In this paper, I argue that an implication of the so-called ‘death of metaphysics’ is the imbrication of the normative and descriptive understandings of morality. This imbrication gives rise to a paradox, which amounts to the desire to refute both a priori moral justifications, and ‘the tyranny of the real’ or the socialisation and relativisation of our moral assertions and positions. I investigate three responses to this paradox, namely the pragmatic response, Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive response, and the ante-philosophical response, which (...) is based on the work of Jean-Luc Nancy. The reason for focusing on these three philosophical positions is that they all espouse an immanent view of morality. Through means of this analysis, I attempt to highlight the following implications of an immanently-defined moral position: the constitutive, as opposed to the pedagogical or prescriptive, nature of philosophy; the increasing focus on the performative force of doing philosophy and the importance of philosophical skill; the problematic nature of the distinctions between philosophy, moral theory, and applied ethics, and therefore also between the nature and function of morality; and the status of philosophy and moral theory as one type of praxis amongst many, rather than the definitive voice on praxis. (shrink)

This essay advances the thesis that Derrida’s ethics consists in the practice of philosophical responsibility. I contend that philosophical responsibility is the historical and ethical task of establishing a critical relation to one’s tradition which deliberately avoids passively and naively taking it for granted by questioning its origin and revealing its historicity. Further, I show that Derrida learns the task of philosophical responsibility from Husserl’s own version of philosophical responsibility, which he later transforms with the help of Husserl’s own methodological (...) tools. I maintain that the difference between Husserl’s and Derrida’s respective tasks is the injunction they are responding to and, concomitantly, the sense each gives to historicity. Whereas Husserl is responding to the principle of reason so as to reawaken the historicity of universal truth and its foundation, that is, the telos of Reason, Derrida is responding for the principle of reason with the purpose of disclosing the historicity of signification – différance – whose operation reduces the telos of Reason. (shrink)

In this article, we consider Derrida’s grasp on counter-institution and outline a peculiar modality of ethics that it engenders. After evoking his counter-institutional public engagements in the introduction, we begin an analysis of the word counter-institution. In the first place, the polysemy of its prefix “counter” is exposed, followed by the claim that in Derrida’s philosophy this term denotes proximity and contact, rather than opposition – thus determining the architecture of the counter-institution. Furthermore, we discuss Derrida’s critique of traditional, sovereign (...) institutions that he saw as unjust and violent, relating it to his theory of decision, and making the claim that counter-institutions are inseparable from justice. In the second part, we conceptualize what is named the counter-ethics of promise and responsibility. By juxtaposing Derrida’s unorthodox views on the notions of promise and responsibility, we seek to formulate a counter-ethical thought that animates the relations in and of the counter-institution and challenges the limits of ethics. Finally, we propose that Derrida’s idea of unfaithful fidelity could be understood as the very condition counter-ethics, and by consequence, of deconstruction. (shrink)

Given previously successful interventions that already have shaken up the convention, it is puzzling that the feminist critique of bioethics should be slow to embrace the exciting new developments that have emerged in philosophy and critical cultural studies over the last fifteen years or so. Both in the arenas of poststructuralism and postmodernism and in the powerful revival of phenomenological thought, in which the stress on embodiment is highly appropriate to bioethics, there is much that might augment the adequacy of (...) our approach. Many of these resources have been developed productively by feminist thinkers to reflect not simply the differential lived experience of women, but also to mobilize a specifically feminist slant to theory itself. The encouragement to read Derrida, Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, or Deleuze results not in a turn back to the masculinist masters, but to a fuller appreciation of just how distinctive a feminist reworking can be. The most exciting feminist theorists are less concerned with an “authentic” representation of an existing oeuvre than in showing how it can be extended, distorted if necessary, and applied to areas far beyond its originally intended scope. In turning to the problem of heart transplantation, I hope to demonstrate such a move at work in a specific material context. (shrink)

This paper addresses ‘the gift’ as the central concept in a discussion about the literacy education for new immigrants that has been developing in Taiwan since the early 1990s. The point of departure for this discussion is the advent of international marriages that are the consequence of new arrivals from Southeast Asia and China, and their effect guest/host relationship. In the first half of the article, I apply Marcel Mauss' idea of gift in order to examine the interactions within this (...) host/guest relationship, engaging the ideologies that underpin the new immigrants' literacy education, and the ways in which new immigrants are identified in Taiwanese society. In the second half of this article, I use Jacques Derrida's critique of Mauss' theory of the gift to explore Derrida's own idea of the gift, with the particular objective of evaluating the question of how national identity in Taiwanese society relates to the new immigrants' literacy education policy. (shrink)

In Culture and Value Wittgenstein remarks: ‘Thoughts that are at peace. That's what someone who philosophizes yearns for’. The desire for such conceptual tranquillity is a recurrent theme in Wittgenstein's work, and especially in his later ‘grammatical-therapeutic’ philosophy. Some commentators (notably Rush Rhees and C. G. Luckhardt) have cautioned that emphasising this facet of Wittgenstein's work ‘trivialises’ philosophy – something which is at odds with Wittgenstein's own philosophical ‘seriousness’ (in particular his insistence that philosophy demands that one ‘Go the bloody (...) hard way’). Drawing on a number of correlations between Wittgenstein's conception of philosophy and that of the Pyrrhonian Sceptics, in this paper I defend a strong ‘therapeutic’ reading of Wittgenstein, and show how this can be maintained without ‘trivialising’ philosophy. (shrink)

Between what we call “us” and what we call “them”, a line must be drawn, which immediately becomes a contentious border, or a divide, that brings to the fore who “we” are, and that consigns to the background, or to the margin, those people who do not count as “us”. Wherever this border is traced — whether along the lines of existing nation-states, racial or linguistic communities, or political affiliations — the resulting potential for antagonism leads to both internal social (...) tensions within a society and, at the level of nations, to outright war—the ultimate example of the friend/enemy divide conceptualized by Carl Schmitt. Once this is recognized, the problem we encounter is the following: can we think of nothing else along the boundaries between “us” and “them”, but an antithesis, nothing else but an antagonism? Under what conditions, “from within what axiomatic” (Derrida), can political thinkers be assured, that the “us/them” relation is by necessity one of hostility? In this paper I will set up a dialogue between Bernhard Waldenfels and Jacques Derrida around the figure of the stranger [_étranger_] — a figure which “frequently operates as a limit-experience for humans trying to identify themselves over and against others” (Kearney) — in order to challenge the logic of this presupposition. My aim is to show how the encounter between these thinkers allows us to challenge _at the same time_ the antagonistic view of the “us/them” relation and the logic of binary opposition that informs it. (shrink)

After 1967, for some twenty years it appears that Derrida has little to say about Husserl. In the late 1980s he returns to Husserl and reiterates his early critiques of the limitations of phenomenology in relation to European humanism. However, in the 1990s there is more than just a return to Husserl, there is also a re-evaluation, prompted by the publication of Derrida's 1953–1954 thesis on phenomenology. This article focuses on Derrida essay from 2000, ‘Et Cetera … (and so on, (...) und so weiter, and so forth, et ainsi de suite, und so überall, etc.)’, which is both the development of a footnote from 1961 and a reminder to his readers to not forget the importance of phenomenology in the history of deconstruction. Focusing on the idealised status of the ‘etc.’ in phenomenology and Husserl's remarkable account of the syncategorematic ‘and’, Derrida's essay suggests that we must think of both ‘deconstruction … and phenomenology’ and of the tradition and legacy of phenomenology as a limit for deconstruction. (shrink)

This paper explores the meaning of teacher–student relationships in the light of Derrida’s notions of hospitality and trust. Drawing on Derrida, the author delineates two aspects of educational hospitality: hospitality without determinacy and hospitality as self-surrender. It is argued that educational hospitality is underpinned by trust. A sound teacher–student relationship, the paper concludes, consists in educational hospitality and embedded trust.

This paper explores how educators might intervene in canonized texts of the human subject on which a particular and exclusive kind of humanism rests. In imagining possible interventions educators might make, I turn to and trace Jacques Derrida's on‐going deconstruction of the philosophical texts of subjectivity. In his body of work, Derrida destabilizes fixed notions of the human subject and the institutions it founds . From Derrida's points of destabilization and through a differing but similar deconstructive stance, I also consider (...) Gayatri Spivak's suggestive question ‘Who is not the subject of humanism?’ to provide another possible trajectory for intervention that educators might take. Departing from knowledge‐based conceptions of human subjectivity, Spivak urges educators to respond to their students in meaningful encounter with the ‘Other’ while Derrida suggests human beings might begin the difficult and complex task of re‐envisioning an altered humanism, a humanism founded on the call of the Other in institutional sites like education. By an engaged rereading of the texts of human subjectivity upon which human beings are written and by turning to respond to the face of the human beings in and outside their classrooms as a means of encountering the Other's humanity, I suggest that educators be the catalyst for changing what it means to be human and education the means by which we approach a humanism yet to be. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue for the impossible possibility of an ethical dwelling with technology. In arguing for an ethical comportment in our dealing with technology, I am not only arguing for the consideration of the ethical implications of technology (which we already do) but also, and more importantly, for an ethics of technological artefacts qua technology. Thus, I attempt to argue for a decentering (or rather overcoming) of anthropocentric ethics, urging us to move beyond any centre, whatever it may (...) be—anthropological, biological, etc. I argue that if we take ethics seriously we must admit that our measure cannot be that of man. To develop the argument, I use an episode in Star Trek where the fate of the highly sophisticated android Commander Data is to be decided. I show how the moral reasoning about Data remains anthropocentric but hints to other possibilities. I proceed to use the work of Derrida and Levinas (with some help from Heidegger) to suggest a possible way to think (and do) an ethos beyond traditional ethics—an ethics of hospitality in which we dwell in a community of those that have nothing in common. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 47, Issue 3, pp 366 - 387 In this article, I focus on Heidegger’s conception of hospitality in his first and final lectures on Hölderlin’s _Germania_, _Remembrance_, and _The Ister_. I argue that the hospitality of the foreigner for Heidegger is the condition of possibility of dwelling understood as the happening of history.In the first section I analyze the notions of hospitality in Levinas and Derrida. The second section unpacks some of the senses of the earth in (...) Heidegger as the site of man’s historical dwelling, whereas in the third section I focus on holy mourning as the disposition that reveals the earth as the uncanny ground of history. In the final section, I spell out Heidegger’s conception of hospitality, the greeting, and the foreign guest. (shrink)

Many Levinasians are prone to merely assert or presuppose that the Other is ‘radically Other’, and that such Otherness is of patent ethical significance. But building ethics into the very concept of ‘the Other’ seems question-begging. What then, if not mere Otherness, might motivate Levinasian responsibility? In the following discussion I argue that this can best be answered by reading Levinas as a post-Holocaust thinker, preoccupied with how one’s simply being-here constitutes a ‘usurpation of spaces belonging to the other’. Then, (...) drawing on Schutz’s phenomenology, I explain how the resultant usurpatory bad conscience presupposes the embodied ‘interchangeability’ of self and Other. As such, one can be said to ‘usurp’ the Other’s place only insofar as self and Other are not radically different. (shrink)

This article elaborates on Christopher Norris's claim that certain aspects of Derrida's work are amenable to formalisation in modal-logical terms. Norris contends that any adequate analysis of the logic behind Derrida's work must provide an account of the notions of possibility, necessity, and necessary possibility, particularly as they are related to Derrida's notion of iterability. This article examines the further hypothesis that Derrida's understanding of modality, according to which possibilities must be accounted for even if they are never realised, might (...) even better be described in terms of possible worlds. In possible-worlds semantics, the conceptual meaning of a statement is constituted by the set of alternative contexts in which that statement is true. This article argues, however, that possible-worlds semantics would be unthinkable without the experience that one referent can be substituted for another. The possibility of this experience is best described in Derridean terms. Read through Derrida's thought of the trace, the properly semantic substitutions may come to be seen as dependent on the substitution of the thing for itself; on what Derrida calls ‘the substitution of the unique for the unique’. (shrink)

Simon Glendinning explains the mysteries of phenomenology.

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)

Trust has been widely investigated both theoretically and empirically. Whether thought of as the result of a calculation of costs/benefits, a shared identity, or a leap of faith, there always seems to be an ‘as if’ rhetorical gesture which is ultimately needed to explain how actors move from the base of trust to expectations of trust via suspending judgment on uncertainty and fear of vulnerability to betrayal and exploitation — the actors ultimately act ‘as if’ they do not fear uncertainty (...) and vulnerability to betrayal. Yet this ‘as if’ element has remained seriously under-theorised. Drawing on Derrida's deconstruction, I propose a way of thinking this ‘as if’ element of trust. I thus argue that the decision to trust occurs in a terrain of structural undecidability. The latter is thought of as the possibility condition of trust as well as the subject of trust and a sense of responsibility for this trust. The aporiatic nature of undecidability makes this trust an auto-immune trust which obeys the tripartite logic of ‘without’ which both negates and affirms trust. (shrink)