Proper attention to the theme of corporeality is crucial for understanding Derrida’s analysis of Hegel in “The Pit and the Pyramid.” This article argues that Derrida’s essay compels us to face the impossibility of giving a wholly coherent account of embodiment. The _Aufhebung_ supposedly unites the exteriority of the corporeal with interiority in a higher unity that cancels and preserves them both; Hegel’s own text reveals, however, that meaning is primordially absent from the body that was thought to incarnate it. (...) And it is this absence of ideal meaning that is originary: Differance conditions the body as it conditions speech, rendering the body other than itself such that it is not categorizable as flesh that is the self or as an object that is not the self. I am and am not my body because the dichotomy between interiority and exteriority breaks down even at the level of the body. Indeed, I am and am not my self; the embodied self is disrupted from the start, never self-contained. Thus embodiment always already testifies to the other. (shrink)

This paper addresses the question of the constitution of ‘the people’. It argues that J.L. Austin’s concept of the ‘perlocutionary’ speech act gives us a framework for understanding the constitutive force of a specific constitutional document: the American Declaration of Independence. It does so through responding to Derrida’s analysis of the Declaration, which itself draws on Austin’s work. Derrida argues that the Declaration’s constitutive force lies in the fact that it cannot be simply understood as either ‘performative’ or ‘constative’, in (...) Austin’s terminology. According to Derrida, ‘the people’ do not pre-exist the Declaration, but are constituted in the act of declaration itself. In response, I argue that while Derrida’s insight regarding the constitution of ‘the people’ is sound, his analysis misses two key aspects of the Declaration. These two lacunae point the way to an understanding of the constitutive force of the Declaration in terms of Austin’s ‘perlocutionary’ speech act. (shrink)

If, today, ‘politics is in culture and culture is relentlessly political’ (Brown, 2002), if the domains of ‘the political’ and ‘the cultural’ can no longer be easily distinguished or kept separate, then contemporary political theory requires an understanding and analysis of cultural politics. This essay undertakes the first stages of such a project by trying to theorize ‘cultural politics’. I argue that ‘cultural politics’ proves to be an object of discourse — it indeed has a certain discursive existence — but (...) not an object of discipline, since no single field or discipline produces it as an object of knowledge. I read this disciplinary failure optimistically, arguing that the study of cultural politics requires a reorientation of theory. The sort of interdisciplinary and multiple-genre work needed to study cultural politics produces a conception of theory as fugitive. Fugitive theory must travel among disciplines, calling on a variety of theoretical and political resources to sustain itself; it refuses the very notion of ‘applied’ theory, insisting that theory ‘is already at work’ in politics (Butler, 1997). To link politics to culture is to practise fugitive theory. And the practice of fugitive theory therefore has the capacity to reveal and explore the workings of cultural politics. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Education appears to bear responsibility on the one hand to do justice to society’s need for reproduction and continuation, and on the other to do justice to the individual’s capacity for and need to express resistance, critique and political action. How we navigate this problem is tied to how we understand justice. ‘Plastic justice’ is the suggestion that questions concerning justice and education might find a materialist expression instead of the usual transcendental ideals of justice. In this perspective, ‘justice’ (...) appears not as an achievable ideal but as a philosophical void that allows us to identify and react to injustice. An example of this is the void that allows for social selection – in the form of admissions or exams – that must be kept open if we wish to avoid encouraging social conformism and reproduction. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

Bildung has lost its critical potential, some thinkers worry, but I put forward that this might not necessarily be the case. Jan Masschelein and Norbert Ricken argue that modernity has seen Bildung and bio-power grow complicit, effectively negating Bildung’s critical edge by turning criticism into a necessary aspect of contemporary society. However, a development of this sort seems to demand a view of both Bildung and bio-power as sovereign entities that subvert the individuals who constitute them. I challenge this view (...) by reference to Catherine Malabou's philosophy. Malabou argues that bio-power seems to suffer from a residual sovereign element which upholds a separation between a material and a symbolic mode of life, even if bio-power was originally thought as a break with sovereign thinking altogether. Malabou’s engagement with the biological concept epigenesis by way of her own concept plasticity provides an ostensibly non-sovereign approach to bio-power, one that emphasizes change, creativity, accident, and reciprocal influence. I suggest that this point of view might challenge the apparent sovereignty of bio-power and open up for a non-sovereign formulation of Bildung. (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)

Cassirer's approach to symbolic mediation differs in some important ways from currently prevailing approaches to meaning and signification such as semiology and its more recent poststructuralist varieties. Cassirer's philosophy of symbolic forms offers a theory of symbols that does not amount to a sign theory or semiology. It sketches out, rather, a dynamic and nonrepresentational framework in which an alternative notion of difference takes centre stage. In order to make the original features of Cassirer's approach stand out, I will compare (...) it with the approach of the perhaps most influential differential thinker of our day, Jacques Derrida. The philosophy of symbolic forms explicitly prefigures a great many of the insights and concerns of poststructuralism. Yet, there are some critical differences. Rather than rejecting the concepts of objectivity, identity, and truth on the premises established by traditional metaphysics, Cassirer chooses to redefine these concepts through a radical conceptual reframing. The result is a doctrine that—in Derridean parlance—neither jumps beyond the oppositions of metaphysics, nor tries to resolve them in a Hegelian synthesis—a doctrine, that is, that even though it appeals to origins, cannot so easily be dismissed as yet another instantiation of the metaphysics of presence. (shrink)

Cassirer’s approach to symbolic mediation differs in some important ways from currently prevailing approaches to meaning and signification such as semiology and its more recent poststructuralist varieties. Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms offers a theory of symbols that does not amount to a sign theory or semiology. It sketches out, rather, a dynamic and nonrepresentational framework in which an alternative notion of difference takes centre stage. In order to make the original features of Cassirer’s approach stand out, I will compare (...) it with the approach of the perhaps most influential differential thinker of our day, Jacques Derrida. The philosophy of symbolic forms explicitly prefigures a great many of the insights and concerns of poststructuralism. Yet, there are some critical differences. Rather than rejecting the concepts of objectivity, identity, and truth on the premises established by traditional metaphysics, Cassirer chooses to redefine these concepts through a radical conceptual reframing. The result is a doctrine that—in Derridean parlance—neither jumps beyond the oppositions of metaphysics, nor tries to resolve them in a Hegelian synthesis—a doctrine, that is, that even though it appeals to origins, cannot so easily be dismissed as yet another instantiation of the metaphysics of presence. (shrink)

This survey of the Supreme Court of Canada’s pivotal anti-discrimination rulings over a 30-year period assesses the extent to which the shifting nature of the grounds approach and the Court’s conceptions of dignity together form part of a gendered system of enunciation at the intersection of autonomy, identity and affect. This article is written as a corrective to some of the author’s early optimism about the possibilities that dignity may offer in the context of constitutional equality rights cases and as (...) a cautionary tale for those who would attempt to use it as a vehicle for rights claiming through the courts. These cases reveal that in the context of Canadian anti-discrimination law, the concept of dignity is most often used to circumscribe agency, limit subjectivity and curtail possibilities for redress by reducing large scale structural problems to the individual in ways that reproduce law’s originary violence. (shrink)

In the interview conducted with Giovanna Borradori, after the attack on the World Trade Centre, in September 2001, Jacques Derrida is pressed to specify connections between his own thinking, Heidegger's deployment of the term ‘event’, and the use of the term ‘event’ to pick out the unprecedented character of that attack. Derrida intimates that the attack is, perhaps, not as unprecedented, not the ‘wholly other’ which it has been framed as being. His reading of that event is to move it (...) from a naive status, as ‘wholly other’, to a philosophically inflected thinking of the political, in the mode of the ‘wholly otherwise’, that is, in a sense to be made out here, whereby politics takes precedence over physics, as the originator of the basic components to be thought, and whereby the future takes precedence over the past, as the site at which what is arrives. The principal aim of this article is to consider how to think this counter-factual ontology, in the mode of a future anteriority. The article will set out Heidegger's move from affirming a fundamental ontology, of Dasein, to an ontology in parentheses (vom Ereignis) but will show how both of these are objectionable, on different counts, to Derrida and to Levinas. Derrida explores the options of supplementing an inadmissible thetic stance, with respect to the future, and therefore with respect to what there is, by developing the notion of the prosthetic, that which stands in for the impossible, timelessly asserted thesis. Levinas invents a new mode of phenomenology which opens a route into this ‘wholly otherwise’. These two strands of enquiry contribute to an analysis displacing these versions of ontology, in favour of a reformulation of political ontology. A subsidiary aim is to clarify Derrida's reservations with respect to the Heideggerian notion of the event. These reservations about Heidegger's usage throw light on his reluctance to deploy the term, within an analysis of the destruction of the World Trade Centre. (shrink)

This article makes the case for including frameworks of media ecology and mobilities research in the shaping of critical robotics research for a human-centered and holistic lens onto robot technologies. The two meta-disciplines, which align in their attention to relational processes of communication and movement, provide useful tools for critically exploring emerging human–robot dimensions and dynamics. Media ecology approaches human-made technologies as media that can shape the way we think, feel, and act. Relatedly, mobilities research highlights various kinds of influential (...) movement and stillness of people, things, and ideas. The emerging field of critical robotics research can benefit from such attention to the ways of thinking, feeling, and moving robotic forms and environments encourage and discourage. Drawing on various studies into robotics, I illustrate those conceptual alignments of media ecology, mobilities, and critical robotics research and point to the value of this interdisciplinary approach to robots as media and robotics as socio-cultural environments. (shrink)

This article develops Derrida's logic of the trace in relation to the concept of time and the revival of various forms of vitalism. Through a critical interrogation of Bergson's notion of duration, I show how the logic of the trace articulates an originary co-implication of time and space, which also entails a co-implication of the animate and the inanimate, the event and the machine. Refuting any vitalist conception of life, the deconstructive logic of the trace allows one to reckon with (...) the philosophical implications of Darwinism. (shrink)

This paper is a response to Derek Attridge's review of my book Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008. Attridge's review was published in Derrida Today Vol. 2, Issue 2 (2009), pp. 271–281, the arguments of which have also been incorporated in Attridge's recent book Reading and Responsibility, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010.

This article explores the relationship between critical distance and the idea of proximity. In times that are often described as ‘global’, ‘24/7’, ‘connected’, ‘networked’ and ‘immersive’, distance seems ever reduced and proximity omnipresent. The contemporary impression of ubiquitous proximity might constitute a threat to the survival of critical distance understood either as a cornerstone of enlightened and humanist critical practice or as a key metaphysical ‘technology’. The resulting ‘crisis of critical distance’ produces the question of how to position oneself with (...) regard to the ‘other’ in a time that lacks distance and privileges proximity? In tracking the ambiguity that surrounds proximity – the desire to be near and the need to maintain a distance – this article rereads some key Heideggerian and Derridean texts in order to attempt a deconstruction of the opposition of distance and proximity at work in the ‘metaphysics of presence’. (shrink)

There is much debate on how to understand Kant’s transcendental idealism in the context of the Critique of Pure Reason. Heidegger’s Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics offers an innovative reading of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, but is often overlooked due to the violence it allegedly does in its interpretation. This paper offers a Heideggerian-inspired phenomenological or ontological interpretation of transcendental idealism by drawing on Heidegger’s interpretation of the Critique. First, I draw a connection between the two uses of (...) noumena in the Critique and, in doing so, draw attention to how the noumena relies on a concept of the proper which gains its meaning from outside the system. I then bring together Kant and Heidegger on the question of the place of truth and the role of the noumena. I claim not only that the ‘noumena’ reveals a ‘shrinking back’ from the ontological release of aletheia; but also, and as a consequence, that the ‘noumena’ does not represent ‘another world,’ but rather is the grounds of the constitution of the phenomenal world itself. Thus, I argue that the noumena is the being of the phenomena, and I do so through looking at objects, faculties, and ethics in the Critique. Finally, I claim that the understanding and reason must both be receptive: even the self-given is ultimately being given. (shrink)

This article explores the relationship between theory and praxis by contrasting three different models of intellectual endeavor: totalizing, particular and decolonial. Attending to the critique that Gayatri Spivak raised against Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze in Can the Subaltern Speak?, this article advocates a dramaturgical reading of texts as a model for political theory to address subaltern agency. It reads such agency in the smile that Pier Paolo Pasolini registers in his 1967 film version of Sophocles’ play, Oedipus Tyrannos. Dramaturgically (...) read, Oedipus reveals another text, the tragic history of a yet insufficiently explored democratic alternative that goes against the established democracy and its complicity with inequality in the continued naturalization of slavery despite its foundation in equality. This subtext demands understanding Oedipus as a political production from the speechless agency of dissident servants, a more subversive aspect of democratic politics. (shrink)

Ethnographic fieldwork is subject to a number of tensions regarding the position of the researcher. Traditionally, these are discussed from a methodological perspective, and draw attention to issues such as ‘objectivity’ of the research and the supposed need for ‘distance’ in the process of knowledge-building. Approaching the issue from a different angle, this article provides a reflection on the positionality of the researcher through an autoethnographical account based on fieldwork with socially excluded groups. Rather than reflecting on the (dis)advantages of (...) proximity for the research process, it explores from a personal stance how this role interacts with other roles in the researcher's life (e.g. being a volunteer, a citizen, an advocate, a moral being). Increased awareness about this intrinsic positionality of the researcher calls for a situated conceptualisation of professionalism and science. The author furthermore explores how an autoethnographical approach relates to educational research and su.. (shrink)

Discourse, Figure signifies an event. I mean this in a variety of ways. There has been a recent event: the publication of an English translation of Jean-François Lyotard’s first major book. Its translation is an event forty years delayed and signifies the closing of a major gap in the translation of Lyotard’s work. Of course, both “signify” and “event” are important words for Lyotard. Discourse, Figure’s goal is to “signify the other of signification” (2011, 13, emphasis his). The question of (...) the representability of events that concerns Lyotard throughout his career originates in Discourse, Figure. I use these two words to guide my review. First I outline the events of the book: its context and its argument. .. (shrink)

Cultural appropriation, as both concept and practice, is a hugely controversial issue. It is of particular importance to the arts because creativity is often found at the intersection of cultural boundaries. Much of the popular discourse on cultural appropriation focusses on the commercial use of indigenous or marginalized cultures by mainstream or dominant cultures. There is, however, growing awareness that cultural appropriation is a complicated issue encompassing cultural exchange in all its forms. Creativity emerging from cultural interdependence is far from (...) a reciprocal exchange. This insight indicates that ethical and political implications are at stake. Consequently, the arts are being examined with greater attention in order to assess these implications. This article will focus on appropriation in literature, and examine the way appropriative strategies are being used to resist dominant cultural standards. These strategies and their implications will be analyzed through the lens of Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of minor literature. (shrink)

Hans Blumenberg is celebrated for demonstrating that metaphors have had a more foundational influence than concepts on European intellectual history. Many acknowledge that his insights might have achieved even greater impact if he had articulated a more explicit theory of metaphor. In 1960 Blumenberg discusses the historical formation of metaphors that have given rise to meaningful discourses on metaphysical abstractions, like God, existence, or Being, but he does not develop a general model of metaphoric language, and his work rarely engages (...) with other contemporary theories of metaphor. During Blumenberg’s lifetime, French and German postwar philosophers rarely cited one another. Yet French hermeneutics, and the work of philosopher Paul Ricoeur in particular, may have strongly influenced Blumenberg’s research group, Poetik und Hermeneutik. This paper is an attempt to recuperate intellectual affinities between Blumenberg and Ricoeur, in order to demonstrate that Ricoeur’s claims about metaphor provide the theoretical background for a fuller appreciation of Blumenberg’s metaphor analyses. (shrink)

This article mounts a defense of Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) from various criticisms made in Russell Sbriglia and Slavoj Žižek’s co-edited anthology Subject Lessons. Along with Sbriglia and Žižek’s own Introduction to the volume, the article responds to the chapters by Todd McGowan, Adrian Johnston, and Molly Anne Rothenberg, the three in which my own version of OOO is most frequently discussed.

This article begins with a treatment of Friedrich Nietzsche’s early essay “On Truth and Lie in the Extra-Moral Sense.” The essay is often read, in the deconstructive tradition, as a showcase example of the impossibility of making a literal philosophical claim: is Nietzsche’s claim that all truth is merely metaphorical itself a true statement, or merely a metaphorical one? The present article claims that this supposed paradox relies on the groundless assumption that all philosophy must ultimately be grounded in some (...) unshakeable literal truth. From here, we turn to Edmund Gettier’s famous critique of the widespread notion of knowledge as “justified true belief.” Expanding on Gettier’s point, it is argued that there can only be “justified untrue belief” or “unjustified true belief,” never a belief that is both justified and true at once. (shrink)

According to Dreyfus and Dreyfus, skilled coping in sport occurs when an athlete reaches an expert level and can execute a sport skill on ‘automatic-pilot’, in a state of ‘flow’. In this paper we reframe phenomenological accounts of sport that try to depict flow-states as part of an athlete’s competency framework. We do so from the point of view of post-structural and post-phenomenological scholars such as Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive work on sovereignty and Jean-Luc Nancy’s ontological vantage of ‘being-with’. This lens (...) pushes us to challenge phenomenological accounts of sport such as skilled coping and flow that, we argue, portray zombie-like performances as optimal. We suggest that such a phenomenological account of sport is not only impoverished as Breivik has argued, but also misses the very promising aspects of sport that can generate the possibility for creative and relational experiences. In making this claim we aim to reorient sport philosophy’s uptake of phenomenology towards a relat... (shrink)

Taiwan is a liminal site of modernity in Asia. It is a modern exemplar as a liberal democracy with a developed economy, but is mostly unrecognized as a nation-state in the international system. In its liminality, however, it traces contours of modern power and their epistemological expression. This paper presents an account of Taiwan as an object of knowledge and representation in instances of scholarship and policy, Taiwanese politics, urban development and art, arguing that the narratives through which Taiwan is (...) understood embed a lived experience as Taiwanese under forms of epistemological domination. The paper then explores Taiwanese responses of co-option and resistance in alternative sites of knowledge, and it concludes that the critical unexamined force in Taiwan’s experience of modernity is violence. (shrink)

Taking ‘the idea of the tragic’ as a point of departure, this article articulates an approach to sociology and social theory from the perspective of a ‘tragic vision’. In arguing for the relevance of ‘tragic thought’ for the analysis of contemporary crises, it suggests that ‘the tragic’ must be understood as a reflection of the long tail of the formation of a particular secular, modern ‘ethico-onto-epistemology’. In making this case, the article provides an ‘interpretive genealogy’ of tragic ethics in social (...) thought, detailing the thought of Lucien Goldmann and Georg Lukács, and putting it in dialogue with contemporary posthumanist theory. It concludes by drawing on recent debates in the latter involving the place of ‘critique’ in contemporary social science, teasing out some implications for thinking about individual action and responsibility. (shrink)

We present a critical appraisal of the impact of the Internet upon processes of democratization and de-democratization in contemporary society. We review accounts of `the information revolution' as these have become polarized into mutually exclusive rhetorics of future cosmopolitan or citadellian e-topias. We question the Manichean assumptions common to both rhetorics: particularly the fetishism of information technology as an intrinsically democratizing or de-democratizing force on societies. In opposition to this new technological fetishism we focus upon Internet historicity; the human/machine nexus; (...) Internet policing and appropriation presenting a different story of the Net, emphasizing contingent, indeterminate and negotiable characteristics of sociotechnical systems, preparing for a more radical critique of existing theories of `global technological citizenship'. Refiguring `culture' as technopoiesis, we argue that an alternative approach to global civil society minimally presupposes a cultural sociology of the Internet: approaching information technologies as the product of specific sociocultural practices and as historical sites of ethico-political transformation and reflexive self-figuration. (shrink)

We present a critical appraisal of the impact of the Internet (and related information technologies) upon processes of democratization and de-democratization in contemporary society. We review accounts of `the information revolution' as these have become polarized into mutually exclusive rhetorics of future cosmopolitan or citadellian e-topias. We question the Manichean assumptions common to both rhetorics: particularly the fetishism of information technology as an intrinsically democratizing or de-democratizing force on societies. In opposition to this new technological fetishism we focus upon (1) (...) Internet historicity; (2) the human/machine nexus; (3) Internet policing and appropriation presenting a different story of the Net, emphasizing contingent, indeterminate and negotiable characteristics of sociotechnical systems, preparing for a more radical critique of existing theories of `global technological citizenship'. Refiguring `culture' as technopoiesis, we argue that an alternative approach to global civil society minimally presupposes a cultural sociology of the Internet: approaching information technologies as the product of specific sociocultural practices and as historical sites of ethico-political transformation and reflexive self-figuration. (shrink)

While fidelity is a crucial aspect of Jacques Derrida’s thinking as it pertains to issues of faith, ethics, and responsibility, this key position in deconstructionist discourse has hardly yet been brought to light. Less still have the biopolitical resonances of Derrida’s work, with its careful attention to the terms and stakes of life particularly in his later writing, been considered as a deconstructionist practice of fidelity and infidelity in its own right. In pursuing these threads, this essay argues that thinking (...) a deconstructionist ethics through fidelity and biopolitics makes possible the crafting of a new philosophical weave for catching our responsibilities to others – to the very otherness of life itself – that Derridean hospitality opens up. Taken together in this way, a deconstructionist fidelity to life otherwise, to a biopolitics to come, makes possible an infidelity to political order as we know it that explodes the limitations of biopolitical theory. In squinting, blinking, tearing up, and listening, the borders of life are blurred in an ambivalent ethics of a transness within which life itself is made to waver and arrive anew. (shrink)

Though currently marginalised in Western philosophy, tenth-century Arabic philosopher Abu Nasr Alfarabi is one of the most important thinkers of the medieval era. In fact, he was known as the ‘second teacher’ (after Aristotle) to philosophers such as Avicenna and Averroes. As this epithet suggests, Alfarabi and his successors engaged in a critical and creative dialogue with thinkers from other historical traditions, including that of the Ancient Greeks, although the creativity of his part is often marginalised as well. In this (...) article, I offer a new interpretation of Alfarabi’s sweeping volume, The Principles of the Opinions of the Virtuous Community. My focus is the materialism that overflows Alfarabi’s account of soul in general and the imaginative power in particular. The political conclusion of this account is that Virtuous Community does not directly present Alfarabi’s ideal ruler or community. Instead, it offers a materialist critique that prefigures critical theory and post-structuralism and thereby provides guidelines for how to more effectively engage monotheistic communities in the pursuit of social justice – including along the axes of race, gender and sexual orientation. (shrink)

Current advances in research, development and application of artificial intelligence systems have yielded a far-reaching discourse on AI ethics. In consequence, a number of ethics guidelines have been released in recent years. These guidelines comprise normative principles and recommendations aimed to harness the “disruptive” potentials of new AI technologies. Designed as a semi-systematic evaluation, this paper analyzes and compares 22 guidelines, highlighting overlaps but also omissions. As a result, I give a detailed overview of the field of AI ethics. Finally, (...) I also examine to what extent the respective ethical principles and values are implemented in the practice of research, development and application of AI systems—and how the effectiveness in the demands of AI ethics can be improved. (shrink)

Derrida argued at great length early on in his career that texts live on in the absence of their author. The question remains, however, of precisely how this survival takes place. In this paper I argue that the life of Derrida’s own œuvre is sustained through his particular practice of self‐inheritance. I justify this claim by focusing on one moment in the text Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, in which Derrida inherits from himself through self‐citation. In citing himself while at (...) the same time modifying his citation, Derrida sets into motion a deconstruction of his own text that he does not seem to anticipate. It is this movement of deconstruction that enables Derrida’s text to live on. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:In this paper I argue that Derrida's writings on education contain a profound rethinking of professorial authority. I first outline the sources of professorial authority and describe how they were traditionally conceived in France at the time when Derrida was working. I then show how Derrida challenges and transforms these sources, focusing in particular on a new relation to knowledge, a new relation to the state, and a new understanding of charisma that emerge from his work.

The author argues that Thomas Hobbes anticipates a set of questions about meaning and semantic order that come to fuller expression in the 20th century, in the writings of W.V.O. Quine, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Donald Davidson, Jacques Derrida, and Richard Rorty. Despite their different points of departure, these 20th-century writers pose a number of profound questions about the conditions for the stability of meaning, and about the conditions that govern the use of the term “language” itself. Though the more recent debate (...) benefits from a set of philosophical tools unavailable in the seventeenth century, the author further argues that Hobbes performs a number of maneuvers in his texts from which his 20th-century successors would profit. (shrink)

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

. The time of the real: When disease is ‘actual’. Cultural Values: Vol. 2, No. 2-3, pp. 243-260.

This paper is concerned with the representation in academic journal articles and textbooks of an organisation theory. In the case of Burns’ and Stalker’s book The Management of Innovation (1961,1966), summaries of the text by other scholars have arguably differed from the original authors and among themselves in their emphases. Similar points have been made about representations of other theorists such as Kurt Lewin and, perhaps most famously, Adam Smith. They all raise issues about the meanings of texts and where (...) such meanings lie: with the author, the reader, the text itself or perhaps some combination of these. They also raise questions about whether texts can be shown to have definitive meanings; and if not, whether there are any criteria for adjudicating on the validity of varied interpretations. Representations by textbook writers are analysed and questions about the meaning of texts raised by ‘structuralist’ and ‘deconstructionist’ writers examined. Their writings beg certain questions about textual representations. Perhaps the most extreme of these views is Barthes’ concept of the ‘death of the author’. Like Barthes, Derrida argues, for the reasons mentioned above, that there is no underlying, final decipherable meaning in a text, but gives more credence to the role of the author, accepting the validity of the author’s consciousness and intentions as one of the sources of meaning in texts. There are also other sources: the situatedness and historical context of the text and the text itself. Derrida’s concept of ‘différance’ requires the reader to engage in an analysis of the text which offers limitless possibilities for interpretation and a renunciation of the certainty of truth, because the meaning of a text may extend beyond the limits of our knowledge at any one time. His notion of the ‘logic of supplementarity’ is a further means to analyse texts, as it also disprivileges obvious or overt meanings in texts by overturning hierarchy in oppositions and questioning univocal definitions of meaning. Questions inspired by these and other writers give rise to an exploration of who is speaking in the text; which subject matter is represented as central and which as marginal; binary oppositions within the text and intertextual connections. The paper then begins the more ambitious task of answering the broader question as to whether it can be shown that there are more and less ‘representative’ or ‘stronger’ interpretations of a text. (shrink)

Don't look for the meaning; look for the use. A few years back the Yale deconstructionist Paul de Man wasposthumously discovered to have written repeatedly for a Belgiancollaborationist journal during the Nazi occupation. So far as I amaware, de Man in his American period espoused no particular politics. Indeed, the Left frequently regarded this as a cause for complaint, since most of them thought of de Man and deconstruction as being their natural allies.

The relation between truth and violence is explored through the logic of sacrifice presented in the Book of Job. Job, as an arbitrary sacrificial victim, learns the truth of the violence perpetrated against him. Such violence is also shown to be constitutive of Western reasoning, including its practices of the truth.

Postcolonial theory has enjoyed wide influence in the humanities but it has left sociology comparatively unscathed. Does this mean that postcolonial theory is not relevant to sociology? Focusing upon social theory and historical sociology in particular, this article considers if and how postcolonial theory in the humanities might be imported into North American sociology. It argues that postcolonial theory offers a substantial critique of sociology because it alerts us to sociology’s tendency to analytically bifurcate social relations. The article also suggests (...) that a postcolonial sociology can overcome these problems by incorporating relational social theories to give new accounts of modernity. Rather than simply studying non-Western postcolonial societies or only examining colonialism, this approach insists upon the interactional constitution of social units, processes, and practices across space. To illustrate, the article draws upon relational theories (actor-network theory and field theory) to offer postcolonial accounts of two conventional research areas in historical sociology: the industrial revolution in England and the French Revolution. (shrink)

Constellations, Volume 28, Issue 4, Page 570-587, December 2021.

Studies of Europe and European identity today are dominated by the methods of the social sciences. Europe is understood as a geographical region of a global totality, and treated in political-economic terms; and European identity is largely investigated through social surveys. This paper explores the possibility of a philosophical contribution to understanding Europe: an understanding based on the idea that Europe is itself a distinctively philosophical phenomenon, and that its modern geopolitical condition has an irreducibly geophilosophical significance.

Readings of Derrida’s work on law and justice have tended to stress the distinction between them. This stress is complicated by Derrida’s own claim that it is not ‘a true distinction’. In this essay I argue that ordinary experiences of the inadequacy of existing laws do indeed imply a claim about what would be more just, but that this claim only makes sense insofar as one can appeal to another more adequate law. Exploring how Derrida negotiates a subtle path between (...) classical Platonism and classical conventionalism about justice, the attempt is made to take seriously Derrida’s aim to affirm the idea of a ‘mystical’ foundation of the authority of laws by taking ‘the use of the word “mystical” in what I venture to call a rather Wittgensteinian direction’. (shrink)

This paper explores the challenges facing educators in a time when modern technology, and especially modern social technology, has an increasingly powerful hold on our lives. The educational challenge does not primarily concern questions concerning the use of technology in the classroom, or as part of the learning environment, but a changeover in the whole social environment that marks our time. Taking guidance from Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Dewey and Nietzsche, the essay explores what we want the education of children to achieve, (...) and how, if at all, this can be achieved in an age of modern social technology. The central argument is that the most basic educational goal of human flourishing cannot be achieved today as long as the main criteria of “best practice” in the classroom foreground pupil enjoyment rather than endurance of suffering. The paradox is that any call for the latter is now largely heard in a way cultivated by the culture of the former: namely, poorly and vulgarly, associated only with bullying authoritarianism, rather than the devoted care of teachers who want to awaken their pupils to self-responsibility. (shrink)

In 1971, answering a question concerning one of the main motifs of his works, Derrida declared that ‘if there were a definition of différance, it would be precisely the limit, the interruption, the destruction of the Hegelian “relève” [i.e. Aufhebung] wherever it operates’. It is apparent that such an approach to Hegel is indebted to Heidegger's program of a ‘destruction’ (Destruktion) of the history of ontology. But what does Derrida's reading of Hegel owe to Heidegger exactly? In this paper, I (...) investigate this question and the genesis of Derrida's reading of Hegel more generally by looking into the interpretation which can be found in the 1964–65 lectures about Heidegger: The Question of Being and History. In the process of interpreting Heidegger, Derrida produces extensive comments about Hegel which document the early elaboration of his perception of the author of the Phenomenology of Spirit. Here, I focus on Hegel's conception of experience, which Derrida compares to Heidegger's understanding of the historicity of Dasein. As will become clear, however, this question involves the way Derrida presents the relationship between the two thinkers throughout these lectures. Specifically, I show that Derrida significantly bases his account of Heidegger's ‘destruction’ of Hegel's philosophy on the former's interpretation of the latter's concept of experience. By examining such an interpretation, I intend to challenge the way Derrida portrays Hegel and I argue as a result that it is questionable whether Heidegger's departure from Hegel can be taken to be as ‘radical’ as Derrida makes it seem. (shrink)