguistic materialism is more realistic than idealistic, though he disavows such binary oppositions, and it is an improvement over all other forms of materialism on account of the notion of différance and his strategy of deconstructive reading. Derrida’s materialism is non-dialectical and non-predictive; it is centered on the notion of messianicity without a Messiah. The erasure of the permanent presence of the materiality of matter is as much important to this materialism as the subversion of the immutable solidity of the metaphysical conception of meaning. Post-metaphysical materialism understands body itself as text and text itself as embodied. (shrink)

The question of the body spans across the work of Jean-Luc Nancy, from Noli me tangere, to Corpus and Jacques Derrida’s dialogue with Nancy in On Touching. In constant conversation with Christianit...

Jean-Luc Nancy is a philosopher. He is not simply a “thinker” or a “theorist”. Of course, philosophers spend their time thinking, often in the most theoretical and abs...

This paper draws on an in-depth phenomenological analysis of some interviews taken from volunteers, inviting them to reflect on their lived experiences of meaningfulness in the context of volunteering and citizenship. It is found that while some testimonies reinforce the standard conceptions of meaningfulness, other testimonies vary from it. The main challenge of this contribution consists in phenomenologically describing this alternative picture of meaningfulness, depicted as the event of witnessing. In a final part, the authors consider how volunteering is at (...) times especially prone to further experiences of witnessing. (shrink)

Historically, the most interesting phases to me are those in which some events are treated, whether for praise or blame, reward or punishment, as dangerous revolts or as promising innovations—generally both at once.February 2, 1945, was an eventful day in the international press. In Pravda, the organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, journalist Boris Polevoi introduced to the world “The Factory of Death at Auschwitz” (1945). Shaken by the horrors he witnessed after the (...) Soviet liberation of the camp, he described in graphic detail the remains of an “electric conveyor belt, on which hundreds of people were simultaneously electrocuted,” and a staggering mass of inmates, “so worn .. (shrink)

Hélène Cixous and Jacques Derrida position themselves very differently in relation to literature. This article analyses that difference in the light of their relation to the symptom, the fundamentally unanalysable form through which the unconscious manifests itself. While Derrida dwells more on the impossibility of ever accessing the original secret wound to whose existence the symptom opaquely attests, Cixous tends to focus more on the effect, the symptom itself. For both, the ‘chance’ of literature lies in the fact that neither (...) the source nor the destination of letters can be determined. I argue that the difference between Derrida's relative resignation to this condition and Cixous's celebration of it helps to explain the contrast between his position at the margins of literature and her unequivocal embrace of it. (shrink)

I suggest in this article that there are several aspects of the Lacanian Real that so-called Lacanian literature has not adequately addressed, or barely did so. In this pursuit, I present a deconstructing reading of a number of Lacanian texts. My deconstructive reading suggests that three key features characterize the literature on the Real. First, there always is resistance that is involved in thinking about, and in experiencing the effects of, the Real. Second, the Real is most characteristically thought of (...) in negative terms. Third, the Real is more or less thought of as a limit that cannot be transgressed. A deconstruction of these features leads to two arguments. First, I propose that the deployment of the Real as khôra within a discourse is an originary performativity which speaks of retroactively positing of a have-always-been-there Real. Second, I argue that the Real is the impossible–possible event which is at the heart of ‘saying the Real’. The deconstruction thus leads to a reconfiguration of the Real as a ‘ saying the Real (as khôra)’ qua event (in the sense of Derrida) in the discourse. (shrink)

With the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, teaching online became a norm for universities in Canada. Besides the challenges of teaching topics that may be impossible to be taught online, a major issue that the mandatory physical distancing brought is the relationality between teachers and students. In order to investigate how educators were making sense of such changes, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 12 education professors across Canada. In light of Derrida’s and Ruitenberg’s ethic of hospitality, this paper explores (...) how the abrupt shift to online education unveiled the nature and challenges of hospitable education, especially in the online context. The implications of online instruction to professors’ relationality, however, are also instrumental in illuminating the complexities and ambiguities of a teacher’s responsibility even in what could be considered the “normal circumstances” of face-to-face instruction. (shrink)

This paper asks and examines the question “who are you?” In doing so it embarks across the conceptual terrain of subjectivity, passing through five different regions. First is the subject and otherness, in which are considered Arendtian notions of the “who” of the individual in the appearing world. Next is the relation between the “I” and the “you” in systems of recognition, and how those systems are creations and expressions of social normativity. This is followed by the idea of the (...) sovereignty of the self as a reaction to its dislocation within systems of recognition. Sovereignty as such is viewed through the thought of Jacques Derrida and Hannah Arendt. With Foucault, the authors approach the question of social normativity as a frame rather than a constraint by which the self is stylized. The fourth section of the paper then explores self-questioning as a means of explicit or intentional self-stylization. Contrasting the “mere liberation” of thinking in Arendt’s thought with broader understandings of freedom, the fifth section relates Arendt’s conception of the miraculous with Derrida’s of the event. The paper’s trajectory returns in conclusion to the implications of its course for the initial question of who one is, particularly with respect to the teaching subject. (shrink)

This paper seeks to elucidate Jean-Luc Nancy’s and Søren Kierkegaard’s shared understanding of faith by providing a phenomenology of faith. This is accomplished by applying Nancy’s conception of experience to Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, of which this paper thus offers a phenomenological reading in order to analyse the experience of faith its pseudonymous author relates. In doing so, however, we will discover that faith belongs to a realm of experience that is more fundamental than, and thus takes priority over, the (...) lived-experience of classical phenomenology: it is an experience of life as a whole that as such forms the basis on which things are subsequently lived in experience. Faith is therefore held up as the prime example of the phenomenologically primary sense of “experience”: namely, the experience in which a life lived consists, the experience of undergoing life itself; the experience that, as Nancy puts it enigmatically, is existence. Since classical phenomenology fails to think this experience that makes its lived-experiences possible, the paper suggests that phenomenology should turn itself into poetics: namely, a discourse on the creative forms of life that constitute all lived-experiences. To that end, the paper proceeds in four steps: the first step consists in an exposition of the phenomenological framework used ; the second and third steps consist in applications of said framework to Kierkegaard’s understanding of faith; the fourth and final step draws on Nancy to spell out the consequences of the preceding analysis. (shrink)

This article aims to demonstrate how the formation of ethical subjectivity must be considered in conjunction with the techno-politics of secrecy and disclosure, and it proposes an account of the ways in which the technical transition and ‘democratization’ of archival upload/download capacity associated with digital communications fundamentally challenges the existing structure of control over such things as censorship and cultural memory understood in terms of power of recall. It argues that it is against this background and in view of the (...) mediality of communications that the question of responsibility with respect to secrets and their disclosure must ultimately be posed. It seeks to establish the difference between a purely political and an ethico-political understanding of the secrecy/disclosure dyad as this functions, on the one hand, in relation to philosophical inquiry itself and, on the other, in relation to normative representations of informational events, and it contextualizes its theoretical account of this difference in relation to the ‘Wikileaks phenomenon’ viewed as a disclosive event. It examines how ethical subjectivity is formed in relation to ‘information’ and in the wider context of a digital culture of archivization, characterized by the ubiquitous recording of communications of all kinds. Drawing centrally on the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, for whom ‘infinite responsibility’ is ‘incarnated’ as the ‘ultimate secret of subjectivity’ in me, and Derrida’s account of both the necessary technicity of the human and the impossibility of ‘saying the event’, it proposes a way of thinking the ethico-techno-politics of secrecy and disclosure in terms of the singularity of the event and the unique responsibility of the ethical Subject in relation to that. (shrink)