I challenge the age-old binary opposition between human and animal, not as philosophers sometimes do by claiming that humans are also animals, or that animals are capable of suffering or intelligence, but rather by questioning the very category of “the animal” itself. This category groups a nearly infinite variety of living beings into one concept measured in terms of humans—animals are those creatures that are not human. In addition, I argue that the binary opposition between human and animal is intimately (...) linked to the binary opposition between man and woman. Furthermore, I suggest that thinking through animal differences or differences among various living creatures opens up the possibility of thinking beyond the dualist notion of sexual difference and enables thinking toward a multiplicity of sexual differences. (shrink)

In this essay I address Derrida’s influential readings of the Course in General Linguistics attributed to Ferdinand de Saussure in Of Grammatology and Glas. I complicate Derrida’s charge of phonocentrism, that is, the charge that Saussure privileges the medium of sound and/or speech as a site of unmediated signifying presence, by re-examining the relevant sections from the Course in light of the materials related to Saussure’s linguistics from the Nachlass, some of them recently discovered. I document especially the extent of (...) editorial involvement in the sections discussed by Derrida that deal with the purportedly ‘natural’ expressions like onomatopoeias and interjections, and with the relation between speech and writing. I make the case that ultimately Derrida’s charge that Saussure’s linguistics is burdened by an allegiance to the metaphysics of presence carries limited force, and that Derrida’s and Saussure’s understanding of signification turn out to be closer related than previously thought: they share the view that entrainment and contamination are inevitable. (shrink)

In this paper we claim educational leadership as an autonomous discipline whose goals and strategies should not mirror those typical of business and political leadership. In order to define the aims proper to educational leadership we question three common assumptions of what it is supposed to carry out. First, we turn to Hannah Arendt and her contemporary critics to maintain that education aims at opening up exceptions within the normal course of events rather than simply preserving it. This way, education (...) is not reduced to an instrument at the service of the reinforcement of a given social and economic system. This leads us to ask what should exactly educational leadership oppose by means of these exceptions. According to Tyson E. Lewis’s wise application to education of Giorgio Agamben’s ontology of impotentiality, the apparently reasonable idea that education must help the subject to develop his potentials is precisely an instrumentalization of education which brings about a desubjectification of the learner. Education should actually make the pupil aware of his right not to carry his potentiality to its actualization and dwell instead in a state of impotentiality. Third and last, we complicate this picture by alluding to Zygmunt Bauman’s critique of the rejection of Western individuals to realize certain possibilities, which they deem too costly. By analysing in conjunction Agamben’s encouragement to suspend one’s potential and Bauman’s insistence on the need of not suspending it, we conclude by defining what, in our opinion, defines the raison d’être of educational leadership. (shrink)

In this article the author explores Jacques Derrida’s reading in The Purveyor of Truth of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Purloined Letter. In his essay, Derrida proposes a reading which differs markedly from the interpretation proposed by Lacan in his Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’. To appreciate Derrida’s reading, which is not hermeneutic-semantic in nature like that of Lacan, it is necessary to look at the relation of Derrida’s essay to his other texts on psychoanalysis, more specifically insofar as the Freudian (...) death drive is concerned. The present article explores this ‘notion’ as elaborated on by Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle as well as Derrida’s reading of this text. It also investigates the importance of the ‘notion’ of the death drive as well as the significance of Derrida’s reading of The Purloined Letter for constitutional interpretation. (shrink)

Se pretende mostrar, en primer lugar, cuál es la reinterpretación que Hegel lleva a cabo del Espíritu Verdadero en la comunidad griega, a partir de la situación de Antígona. Luego, se expone cómo esta armonía entre las leyes divina y humana podría llevar dentro la semilla de su fracaso porque, el (lugar del) entierro y la relación entre Polinices y Antígona, se encontrarían por fuera del sistema mismo y lo destruirían, si se hiciesen efectivos. Para esto último, estaríamos frente a (...) un “proceso autoinmune”, como lo llama Derrida, porque se trataría de poner en el núcleo y fundamento mismo de la comunidad un lugar imposible dentro de ella, un lugar para su autodestrucción. Finalmente, se pretende cuestionar tanto la posición de Hegel como la de Derrida en torno a Antígona. (shrink)

Kristeva’s Revolution in Poetic Language offers a challenge to theories of the subject in psychoanalysis, linguistic theory, and in philosophy. Central to that challenge is Kristeva’s conception of negativity. In this article, I trace the development of the concept of negativity in Revolution in Poetic Language from its root in Hegel, to rejection, which Kristeva develops out of Freud. Both are crucial to the development of the material dialectic between the semiotic and the symbolic that makes up Kristeva’s subject-in-process/on trial. (...) I argue that a clearer understanding of Kristeva’s conception of negativity helps us to better appreciate the force of Kristeva’s challenge, both philosophically and politically. Finally I argue that Kristevan negativity also helps us to clarify the relation between the delimited space of politics and its conditions, laying the groundwork for constitutive exclusion as political critique and opening a space for the possibility of political re-constitutions. (shrink)

The theme of the ‘deconstruction of Christianity’, which was selected for this special issue of Derrida Today, is one that arises not from the work of Derrida himself in the first instance but instead from that of Jean-L Nancy. Not only is this so but Derrida's ([2000] 2005) own view of the notion of the ‘deconstruction of Christianity’ seems, on the evidence available, to be at least open to quite a bit of interpretation given the ambiguous nature of some of (...) his comments on the question. Given this is so it might not be thought at all obvious why this theme should be selected for a special issue of Derrida Today and in this introduction I want to address both this possible disquiet and also provide some background to the arrival of concern with this topic. (shrink)

This article aims to locate the connections between Hegel’s philosophy and psychoanalytic theory, with a particular focus on the model of intersubjectivity, as drawn from his Phenomenology of Spirit. The roots of the encounter between the philosophy of Hegel and psychoanalytic theory can be traced back to Jacques Lacan and the less well‐considered figure of Jean Hyppolite. Lacan, as a psychoanalyst, used Hegel’s thought in his own theory, as is well known, while Hyppolite was arguably one of the first to (...) write from a philosophical angle about the links between the two seemingly opposed systems of thinking. I will give a broad overview of the use of Hegelian philosophy in psychoanalytic theory from the Hyppolite–Lacan relationship through to contemporary thinkers in the fields of philosophy and psychoanalysis. Although recently the figure of Slavoj Žižek has popularised the Hegel‐psychoanalysis connection, there remains much more to be explored in this branch of Hegel studies that widens the scope beyond the Lacanian‐Marxist version he employs. This article will survey existing literature (in the English language) and thus illuminate the key texts in the history of Hegel’s impact on psychoanalytic theory and the concept of intersubjectivity and gesture towards the future potential of this line of inquiry. (shrink)

This essay argues that Hegel's discussion of the family in "The Ethical Order" section of Phenomenology of Spirit undermines the entire project of that text. Hegel's project demands that every element of consciousness be conceptualizable, and yet, woman, an essential unconscious element of consciousness, is in principle unconceptualizable. The end of the essay attempts to relate Hegel's discussion of the family to contemporary discussions of family values.

Antigone fascinates G. W. F. Hegel and Luce Irigaray, both of whom turn to her in their explorations and articulations of ethics. Hegel and Irigaray make these re-turns to Antigone through the double and related lenses of nature and sexual difference. This essay investigates these figures of Antigone and the accompanying ethical accounts of nature and sexual difference as a way of examining Irigaray's complex relation to and creative uses of Hegel's thought.

The focus of this paper is Derrida's idea of rhythm. I will analyse how the idea of rhythm can work in a contemporary semiotic, and in particular in a semiotic of interpretation, in order to eliminate the confusion between interpretation and semantics and to constitute a syntactic model of interpretation. In ‘The Double Session’ Derrida uses the Greek word rytmos in order to indicate the ‘law of spacing’. Rytmos is a form that is always about to change or to break (...) up, because it is not a definitive form. It is a not-proper form. But when I say here that a rhythmic relation is a not-proper form, the word ‘proper’ is intended in the sense of Heidegger's Eigentlichkeit. In this sense a not-proper relation is a relation which is not grounded on a justification. What I'm trying to demonstrate in this essay is that the rhythmic relation discovers another sense of the word ‘proper’, another meaning, which is far from Heidegger's Eigentlichkeit. In this sense, it is possible to say that the problem of a rhythmic relation is the problem of a relation between ‘two’ that is not justified by the third element which makes it proper or eigentlich. (shrink)

Starting from the sensuous perception of what is seen, an attempt is made at re-casting a Husserlian theory of constitution of the object of intuition, as one leaves the natural attitude through a transcendental method, by positing several theses so as to avoid the aporias of philosophical binary oppositions such as rationalism and empiri-cism, realism and idealism, logicism and psychologism, subjectivism and objectivism, transcendentalism and ontologism, metaphysics and positivism. Throughout fifty-five theses on constitution, the Husserlian proposal of continuously reforming philosophizing (...) by transcendental reduction is revisited, leaving the latter incomplete as new conversions are required by noetic-noematic correlations between world and consciousness. (shrink)

In the pre-Independence era, our republic founders held the Cold War mindset strongly. Consequently, the Indonesian republic proclaimed in 1945 was based on a Cold War mindset; our state philosophy (Pancasila) and the Constitution (UUD '45) were understood and construed on the Cold War discourse basis; and binary oppositions of capitalism-socialism and liberalism-communism since then have been created. Up to the 2020s, the Cold War mindset has still been held by public intellectuals and the binary oppositions have still been rampant (...) in intellectual discourses. If the mindset were still held for three decades to come, it would cause a setback to the development of Indonesian philosophy history. This article is a call to stop and an invitation to escape from the retrogressive mindset. As a call, the article exposes first the evil root of the Cold War mindset as well as the philosophical critique towards it. Then, as an invitation, it suggests three realistic alternative mindsets to replace the Cold War mindset, i.e. post- Cold War capitalistic mindset, deconstructive mindset, and utopian mindset, which are called herein as three growth scenarios. It is believed that, if the three generating scenarios are followed, they will move Indonesian philosophy history forward, and its ongoing development will not hinder or retard. (shrink)

When we deal with complex things, like human subjects or organizations, we deal with identity – that which makes a person or an organization what it is and distinguishes him/her/it from other persons or organizations, a kind of “self”. Our identity determines how we think about and interact with others. It will be argued in this chapter that the self is constituted relationally. Moreover, when we are in the realm of the self, we are always already in the realm of (...) engaging with and mediating differences – the realm of ethics. The position which will be developed argues that approaching identity as a complex system allows us to resist thinking of identity as an easily identifiable and static entity. Identity is always being constituted within a complex and contingent world, where we have to make choices based on contingent values rather than on universal knowledge or the outcome of rational calculations. As a result, we have to keep in mind that our daily practices always already have an ethical component, and our decisions need to be continually evaluated and re-evaluated in the light of our (and others’) varying identities. (shrink)

The paper proposes to grasp handwritten signature as a metaphysical invention of the so-called “Western” civilization, where the signature is supposed to make possible juridical identification of the person who wrote it. However, despite this expectation of reliability, the Western handwritten signature is an aporetic sign, which is considered to be authentic (unrepeatable) and conventional (repeatable) at the same time. Because the signature is a sign of juridical identification and its authenticity can always be forged, Jacques Derrida tries to deconstruct (...) the contradictory functioning of Western metaphysics, which leads to confusion in our expectations of authenticity and identity in our uses of signatures. By proposing a new reading of Derridean texts concerning writing, the paper focuses on the pragmatical paradox that grounds our contradictory legal politics of signing: because the exact manual reproduction of a line is impossible, no one can satisfy the legislative obligation to sign conformably to the model signature. That’s the aporia of trace’s recognition, which establishes the signature as a sign: on the one hand, the signature is supposed to represent the juridical identity of the person who traced it; on the other hand, the signature, which constantly changes its graphical form, makes every certain identification impossible. In order to question the juridical identity traditionally guaranteed by the signature, this paper invites to grasp the legal practice of signing as a subversive performativity, which is produced during the passage between recognition of juridical identity requested by the law and its simultaneous and inevitable transgression. Finally, the paper proposes a new approach to the signature as a visual performance of the self, based on a reevaluation of the altercation between Jacques Derrida and John Searle concerning the iterative character of traces and performatives. (shrink)

The split between analytic philosophy and Continental philosophy has mainly preoccupied scholars of philosophy so far, but in fact, it has broader pedagogical implications. This article argues that conventions of argumentative writing, as taught in colleges today, have their roots in analytic philosophy and its assumptions regarding ways of disseminating knowledge. Behind writing instructors’ emphasis on the ‘thesis and evidence’ structure lie analytic tendencies such as verifiability and intersubjectivity. By contrast, Continental philosophy emphasises the subjective human experience, which leads to (...) a more experimental form of writing. This split and the embeddedness of argumentation in analytic philosophy is indispensable in comprehending the rationale behind the conventions of academic writing taught in colleges today. (shrink)

The idea that Derrida kept silent on Marx before the publication of Spectres de Marx, in 1993, has become a commonplace in Derrida studies and in the history of Marxism and French 20th century political thought. This idea has often been accompanied by a certain representation of the relationship between deconstruction and dialectical materialism, and fed the legend of deconstruction’s «apoliticism» – at least before what some have called Derrida’s «ethicopolitical turn», usually dated in the early 1990s. Against this narrative, (...) this essay analyzes Derrida’s notorious «silence on Marx» before Specters of Marx from the perspective of the archives. Archival research transforms the narrative: Derrida’s «silence on Marx» was only «relative». Beyond the scene of publications, archives reveal another scene: multiple engagements with Marx and Marxist thought, marked and remarked in many archival documents – more particularly in a series of early seminar notes from the 1960s and 1970s. How does this archival scene transform our interpretation of Derrida’s «silence»? (shrink)

Globalization processes imply the self-deconstruction of the hierarchy of legal norms. Thus, legal pluralism is no longer only an issue for legal sociology, but becomes a challenge for legal practice itself. Traditionally, rule making by `private regimes' has been subjugated under the hierarchical frame of the national constitution. When this frame breaks, then the new frame of legal institutions can only be heterarchical. The origin of global non-state law as a sequence of recursive legal operations is an `as if', not (...) only a founding myth as a self-observation of law, rather the legal fiction of concrete past operations. This fiction, however, depends on social conditions outside legal institutions, on a historical configuration in which it is sufficiently plausible to assume that in earlier times, too, legal rules were applied. (shrink)

In her essay, “After de Brosses” (2017), Rosalind C. Morris briefly considers the historical importance of the concept of the fetish on the relatively recent movements of new materialism, but she does not engage with Speculative Realism and Object-Oriented Ontology. This essay addresses this gap and focuses on the influence of the fetish on Speculative Realism and Object-Oriented Ontology by focusing on Graham Harman’s conception of objects and Quentin Meillassoux’s theory of arche-fossils. In short, I am offering a posthumanist theorization (...) of the fetish in order to argue that Object-Oriented Ontology can be considered, at points, to be a fetish-oriented ontology and that this notion of the fetish allows us to think about philosophical considerations of objects in a new light. (shrink)

La deconstrucción es la apertura al porvenir, hacia el otro como porvenir absoluto. Sin embargo, ese otro se encuentra ante nosotros y tras nosotros, es un pasado por venir, un pasado que nunca ha sido presente. De este modo, la obra de Derrida puede ser leída como la preocupación constante por esa memoria del porvenir, por la herencia y el duelo, por la apertura al acontecimiento. En este sentido, la memoria en Derrida no puede comprenderse como «reunión en el pensamiento», (...) como «Versammlung» y, por tanto, supone quizás una distancia radical en la obra de Derrida con respecto al pensamiento heideggeriano. (shrink)

My essay will take as its point of departure the paragraph from Gershom Scholem’s “Reflections on Jewish Theology,” in which he depicts the modern religious experience as the one of the "void of God" or as "pious atheism". I will first argue that the "void of God" cannot be reduced to atheistic non-belief in the presence of God. Then, I will demonstrate the further development of the Scholemian notion of the ‘pious atheism’ in Derrida, especially in his Lurianic treatment of (...) Angelus Silesius, whose modern mysticism emerges in Derrida’s reading as the ‘almost-atheism’. The interesting feature of this development is that, while for Scholem, the ‘void of God’ is a predominantly negative experience, for Derrida, it becomes an affirmative model of modern – not just Jewish, but more generally, Abrahamic – religiosity which, on the one hand, touches upon atheistic non-belief in the divine presence here and now, yet, on the other, still insists on commemorating the ‘withdrawn God’ through his ‘traces.’ What, therefore, for Scholem, constitutes the ultimate cry of despair, best embodied in Kafka’s work – for Derrida, reveals the more positive face of the modern predicament in which God has absented himself in order to make room for the creaturely reality. And while Scholem envisages redemption as the full restoration of the divine presence – Derrida redefines redemption as the ‘pious’ work of deconstruction to be undertaken in the ‘almost-atheistic’ condition of irreversible separation between God and the world. (shrink)

During Jacques Derrida’s earlier phases, his stylistique acts out (in the sense of “performs”) the same project evident in his semantic. Derridean stylistic practice and thematics both undertake the project of deconstructing entitative thinking. Anglophonic philosophers often ignore (or cannot detect) his stylistic games, which are often Talmudic or unique to French. Derrida did not have a Buddhist agenda, but two of my past books, both well-received, show that Derridean deconstruction intersects with Mādhyamikan deconstruction of the self-identical. (Intersection does not (...) imply “common ground” because lines have no width.) This article demonstrates Derridean/buddhist intersections through (1) themes undoing themselves, (2) image motifs undoing themselves, (3) ambiguous referents dissolving Proper Names, (4) the “Uncanny” deconstructing logic, (5) enumeration undoing ontology, and (6) homophones and homographs unsettling correspondence theory. Finally, Derrida’s “free-floating syllables,” “floating graphic traits,” “palindromes,” and “scrambled words” are shown to dissolve entitative constructs. (shrink)

This article exploits a core defect in the phenomenology of sensation and self. Although phenomenology has made great strides in redeeming the body from cognitive solipisisms that often follow short-sighted readings of Descartes and Kant, it has not grappled with the specific kind of self-reflexivity that emerges in the sense of taste with the thoroughness it deserves. This path is illuminated by the works of Martin Luther, Jean-Luc Marion, and Jacques Derrida as they attempt to think through the specific phenomena (...) accessible through the lips, tongue, and mouth. Their attempts are, in turn, supplemented with detours through Walter Benjamin, Hélène Cixous, and Friedrich Nietzsche. The paper draws attention to the German distinction between Geschmack and Kosten as well as the role taste may play in relation to faith, the call to love, justice, and messianism. The messiah of love and justice will have been that one who proclaims: taste the flesh. (shrink)

"[O]ther contributors argue that taste has a clear epistemic function. Brower cites Agamben as claiming that taste is a priveleged locus for knowledge...A phenomenology of taste, then, is no mere trivial or personal matter, but one with wide-ranging consequences. And some of these conseqences are ethical...[D]oes the debasement of taste indeed breed xenophobic oppression, as Brower is sure that it does? [sic:)] These are contentious claims. Surely a person of exemplary aesthetics and gustatory taste can still be a moral monster...aesthetic (...) delicacy does not entail ethical virtue. It has been a long time since beauty was associated with moral good, yet the connection persists...It has been a long time since beauty was associated with truth, as well, and yet, again, the conection endures..." (Eds' Preface, ix-x). (shrink)

This monograph sets out from the idea of an obscure and perverted relationship between environmentalism, understood as a 21 st century green and popular movement, and pornography, understood as a traditionalist and conservative art form. Both sides seem to come together in the interest of what has been called the Anthropocene. Somehow the same groups that rely on a fierce defense of the planet and demand a collective awareness of the risk the entire humanity faces do not do it any (...) longer on behalf of an unknown future or revolutionary goal, but for the conservation of a still image of Earth: a positive conviction on how the future is going to look like. This aporia is dissolved into an oxymoron when environmentalist practices are put at work. (shrink)

When Susan Sontag addresses the problem of pornography and relates it to Hegel, she is not merely describing a path in European philosophy aimed to construct a new language, but she is also committing this aim to the importance of re-reading culture. The fashion in which pornography describes reality is meaningful when we are trying to approach Hegel in his aim to construct a post-religious language that finally will make ready-to-hand life as life. Politics, and society, being two essential elements (...) to understand reality, become singularly interesting when analyzed through the gaze of Sontag in combination of Hegel’s philosophy. The conservative morals that reign over what we understand as pornography, and the cultural moment of Europe since the most progressive moments of the 19 th century, describe a fatalist landscape for the future of society and politics. Yet, the learnings from Hegel remain meaningful. In this paper I examine how a post-religious philosophy, aimed long ago by Hegel’s contribution to philosophy, can serve to the understanding of a post-pornographic society: a society that is able to learn from the contributions of Frankfurt’s school with regards to an efficient cultural tissue, and defeat the old religious morals that are inserted in the backbone of politics and philosophy still today. (shrink)

This paper is a reconstruction of Levinas’ reading of Hegel and his understanding of violence. Combining Franz Rosenzweig’s reflections which concern the sick philosopher and Hegel’s state, as well as Derrida’s interpretation of the different attributes of violence, our aim is also to give full evidence of Derrida’s critical reading of Levinas. The first part illustrates the various classifications of the figures of violence from the different periods of Hegel’s life and the traces that these figures have left in Levinas’ (...) texts beginning with ‘Liberté et commandement’ in 1953. In the second part we discuss Hegel’s well-known analogy from his Rechtsphilosophie on sovereignty and the organism—that is to say the parallel reading of some paragraphs of Naturphilosophie too—and the relation between totality and violence, in Levinas’ ‘ontology as allergy’ and in Derrida’s autoimmunology. (shrink)

In this article the Derrida/Foucault debate is scrutinised with two closely related aims in mind: reconsidering the way in which Foucault’s texts, and especially the more recently published lectures, should be read; and establishing the relation between law and madness. The article firstly calls for a reading of Foucault which exceeds metaphysics with the security it offers, by taking account of Derrida’s reading of Foucault as well as of the heterogeneity of Foucault’s texts. The article reflects in detail on a (...) text of Derrida on Foucault as well as a text of Foucault on Blanchot. The latter text shows that Foucault was at times acutely aware of the difficulty involved in exceeding metaphysics and that he realised the importance in this regard of a reflection on literature. These reflections tie in closely with Foucault’s History of Madness as well as with Derrida’s reflections on literature and on madness. Both Derrida and Foucault contend that law has much to learn from literature in understanding the relation between itself and madness. Literature more specifically points to law’s ‘origin’ in madness. The article contends that a failure to take seriously this origin, also in the reading of Foucault’s lectures, would amount to a denial by law of itself. (shrink)

The paper explores the role of Jacques Lacan’s Ethics of Psychoanalysis in debates in law and legal philosophy. It proceeds by considering a debate between Slavoj Žižek and Judith Butler over Lacan’s concept of the real, which forms part of a larger discussion over the future of democracy and the rule of law. Through reference to discussions of the relationship between law and ethics based on the Antigone tragedy, I argue that the difference between Žižek and Butler’s positions should not (...) be understood in terms of the correctness of their reading of Lacan, but in terms of the political commitments that inform their respective interpretations. I explain the implications of this debate over one of Lacan’s most enigmatic concepts, thereby showing how Lacan’s theory can be used to rethink the politics of law in light of the increased emphasis on ethics in contemporary legal debates. (shrink)

Derrida notes that while many discourses—like law, politics, morality and theology—make use of the term cruelty, psychoanalysis alone takes psychical suffering as its own object of study. He is therefore incredulous that psychoanalysis has had so little to say about such important legal and political questions as the death penalty and other forms of state-sanctioned cruelty. His diagnosis is that insofar as psychoanalysis remains attached to a logic or a fantasy of sovereignty—one in which subjectivity is understood as individual or (...) indivisible—its revolutionary force remains blunted. Thus, Derrida calls for ‘a psychoanalysis to come’, a psychoanalysis for whom ‘cruelty’ is delinked from moral or theological approaches, a psychoanalysis which is delinked from its reliance on sovereignty—the sovereign subject, the sovereign nation or sovereign knowledge. Significantly, the ‘to come’ here is not the positing of some horizon of possibility for psychoanalysis, as if this were just an Idea that we must move towards. Rather the ‘to come’ expresses the dislocation that structures the very possibility of psychoanalysis from within. I conclude by asking how this psychoanalysis to come might shed light on what Angela Davis called the ‘great feat of the imagination’ required to ‘envision life beyond the prison’. (shrink)

Este artículo es una lectura del problema filosófico del mal a partir del estudio de las figuras de la bruja, la vaca y la leche en la obra de Derrida. Seguiremos los desarrollos que de este problema se encuentran en sus lecturas de Hegel, Nietzsche y Freud proponiendo, en primer lugar, algunas variaciones filosóficas y psicoanalíticas para comprender un conjunto de intrincadas referencias cruzadas con el trabajo de Hamacher y el problema del comer y, en segundo lugar, mostrando cómo la (...) significación de esta discusión sobre el problema del mal en estos autores se pudo convertir en un lugar de referencia para las "lecturas deconstructivas". (shrink)

This piece undertakes to sketch the contemporary approaches toward meaning known as pragmatics and semantics. Today, this pairing is associated with a controversy or question that concerns the proposition. Yet, while the pragmatics/semantics debate attests to the proposition's precise status being in doubt, the underlying belief remains that the work of the proposition or something like it – e.g., utterances, a portion of which function propositionally – eventually can be established. Jacques Derrida in his writings on Husserl questions even this (...) assumption. He argues that there is an internal limit to propositionality, thanks to a writing that ultimately exceeds it. Moreover, Derrida focuses on themes that are central for the discussions of semantics and pragmatics, while a good deal of common ground exists between Derrida's interlocutor, Husserl, and the analytic tradition. Accordingly, after here reviewing pragmatics and semantics, and some of the complexity of their relation, I turn to Husserl and to Derrida ultimately for a perspective that calls into doubt these projects as such. (shrink)

This thesis takes a critical approach to dominant ways of understanding leadership. The context for the study is UK local government where leadership has been popularised as a key feature of the latest phase of public sector modernisation. By drawing on the linguistic turn inherent in poststructuralism, and in particular the work of Jacques Derrida, the thesis challenges the orthodox assumption that leadership is a neutral and stable pre-linguistic phenomenon. In contrast it suggests that any given 'truth' of leadership can (...) be seen as an attempt to control a linguistic system that is inherently undecidable. It is an attempt to 'write' the world in a particular way, which is then forgotten. The thesis begins by considering orthodox approaches to the role of language in theorising organising in general, and also reviews a range of alternative perspectives that have gone some way towards engaging more fully with its epistemological, ontological and normative-ethical deficits. It then justifies the distinctive contribution to these debates made by the radicalised view of language found in poststructuralism in general, and the work of Jacques Derrida in particular. A review of the leadership literature suggests that it is dominated by an assumption that language is representational. Leadership is also depicted unquestioningly as an individualistic and impartial phenomenon. It is thus argued that the field is ripe for a more detailed focus on the politics of the language of leadership. The implications of Derrida's work for reading and writing texts, and the possibility of a poststructuralist methodology, are discussed in some detail. In particular, I highlight the need to reflexively problematise the textuality of the truth of this thesis. This is addressed by means of a deconstruction of the assessment criteria for a PhD thesis, which is included in the Appendix. An analysis of the linguistic decisions I made in order to stage an exemplary chapter betrays the discipline exerted by the academy. The main empirical work is based on a variety of texts from the case study organisation, including interviews with putative leaders, and formal documentation, such as a statement of leadership competences. These are subject to close reading in the spirit of what has been termed 'deconstruction', focusing on how and with what consequences the popularised truth of leadership is organised through language. Each reading concentrates in turn on one aspect of the leadership truth being promoted in the case study organization, namely leadership that is 'visible', 'strong', 'understanding' and 'shared'. I suggest that 'leadership' is an unsuccessful attempt to stabilize the play of language around individualism, specific aspects of which serve to privilege the productive power of the person of the office holder as part of local government modernisation. The study concludes by suggesting that the very instability of the truth offers opportunities for rethinking both leadership and public sector reform, in ways that are more open to the other. (shrink)

In this article, I rely both on Derrida's 1974 work Glas, as well as Derrida's 1971–72 lecture course, “La famille de Hegel,” to argue that the concept of the quasi-transcendental is central to Derrida's reading of Hegel and to trace its implications beyond the Hegelian system. I follow Derrida's analysis of the role of Antigone—or, as the lecture course has it, “Antigonanette”—in Hegel's thought to argue that the quasi-transcendental indicates a restriction of empirical difference into the transcendental, which is thereby (...) only ever provisionally transcendental. I then argue that the economy of difference indicated by the quasi-transcendental is neither a general economy, nor is it in each case singular, but rather it ambivalently oscillates between these two. Finally, I treat the temporality of the quasi-transcendental, arguing that the economy of difference indicated by the quasi-transcendental is not prior to the restriction of empirical difference, but is paradoxically produced by it by being retroactively constituted. I take up this analysis for the sake of describing what I contend is the quasi-transcendental structure of constitutive exclusion, a way of understanding the conceptual structure of political bodies, and the political structure of concepts. (shrink)

This paper considers the traditional debate about Marx and justice in light of Jacques Derrida's recent text, Spectres of Marx Specifically, I treat Derrida's consideration of the Marxist notion of justice in terms of the problematic of time. Following Derrida, I suggest that while much of the history of Marxism relies on a teleological and Hegelian understanding of time‐becoming‐history, the Marxist critique of justice is actually made possible by what Derrida calls a ‘messianic’ notion of time; one wherein history does (...) not come to an inevitable and predictable end, but rather breaks away to begin a whole new history. I conclude that the outcome of Derrida's analysis is that our responsibility as Marx's heirs is to resist the dogmatism inherent in the former logic, and to heed the normative call of the latter. (shrink)

By considering the way in which the mechanism of the scapegoat in René Girard's work is predicated on a phenomenal and anthropic understanding of violence, the following shows how Girard's anthropological conception of religion determines and limits from the beginning relations between the violent and the nonviolent and the phenomenal and the nonphenornenal. This conception is then inscribed within a larger economy of violence that opens up Girard's account of victimization and sacrifice to wider determinations. Important distinctions are made along (...) the way between the human sciences, religion, ethics and philosophy. If the work of Jacques Derrida in particular and deconstruction in general permit this widening in this article, I then argue however that such concepts as originary violence also short‐circuit the differentiations, with which we are concerned, to address, with and beyond Girard, a radical ethics of the lesser violence. (shrink)

. The time of violence: Deconstruction and value. Cultural Values: Vol. 2, No. 2-3, pp. 190-205.

Sin tantear recorridos lineales, la mayor parte de los siguientes renglones, entresacados de aquellos parajes por los que merodearían los lectores de Emmanuel Lévinas más propensos a las responsabilidades del sueño lúcido, modifican unas páginas de Teleón, obra no del todo en marcha entregada a las excursiones que la escritura de León de Greiff estimula a través de regiones y climas no siempre incluidos en los informes de la crítica literaria o en los plegables temáticos de los debates ideológicos. A (...) distinción de los textos del lituano y demás autores mencionados, ningún dispositivo referencial acompaña las citas inherentes a las composiciones del antioqueño, no propiamente con la intención de dar a entender que su procedencia debería resultar descontada a las generaciones sumidas en todos los hechos y en los hechos del Todo que, a juicio de algún televidente muy dueño y señor de su cabeza, refutarían las exigencias éticas de Lévinas, si acaso con el propósito de sugerir la urgencia de subvertir los criterios de vigilancia universitaria acogiendo el asomo del otro, ningún duplicado, ningún paredros gnóstico, sino el otro expirante e inspirante, el poeta en persona, quien por ventura los devolvería al sarcófago vacío de la “momia fiambre” que nunca quiso llegar a ser. (shrink)

This article offers a reading of the effect of exchange on subjectivity. Two modes of exchange are discussed: commodity-exchange and gift-exchange. Following Marx, Simmel, Lukács, and Bewes, commodity exchange is argued to be detrimental to subjectivity insofar as it leads to abstract, mediated social relationships, and reifies the subject. Debates around the notion and application of reification are investigated. The anthropological insight of Mauss on gift-exchange is introduced and used to challenge elements of the thesis of reification and process of (...) on-going commodification. Gift-exchange is argued to perpetuate concrete, immediate social relations. Critical attention is drawn to the gift as critique of the commodity. My interrogation suggests that there is a problem because the gift is often over-idealized in much gift discourse and figures as a binary opposite to the commodity. This is especially the case with one of the leading contemporary theorists on the gift, Jacques Godbout. Themes that support the notion of the gift, such as family and community bonds, reciprocity, and ‘face to face’ relations, are often taken for granted as being fully enabling. On the other hand commodity exchange is perceived as being exclusively disabling. The article begins to challenge this thinking. (shrink)

We return to Derrida's 1974 Glas. It has probably never occurred to readers of Glas that it could have relevance for any kind of critique of empire - let alone a critique of empire via the Mediterranean. But Braudel's investigation of the difficult question of the `historical Mediterranean' is precisely the lens through which Glas's nascent critique of imperialism comes into focus. In this strange work, a `thinking' of passages emerges - disruptive passages moving from west to east, ceaselessly criss-crossing (...) the vectors of the western empire's seemingly `continuous' move westward. As a rigorous critique of origins and borders, Derridean deconstruction can provide a useful perspective on ongoing efforts to pinpoint the borders of a `historical Mediterranean' and on the ways in which medieval mercantile histories of the Mediterranean themselves serve as a critique of empire. (shrink)

This article discusses the idea of globalization and its consequences for the religious field. In a methodological section, it critically introduces the terminology of globalization analysis, sketching the historical background of the topic. Than, it investigates the commonalities between the theory of globalization and Christian language, taking into account the differences among the Christian confessions. He proposes a geopolitical analysis of the relations between Catholics and Orthodox Christians that uses the model of “spiritual pairs”. Finally, a framework for inter-religious dialogue (...) in a unified Europe is proposed that would make use of the globalization localization dualism. (shrink)

The article attempts to think friendship in its relation to law and justice and provides some arguments for the importance of this concept in Derrida’s ethical, legal and political philosophy. It draws on early texts such as Of grammatology and reads them in conjunction with later texts such as The animal that therefore I am. The relation of friendship to law and justice is explored by means of Derrida’s notion of “degenerescence” understood as the necessity or law of indeterminateness that (...) cuts across, both limiting and de-limiting, all laws, types and generic partitions, for instance, juridical (natural and positive right), humanistic (human and animal), anthropological (sexual difference), philosophical (physis and nomos). Drawing on Derrida’s readings of “sexual difference” in Heidegger and the latter’s evocation of “the voice of the friend” in Being and time, the article addresses the theme of Geschlecht and articulates the exigency to think sexual difference beyond duality together with the exigency to rethink law and right otherwise than on the ground of nativity and “natural fact” and in terms of what Derrida calls “a friendship prior to friendships” at the origin of all law and socius. (shrink)