This paper concerns the issue of the continual arrival of irregular immigrants in Malta and the problems that ensue. The view generally held is that we need to respond to the needs of irregular immigrants by providing services. However, with reference to some of Jacques Derrida's ideas, I argue in this paper that the other /immigrant is not there for us to respond to by creating services to cater for her needs. Through the presence of the irregular immigrant, we are (...) made to question who we are, and are faced with our own vulnerability. We become 'other' to ourselves. This paper uses Derrida's ideas of tensions, trembling, borders and limited and unlimited hospitality, to lay the way for some suggestions of how the education of children can be influenced. In a time when educational discourse rotates around performativity, this paper suggests that space should be made in education for astonishment, surprise and enigmatic experience. (shrink)

The text by Derrida entitled, in English, Touching On – Jean-Luc Nancy is a text about neither ‘touching’ nor Jean-Luc Nancy, in any easy sense. Derrida never really gets started with touch and goes out of his way to correct Nancy's use of the term ‘deconstruction’. Following some exemplary cases of this in the book, this article demonstrates the technical differences between Derrida and Nancy that the former is keen to impress upon his readers.

This essay investigates thought as an event of “multiplicity.” French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Alain Badiou pose this as a concept of change (political and otherwise). Both philosophers propose that multiplicity means thinking happens as an event by engaging a theoretical impasse, or “un-thought.” Un-thought opens up and changes ideas into complex varieties or multiplicities. This dynamic is examined through the example of May ‘68, an actual event that gives context to how multiplicity expresses “radical change.” The aim of this (...) article is to see how both thinkers’ theories overlap. For Badiou, multiplicities are “truths” that happen whilst making a decision, engaging a notion of “point.” For Deleuze, multiplicities are concepts that happen materially in life as metaphysical forces, or “lines.” Multiplicity is critically approached as a complex variety of ideas that change in the forms of art, politics, and science. (shrink)

Marcel Mauss’s discussion of the gift relies on a paradox: although gift-giving is the foundational act of building a society, in order for a gift to be circulated, society must be always-already presupposed so that the gift can reach and be recognized by its destination. This article focuses on how this paradox has been addressed in anthropological and philosophical studies of the gift, by reviewing work by Claude Lévi-Strauss, Maurice Godelier and Jacques Derrida. By illuminating each position through the lens (...) of the Lacanian triad of the symbolic, the imaginary and the real, I first show how Lévi-Strauss and Godelier, respectively, focus on the symbolic and imaginary economies of the gift and how their perspectives are still bound by Mauss’s paradox in assuming the totality of society as the ultimate basis of gift exchange. I then read Derrida’s critique of Mauss as an attempt to explore the space for the aneconomic that grounds but simultaneously threatens the symbolic and imaginary economies of society. In doing so, I argue that the gift always includes the effaceable negativity and uncertainty that serve as the condition of (im)possibility for the social. (shrink)

My paper examines Derrida's attempts to resist, on the one hand, what he thought of as the increasing international hegemony of American English as the technolanguage of communication, and, on the other hand, forms of linguistic nationalism, when using the resources of the French language to deploy the syntagma: démocratie à venir. It does this by investigating what happens when claims about democracy are made in such a way as to be singularly idiomatic – made from a cosmopolitan point of (...) view that takes into account, rather than vitiates à la Kant, the singular poeticity of idioms. It contrasts Derrida's analysis of the relationship between the national, democracy and idiomaticity with Tocqueville's nationalistic claims; examining, in particular, the issue of how language supposedly binds people together, the role of singularity and generality in thinking about idioms, the divide between originary and techno-scientific idioms, and Derrida's practice of writing in plus d'une langue. It also outlines how, paradoxically, it is a form of idiomaticity and not linguistic instrumentality that disrupts the logic of appropriation, the logic inscribed in the neighbouring, though different, conceptual values of idion, proprius and le propre. (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)

This paper argues that insofar as the ‘translation’ of deconstruction in America has become a discourse on the sacred, it mis‐recognizes what Derrida calls the trace, and identifies it as the radical outside to thought, or as ‘God’. The ‘trace’ on Derrida's account is indeed unknowable, but it is not the radical outside of thought. Rather, it is a disruptive force that is internal to thought. Reconstructive analyses investigate the way that thought is breached, and necessarily so, by what thought (...) cannot think. This breach, this unsignifiable opening, is intolerable to philosophical undertakings because philosophy must totalize; this is what philosophy does. Following Walter Benjamin, I argue that translation is possible, precisely because of this breach. Thus, just because this breach or opening is intolerable to thought or to philosophy does not prevent it from happening. On Jacques Derrida's analysis, this opening has a name: it is deconstruction. To this extent, those variants of ‘deconstruction in America’ which misrecognize the trace as God, miss the very political force of deconstruction in the first place, which is to say, a philosophical undertaking which thematizes the intolerability of refusing what philosophy does and must do.The breach in thought is precisely what Walter Benjamin suggests is untranslatable. It cannot be communicated by any sign. Notwithstanding the great difference between Benjamin and Hegel's political commitments, comparing Benjamin's work on the untranslatability of language's ‘languageness’ to Hegel's semiological theory is instructive. It establishes that both thinkers argue that the practice of language should be the practice of learning each word as though it were a proper name. Each argues in their own way that the practice of language should erase the trace. It is precisely this erasure — the identification of the trace as radically exterior to thought ‐ that covers over what is at stake, not simply philosophically, in an investigation into the breach of language, but what is at stake politically. What is at stake politically is what Derrida calls the ‘risk of absolute surprise’ which is nothing less than the risk of a political philosophy with no guarantee. (shrink)

Generally, regulation is thought of as a constant that carries with it both a formative and conservative power, a power that standardises, demarcates and forms an order, through procedures, rules and precedents. It is dominantly thought that the singularity and formalisation of structures like rules is what enables regulation to achieve its aim of identifying, apprehending, sanctioning and forestalling/pre-empting threats and crime or harm. From this point of view, regulation serves to firmly establish fixed and stable categories of what norms, (...) customs, morals and behaviours are applicable to a particular territory, society or community in a given time. These fixed categories are then transmitted onto individuals by convention, ritual and enforcement through imperatives of law (and technology) that mark certain behaviours as permissible and others as forbidden, off bounds. In this manner, regulation serves a programming (i.e., a calculable or determinable) purpose. It functions as a pro-active management or as a mastery of threats, risks, crimes and harms that affect a society and its security both in the future and in the present. Regulation for instance, will inscribe and codify what it determines to constitute crime or harm such as pornography, incitement of terrorism, extremist speech, racial hatred etc. These determined or calculated/calculable categories will then be enforced and regulated (e.g. through automated filtering) in order to ensure a preservation of public order within society. Drawing mainly from deconstruction, this article situates law and technologies within a wider ecological process of texts, speech and writing i.e., communication. In placing regulation within disseminatory and iterable processes of communication, this article complicates, destabilises and critiques the dominant position of determinability and calculability within the regulatory operations of law. (shrink)

The paper argues for the importance to Kant's critique of judgment of epistemological reflections upon the problematics of experimentation on organic processes. It examines the investigations of generation by Wolff and Blumenbach, demonstrating how their experimental practices mediated reflectively between organic phenomena and their conceptualisation, acting as instruments of their judgments of these processes. It then reads Kant's ‘Kritik der teleologischen Urteilskraft’ in light of these experimental investigations, arguing that Kant highlights how the problematic relation between organic phenomena and their (...) conceptualisation manifested in such investigations is opened up as a space for reflection, thus making this act of judgment conscious. The relation between Kant's critiques of judgment in his first and third critiques are then discussed, and it is argued that the reflective character of judgment highlighted in the judgment of organic processes draws into focus the problematic aspects of all judgments of natural phenomena, by making conscious the synthetic process of judgment effected by unconscious acts of the imagination in the first critique. Finally, the paper examines Humboldt's galvanic experiments, showing how they were informed by Kant's critical philosophy, but also how they contributed to the blurring of the boundaries between the judgment of organic and inorganic processes. Thus it is claimed that the reflections upon judgment in the Kritik der Urteilskraft problematized rather than clarified Kant's treatment of judgment in the first critique. (shrink)

ABSTRACTJulian of Norwich, anchorite and seer, was, according to the twentieth-century mystic poet and monk Thomas Merton, “one of the most wonderful of all Christian voices” and “with Newman the greatest English theologian.” Her Shewings, or Revelations of Divine Love, are an account, meditation, and teaching proceeding from sixteen visions she experienced on a single day in May of 1373. This “Soundproof Room” encounter takes the form of a mild creole of medieval and postmodern English of the sort that in (...) prior works, most notably Paris Views and Foucault in Winter, in the Linnaeus Garden, the author has called “mixed language.” Here also the author takes his cue from Merton’s reputed avowal that “Rather than ‘Sister’, one calls her the ‘Lady Julian’,” by making dialogue a like instance of seeking how to address another. (shrink)

The critical resources furnished bydeconstruction have more than occasionally beenturned with negative effect on traditional andmore recent conceptions of liberal learning,including the reaffirmation of the humanitiesassociated with philosophical hermeneutics. Thefirst two sections of the paper review thecontrasting and mutually opposed stancestowards learning represented by earlyformulations of deconstruction and ofhermeneutics. An exploration is thenundertaken in the later sections ofdevelopments that have taken place in bothdeconstruction and hermeneutics since theDerrida-Gadamer encounter in Paris in 1981.While not in any sense assimilatinghermeneutics to deconstruction or (...) vice versa,this exploration identifies significant shiftsin later formulations of both which provide amore inclusive context for understandinglearning as a human undertaking, including theidentification of tensions that are morepromising than negative. (shrink)

Abstract The first section of the paper reviews the kind of action which unfolds in Plato's Republic, and argues that, from Book II onwards, its character shifts from a genuine dialogue (communicative action) to a more manipulative kind of intercourse (strategic action). While the former kind of action was characteristic of the educational activities of the historical Socrates, the case is made that this kind of action became largely eclipsed in Western education and superseded by the strategic concerns to which (...) Platonist conceptions of learning gave prominence. The Platonist legacy, it is pointed out, had a decisive impact on Western conceptions of learning, even beyond the Enlightenment. These conceptions were largely custodial rather than emancipatory in character. An argument is presented in thirteen steps in the second section of the paper, to establish the case that the kind of action which properly describes the experience of teaching and learning is that of a cultural courtship. A distinction is drawn between honourable and dishonourable forms of courtship, the honourable being a candidate for defence in universalist terms. The practical import of the distinction is considered. Under the title ?The Dialogue that we Aren't?, the third section reviews postmodern objections ? particularly those of Lyotard ? to the kind of argument made in the thirteen steps, and the concluding section considers Habermas? later theories in relation to my own ?universalist? argument. (shrink)

This article provides an introductory overview of the theories of Paul Virilio, particularly regarding how technologically-enhanced speed impacts human reality. It positions Virilio as part modernist, part postmodernist and discusses how his ethico-political views color his more aesthetic metaphysics, creating a tension in his final position on the merits of technological speed's blurring of the real and the imaginary. It concludes by contrasting Virilio's position with some comments on aesthetics by Ludwig Wittgenstein.

This article seeks to reconsider how traditional notions of ethics-ethics that privilege reason, truth, meaning, and a fixed conception of "the human"-are upended by digital technology, cybernetics, and virtual reality. We argue that prevailing ethical systems are incompatible with the way technology refigures the concepts and practices of identity, meaning, truth, and finally, communication. The article examines how both ethics and technology repurpose the liberal humanist subject even as they render such a subject untenable. Such an impasse reformats the question (...) of ethics by introducing questions of radical alterity, making it possible for new ethical systems to emerge. (shrink)

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

A possible relation between Derrida's deconstruction of metaphysics and connectionism is explored by considering diffeacuterance in neural nets terms. First diffeacuterance, as the crossing of Saussurian difference and Freudian deferral, is modeled and then the fuller 'sheaf of diffeacuterance is taken up. The metaphysically conceived brain has two versions: in the traditional computational version the brain processes information like a computer and in the connectionist version the brain computes input vector to output vector transformations non-symbolically. The 'deconstructed brain' neither processes (...) information nor computes functions but is spontaneously economical. (shrink)

The following article is an exploration of the non-linear and non-unified identities that make up Australian feminism. The main premise is that the divergent strands of rational and romantic thought, central to the project of liberalism, are inherent in the characterization of Australian feminisms. As a result, there have always been tensions between feminists, centred around politics of self-identification. These tensions continue to exist, but to be articulated in different ways in different decades as a result of the ever changing (...) relationships between feminist, state and media/public discourses. These ideas are explored through comparing two key moments in our recent past in which differences between feminisms were declared. These two events – the Mary Daly visit to Australia to promote Gyn/ecology in 1981, and the debate engendered by Helen Garner's The First Stone in 1995 – are taken to be performative metaphors through which the continuities and discontinuities of the nature of Australian feminisms can be subjectively explored. (shrink)

A study of the reception and utilization of realism in literature outside of Europe during and after the nineteenth century, the area and period of its prominence, grants us some insight into how theories, practices and cultures travel and change in the process. In particular, it allows us to see how realism has been relativized in such a way as to open up the possibilities of redefinition of the notion and practice and moving beyond them. For these reasons I am (...) undertaking a short survey in this paper of the transculturation, after Fernando Ortiz, of realism in Africa, tracing its genesis from the primary mode of the western novel form to its utilization in anticolonial resistance literature and transmogrification into the magical realism and postmodernism of postcolonial experimental writing. (shrink)

Derrida frequently comments on the need to read and reread the texts of the tradition, to be always starting again with them. In On Touching – Jean-Luc Nancy Derrida offers another reading of (he starts again with) Aristotles's De Anima. By paying attention to the play of the palintropic, diaphanous, exactitude and ‘penser’ in Derrida's text, this paper seeks to show how important Aristotle is for Derrida in this book and in any deconstruction of the sense of touch. *.

In the face of the ever-growing effect the actions of the present may have upon future people, most conspicuously around climate change, democracy has been accused, with good justification, of a presentist bias: of systemically favouring the presently living. By contrast, this paper will argue that the intimate relation, both quasi-ontological and normative, that Derrida's work establishes between temporality and justice insists upon another, more future-regarding aspect of democracy. We can get at this aspect by arguing for two consequences of (...) the deconstructive affirmation of sur-vivre, of the alterity of death in life. Firstly, justice is not first of all justice for the living, but intergenerational from the start. This is so because no generation coincides with itself; rather, it dies and is reborn at every moment, and so – and this is the second consequence – consists in taking turns. Affirming life as living-on means affirming that it involves exchanging life's stations, as the young become the old, and the unborn become the dead. In this sense, the justice of living-on, I will argue, shares an essential feature with democracy, whose principle of exchanging the rulers with the ruled led Derrida to characterize it in terms of the wheel. Democracy consists in the principled assent to power changing hands, a switchover life demands of every generation at every turn. This assent further requires an acceptance of the gift of inheritance without which no life can survive. But as the gift can also never be fully acknowledged or appropriated, it must be passed on to the indefinite, unknown future, in a turning that is the time of life. (shrink)

Academia’s mathematical metaphysics are briefly explored en route to an elaboration of the qualitatively rigorous requirements underpinning the calibration and unambiguous interpretation of quantitative instrumentation in any science. Of particular interest are Gadamer’s emphases on number as the paradigm of the noetic, on the role of play in interpretation, and on Hegel’s sense of method as the activity of the thing itself that thought experiences. These point toward and overlap with (1) Latour’s study of the metrological social networks through which (...) technological phenomena are brought into language as modes of being that can be understood, and (2) the way that Rasch’s models for measurement comprise a potential beginning for metaphysically astute, qualitatively and quantitatively integrated, mathematical methods in the social sciences. The paper closes with observations on the general problem that is philosophy, the need to remain open to multiplicities of meaning even as clear understandings are sought and obtained. (shrink)

This paper argues that the slogans “A Woman's Right to Choose” and “The Personal is the Political” typify different traditions within feminist thinking; one emphasizing rights and equality, the other the unconscious and the personal. The author responds to both traditions by bringing together mind and body, and reason and emotion, via the figure of the copula. The copula expresses an alternative model of identity which indicates that value can be produced only in relation.Let us say that the problem is (...) violence. At its most naive: how can the sexual relation, which is supposedly full of love, be violent?I mean the sexual relation in its resonances and ambiguity—to indicate the relation between the sexes, and the relation between lovers. In no way can the relation be confined to love, either heterosexual or homosexual, since it is often a contest. It cannot be reduced solely to a social relation, because in one of its aspects it addresses the most intimate subjectivity.In a certain feminist lifestyle advocacy, those women who are in same sex relations avoid sexual violence by avoiding men, and those who are in heterosexual relationships strive to find the “right kind”—that is, relationships of respectful and supportive love—rejecting all signs of aggression, from sexist disparagement and emotional cruelty to sexual humiliation and physical assault, as “abuse.”Strangely, this dichotomy does not explain the proximity of passion and aggression, whether in love between men and women or in same-sex relationships between feminist women. As rational counsel, it resists the important sense in which the erotic is, and is even valued as, the excess of the rational. And as an analysis of the oppression of women it defeats itself, for to insist on masculinity as violence itself, and/or on the sexual relation as properly governed by reason, seems to miss the point of both love and feminism.Stranger still, feminisms, which set out to address and redress the oppression of women, have become rivalrous themselves. Are these aggressions a legacy of the intellectual world they must take place in. Have we overlooked an aspect of the relation between sisters? Feminism has not addressed the question of aggression in feminism as anything more than contamination.Perhaps, after all, the thing that feminism has not yet successfully addressed is love. The “battle between the sexes” has not rendered the ambivalence of the heterosexual relation. As a species of theory, feminism has relished the rigor of distinction and has not found it easy to tolerate the proximity of opposites.And yet, in evoking the body, some feminisms approach closer to this difficulty. It remains to take up the relation between the body and the concept more thoroughly, in order to find out whether sexual difference could ever be philosophical. (shrink)

The intensifying speed-up of contemporary economic, social and political life troubles democratic theorists because they assume that democracy depends on patience. This article turns to Martin Luther King, Jr. to challenge democratic theory’s temporal bias. I argue that King demonstrates that impatience, too, is a democratic virtue. Building on impatient knowledge, democratic impatience aides in overcoming undemocratic legacies, fosters democratic subjectivity and agency, ensures political accountability, and creates a more inclusive practice of democratic belonging. I furthermore show that King reveals (...) the temporal sophistication of democratic impatience, thereby contradicting the prevailing interpretation of self-defeating instantaneousness. In particular, democratic impatience’s temporal origins of centuries of injustice, human mortality, and the context of social acceleration provide a mature impetus for democratic action. Moreover, democratic impatience persists over time. On the one hand, it does so because injustice persists. On the other hand, democratic impatience contains within itself a subordinate operational patience. In other words, democratic impatience is always already somewhat ‘patient.’ King’s democratic impatience therefore not only redresses democratic theory’s shortcomings, but it also generates a renewed sense of democratic possibility in our age, as democratic impatience is well suited to help us in redressing the crises and injustices deepened or generated by social acceleration. (shrink)

Derrida’s philosophy is usually known as a form of critique of metaphysics. This article, however, argues that Derrida’s deconstructions do not only dismantle metaphysics from within, but also remain in themselves thoroughly, and problematically, metaphysical. Its goal is to determine exactly where the metaphysical features of Derrida’s work can be found. The article starts with an analysis of Derrida’s understanding of metaphysics, as well as its deconstruction, by explaining the working of différance, mainly focusing on its temporality. Further, it will (...) demonstrate how in the temporization or deferral of différance a metaphysical desire for purity remains effective. In readings of several texts, the mutual interdependence of metaphysics and deconstruction will be sketched. Then the ethical side of deconstruction will be highlighted, both in Derrida’s early work as well as in the slightly different elaboration of différance in the later ethical notions like justice, the gift and the messianic. This results in a distinction of three versions of différance. Finally, a critical discussion of the metaphysical side of deconstruction will be followed by a comparison of different readings of deconstruction and différance. (shrink)

The essay on Husserl’s phenomenology of touch in Derrida’s recent On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy represents his only substantial re-engagement with Husserlian phenomenology to be published following the series of texts dating from the period marked by his Mémoire of 1955 through to the essay ‘Form and Meaning’ included in Margins (1972). The essay, devoted to some key sections of Husserl’s Ideas II, appears to break new ground in Derrida’s readings of Husserl, but in fact demonstrates a profound continuity with his earlier (...) readings. In fact, I argue that this continuity is in a part an effect of Derrida’s ongoing commitment to the ‘methodology’ of deconstruction. I show how this commitment leads Derrida to conflate three separate distinctions within Husserl’s discussion, a conflation that obliges Derrida to misread the letter of Husserl’s text, and which, in turn, blinds him to a certain radical potentiality within Husserl’s phenomenology of sensibility. (shrink)

This article presents Derrida as a philosopher of history by reinterpreting his De la Grammatologie. In particular, it provides a schematic reconstruction of Part II of that book from the perspective of the problem of history. My account extends work on historicity in Derrida by privileging the themes of ‘history’ and ‘diagram’ in the Rousseau part. I thereby establish a Derridean concept of history which aims at accounting for the continuities and discontinuities of the past. This is in contrast to (...) some criticism that Derrida leaves behind, or inadequately accounts for history. Derrida describes a necessarily contorted condition of relating any historical event or development to itself or to another. This historicity informs other well-known aspects of Derrida's work, like the ‘quasi-transcendental’ terms he developed. I conclude that ‘history’ is a critical element in any understanding of deconstruction, and that deconstruction entails new kinds of history, but that some axioms of current historical thought require reformation. (shrink)

Derrida's work encompasses dynamic spatial dimensions to understanding as a pervasive theme, including the search for a ‘new psychoanalytic graphology’ in Writing and Difference. This preoccupation with a spatial text for repression also occurs later in Archive Fever. Building on Derrida, this paper seeks to develop key aspects of a new dynamic psychoanalytic graphology through diametric and concentric interactive spatial relation. These spatial movements emerge from a radical reconstruction of a neglected aspect of structural anthropologist Lévi-Strauss’ work on spatial relations (...) prior to myth. This psychoanalytic graphology is argued to silently pervade Freud's own direct accounts of repression. This graphological domain is developed through diametric and concentric spatial movements across common concerns of Derrida and Freud such as inversions, interruption and restoration, regarding traces in the unconscious. A spatial text is uncovered for diverse features of Freudian repression, including ambivalence in obsessional neurosis and psychosis, splitting of the ego and repetition compulsion. This psychoanalytic graphology challenges the construction of a restricted subjectivity based on repressive diametric spatial relations. It goes beyond Freud's logocentric repression, resonant with Derrida's more radical call for a wider spatio-temporal understanding of structures of differential relation, prior to causality and myth. (shrink)

Through a re-reading of Antigone, I offer a critique of Hegel's use of the story to illustrate the unity which emerges from the representation of sexual difference in ethical life. Using Hegel's own account of habits, as the mechanism by which the body becomes a sign of the self, I argue that the pretense of social unity assumes the proper construction and representation of one body only. This critique is brought to bear upon contemporary moves towards a post-Hegelian ethics of (...) difference. (shrink)

This article considers martial corporeality in light of the revolution in military affairs and the transformation of strategic discourse wrought by the confluence of the digital and molecular revolutions whose ontology is that of code. It deconstructs contemporary strategic desires to make the military body intelligence incarnate through mastery of code. That desire is an ancient one. The article therefore proceeds by taking military strategic discourse’s invocation of Athena seriously, and re-reads the myth of Athena in terms of a primordial (...) war of the sign to master the undecidablity of the sign. Conflict over the sign’s un-masterable power of engendering is typically played out in sexualized terms. The will to martial corporeality as intelligence incarnate is characterized as a modern replay of this war As military embodiment pursues the intelligence incarnate offered by the information and molecular revolutions, power over life becomes allied with power over death in a complex convergence of sovereign geopolitics with a global biopolitics gone digital. Populated by martial bodies that have long been cyborgs, the digital way of war witnesses the emergence of a libidinality in thrall to Athena-the-wise as digital dominatrix. (shrink)

Jean-Francois Lyotard's essay `Adorno as the Devil' had argued that Theodor Adorno's Philosophy of Modern Music was a `diabolic' work of `negative theology' which attributed to Schoenberg's music a secret redemptive power. However, in his later writings, such as the essays in The Inhuman, Lyotard has himself moved close to a `negative theological' position with respect to modernity, time, aesthetics and music. The paper uses the occasion of Lyotard's own theologically inspired essays on music, `God and Puppet' and `Obedience', to (...) re-evaluate the following: Adorno's claims that music transcends mere language and `reaches' for the theological; and more general claims within modern western culture on behalf of music's ability to express the inexpressible. The argument is that the music as negative theology position is not inherently metaphysical but rather that it reflects the importance of the `unsayable' to modern conceptions of reason. In resisting the `closure' of the modern narrative of reason, music, as a temporal art, has often given expression to the more radical forms of alterity present within modern forms of time. In other words, negative theology is not the discourse of the devil; it is the impossible discourse of western reason and its internal fracturing. (shrink)

In his 2012 article Philosophy of Education for the Public Good: Five Challenges and an Agenda, Gert Biesta identifies five substantial issues about the future of education and the work required to address these issues. This article employs a Heideggerian reading of education to evaluate ‘Biesta’s truth’. I argue that Biesta’s point of view underestimates knowledge’s predominance and relativism; frames intentionality in pre-Heideggerian terms, which—although not a problem in itself because an individual is free to choose a particular perspective on (...) the concept—raises the issue of consistency in Biesta’s theoretical framework; and a final criticism concerns Biesta’s choice of tools for engaging with the identified challenges: The primary tools Biesta uses are intrinsic to the perspective he challenges. The use of a ‘first person perspective’ to frame pedagogy that focuses on the subject and ‘subjectification’ reaffirms the fundamental Western gesture that makes human beings subjects who ‘stand-over-and-against’ the world. I argue that it is possible to penetrate Plato’s ‘theoretical gaze’ and find a ‘weak’ alternative to an all-encompassing point of view of education through a Heideggerian approach that regards intentionality and thinking as ‘hearing’. (shrink)

This paper orchestrates various moments in which Derrida makes recourse to the notion of anachrony – in analyses of khōra and demiurgic creation in the Timaeus and of the trace in Husserl – in order to describe a structural law according to which philosophy attempts to determine some ‘thing’ with the very categories that it makes possible and that are therefore structurally derivative, both too early and too late, in a word, anachronous.

One of the problems in phenomenological approaches to art, is to understand the link between the ontologies of art media and questions of value. Unfortunately, recent discussions of art’s broader cultural context have not helped in this task. There has been a widespread assumption that the historical circumstances of art’s cultural production, its constituencies of reception, and contexts of transmission and the like, render artistic value relative to the time and place of its production. My purpose in this critical discussion, (...) is to move beyond the restrictions and contradictions of such relativism. I shall argue that art engages with factors that are of universal rather than relative import, and that questions of value are connected to this. In doing so, I will hope, in other words, to subvert the relativist orthodoxy by clarifying art’s reality as art. I shall do so as perversely as possible by, in Part One, criticizing and developing one of the great inspirations for relativism, namely Derrida’s notion of différance. In Part Two, I shall use components of that concept, namely difference and iterability to indicate the basis of art’s reality qua art, the justification of canonic work, and, in the course of this, art’s legitimate claim to high-cultural status. (shrink)