Kojève’s lectures on Phenomenology of Spirit generated two ideas – otherness is something threatening that must be overcome and one’s relationships with others are inexorably violent – that fundamentally shaped the way many exponents of early French phenomenology regarded intersubjectivity. This essay shows how Beauvoir’s appropriation of Hegel in The Ethics of Ambiguity offers a perspective on intersubjectivity that defies the other-conquering Cartesian hero implied by Kojève and celebrated in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. Beauvoir appreciates the degree to which Hegel (...) makes subjectivity indebted to otherness. Like Hegel, she defines oppression as the failure to recognise the otherness of the other. Beauvoir shares Hegel’s optimism that individuals can sublate their naïve solipsism. She associates reciprocal recognition between subjects with ethical freedom, which she distinguishes from Sartre’s concept of freedom. From the analysis of ethical freedom it is concluded that both conflict and friendship are side-effects of the essential bond between subjects and their mutual need for one another. The Hegel-inspired hopefulness at the core of The Ethics of Ambiguity is further demonstrated by Beauvoir’s rejection of the absurd in favour of ambiguity, her positive rendering of failure, her appeal to outrageousness, and focus on the joy of existence. (shrink)

Focusing particularly on the role of the clock in social life, this article explores the conventions we use to “tell the time.” I argue that although clock time generally appears to be an all-encompassing tool for social coordination, it is actually failing to coordinate us with some of the most pressing ecological changes currently taking place. Utilizing philosophical approaches to performativity to explore what might be going wrong, I then draw on Derrida’s and Haraway’s understandings of social change in order (...) to suggest a fairly unconventional, but perhaps more accurate, mode of reckoning time in the context of climate change, resource depletion, and mass extinctions. (shrink)

This essay sounds out Derrida's plurivocal term of frequencies as well as Nancy's understanding of resonance to argue that ghosts live in the ear. Heeding how the different nuances of this term bear on Derrida's reading of Hamlet, it not only seeks to understand the significance of the ghost's rhythmic appearance:disappearance in Shakespeare's play, but indeed, how it comes to frequent Derrida's Specters of Marx.

Early on in Specters of Marx, the first sentence in Exordium reads: ‘Someone, you or me, comes forward and says: I would like to learn to live finally’. In the last paragraph of the last chapter, Derrida gives the injunction: ‘If he loves justice at least, the “scholar” of the future, the “intellectual” of tomorrow should learn it and from the ghost’. The ghost is the gift Derrida leaves us, yet, what can ghosts teach us about justice and how may (...) we (dare we) learn from them? Derrida invokes Levinas's name for the only time in Specters of Marx, with the line ‘The relation to others – that is to say, justice, writes Levinas’. From ‘Violence and Metaphysics’ to ‘At This Very Moment in This Work Here I Am’, the spectral relation between Derrida and Levinas already performs spectral justice. How do we say ‘J'accepte’ to spectral justice – justice that we cannot rightly possess? The figure and logic of the ghost serve not merely rhetorical purposes but, in its non-presence and presence, the ghost becomes the trace of the justice that we can neither own nor disown, but need to learn to live with, even if, in politics and in life, the fear of ghosts remains. (shrink)

How much of philosophical, scientific, and political thought is caught up with the idea of continuity? What if it were otherwise? This paper experiments with the disruption of continuity. The reader is invited to participate in a performance of spacetime (re)configurings that are more akin to how electrons experience the world than any journey narrated though rhetorical forms that presume actors move along trajectories across a stage of spacetime (often called history). The electron is here invoked as our host, an (...) interesting body to inhabit (not in order to inspire contemplation of flat-footed analogies between ‘macro’ and ‘micro’ worlds, concepts that already presume a given spatial scale), but a way of thinking with and through dis/continuity – a dis/orienting experience of the dis/jointedness of time and space, entanglements of here and there, now and then, that is, a ghostly sense of dis/continuity, a quantum dis/continuity. There is no overarching sense of temporality, of continuity, in place. Each scene diffracts various temporalities within and across the field of spacetimemattering. Scenes never rest, but are reconfigured within, dispersed across, and threaded through one another. The hope is that what comes across in this dis/jointed movement is a felt sense of différance, of intra-activity, of agential separability – differentiatings that cut together/apart – that is the hauntological nature of quantum entanglements. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that we need to re-address the issue of freedom as it relates to democracy and critical practice. My argument is drawn out of Derrida's deconstructive reading of Jean-Luc Nancy's The Experience of Freedom which proposes freedom in ontological terms as an experience of indeterminate openness that must be thought prior to any freedom of the self. I show how Derrida's reading of Nancy's text is itself a re-enactment of the freedom that Derrida finds wanting in (...) Nancy's text, but which, by that very fact, affirms the power of critique in its capacity to think freely. The urgency of the thought of freedom is not something that can be avoided, but is itself the fact of critique in its thinking of democracy as a possibility, as something that might come about, as distinct from an already accomplished idea. To think in this way is, I argue, a matter of virtue, that is, of being free, as the virtue of critique and its capacity to act decisively, thereby bringing something forth by risking what it already is, in the absolute possibility of it not being. (shrink)

In Specters of Marx, Derrida proposes a return to the spirit of Marxism as a way of dealing with the 'repoliticization' of contemporary realities. I suggest that Derrida's rediscovery of Marx allows one to map out what I call the end(s) of postmodernism, that is to say, the point(s) where the cultural free-play characteristic of the postmodern mood is confronted with renewed questions of politics, ideology and technology. Through a micro-reading of Derrida's text, two possible end(s) of postmodernism are identified. (...) One is a 'retro-(post)modernist' discourse which turns liberal and provides the vision of a 'New International' as an end result. The other is a '(post)-postmodern' approach which finds a way of tackling politics and ideology by rediscovering a mode of situationist engagement. By investigating the 'specters' of postmodernism through Derrida's recent work, this paper contributes to the debate over what type of theoretical formations may emerge after postmodernism. Key Words: culture • deconstruction • Derrida • détournement • ideology • Marx • the New International • postmodernism • situationism. (shrink)

: This paper addresses the question of whether Derrida's "hauntology," as developed in Specters of Marx and related texts, can be anything more than yet another repetition of a specifically male preoccupation with the Father inscribed on the bodies of women, in this case the always absent daughter. A careful reading suggests that Derrida, and playwright fathers of daughters such as Shakespeare and August Wilson, may be aware of the paradoxes of their situation.

: Drawing on Adriana Cavarero's account of natality, Guenther argues that Martin Heidegger overlooks the distinct ontological and ethical significance of birth as a limit that orients one toward an other who resists appropriation, even while handing down a heritage of possibilities that one can—and must—make one's own. Guenther calls this structure of natality Being-from-others, modifying Heidegger's language of inheritance to suggest an ethical understanding of existence as the gift of the other.

This article considers sociocultural identity and identification in the work of Jacques Derrida. Though Derrida’s philosophy is often presented as a source of inspiration for identity politics, Derrida’s precise position on identity is far from evident. This discussion will unpack his account of identity through a dialogue with the work of Amartya Sen, a Nobel laureate in economics and moral philosopher, known for his capabilities approach. In spite of their philosophical differences, I propose that Sen and Derrida share strikingly similar (...) views about identity. Descriptively, they both understand sociocultural identity as inherently hybrid, anti-essentialist and plural. Sen’s argument for this is based on empirical and historical examples, while Derrida’s focuses on the relationship between cultural identity and the other. Their shared understanding of identity is reflected in a similar normative argument: we should consciously select our identities, so as to protect the plural nature of identities. In the case of Sen, this is accomplished through reason. Derrida takes a broader understanding of this, based on his concept of inheritance. I propose that inheritance needs to be interpreted as involving active and critical deliberation on identity and that this is an ethical dimension of Derrida’s work. I conclude by pointing to the potential for future dialogue between Sen and Derrida, the need to reflect further on the normative aspects of inheritance and the potential for their work to inform identity politics. (shrink)

Because the pandemic has kept the world busy in the last two years, a revival of Derrida's writings on biology is an urgent prerequisite today. The tsunamic invasion of the Coronavirus or Covid-19 pandemic took more than two million lives and thousands are still being tested positive as I write. The speed of the virus and the seeming human inability to stop its spread necessitates a study on the relationship between Covid-19 and Derrida's deconstructive philosophy. Hence the portmanteau Coviderrida – (...) inspired by Hélène Cixous’ ‘ derridevilishly’ – attempts to demonstrate how the pathogen operates as an event or possibility to which Derrida's neologisms ‘différance’, ‘supplement’, ‘trace’, ‘archi-writing’, and ‘text’ testify. The main concern of this paper is to restore the deconstructive logic that Derrida advocates to restructure the relationship between life and death in his 1975-6 seminar La vie la mort, and reshape our notion of human survival in his 2001 interview with Giovanna Borradori, ‘Autoimmunity’. These two texts redefine the political and religious questions, which are ‘left hanging, uncertain, still in movement and therefore, yet “to come”’. (shrink)

As they make their way through Louis Althusser’s and Jacques Derrida’s texts, readers will cross innumerable curtains – ‘the words and things’, as Derrida says, as many fabrics of traces. These curtains open onto a multiplicity of scenes and mises en scène, performances, roles, rituals, actors, plays – thus unfolding the space of a certain theatricality. This essay traces Althusser’s and Derrida’s respective deployments of the theatrical motif. In his theoretical writings, Althusser’s theatrical dispositive aims to designate the practical and (...) material dimension of the scenes of ideology, materially enacted through roleplays, performances, acts, or discourses. At the horizon: a scientific discourse on ideology or, later, a strategic intervention in the class struggle. This scientific and/or strategic orientation echoes Althusser’s definition of materialism: ‘no more storytelling’. But Derrida’s ‘closure of representation’ reminds us that there’s no presence – even the most ‘material’ – no ‘truth’ or ‘correctness’ – in theoretical or strategic terms – without effects of re-presentation, differential repetition, narrative reconstruction: theatricality and materiality suppose a force of resistance, a secret heterogeneity, curtain foldings. Hence the irreducible necessity of reading, storytelling, transformative interpretation. What are the implications for thinking inheritance and debt – for example, the one binding Althusser and Derrida, and us to them? (shrink)

Since the first lockdown in March 2020, time seems to have slowed to a continuous present tense. The Greek language has three words to express different experiences of time: aion, chronos and kairos. If aion is the boundless and limbo-like time of eternity, chronos represents chronological, sequential, and linear time. Kairos, however, signifies the rupture of ordinary time with the opportune moment, epiphany and redemption, revolution, and most broadly, crisis and emergency. This paper argues that the pandemic is impacting how (...) individuals perceive time in two ways: first, as a distortion of time in which individuals are caught between linear time (chronos) and rupture (kairos) invoking the state of emergency and second, as an extended present that blurs the passing of chronological time with its seeming eternity (aion). As a result of the perceived suspension of ordinary time, temporal understandings of the future are postponed, while the past hovers like a ghost over the present. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to provide a philosophical conceptual framework to understand the theoretical roots and political implications of the interpretations of Plato’s work in Jaeger’s Third Humanism and Krieck’s völkisch-racist pedagogy and anthropology. This article will seek to characterize, as figures of localitas, their conceptions of the individual, community, corporeality, identity, and the State that both authors developed departing from Platonic political philosophy. My main hypothesis is that Jaeger’s and Krieck’s interpretations of Platonic paideía shared several core-elements (...) based on a modern conception of State sovereignty and human will, whose fundamental ground is the subjectivist-technical metaphysics. The “production” of a human type (spiritual and/or racial) and a unitary State political community appears in both authors mediated by a theory of political education, that I define as «State typohumanism», that sought its sustenance in Plato’s political philosophy, mainly by means of a distorted understanding of the notions of týpos and ē̂thos, and that, I argue, played a key role in the intellectual legitimization of völkisch-racism. This would be broadly translated into a programmatic and literal understanding of the Platonic Republic which assumes that the inherent function of any State is to produce subjectivities based on national identities grounded on homogeneous characteristics. In these varied characterizations similar appropriations of humanitas have been expressed both in Jaeger and in Krieck. (shrink)

An increasing number of people worldwide are living with chronic conditions that have an aspect of bodily fragility as part of the condition or as an effect of treatment. In this article, I explore the temporal experience of bodily fragility and the particularities of consciousness states among people with the chronic condition osteogenesis imperfecta (OI) in Denmark. My aim is threefold. First, my goal is to give an insight into life with OI, a rare and rarely studied condition. Second, I (...) shed light on bodily fragility, a theme that lives in the shadows of other analytical foci in anthropology. Third, I will contribute to the anthropological understanding of the connection among body, physical environment, and consciousness. I argue that the lifeworlds of people with OI are haunted by mental and bodily memories and fearful future scenarios, which makes the past and the future collapse into the present. (shrink)

This thought piece dealing with the Covid-19 ‘crisis’ was written – in the form of a diary that runs from February to July 2020 – for a special issue of Derrida Today entitled ‘Fire, Flood, Pestilence and Protest’, edited by Nicole Anderson, and published in November 2020. The piece deals with matters of biopolitics, telecommunication, death and mourning through Derrida and Agamben, and interrogates the eventness of what is called an ‘event’.

One of the starting points of Derrida’s deconstruction is the idea that metaphysics is dominated by an ontological primacy of the present. It is well known that Derrida took up this thesis of the ‘...

This paper argues that Jacques Derrida provides a compelling rebuttal to a secularism that seeks to exclude religion from the public sphere. Political theorists such as Mark Lilla claim that religion is a source of violence, and so they conclude that religion and politics should be strictly separated. In my reading, Derrida’s work entails that a secularism of this kind is both impossible (because religion remains influential in the wake of secularization) and unnecessary (because religious traditions are diverse and multivalent). (...) Some attempt to contain the disruptive force of religion by excluding it from the public sphere, but Derrida argues that one may endure instability for the sake of something more important than safety. Although Derrida admits that religion is dangerous, he demonstrates that it is nevertheless an indispensable resource for political reflection. (shrink)

This paper takes as its starting point the observation of quasi-religious, ‘cultural’ characteristics in the dominant discourse of Western liberal democracy, and of ‘ideological’ characteristics in the discourse of Islamism – noting that both discourses rely, to some extent, upon the notion of rationality. Having provided working definitions of rationality, ideology, and culture, it goes on to argue that culture and ideology may be viewed as discursive macro-strategies which are related to the degree of power enjoyed by a given social (...) system at particular historical moments in time: the former being associated with the consolidation of established power and the latter with a bid to acquire power. It suggests that the general function of cultural and ideological strategies is to mask the underlying irrationalities of free-market democracy and Islamism, respectively, and concludes by considering some of the implications of this view in the context of globalization and the ‘war on terror’. (shrink)

This paper is an attempt to stage some questions concerning methodology and education, inspired by Ophelia in Shakespeare's Hamlet and by Jacques Derrida's poetic philosophical oeuvres. What are at stake are the long traditions of preferences of sanity over madness, friend over enemy, male over female and of clean, unambiguous univocal language over the poetic. I will argue that educators will have an extra responsibility towards challenging the ancient tradition of phallogocentrism, both in our teaching and in our research.

In times of a felt need to justify the value of the humanities, the need to revisit and re-establish the public relevance of the discipline of history cannot come as a surprise. On the following pages I will argue that this need is unappeasable by scholarly proposals. The much desired revitalization of historical writing lies instead in reconciling ourselves with the dual meaning of the word history, in exploring the necessary interconnection between history understood as the course of events and (...) as historical writing. Despite the general tendency of the last decades to forbid philosophizing about history in the former sense (at least in departments of history and philosophy), I think that to a certain extent we already do so without succumbing to substantive thought. We already have the sprouts of a speculative although only quasi-substantive philosophy of history that nevertheless takes seriously the postwar criticism of the substantive enterprise. In this essay I will first try to outline this quasi-substantive philosophy of history that attests to the historical sensibility of our times; and second, I will try to outline its consequences regarding history as historical writing. Finally, in place of a conclusion I will suggest that historical writing is not as much a contribution to public agendas as it is the very arena in which public life is at stake. (shrink)

Each is for the other the middle term, through which each mediates itself with itself and unites with itself; and each is for itself, and for the other, an immediate being on its own account, which at the same time is such only through this mediation. They recognize themselves as mutually recognizing one another. Scholars seeking an account of recognition will be familiar with the seminal section on lordship and bondage in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. In these passages we learn (...) that the dialectic of mutual recognition is the key to actualized self-consciousness, that moment in which the “I” transcends its immanence in the life process to become a self-reflective subject, actively superseding the.. (shrink)

This article attempts to critically challenge Richard Rorty's view that the work of Jacques Derrida has no political utility. For Rorty, Derrida is a ‘private ironist’ whose quest for personal perfection renders him ineffectual as a ‘public liberal’. This view, I contend, is the consequence of looking at Derrida from the perspective of critics, such as Simon Critchley, who suggest that there is a strong ethico‐political strain in deconstruction on the basis of its Levinasian import. But to ally Derrida too (...) closely with Levinas, I maintain, runs the risk of obfuscating the rich and powerful insights regarding the nature of justice and democracy which Derrida has been developing for some time now. By showing how the theme of justice in Derrida differs from that encountered in Levinas, it becomes possible for us to show how Derrida's political intuitions bear remarkable and surprising similarity to those forged by Rorty. Derrida, on this reading, appears as a Utopian liberal in the pragmatic mode, one for whom progress in the political sphere is engendered by attending to the suffering of those about us and not (pace Marx, Althusser, and Foucault) by way of large‐scale revolution. The notion that solidarity is ultimately founded on our mutual susceptibility to suffering, I argue finally, is what serves to link Rorty's idea of a ‘liberal utopia’ to Derrida's ‘new international’, a comparison which significantly undermines the contention that the latter is useful for exclusively private purposes. (shrink)

The “end of history” by Fukuyama is mainly based on Hegel’s treatise of the end of history and Kojeve’s corresponding interpretation. But Hegel’s “end of history” is a purely philosophical question, i.e., an ontological premise that must be fulfilled to complete “absolute knowledge.” When Kojeve further demonstrates its “universal and homogeneous state,” Fukuyama extends it into a political view: The victory of the Western system of freedom and democracy marks the end of the development of human history and Marxist theory (...) and practice. This is a misunderstanding of Hegel. Marx analyzes, scientifically, the historical limitation of Western capitalism and maintains, by way of a kind of revolutionary teleology, the expectation of and belief in human liberation, which is the highest historical goal. His philosophy of history is hence characterized by theoretical elements from both historical scientificalness and historical teleology. (shrink)

In this article I attempt to engage with Charlotte Brontë as both a teacher and a philosopher. In her depiction of two impoverished gentlewomen as teachers Brontë is, as is often pointed out, drawing on her own history, but she is also exploring two conflicting contemporary philosophic notions: the romantic ideal and the ideal of rationality, as they are played out in the lives of women. Brontë uses the plot device of taking her teachers into new environments, from where as (...) strangers they can report to the reader on the conditions they experience. But the teachers are also strangers in the teaching environments of their employment and, moreover, as individuals are stripped of all familial and social support. While her pedagogic strategies may not be appealing to twentieth century tastes, Brontë and her creations still have something to say about the issues, choices and constraints faced by young and inexperienced teachers, and the available subject-positions teachers may construct for themselves as they grapple with their own foreignness in their classrooms or other teaching situations. (shrink)

In her paper “Creative Evolution and the Creation of Man,” one of the arguments Colebrook puts forth is that as a means of challenging the mechanistic and teleological conception of Darwinian evolution, creative evolution takes an antihumanist position by positing that there is an absence of end, thus “man” is able to create his own end. But in taking this position, Colebrook points out that creative evolution re-establishes the humanistic discourse on the human that it was attempting to challenge. To (...) elucidate Colebrook's argument, this paper draws on the work of Derrida to “play” with the notion of style in order to reflect on the ways in which philosophical deductive argumentation and reasoning constitute and perpetuate humanist and metaphysical discourses on the human, and the ends of “man.”. (shrink)

Deconstruction occupies an “eccentric” place in the varied field of biopolitics, as it radicalizes the indissoluble knot that binds life to power. On the basis of Foucauldian analysis, Derrida reflects on the “deviation” of biopolitics, which turns into bio-thanato-politics, that is to say, politics over life (bios) and death (thanatos). Life and death are not opposite, rather, they are inseparable, as one has inscribed the other within itself. Derrida’s bio-thanato-politics, as a deconstruction of the concept of life and its relationship (...) with the power, which is always the power of life and death, is not a different declination of biopolitics, but its radicalization. Beyond the biopolitical alternative between a power over life and a power of life, Derrida thinks a bio-thanato-politics, namely, a politics of the survival. Surviving well together, indeed, is the essential character of his democracy to-come. (shrink)

Infusing contemporary critical terrorism studies (CTS) with concepts and methodologies from philosophy and critical theory via a Baradian posthumanist agential realist perspective and (counter)terrorist cases and vignettes, this chapter argues for a retheorisation of (counter)terrorism. It does so, firstly, by reconceptualising terrorism and counterterrorism as complex assemblages consisting not only of discursive-material components – an entanglement now largely accepted within CTS and critical security studies (CSS) – but also of affective layers and more-than-human phenomena. Secondly, by analysing European urban (counter)terrorist (...) cases from the UK, Germany, France, and Spain, together with these cases’ surprising spacetime-jumping interlinkages underwriting what we here conceptualise as queer(ing) spacetimematterings, this chapter zooms in on the intra-actions taking place between human and more-than-human agential phenomena and their risk-managed urban environments. Lastly, extra analytical attention is paid to how, in this neoliberal day and age – here rephrased as control society-driven ‘situationscaping times’ – very specific macro- and micropolitical violence-preventing measures and efforts are employed in the fight against various manifestations of urban terror and terrorism. (shrink)

This essay deploys the theoretical frames of inheritance and echography to recover and redefine the meaning, for environmental philosophy, of Martin Heidegger’s storied hut in the Black Forest in Germany, where large portions of Being and Time and other major texts were written. Drawing on the work of Jacques Derrida, Stanley Cavell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and others, the essay insists that a deconstructive reading is crucial to recovering and sustaining the significance for environmental philosophy of Heidegger’s work, a reading quite (...) different from those found in Deep Ecology. In that context, the essay transforms the hut into a kind of spectral presence that is put into dialogue with other, later “echoes”: the poetry of Paul Celan, the work of experimental film-maker and artist James Benning, and the author’s own current art project, focused on a clearcut site in the mountains of Colorado. (shrink)

This article develops a view of collective memory as a rhetorical practice with an intimate connection to death. Drawing on the philosophy of Jacques Derrida, I argue that memory is inhabited by death – the loss of a living presence which, nonetheless, is the very condition for recollection and communication. Memory can never retrieve presence, for time is discontinuous, disjointed rather than linear. Instead, memory is presented as an ‘impossible gift’, a form of inheritance that charges us to remember anew. (...) These motifs, I argue, are central in epideictic rhetoric which, by dwelling on the present, invites collective recognition and affirmation concerning what fundamentally is. In the genre of the eulogy, especially, the event of death is encountered by reference to the fracturing of time, the experience of the gift, and the question of inheritance. Eulogy rhetoric, I suggest, is a powerful mode of collective memory that captures much of how we remember. (shrink)

This article traces the radical devaluation of the phantasm throughout Western civilization. With the help of Nietzsche’s critical perspective, I develop a notion of hystery as the series of collective traumas repeated in each individual’s growth, whereby the phantasm changes value from psychosomatic interface, to evil incarnate, to disease of learning. Beginning with the Classical episteme represented by Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics, then moving up through the Christian era, I focus primarily on Enlightenment thinkers such as Hobbes and Bacon, (...) who represent the last nail in the imagination’s coffin. The next section examines Nietzsche’s rediscovery of the phantasm and the theoretical contributions of post-structuralism that follow in Nietzsche’s wake. Juxtaposing Bataille and Deleuze, I look at Deleuze’s early enthusiasm and ultimate betrayal of the phantasm, and I posit Bataille’s emphasis on the affective force of the mythological phantasm as an insurrection to reclaim our experience and life along with it. The article ends with speculation, offering Bruno’s art of memory as an ontic and epistemic alternative to dominant Western hystery, other pasts opening to other possible futures, an ungrounding that paradoxically leads to a restoration of the human house in a re-enchanted cosmos. (shrink)

Constellations, Volume 28, Issue 3, Page 350-367, September 2021.

The technologies used to govern performance at universities consist of monitoring and comparative instruments. They are designed to affect and direct behaviour. In these academic environments of exposure, comparison and self-monitoring are deeply entangled with a vulnerable affective economy. This article explores how these data may affect our moods and how academic value could be curated by other means and with care. Drawing on feminist new materialist thinking and speculative feminist storytelling, the article takes this picture of the actual as (...) a point of departure for discussing ways of experimenting with affirmative critique of the current use of data. Through a smaller experiment with thirty PhD students, the article discusses how to speculatively curate academic value by other means that provide more liveable world(ing)s than data visuals measuring performance and that engage other sensorial and affective registers. (shrink)

James Joyce’s Ulysses can be read through the prism of the New Materialist School of contemporary critical thought to shed light on ongoing questions in the humanities about the relationship between language and embodiment. Specifically, Ulysses resonates with three thematic concerns of New Materialisms: the nature of matter, the correspondence between human and animal, and the role of affect. Contra some calls for the humanities to retrench in a conservative posture that reaffirms the special status of human reason and “consciousness” (...) – corresponding to Catholic readings of Ulysses that find in Joyce a metaphysical philosopher of transcendence – New Materialisms take human continuity with animals and matter seriously. Joyce’s Ulysses, by developing robust accounts of the interactions between matter, language, and thinking bodies, offers a template for exploring this convergence, demonstrating that the human “ghost” must be understood as radically inextricable from its material body and the material formations of its world. (shrink)

This paper considers two among the several points of intersection in the work of Roberto Esposito and Jacques Derrida. First, and most obviously: in the context of conceptualizing community, and more broadly, Esposito and Derrida have elaborated concepts of immunity and auto-immunity to refer to auto-destructive modes of defense which profoundly threaten what – seemingly – ought to have been safeguarded through their mechanism. The second point of proximity is the use both make of figures of maternity and birth in (...) these conceptualizations. This comparison not only illuminates the differing philosophical commitments of Derrida and Esposito but also offers a means of challenging the fate of sexual difference in the work of Esposito. (shrink)

The Anaximander fragment, in the readings of both Heidegger and Derrida, speaks of that which exceeds positive law. In this article, the author provides a detailed reading of Heidegger’s Der Spruch des Anaximander, showing how Heidegger relates this fragment to his thinking of Being, the latter having been ‘forgotten’ by metaphysics. Heidegger’s reading at the same time involves a contemplation of technology and of the ontological relation of beings to each other. Derrida’s reading of Heidegger’s Der Spruch highlights specifically those (...) parts of Heidegger’s text where that which precedes Being’s gathering, Being’s disjoining or dissemination, is pointed to. This disjoining, Derrida contends, speaks of the gift of a day more ancient than memory itself and ties in closely with certain aspects of the thinking of Marx. Derrida’s focus on that which precedes Being is in turn related to his contemplation of the law or condition of possibility of technology and also of that which makes possible a relation to the other as other. This condition of possibility, or the gift of Being, which Heidegger’s text also speaks of, involves a ‘higher law’ which can serve as a ‘measure’ for the evaluation, interpretation and transformation of positive law. (shrink)

ABSTRACTTaking its point of departure in an enigmatic passage from the Analects, in which the interlocutor is likened by the master to a sacrificial vase, the essay explores how this teaching can be read as a indirect commentary on the proper way of inhabiting and communicating tradition. The relation to the ancestors and the proper way of handling the rites for the dead is shown to reveal a more basic hermeneutic argument in Confucian thinking, opening the text to its own (...) future transformation. (shrink)

This article examines the way aspects of recent history were excluded in key studies emerging from psychoanalytic social psychology of the mid-20th century. It draws on work by Erikson, Marcuse and...

This paper addresses the question of whether Derrida's “hauntology” as developed in Specters of Marx and related texts, can be anything more than yet another repetition of a specifically male preoccupation with the Father inscribed on the bodies of women, in this case the always absent daughter. A careful reading suggests that Derrida, and playwnght fathers of daughters such as Shakespeare and August Wilson, may be aware of the paradoxes of their situation.

As educators we are haunted. This haunting takes place on several levels, through our personal histories, through key theoretical ideas we have encountered on our journeys, and by those significant educators who have gone before. This paper highlights how Elwyn S. Richardson continues to haunt education in New Zealand. Also how Elwyn, in turn, was haunted by ‘Wal’ and John Dewey. Rubbing up against neo-liberal reform, philosophers such as Elwyn, give us permission to develop our own personal educational philosophy. Through (...) employing an arts-based autoethnography, we explore how our educational journeys have been haunted by Elwyn. And by drawing on Jacques Derrida’s directive, ‘speak to the ghost’, we summon up Elwyn. To do this we write a series of fictional letters which enable us to reflect on one author’s memories. Through analysis of these letters we demonstrate the importance of the Arts as a method to critically reflect upon, and rise above, the dominant neo-liberal ideology we work within. We speculate here that a strong personal philosophy has the potential to disrupt and engage educators critically with an institutional philosophy that continues to dominate much of mainstream education in New Zealand. (shrink)

This article looks at the problems of the co-determination of the political within western metaphysics and political reflection, and considers solutions that are figured in terms of failure and incompletion. The focus is on the relation of the political to political modernity, its defenders and attackers, and those who seek to overcome the opposition.

(2008). B Is For Burqa, C Is For Censorship: The Miseducative Effects of Censoring Muslim Girls and Women's Sartorial Discourse. Educational Studies: Vol. 43, No. 1, pp. 17-28.

Although conceptually distinct, ‘ time ’ and ‘community’ are multiply intertwined within a myriad of key debates in both the social sciences and the humanities. Even so, the role of conceptions of time in social practices of inclusion and exclusion has yet to achieve the prominence of other key analytical categories such as identity and space. This article seeks to contribute to the development of this field by highlighting the importance of thinking time and community together through the lens of (...) political apologies. Often ostensibly offered in order to re-articulate both the constitution of ‘the community’ and its future direction, official apologies are prime examples of deliberate attempts to intervene in shared understandings of political community and its temporality. Offering a detailed case study of one of these apologies, I will focus on Australian debates over the removal of indigenous children from their families, known as the Stolen Generations, and examine the temporal dimensions of the different responses offered by former prime ministers John Howard and Kevin Rudd. (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 essay addresses the relation between ghosts and the fires of writing. It allows itself to dream of purely burning, of consuming and leaving behind all objects, topics and occasions in an absolutely concrete, singular, sensational experience of reading. It is written to and for ghosts – the only ones who can survive in the blazing building that writing can become. The ghosts live in burning house scenes, in poems about dream rooms and erotic hauntings, and in the intellectual tension (...) of literary and non-literary texts. They have something to do with the fires of sexuality, and the intensities of sublimation. It is all about love and death. (shrink)

This paper revisits Giorgio Agamben’s text The Time That Remains and through a comparative analysis contrasts the author’s reading of St Paul’s Romans to relevant Derridean thematics prevalent in the text. Specific themes include language, the law, and the subject. I illustrate how Agamben attempts to revitalise the idea of philosophical anthropology by breaking away from the deconstructive approach. Agamben argues that language is an experience but is currently in a state of nihilism. Consequently, the subject has become lost; or, (...) more specifically, the subject and its object have not disappeared in language but through language. The resuscitation of experience is thus required to defeat this condition: only in language does the subject have its site and origin. Unlike deconstruction, which highlights an inherent paradox within a situation unearthing a questionable foundation, Agamben argues that, by investigating the “exception,” one finds neither a norm nor an inherent truth of the situation, but the confusion which surrounds them both. (shrink)