The characterisation of Derrida’s politics as a seeking for the “lesser violence” has become an almost paradigmatic interpretation. Yet the phrase _la moindre violence_ appears only in the early essay “Violence and Metaphysics” and its meaning is not as straightforward as might initially seem. I will argue that it is a mistake to take this expression to summarise the political import of this essay let alone of deconstruction more generally. What Derrida repeatedly concerns himself on that occasion is not “the (...) lesser violence” but “worse violence” and “the worst violence,” terms that appears several times. This will be seen to be as a prefiguring of how, from the early 1980s on, following engagements with Plato and Lyotard, Derrida repeatedly names and elaborates “the worst” as that which we should seek to avoid. In order to uncover the politics of deconstruction, I will examine what Derrida has to say about “the worst” as well as what is said in the secondary literature, for it is also a term around which a number of unfortunate misinterpretations have arisen. In conclusion, it will be remarked that with the late coinage of the term _aimance_ Derrida makes clear his close proximity to the ethics of Levinas and his affirmation of an aspiration to nonviolence in the relationship with the other. (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)

Friendship is such a unique relationship among human beings that even philosophers have considered it as a vital factor in the social life of humans. Aristotle is one such philosopher who has given a significant amount of space to friendship among the mortals. Friendship is relational in nature and thereby calls for various discourses between the ‘self’ and the ‘other’. In this regard, McDowell’s idea of ‘second nature’ is significant since it adds that extra responsibility, willingness and rational capacity enabling (...) us to live in communion. However, friendship has a peculiar relation with politics as in this world one cannot deny that there will be enemies as well as friends. In this respect, Derrida situates Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political as an evolution in the politics of friendship either in the form of ‘dissolution’ or in the form of ‘upheaval’. I have tried to analyse Derrida’s views in the background of the contrast between the ‘dying sage’ and the ‘living fool’ where the discourses change between friendship and politics. Friendship and politics are not alien to Indian philosophy as well. The relationships between Kṛṣṇa and Arjuna, between Karṇa and Duryodhana in the Mahābhārata could be analysed from various angles. Friendship has a trans-political character which has been addressed in the paper by showing the hermeneutic of solidarity after Gadamer. This paves way for a reappraisal of the Aristotelian conception of friendship. I think that the discourses between friendship and politics bring about new insights regarding the notion of friendship itself, and it is important to recognise that difference and reciprocity may exist together without distressing the relationship and at the same time with the (dis)closure of the self. (shrink)

Countering the common assumption in affect theory that deconstruction is incompatible with studies of affect, this essay theorises a deconstructive approach to reading for affect in texts and examines the role affect has always played in deconstructive reading. It reads Derrida alongside Deleuze who has been influential in affect theory in order to explicate what deconstruction adds to existing poststructural theories of affect: namely, how affect functions at the scene of reading, shaping the reading itself and coming into view through (...) textual forms. In its second half, the essay turns to Cixous' ‘Savoir,’ demonstrating through a reading of that text what a deconstructive reading of affect looks like in practice and exploring the ethics of such an approach. (shrink)

This essay describes Derrida's later articulations of the logical; of the ‘undeniable’ and its constant denial. Against anti-realist readings of Derrida as some sort of textual idealist, I show how Derrida's thinking of the undeniable informs his deconstruction of the death penalty in the recently published 1999–2001 lecture courses, as well as the considerations of mortality and finitude that inform all of his writings.

Certain of Kant’s political essays suggest that the project of socio-political emancipation should be seen as a process of working ourselves out of affective attachments to pathological social relations. This aspect of Kant’s thinking is read through Marx’s materialist notion of commodity fetishism, which provides a paradigmatic approach to understanding the ways in which concrete forms of sociality either thwart or facilitate the process of emancipation. It is then suggested that Freud’s notion of the work of mourning can help to (...) clarify the possibility of breaking with the fixated attachments that contribute to our own domination. In this light, the author considers the respective accounts of the relationship between Freudian theory and Kantian cosmopolitanism given by Julia Kristeva and Judith Butler in light of Theodor Adorno’s materialist account of working-through the past. Reading Freud with Adorno offers a more coherent clarification of the concrete conditions of possibility of cosmopolitanism. (shrink)

The question of where ghosts live can hardly be addressed without speaking of a haunted house. This essay reads Don DeLillo's novel The Body Artist, in which there is a ghost called Mr. Tuttle who haunts the house of Lauren Hartke, the body artist, as a text grafted onto Jacques Derrida's Dissemination. The essay takes as its starting point the first words spoken in DeLillo's text, ‘I want to say something but what’, a quasi-question directed to Lauren by her husband (...) Rey, in order to ask if it can ever be said what lies on the other side of ‘what’, or if it remains forever unknowable, or unheard, at an ‘infinite remove’, even if it is one's self. It is Rey's suicide, and Lauren's subsequent work of mourning, which locates DeLillo's phrase within the context of Derrida's efforts, again and again, to give words to those whose voices are absent: the lost friend, the other self, the dead. To Lauren's question, ‘What am I supposed to say?’ Derrida replies, ‘Speaking is impossible, but so too would be silence or absence’. Through the ghostly form of Mr. Tuttle, DeLillo's work tells of the various mimetisms by which the silent speaker is heard and remembered. (shrink)

For Derrida, the ‘‘as if’’, as a regulative principle directly appropriated and modified from its Kantian context, becomes the central lynchpin for understanding, not only Derrida's philosophical system as a whole, but also his numerous seemingly enigmatic references to his ‘‘jewishness’’. Through an analysis of the function of the ‘‘as if’’ within the history of thought, from Greek tragedy to the poetry of Wallace Stevens, I hope to show how Derrida can only appropriate his Judaic roots as an act of (...) mourning that seeks to render the lost object as present, ‘‘as if’’ it were incorporated by the subject for whom this act nevertheless remains an impossibility. As Derrida discerns within the poetry of Paul Celan, bringing a sense of presence/presentness to our experiences, and as a confirmation of the subject which the human being struggles to assert, is the poetic task par excellence. It is seemingly also, if Derrida is to be understood on this point, the only option left to a humanity wherein poetry comes to express what religious formulations can no longer justify. (shrink)

In this paper I offer some existential-phenomenological reflections on the interrelationships among the forms of love, loss, and human finitude. I claim that authentic Being-toward-death entails owning up not only to one’s own finitude, but also to the finitude of all those we love. Hence, authentic Being-toward-death always includes Being-toward-loss as a central constituent. Just as, existentially, we are “always dying already,” so too are we always already grieving. Death and loss are existentially equiprimordial. I extend these claims to a (...) discussion of the four forms of love identified by the ancient Greeks, contending that the nature of a loss experience will depend complexly on the forms or dimensions of love that had constituted the lost relationship. I argue that authentic solicitude can be shown to entail one of the constitutive dimensions of deep human bonding, in which we value the alterity of the other as it is manifested in his or her own distinctive affectivity, in particular, in those painful emotional states disclosive of authentic existing. Lastly, I explore the ethical implications of these claims. (shrink)

This article suggests an oblique reading of The Headless Woman, the latest film by Lucrecia Martel, a founder member of the so-called New Argentine Cinema and one of the major stylists of contemporary cinema. Unlike the many memorial films that surround the trauma of the dis- appeared in Argentina, The Headless Woman ‘countersigns’ the genre, proposing a hallucinatory experience of immersion within the affects of guilt, complicity and denial unleashed by the last dictatorship. By presenting the existentialist drama of an (...) upper-class woman involved in a seemingly minor car accident on a deserted provincial road, the film manages to stage a counter-narrative of the traumatic past that affected the whole of society beyond obvious sites of suffering. Through an engagement with Judith Butler’s account of mourning, this article argues that the film bears the traces of a collective mourning, an experience of grief that permeated the Argentine citizenry and challenged blood as the only form of kinship. The article contends that the affects explored in Martel’s film may be crucial in confronting the new faceless, that is, those whose social exclusion persists unnoticed during the current democratic regime, and whose lives are in a sense ‘ungrievable’. By proposing an entanglement of temporalities, the analysis suggests that the 30,000 lives made to disappear during dictatorial times cannot be grasped except in conjunction with the silence surrounding poverty, the new spectre of the present. In Martel’s film each viewer becomes a witness and also a survivor and is thereby subtlety compelled to respond. In this way, The Headless Woman also suggests an ethical key to future possibilities. (shrink)

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)

In response to distant suffering, global civil society is being consumed by a generalized witnessing fever that converts public spaces into veritable machines for the production of testimonial discourses and evidence. However, bearing witness itself has tended to be treated as an exercise in truth-telling, a juridical outcome, a psychic phenomenon or a moral prescription. By contrast, this article conceives of bearing witness as a transnational mode of ethico-political labour, an arduous working-through produced out of the struggles of groups and (...) persons who engage in testimonial tasks in order to confront corresponding perils produced by instances of situational or structural violence; it is the work of witnessing, the normative and political substance generated through the performance of patterns of social action, which matters. Using Celan's allegory of the poem as a message in a bottle, I consider bearing witness as a web of cosmopolitan testimonial practices structured around five dialectically related tasks and perils: giving voice to mass suffering against silence ; interpretation against incomprehension ; the cultivation of empathy against indifference ; remembrance against forgetting ; and prevention against repetition. (shrink)

I begin by examining the logic of autoimmunity as characterized by Jacques Derrida, ‘that strange behaviour where a living being, in quasi-suicidal fashion, ‘‘itself’’ works to destroy its own protection, to immunize itself against its own immunity’ (Borradori, 2003: 94). According to Derrida, religion, democracy, terrorism and recent responses to the trauma of terrorism can be understood in terms of this logic. Responses to terrorism are ‘autoimmune’ and increase the trauma of terrorism as well as risking democratic values. I argue (...) that the risks of autoimmunity can be negotiated in better ways if we see how autoimmunity relates to another important Derridean concept, hospitality. (shrink)

The politics of precarity have emerged on the contemporary scene of critical theory with great social force in recent years. This paper looks at the risks and obstacles of positing precariousness and vulnerability as the basis of a universal ethics while also arguing for the socially transformative potential of such a model. More broadly, it considers the crucial question of what stands in the way of human relation and ethical life in an age of neoliberalism and biopolitics, and posits an (...) ethics of resemblance grounded in the commonality of flesh and in the at once singular and universal experience of loss. (shrink)

Marx’s call for a materialism capable of engaging reality as ‘sensuous human activity’ opens a question about the role of representation in relation to data. Images have increasingly been seen as significant forms of data in the history of education. Derrida’s theory of the spectre—a variation on the positions established in his earlier works on the trace, the supplement and differance—offers a way of rethinking visual images, their relations with existing discourses of knowledge and with positioned subjects who makes sense. (...) Two early twentieth-century photographs are explored here in relation to ideas derived from Derrida as an exercise in the philosophy of representation. (shrink)

Though Derrida had often appealed to the notion of le reste, in works ranging from Glas to Shibbloth to Cinders, it was not until his 2002 essay Reste – le maître that he would devote an entire work to the topic. In this essay, I look at a few of Derrida's early attempts to think le reste, particularly in relationship to poetry in ‘Che cos'è la poesia?’ before concentrating on Reste – le maître. I show that it is only in (...) this latter work that Derrida develops a full ‘theory’ of le reste as a ‘quasi-transcendental’ along the lines of différance or, indeed – and Derrida himself makes the comparison – the ‘Good beyond being’ in Plato and Plotinus. But it is also in this latter text that Derrida uses the notion of the reste to suggest a relationship, an analogy, between the logic of sacrifice and mastery in Western onto-theology and the logic of sacrifice and mastery in the Brahmin culture of India. As such, I suggest in conclusion, le reste is perhaps the most suggestive and the most powerful notion in all of Derrida's work for thinking today the relationship between deconstruction and the rest of the world. (shrink)

The aim of my paper is to focus upon those aspects of Derrida's relation to language and textual interpretation that have not been adequately dealt with by either proponents of deconstruction, who take Derrida to have effected a total revolution in the way in which we must read texts, or those critics who view deconstruction as having subverted all possible criteria for a valid interpretation leading, thus, to an anarchical textual ‘freeplay’. This inadequate approach by both proponents and critics is (...) the result of a failure to consider Derrida's deconstructive approach as enacting a process of ‘double reading.’ This ‘double reading’ commences with an initial stage or level which seeks to reconstruct a text's authorial intention or its vouloir dire. This initial level then prepares the text, through the identification of authorial or textual intention, for the second stage or level. At this second stage or level, which is the passage to deconstructive reading per se, the blind spots and aporias of the text are set forth. Through this focus upon the process of deconstructive reading as ‘doubling reading,’ it becomes evident that deconstruction is not as revolutionary as proponents or critics have assumed. For, Derrida's initial reading, or the ‘doubling’ of a text's authorial or textual intention is firmly set within a traditional interpretative form. (shrink)

This review essay critically maps the Anglophone reception of Lyotard's Discourse, Figure onto the text's own two-part organization. Earlier deconstructive readings tended to focus on the critique of structuralism presented in Discourse, Figure’s first half, under-emphasizing the post-Freudian philosophy of desire developed by Lyotard in the text's latter stages. This essay instead presents Lyotard's first major work not as two separable or opposed parts, but as a coherent trajectory responding to a specific philosophical problem, namely, the Hegelian account of sense-perception (...) and signification as outlined in Hyppolite's Logic and Existence. In so doing, this review essay seeks to isolate key references and clarify the stakes for future readings of Lyotard's text. (shrink)

This article presents a reading of mourning in Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu from the philosophical perspective of Jacques Derrida to imagine a relationship between death and literature. When he writes mourning, Proust works over an irreconcilable abyss – he writes the possibility of mourning, but never writes its completion. In fact, he dies before writing any completion; he dies in deferring it, opening up a mourning for his signature that he had already begun. This, I argue, (...) underlines the aporia that Proust contends with in writing a subjectivity of mourning and death. Death in literature dissects the arresting spectral quality of literature itself – the disability to irrevocably absent its transversal representations, or the interminable coming-back of its ghosts. In composing a literary mourning, Proust dies into a work in which the separation of signatories blurs into an indistinguishable synecdoche. As such, the article resolves upon the consideration that Proust seemingly left his novel – when we create a fictive image of death, how can we imagine anything other than life? The literary dissemination of the signature, of every past self, presents, or imagines, absence as a dream of nothingness. (shrink)

In this contribution, the author takes as his starting point two paintings by Poussin on the subject of The Death of Phocion and their implications for subjectivity and a contemporary politics. Focusing on the South African context, he makes use of the metaphor of the wall, as representative of both the politics of oppression as well as the politics of reconciliation. The wall is consequently related to the transformative role of mourning in what he refers to as a politics that (...) comes after—a politics that itself depends on a disruption of the traditional model of rational politics depicted in the Poussin paintings by the brightly-lit walls and buildings of Athens. In this regard the author defends an ethico-politics of unboundedness where the wall no longer primarily functions as a cipher of exclusion or a stable inside/outside but, in addition, comes to stand as a marker of the radical disruption of a politics founded in subjectivity. Here the author refers to the ongoing interruption of the South African political landscape by the return of the remains which highlights the significant transformative relationship between mourning and democracy. (shrink)

I mourn therefore I am.I live my death in writing.In Specters of Marx, Jacques Derrida hails a new “scholar”—a scholar to come, a scholar of the future—who addresses the dead . This new scholar would stand in stark contrast to the “traditional” scholar, who has never been “capable” of “addressing himself … to ghosts” precisely because the “traditional” scholar insists on the “the sharp distinction between the real and the unreal …, the living and the non-living” and hence does not (...) believe in “the virtual space of spectrality” . The specter—as an incorporeal phantom—challenges such “sharp distinctions”: if the specter doesn’t exist, how can it be?1 How can the nonliving be living, and how can the .. (shrink)

Derrida’s highly personal mourning texts are collected and published in a unique book under the title The Work of Mourning edited by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, two outstanding translators of Derrida’s works. The English collection is published in 2001, while the French edition came out later in 2003 titled Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde. In his deconstructed eulogies, Derrida, being in accordance with ‘the mission impossible’ of deconstruction, namely, ‘to allow the coming of the entirely other’ in (...) its otherness, seems to find his own voice. In my paper, I will focus on this special segment of Derrida’s death-work ; namely, on his mourning texts written for his dead friends, paying special attention to the rhetoric ‘circling around’ fidelity, friendship, and the other in his textual mourning. (shrink)