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Jacques Derrida has had a great influence on contemporary political theory and political philosophy. Derrida's thinking has inspired Slavoj Zizek, Richard Rorty, Ernesto Laclau, Judith Butler and many more contemporary theorists who have developed a deconstructive approach to politics. Because deconstruction examines the internal logic of any given text or discourse it has helped many authors to analyse the contradictions inherent in all schools of thought; and, as such, it has proved. Jacques Derrida’s “Force of Law” (in “Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice”) is crucial to thinking the nexus between deconstruction and critical legal theory, and is must reading for anybody interested in the critical field. Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences”1 (1970) Perhaps something has occurred in the history of the concept of structure that could be called an “event,” if this loaded word did not entail a meaning which it is precisely the function of.
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Book “ Of Grammatology” (1976:158) Jacques Derrida developed the literary theory which contributed a new breath in literary criticism. As he tells us in this book, we can only make use of. May 27, 2016 Jacques Derrida and John D Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida (Fordham, 1997) (referred to as the Villanova Roundtable) ↩ Jacques Derrida, ‘Letter to a Japanese Friend’ in Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth G Rottenberg (eds) Psyche: Interventions of the Other Volume III (Stanford University Press, 2008) ↩. Jacques Derrida's theory of the sign fits into the poststructuralist movement, which runs counter to Saussurean structuralism (the legacy of linguist Ferdinand de Saussure). Maintaining that the signifier (the form of a sign) refers directly to the signified (the content of a sign), structuralist theory has passed down a whole current of.
Born | Jackie Élie Derrida July 15, 1930 |
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Died | October 9, 2004 (aged 74) Paris, France |
Education | B.A., M.A., Dr. cand.: École Normale Supérieure Postgraduate studies: Harvard University DrE: University of Paris |
Spouse(s) | |
Era | 20th-century philosophy |
Region | Western philosophy |
School |
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Institutions |
Jacques Derrida (/ˈdɛrɪdə/; French: [ʒak dɛʁida]; born Jackie Élie Derrida;[2] July 15, 1930 – October 9, 2004) was an Algerian-born French-Jewish philosopher best known for developing a form of semiotic analysis known as deconstruction, which he discussed in numerous texts, and developed in the context of phenomenology.[3][4][5] He is one of the major figures associated with post-structuralism and postmodern philosophy.[6][7][8]
During his career Derrida published more than 40 books, together with hundreds of essays and public presentations. He had a significant influence upon the humanities and social sciences, including philosophy, literature, law,[9][10][11] anthropology,[12] historiography,[13] applied linguistics,[14] sociolinguistics,[15] psychoanalysis and political theory.
His work retains major academic influence throughout continental Europe, South America and all other countries where continental philosophy has been predominant, particularly in debates around ontology, epistemology (especially concerning social sciences), ethics, aesthetics, hermeneutics, and the philosophy of language. In the Anglosphere, where analytic philosophy is dominant, Derrida's influence is most presently felt in literary studies due to his longstanding interest in language and his association with prominent literary critics from his time at Yale. He also influenced architecture (in the form of deconstructivism), music,[16] art,[17] and art criticism.[18]
Particularly in his later writings, Derrida addressed ethical and political themes in his work. Some critics consider Speech and Phenomena (1967) to be his most important work. Others cite: Of Grammatology (1967), Writing and Difference (1967), and Margins of Philosophy (1972). These writings influenced various activists and political movements.[19] He became a well-known and influential public figure, while his approach to philosophy and the notorious abstruseness of his work made him controversial.[19][20]
- 2Philosophy
- 5Peers and contemporaries
- 6Criticism
- 6.2Criticism from analytic philosophers
- 11Further reading
Life[edit]
Derrida was born on July 15, 1930, in a summer home in El Biar (Algiers), Algeria,[2] into a Sephardic Jewish family (originally from Toledo) that became French in 1870 when the Crémieux Decree granted full French citizenship to the indigenous Arabic-speaking Jews of Algeria.[21] His parents, Haïm Aaron Prosper Charles (Aimé) Derrida (1896–1970)[22] and Georgette Sultana Esther Safar (1901–1991),[23][24][25] named him 'Jackie', 'which they considered to be an American name', though he would later adopt a more 'correct' version of his first name when he moved to Paris; some reports indicate that he was named Jackie after the American child actor Jackie Coogan, who had become well-known around the world via his role in the 1921 Charlie Chaplin film The Kid.[26][27][28] He was also given the middle name Élie after his paternal uncle Eugène Eliahou, at his circumcision; this name was not recorded on his birth certificate unlike those of his siblings, and he would later call it his 'hidden name'.[29]
Derrida was the third of five children. His elder brother Paul Moïse died at less than three months old, the year before Derrida was born, leading him to suspect throughout his life his role as a replacement for his deceased brother.[26] Derrida spent his youth in Algiers and in El-Biar.
On the first day of the school year in 1942, French administrators in Algeria—implementing antisemitism quotas set by the Vichy government—expelled Derrida from his lycée. He secretly skipped school for a year rather than attend the Jewish lycée formed by displaced teachers and students, and also took part in numerous football competitions (he dreamed of becoming a professional player). In this adolescent period, Derrida found in the works of philosophers and writers (such as Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Gide) an instrument of revolt against family and society.[30] His reading also included Camus and Sartre.[30]
In the late 1940s, he attended the Lycée Bugeaud [fr], in Algiers;[31] in 1949 he moved to Paris,[3][20] attending the Lycée Louis-le-Grand,[31] where his professor of philosophy was Étienne Borne.[32] At that time he prepared for his entrance exam to the prestigious École Normale Supérieure (ENS); after failing the exam on his first try, he passed it on the second, and was admitted in 1952.[20] On his first day at ENS, Derrida met Louis Althusser, with whom he became friends. After visiting the Husserl Archive in Leuven, Belgium (1953–1954), he completed his master's degree in philosophy (diplôme d'études supérieures [fr]) on Edmund Husserl (see below). He then passed the highly competitive agrégation exam in 1956. Derrida received a grant for studies at Harvard University, and he spent the 1956–57 academic year reading James Joyce's Ulysses at the Widener Library.[33] In June 1957, he married the psychoanalyst Marguerite Aucouturier in Boston. During the Algerian War of Independence of 1954–1962, Derrida asked to teach soldiers' children in lieu of military service, teaching French and English from 1957 to 1959.
Following the war, from 1960 to 1964, Derrida taught philosophy at the Sorbonne, where he was an assistant of Suzanne Bachelard (daughter of Gaston), Georges Canguilhem, Paul Ricœur (who in these years coined the term school of suspicion) and Jean Wahl.[34] His wife, Marguerite, gave birth to their first child, Pierre, in 1963. In 1964, on the recommendation of Louis Althusser and Jean Hyppolite, Derrida got a permanent teaching position at the ENS, which he kept until 1984.[35][36] In 1965 Derrida began an association with the Tel Quel group of literary and philosophical theorists, which lasted for seven years.[36] Derrida's subsequent distance from the Tel Quel group, after 1971, has been attributed[by whom?] to his reservations about their embrace of Maoism and of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.[37]
With 'Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences', his contribution to a 1966 colloquium on structuralism at Johns Hopkins University, his work began to gain international prominence. At the same colloquium Derrida would meet Jacques Lacan and Paul de Man, the latter an important interlocutor in the years to come.[38] A second son, Jean, was born in 1967. In the same year, Derrida published his first three books--Writing and Difference, Speech and Phenomena, and Of Grammatology.
In 1980, he received his first honorary doctorate (from Columbia University) and was awarded his State doctorate (doctorat d'État) by submitting to the University of Paris ten of his previously published books in conjunction with a defense of his intellectual project under the title 'L'inscription de la philosophie : Recherches sur l'interprétation de l'écriture' ('Inscription in Philosophy: Research on the Interpretation of Writing').[31][39] The text of Derrida's defense was based on an abandoned draft thesis he had prepared in 1957 under the direction of Jean Hyppolite at the ENS titled 'The Ideality of the Literary Object'[39] ('L'idéalité de l’objet littéraire');[40] his 1980 dissertation was subsequently published in English translation as 'The Time of a Thesis: Punctuations'. In 1983 Derrida collaborated with Ken McMullen on the film Ghost Dance. Derrida appears in the film as himself and also contributed to the script.
Derrida traveled widely and held a series of visiting and permanent positions. Derrida became full professor (directeur d'études) at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris from 1984 (he had been elected at the end of 1983).[39] With François Châtelet and others he in 1983 co-founded the Collège international de philosophie (CIPH), an institution intended to provide a location for philosophical research which could not be carried out elsewhere in the academia. He was elected as its first president. In 1985 Sylviane Agacinski gave birth to Derrida's third child, Daniel.[41]
In 1986 Derrida became Professor of the Humanities at the University of California, Irvine, where he taught until shortly before his death in 2004. His papers were filed in the university archives. After Derrida's death, his widow and sons said they wanted copies of UCI's archives shared with the Institute of Contemporary Publishing Archives in France. The university had sued in an attempt to get manuscripts and correspondence from Derrida's widow and children that it believed the philosopher had promised to UC Irvine's collection, although it dropped the suit in 2007.[42]
Derrida was a regular visiting professor at several other major American and European universities, including Johns Hopkins University, Yale University, New York University, Stony Brook University, and The New School for Social Research.
He was awarded honorary doctorates by the University of Cambridge (1992), Columbia University, The New School for Social Research, the University of Essex, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, the University of Silesia, the University of Coimbra, the University of Athens, and many others around the world.
Derrida's honorary degree at Cambridge was protested by leading philosophers in the analytic tradition. Philosophers including Quine, Marcus, and Armstrong wrote a letter to the university objecting that 'Derrida's work does not meet accepted standards of clarity and rigour,' and 'Academic status based on what seems to us to be little more than semi-intelligible attacks upon the values of reason, truth, and scholarship is not, we submit, sufficient grounds for the awarding of an honorary degree in a distinguished university'.[43]
Derrida was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Although his membership in Class IV, Section 1 (Philosophy and Religious Studies) was rejected,[citation needed] he was subsequently elected to Class IV, Section 3 (Literary Criticism, including Philology).[citation needed] He received the 2001 Adorno-Preis from the University of Frankfurt.
Late in his life, Derrida participated in making two biographical documentaries, D'ailleurs, Derrida (Derrida's Elsewhere) by Safaa Fathy (1999),[44] and Derrida by Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman (2002).[45]
Derrida was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2003, which reduced his speaking and travelling engagements.[46] He died during surgery in a hospital in Paris in the early hours of October 9, 2004.[47][19]
At the time of his death, Derrida had agreed to go for the summer to Heidelberg as holder of the Gadamer professorship,[48] whose invitation was expressed by the hermeneutic philosopher himself before his death. Peter Hommelhoff, Rector at Heidelberg by that time, would summarize Derrida's place as: 'Beyond the boundaries of philosophy as an academic discipline he was a leading intellectual figure not only for the humanities but for the cultural perception of a whole age.'[48]
Philosophy[edit]
Derrida referred to himself as a historian.[49][50] He questioned assumptions of the Western philosophical tradition and also more broadly Western culture.[51] By questioning the dominant discourses, and trying to modify them, he attempted to democratize the university scene and to politicize it.[52] Derrida called his challenge to the assumptions of Western culture 'deconstruction'.[51] On some occasions, Derrida referred to deconstruction as a radicalization of a certain spirit of Marxism.[53][54]
With his detailed readings of works from Plato to Rousseau to Heidegger, Derrida frequently argues that Western philosophy has uncritically allowed metaphorical depth models[jargon] to govern its conception of language and consciousness. He sees these often unacknowledged assumptions as part of a 'metaphysics of presence' to which philosophy has bound itself. This 'logocentrism,' Derrida argues, creates 'marked' or hierarchized binary oppositions that have an effect on everything from our conception of speech's relation to writing to our understanding of racial difference. Deconstruction is an attempt to expose and undermine such 'metaphysics.'
Derrida approaches texts as constructed around binary oppositions which all speech has to articulate if it intends to make any sense whatsoever. This approach to text is, in a broad sense, influenced by the semiology of Ferdinand de Saussure.[55][56] Saussure, considered to be one of the fathers of structuralism, posited that terms get their meaning in reciprocal determination with other terms inside language.[57]
Perhaps Derrida's most quoted and famous assertion,[55] which appears in an essay on Rousseau in his book Of Grammatology (1967),[58] is the statement that 'there is no out-of-context' (il n'y a pas de hors-texte).[58] Critics of Derrida have been often accused of having mistranslated the phrase in French to suggest he had written 'Il n'y a rien en dehors du texte' ('There is nothing outside the text') and of having widely disseminated this translation to make it appear that Derrida is suggesting that nothing exists but words.[59][60][61][62][63] Derrida once explained that this assertion 'which for some has become a sort of slogan, in general so badly understood, of deconstruction [..] means nothing else: there is nothing outside context. In this form, which says exactly the same thing, the formula would doubtless have been less shocking.'[59][64]
Early works[edit]
Derrida began his career examining the limits of phenomenology. His first lengthy academic manuscript, written as a dissertation for his diplôme d'études supérieures and submitted in 1954, concerned the work of Edmund Husserl.[65] In 1962 he published Edmund Husserl's Origin of Geometry: An Introduction, which contained his own translation of Husserl's essay. Many elements of Derrida's thought were already present in this work. In the interviews collected in Positions (1972), Derrida said: 'In this essay the problematic of writing was already in place as such, bound to the irreducible structure of 'deferral' in its relationships to consciousness, presence, science, history and the history of science, the disappearance or delay of the origin, etc. [..] this essay can be read as the other side (recto or verso, as you wish) of Speech and Phenomena.'[66]
Derrida first received major attention outside France with his lecture, 'Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,' delivered at Johns Hopkins University in 1966 (and subsequently included in Writing and Difference). The conference at which this paper was delivered was concerned with structuralism, then at the peak of its influence in France, but only beginning to gain attention in the United States. Derrida differed from other participants by his lack of explicit commitment to structuralism, having already been critical of the movement. He praised the accomplishments of structuralism but also maintained reservations about its internal limitations;[67] this has led US academics to label his thought as a form of post-structuralism.[6][7][68]
The effect of Derrida's paper was such that by the time the conference proceedings were published in 1970, the title of the collection had become The Structuralist Controversy. The conference was also where he met Paul de Man, who would be a close friend and source of great controversy, as well as where he first met the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, with whose work Derrida enjoyed a mixed relationship.
Phenomenology vs structuralism debate (1959)[edit]
In the early 1960s, Derrida began speaking and writing publicly, addressing the most topical debates at the time. One of these was the new and increasingly fashionable movement of structuralism, which was being widely favoured as the successor to the phenomenology approach, the latter having been started by Husserl sixty years earlier. Derrida's countercurrent take on the issue, at a prominent international conference, was so influential that it reframed the discussion from a celebration of the triumph of structuralism to a 'phenomenology vs structuralism debate.'
Phenomenology, as envisioned by Husserl, is a method of philosophical inquiry that rejects the rationalist bias that has dominated Western thought since Plato in favor of a method of reflective attentiveness that discloses the individual's 'lived experience;' for those with a more phenomenological bent, the goal was to understand experience by comprehending and describing its genesis, the process of its emergence from an origin or event.[citation needed] For the structuralists, this was a false problem, and the 'depth' of experience could in fact only be an effect of structures which are not themselves experiential.[citation needed]
In that context, in 1959, Derrida asked the question: Must not structure have a genesis, and must not the origin, the point of genesis, be already structured, in order to be the genesis of something?[69] In other words, every structural or 'synchronic' phenomenon has a history, and the structure cannot be understood without understanding its genesis.[70] At the same time, in order that there be movement or potential, the origin cannot be some pure unity or simplicity, but must already be articulated—complex—such that from it a 'diachronic' process can emerge. This original complexity must not be understood as an original positing, but more like a default of origin, which Derrida refers to as iterability, inscription, or textuality.[71] It is this thought of originary complexity that sets Derrida's work in motion, and from which all of its terms are derived, including 'deconstruction'.[72]
Derrida's method consisted in demonstrating the forms and varieties of this originary complexity, and their multiple consequences in many fields. He achieved this by conducting thorough, careful, sensitive, and yet transformational readings of philosophical and literary texts, to determine what aspects of those texts run counter to their apparent systematicity (structural unity) or intended sense (authorial genesis). By demonstrating the aporias and ellipses of thought, Derrida hoped to show the infinitely subtle ways in which this originary complexity, which by definition cannot ever be completely known, works its structuring and destructuring effects.[73]
1967–1972[edit]
Derrida's interests crossed disciplinary boundaries, and his knowledge of a wide array of diverse material was reflected in the three collections of work published in 1967: Speech and Phenomena, Of Grammatology (initially submitted as a Doctorat de spécialité thesis under Maurice de Gandillac),[31] and Writing and Difference.[74]
On several occasions, Derrida has acknowledged his debt to Husserl and Heidegger, and stated that without them he would not have said a single word.[75][76] Among the questions asked in these essays are 'What is 'meaning', what are its historical relationships to what is purportedly identified under the rubric 'voice' as a value of presence, presence of the object, presence of meaning to consciousness, self-presence in so called living speech and in self-consciousness?'[74] In another essay in Writing and Difference entitled 'Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas', the roots of another major theme in Derrida's thought emerges: the Other as opposed to the Same[77] 'Deconstructive analysis deprives the present of its prestige and exposes it to something tout autre, 'wholly other,' beyond what is foreseeable from the present, beyond the horizon of the 'same'.'[78] Other than Rousseau, Husserl, Heidegger and Levinas, these three books discussed, and/or relied upon, the works of many philosophers and authors, including linguist Saussure,[79]Hegel,[80]Foucault,[81]Bataille,[80]Descartes,[81] anthropologist Lévi-Strauss,[82][83] paleontologist Leroi-Gourhan,[84] psychoanalyst Freud,[85] and writers such as Jabès[86] and Artaud.[87]
This collection of three books published in 1967 elaborated Derrida's theoretical framework. Derrida attempts to approach the very heart of the Western intellectual tradition, characterizing this tradition as 'a search for a transcendental being that serves as the origin or guarantor of meaning'. The attempt to 'ground the meaning relations constitutive of the world in an instance that itself lies outside all relationality' was referred to by Heidegger as logocentrism, and Derrida argues that the philosophical enterprise is essentially logocentric,[88] and that this is a paradigm inherited from Judaism and Hellenism.[89] He in turn describes logocentrism as phallocratic, patriarchal and masculinist.[89][90] Derrida contributed to 'the understanding of certain deeply hidden philosophical presuppositions and prejudices in Western culture',[89] arguing that the whole philosophical tradition rests on arbitrary dichotomous categories (such as sacred/profane, signifier/signified, mind/body), and that any text contains implicit hierarchies, 'by which an order is imposed on reality and by which a subtle repression is exercised, as these hierarchies exclude, subordinate, and hide the various potential meanings.'[88] Derrida refers to his procedure for uncovering and unsettling these dichotomies as deconstruction of Western culture.[citation needed]
In 1968, he published his influential essay 'Plato's Pharmacy' in the French journal Tel Quel.[91][92] This essay was later collected in Dissemination, one of three books published by Derrida in 1972, along with the essay collection Margins of Philosophy and the collection of interviews entitled Positions.
1973–1980[edit]
Starting in 1972, Derrida produced on average more than one book per year. Derrida continued to produce important works, such as Glas (1974) and The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond (1980).
Derrida received increasing attention in the United States after 1972, where he was a regular visiting professor and lecturer at several major American universities. In the 1980s, during the American culture wars, conservatives started a dispute over Derrida's influence and legacy upon American intellectuals,[51] and claimed that he influenced American literary critics and theorists more than academic philosophers.[88][93][need quotation to verify]
Of Spirit (1987)[edit]
On March 14, 1987, Derrida presented at the CIPH conference titled 'Heidegger: Open Questions' a lecture which was published in October 1987 as Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question. It follows the shifting role of Geist (spirit) through Heidegger's work, noting that, in 1927, 'spirit' was one of the philosophical terms that Heidegger set his sights on dismantling.[94] With his Nazi political engagement in 1933, however, Heidegger came out as a champion of the 'German Spirit,' and only withdrew from an exalting interpretation of the term in 1953. Derrida asks, 'What of this meantime?'[95] His book connects in a number of respects with his long engagement of Heidegger (such as 'The Ends of Man' in Margins of Philosophy, his Paris seminar on philosophical nationality and nationalism in the mid-1980s, and the essays published in English as Geschlecht and Geschlecht II).[96] He considers 'four guiding threads' of Heideggerian philosophy that form 'the knot of this Geflecht [braid]': 'the question of the question,' 'the essence of technology,' 'the discourse of animality,' and 'epochality' or 'the hidden teleology or the narrative order.'[97]
Of Spirit contributes to the long debate on Heidegger's Nazism and appeared at the same time as the French publication of a book by a previously unknown Chilean writer, Victor Farías, who charged that Heidegger's philosophy amounted to a wholehearted endorsement of the NaziSturmabteilung (SA) faction. Derrida responded to Farías in an interview, 'Heidegger, the Philosopher's Hell' and a subsequent article, 'Comment donner raison? How to Concede, with Reasons?' He called Farías a weak reader of Heidegger's thought, adding that much of the evidence Farías and his supporters touted as new had long been known within the philosophical community.[98]
1990s: political and ethical themes[edit]
Some have argued that Derrida's work took a 'political turn' in the 1990s. Texts cited as evidence of such a turn include Force of Law (1990), as well as Specters of Marx (1994) and Politics of Friendship (1994). Others, however, including Derrida himself, have argued that much of the philosophical work done in his 'political turn' can be dated to earlier essays.[99] Derrida develops an ethicist view respecting to hospitality, exploring the idea that two types of hospitalities exist, conditional and unconditional. Though this contributed to the works of many scholars, Derrida was seriously criticized for this.[100][101][102]
Those who argue Derrida engaged in an 'ethical turn' refer to works such as The Gift of Death as evidence that he began more directly applying deconstruction to the relationship between ethics and religion. In this work, Derrida interprets passages from the Bible, particularly on Abraham and the Sacrifice of Isaac,[103][104] and from Søren Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling. Derrida's contemporary readings of Emmanuel Levinas, Walter Benjamin, Carl Schmitt, Jan Patočka, on themes such as law, justice, responsibility, and friendship, had a significant impact on fields beyond philosophy. Derrida and Deconstruction influenced aesthetics, literary criticism, architecture, film theory, anthropology, sociology, historiography, law, psychoanalysis, theology, feminism, gay and lesbian studies and political theory. Jean-Luc Nancy, Richard Rorty, Geoffrey Hartman, Harold Bloom, Rosalind Krauss, Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, Duncan Kennedy, Gary Peller, Drucilla Cornell, Alan Hunt, Hayden White, Mario Kopić, and Alun Munslow are some of the authors who have been influenced by deconstruction.
Derrida delivered a eulogy at Levinas' funeral, later published as Adieu à Emmanuel Lévinas, an appreciation and exploration of Levinas's moral philosophy. Derrida used Bracha L. Ettinger's interpretation of Lévinas' notion of femininity and transformed his own earlier reading of this subject respectively.[105]
Derrida continued to produce readings of literature, writing extensively on Maurice Blanchot, Paul Celan, and others.
In 1991 he published The Other Heading, in which he discussed the concept of identity (as in cultural identity, European identity, and national identity), in the name of which in Europe have been unleashed 'the worst violences,' 'the crimes of xenophobia, racism, anti-Semitism, religious or nationalist fanaticism.'[106]
At the 1997 Cerisy Conference, Derrida delivered a ten-hour address on the subject of 'the autobiographical animal' entitled The Animal That Therefore I Am (More To Follow). Engaging with questions surrounding the ontology of nonhuman animals, the ethics of animal slaughter and the difference between humans and other animals, the address has been seen as initiating a late 'animal turn' in Derrida's philosophy, although Derrida himself has said that his interest in animals is present in his earliest writings.[107]
The Work of Mourning (1981–2001)[edit]
Beginning with 'The Deaths of Roland Barthes' in 1981, Derrida produced a series of texts on mourning and memory occasioned by the loss of his friends and colleagues, many of them new engagements with their work. Memoires for Paul de Man, a book-length lecture series presented first at Yale and then at Irvine as Derrida's Wellek Lecture, followed in 1986, with a revision in 1989 that included 'Like the Sound of the Sea Deep Within a Shell: Paul de Man's War'. Ultimately, fourteen essays were collected into The Work of Mourning (2001), which was expanded in the 2003 French edition, Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde (literally, 'The end of the world, unique each time'), to include essays dedicated to Gérard Granel and Maurice Blanchot.
2002[edit]
In October 2002, at the theatrical opening of the film Derrida, he said that, in many ways, he felt more and more close to Guy Debord's work, and that this closeness appears in Derrida's texts. Derrida mentioned, in particular, 'everything I say about the media, technology, the spectacle, and the 'criticism of the show', so to speak, and the markets – the becoming-a-spectacle of everything, and the exploitation of the spectacle.'[108] Among the places in which Derrida mentions the Spectacle, is a 1997 interview about the notion of the intellectual.[109]
Politics[edit]
Derrida engaged with many political issues, movements, and debates:
- Although Derrida participated in the rallies of the May 1968 protests, and organized the first general assembly at the École Normale Superieure, he said 'I was on my guard, even worried in the face of a certain cult of spontaneity, a fusionist, anti-unionist euphoria, in the face of the enthusiasm of a finally 'freed' speech, of restored 'transparence,' and so forth.'[110] During May '68, he met frequently with Maurice Blanchot.[111]
- He registered his objections to the Vietnam War in delivering 'The Ends of Man' in the United States.
- In 1977, he was among the intellectuals, with Foucault and Althusser, who signed the petition against age of consent laws.
- In 1981 Derrida, on the prompting of Roger Scruton and others, founded the French Jan Hus association with structuralist historian Jean-Pierre Vernant. Its purpose was to aid dissident or persecuted Czech intellectuals. Derrida became vice-president.[112]
- In late 1981 he was arrested by the Czechoslovakian government upon leading a conference in Prague that lacked government authorization, and charged with the 'production and trafficking of drugs', which he claimed were planted as he visited Kafka's grave. He was released (or 'expelled', as the Czechoslovakian government put it) after the interventions of the Mitterrand government, and the assistance of Michel Foucault, returning to Paris on January 1, 1982.[113]
- He registered his concerns against the proliferation of nuclear weapons in 1984.[114]
- He was active in cultural activities against the Apartheid government of South Africa and on behalf of Nelson Mandela beginning in 1983.
- He met with Palestinian intellectuals during a 1988 visit to Jerusalem.
- He protested against the death penalty, dedicating his seminar in his last years to the production of a non-utilitarian argument for its abolition, and was active in the campaign to free Mumia Abu-Jamal.
- Derrida was not known to have participated in any conventional electoral political party until 1995, when he joined a committee in support of Lionel Jospin's Socialist candidacy, although he expressed misgivings about such organizations going back to Communist organizational efforts while he was a student at ENS.[citation needed]
- In the 2002 French presidential election he refused to vote in the run-off between far-right candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen and center-right Jacques Chirac, citing a lack of acceptable choices.[115]
- While supportive of the American government in the wake of the terrorist attacks of 9/11, he opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq (see Rogues and his contribution to Philosophy in a Time of Terror with Giovanna Borradori and Jürgen Habermas).
Beyond these explicit political interventions, however, Derrida was engaged in rethinking politics and the political itself, within and beyond philosophy. Derrida insisted that a distinct political undertone had pervaded his texts from the very beginning of his career. Nevertheless, the attempt to understand the political implications of notions of responsibility, reason of state, the other, decision, sovereignty, Europe, friendship, difference, faith, and so on, became much more marked from the early 1990s on. By 2000, theorizing 'democracy to come,' and thinking the limitations of existing democracies, had become important concerns.
Influences on Derrida[edit]
Crucial readings in his adolescence were Rousseau's Reveries of a Solitary Walker and Confessions, André Gide's journal, La porte étroite, Les nourritures terrestres and The Immoralist;[30] and the works of Friedrich Nietzsche.[30] The phrase Families, I hate you! in particular, which inspired Derrida as an adolescent, is a famous verse from Gide's Les nourritures terrestres, book IV.[116] In a 1991 interview Derrida commented on a similar verse, also from book IV of the same Gide work: 'I hated the homes, the families, all the places where man thinks he'll find rest' (Je haïssais les foyers, les familles, tous lieux où l'homme pense trouver un repos).[117]
Other influences upon Derrida are Martin Heidegger,[75][76]Plato, Søren Kierkegaard, Alexandre Kojève, Maurice Blanchot, Antonin Artaud, Roland Barthes, Georges Bataille, Edmund Husserl, Emmanuel Lévinas, Ferdinand de Saussure, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Claude Lévi-Strauss, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, J. L. Austin[49] and Stéphane Mallarmé.[118]
His book, Adieu à Emmanuel Lévinas, reveals his mentorship by this philosopher and Talmudic scholar who practiced the phenomenological encounter with the Other in the form of the Face, which commanded human response.[119]
Peers and contemporaries[edit]
Derrida's philosophical friends, allies, students and the heirs of Derrida's thought include Paul de Man, Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Blanchot, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-Luc Nancy, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Sarah Kofman, Hélène Cixous, Bernard Stiegler, Alexander García Düttmann, Joseph Cohen, Geoffrey Bennington, Jean-Luc Marion, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Raphael Zagury-Orly, Jacques Ehrmann, Avital Ronell, Judith Butler, Béatrice Galinon-Mélénec, Ernesto Laclau, Samuel Weber and Catherine Malabou.
Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe[edit]
Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe were among Derrida's first students in France and went on to become well-known and important philosophers in their own right. Despite their considerable differences of subject, and often also of a method, they continued their close interaction with each other and with Derrida, from the early 1970s.
Derrida wrote on both of them, including a long book on Nancy: Le Toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy (On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy, 2005).
Paul de Man[edit]
Derrida's most prominent friendship in intellectual life was with Paul de Man, which began with their meeting at Johns Hopkins University and continued until de Man's death in 1983. De Man provided a somewhat different approach to deconstruction, and his readings of literary and philosophical texts were crucial in the training of a generation of readers.
Shortly after de Man's death, Derrida wrote the book Memoires: pour Paul de Man and in 1988 wrote an article in the journal Critical Inquiry called 'Like the Sound of the Sea Deep Within a Shell: Paul de Man's War'. The memoir became cause for controversy, because shortly before Derrida published his piece, it had been discovered by the Belgian literary critic Ortwin de Graef that long before his academic career in the US, de Man had written almost two hundred essays in a pro-Nazi newspaper during the German occupation of Belgium, including several that were explicitly antisemitic.
Derrida complicated the notion that it is possible to simply read de Man's later scholarship through the prism of these earlier political essays. Rather, any claims about de Man's work should be understood in relation to the entire body of his scholarship. Critics of Derrida have argued that he minimizes the antisemitic character of de Man's writing. Some critics have found Derrida's treatment of this issue surprising, given that, for example, Derrida also spoke out against antisemitism and, in the 1960s, broke with the Heidegger disciple Jean Beaufret over Beaufret's instances of antisemitism, about which Derrida (and, after him, Maurice Blanchot) expressed shock.
Michel Foucault[edit]
Derrida's criticism of Foucault appears in the essay Cogito and the History of Madness (from Writing and Difference). It was first given as a lecture on March 4, 1963, at a conference at Wahl's Collège philosophique, which Foucault attended, and caused a rift between the two men that was never fully mended.[35]
In an appendix added to the 1972 edition of his History of Madness, Foucault disputed Derrida's interpretation of his work, and accused Derrida of practicing 'a historically well-determined little pedagogy [..] which teaches the student that there is nothing outside the text [..]. A pedagogy which inversely gives to the voice of the masters that infinite sovereignty that allows it indefinitely to re-say the text.'[120] According to historian Carlo Ginzburg, Foucault may have written The Order of Things (1966) and The Archaeology of Knowledge partly under the stimulus of Derrida's criticism.[121] Carlo Ginzburg briefly labeled Derrida's criticism in Cogito and the History of Madness, as 'facile, nihilistic objections,' without giving further argumentation.[121]
Derrida's translators[edit]
Geoffrey Bennington, Avital Ronell and Samuel Weber belong to a group of Derrida translators. Many of Derrida's translators are esteemed thinkers in their own right. Derrida often worked in a collaborative arrangement, allowing his prolific output to be translated into English in a timely fashion.
Having started as a student of de Man, Gayatri Spivak took on the translation of Of Grammatology early in her career and has since revised it into a second edition. Barbara Johnson's translation of Derrida's Dissemination was published by The Athlone Press in 1981. Alan Bass was responsible for several early translations; Bennington and Peggy Kamuf have continued to produce translations of his work for nearly twenty years. In recent years, a number of translations have appeared by Michael Naas (also a Derrida scholar) and Pascale-Anne Brault.
Bennington, Brault, Kamuf, Naas, Elizabeth Rottenberg, and David Wills are currently engaged in translating Derrida's previously unpublished seminars, which span from 1959 to 2003.[122] Volumes I and II of The Beast and the Sovereign (presenting Derrida's seminars from December 12, 2001 to March 27, 2002 and from December 11, 2002 to March 26, 2003), as well as The Death Penalty, Volume I (covering December 8, 1999 to March 22, 2000), have appeared in English translation. Further volumes currently projected for the series include Heidegger: The Question of Being and History (1964-1965), Death Penalty, Volume II (2000–2001), Perjury and Pardon, Volume I (1997–1998), and Perjury and Pardon, Volume II (1998–1999).[123]
With Bennington, Derrida undertook the challenge published as Jacques Derrida, an arrangement in which Bennington attempted to provide a systematic explication of Derrida's work (called the 'Derridabase') using the top two-thirds of every page, while Derrida was given the finished copy of every Bennington chapter and the bottom third of every page in which to show how deconstruction exceeded Bennington's account (this was called the 'Circumfession'). Derrida seems to have viewed Bennington in particular as a kind of rabbinical explicator, noting at the end of the 'Applied Derrida' conference, held at the University of Luton in 1995 that: 'everything has been said and, as usual, Geoff Bennington has said everything before I have even opened my mouth. I have the challenge of trying to be unpredictable after him, which is impossible.. so I'll try to pretend to be unpredictable after Geoff. Once again.'[124]
Marshall McLuhan[edit]
Derrida was familiar with the work of Marshall McLuhan, and since his early 1967 writings (Of Grammatology, Speech and Phenomena), he speaks of language as a 'medium,'[125] of phonetic writing as 'the medium of the great metaphysical, scientific, technical, and economic adventure of the West.'[126]
He expressed his disagreement with McLuhan in regard to what Derrida called McLuhan's ideology about the end of writing.[127] In a 1982 interview, he said:
I think that there is an ideology in McLuhan's discourse that I don't agree with because he's an optimist as to the possibility of restoring an oral community which would get rid of the writing machines and so on. I think that's a very traditional myth which goes back to.. let's say Plato, Rousseau.. And instead of thinking that we are living at the end of writing, I think that in another sense we are living in the extension – the overwhelming extension – of writing. At least in the new sense.. I don't mean the alphabetic writing down, but in the new sense of those writing machines that we're using now (e.g. the tape recorder). And this is writing too.[128]
And in his 1972 essay Signature Event Context he said:
As writing, communication, if one insists upon maintaining the word, is not the means of transport of sense, the exchange of intentions and meanings, the discourse and 'communication of consciousnesses.' We are not witnessing an end of writing which, to follow McLuhan's ideological representation, would restore a transparency or immediacy of social relations; but indeed a more and more powerful historical unfolding of a general writing of which the system of speech, consciousness, meaning, presence, truth, etc., would only be an effect, to be analyzed as such. It is this questioned effect that I have elsewhere called logocentrism.[129]
Architectural thinkers[edit]
Derrida had a direct impact on the theories and practices of influential architects Peter Eisenman and Bernard Tschumi towards the end of the twentieth century. Derrida impacted a project that was theorized by Eisenman in Chora L Works: Jacques Derrida and Peter Eisenman.[130] This design was architecturally conceived by Tschumi for the Parc de la Villette in Paris, which included a sieve, or harp-like structure that Derrida envisaged as a physical metaphor for the receptacle-like properties of the khôra. Moreover, Derrida's commentaries on Plato's notion of khôra (χώρα) as set in the Timaeus (48e4) received later reflections in the philosophical works and architectural writings of the philosopher-architect Nader El-Bizri within the domain of phenomenology.
Derrida used 'χώρα' to name a radical otherness that 'gives place' for being. El-Bizri built on this by more narrowly taking khôra to name the radical happening of an ontological difference between being and beings.[131] El-Bizri's reflections on 'khôra' are taken as a basis for tackling the meditations on dwelling and on being and space in Heidegger's thought and the critical conceptions of space and place as they evolved in architectural theory (and its strands in phenomenological thinking),[132] and in history of philosophy and science, with a focus on geometry and optics.[133] This also describes El-Bizri's take on 'econtology' as an extension of Heidegger's consideration of the question of being (Seinsfrage) by way of the fourfold (Das Geviert) of earth-sky-mortals-divinities (Erde und Himmel, Sterblichen und Göttlichen); and as also impacted by his own meditations on Derrida's take on 'χώρα'. Ecology is hence co-entangled with ontology, whereby the worldly existential analytics are grounded in earthiness, and environmentalism is orientated by ontological thinking[134]Derrida argued that the subjectile is like Plato's khôra, Greek for space, receptacle or site. Plato proposes that khôra rests between the sensible and the intelligible, through which everything passes but in which nothing is retained. For example, an image needs to be held by something, just as a mirror will hold a reflection. For Derrida, khôra defies attempts at naming or the either/or logic, which he 'deconstructed'.
Criticism[edit]
Criticism from Marxists[edit]
In a paper entitled Ghostwriting,[135]Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak—the translator of Derrida's De la grammatologie (Of Grammatology) into English—criticised Derrida's understanding of Marx.[136] Commenting on Derrida's Specters of Marx, Terry Eagleton wrote 'The portentousness is ingrained in the very letter of this book, as one theatrically inflected rhetorical question tumbles hard on the heels of another in a tiresomely mannered syntax which lays itself wide open to parody.'[137]
Criticism from analytic philosophers[edit]
Though Derrida addressed the American Philosophical Association on at least one occasion in 1988,[138] and was highly regarded by some contemporary philosophers like Richard Rorty, Alexander Nehamas,[139] and Stanley Cavell, his work has been regarded by other analytic philosophers, such as John Searle and Willard Van Orman Quine,[140] as pseudophilosophy or sophistry.
Some analytic philosophers have in fact claimed, since at least the 1980s, that Derrida's work is 'not philosophy.' One of the main arguments they gave was alleging that Derrida's influence had not been on US philosophy departments but on literature and other humanities disciplines.[88][93]
In his 1989 Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Richard Rorty argues that Derrida (especially in his book, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, one section of which is an experiment in fiction) purposefully uses words that cannot be defined (e.g., différance), and uses previously definable words in contexts diverse enough to make understanding impossible, so that the reader will never be able to contextualize Derrida's literary self. Rorty, however, argues that this intentional obfuscation is philosophically grounded. In garbling his message Derrida is attempting to escape the naïve, positive metaphysical projects of his predecessors.[141]
Philosopher Sir Roger Scruton wrote in 2004, 'He's difficult to summarise because it's nonsense. He argues that the meaning of a sign is never revealed in the sign but deferred indefinitely and that a sign only means something by virtue of its difference from something else. For Derrida, there is no such thing as meaning – it always eludes us and therefore anything goes.'[142]
On Derrida's scholarship and writing style, Noam Chomsky wrote 'I found the scholarship appalling, based on pathetic misreading; and the argument, such as it was, failed to come close to the kinds of standards I've been familiar with since virtually childhood. Well, maybe I missed something: could be, but suspicions remain, as noted.'[143]
Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt also criticized his work for misusing scientific terms and concepts in Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels With Science (1994).[144]
Three quarrels (or disputes) in particular went out of academic circles and received international mass media coverage: the 1972–88 quarrel with John Searle, the analytic philosophers' pressures on Cambridge University not to award Derrida an honorary degree, and a dispute with Richard Wolin and the NYRB.
Searle–Derrida debate[edit]
In the early 1970s, Searle had a brief exchange with Jacques Derrida regarding speech-act theory. The exchange was characterized by a degree of mutual hostility between the philosophers, each of whom accused the other of having misunderstood his basic points.[145][citation needed] Searle was particularly hostile to Derrida's deconstructionist framework and much later refused to let his response to Derrida be printed along with Derrida's papers in the 1988 collection Limited Inc. Searle did not consider Derrida's approach to be legitimate philosophy or even intelligible writing and argued that he did not want to legitimize the deconstructionist point of view by dedicating any attention to it. Consequently, some critics[146] have considered the exchange to be a series of elaborate misunderstandings rather than a debate, while others[147] have seen either Derrida or Searle gaining the upper hand. The level of hostility can be seen from Searle's statement that 'It would be a mistake to regard Derrida's discussion of Austin as a confrontation between two prominent philosophical traditions', to which Derrida replied that that sentence was 'the only sentence of the 'reply' to which I can subscribe'.[148] Commentators have frequently interpreted the exchange as a prominent example of a confrontation between analytical and continental philosophy.
The debate began in 1972, when, in his paper 'Signature Event Context', Derrida analyzed J. L. Austin's theory of the illocutionary act. While sympathetic to Austin's departure from a purely denotational account of language to one that includes 'force', Derrida was sceptical of the framework of normativity employed by Austin. He argued that Austin had missed the fact that any speech event is framed by a 'structure of absence' (the words that are left unsaid due to contextual constraints) and by 'iterability' (the constraints on what can be said, given by what has been said in the past). Derrida argued that the focus on intentionality in speech-act theory was misguided because intentionality is restricted to that which is already established as a possible intention. He also took issue with the way Austin had excluded the study of fiction, non-serious or 'parasitic' speech, wondering whether this exclusion was because Austin had considered these speech genres governed by different structures of meaning, or simply due to a lack of interest. In his brief reply to Derrida, 'Reiterating the Differences: A Reply to Derrida', Searle argued that Derrida's critique was unwarranted because it assumed that Austin's theory attempted to give a full account of language and meaning when its aim was much narrower. Searle considered the omission of parasitic discourse forms to be justified by the narrow scope of Austin's inquiry.[149][150] Searle agreed with Derrida's proposal that intentionality presupposes iterability, but did not apply the same concept of intentionality used by Derrida, being unable or unwilling to engage with the continental conceptual apparatus.[147] This, in turn, caused Derrida to criticize Searle for not being sufficiently familiar with phenomenological perspectives on intentionality.[151] Searle also argued that Derrida's disagreement with Austin turned on his having misunderstood Austin's type–token distinction and his failure to understand Austin's concept of failure in relation to performativity. Some critics[151] have suggested that Searle, by being so grounded in the analytical tradition that he was unable to engage with Derrida's continental phenomenological tradition, was at fault for the unsuccessful nature of the exchange.
The substance of Searle's criticism of Derrida in relation to topics in the philosophy of language—referenced in Derrida's Signature Event Context—was that Derrida had no apparent familiarity with contemporary philosophy of language nor of contemporary linguistics in Anglo-Saxon countries. Searle explains, 'When Derrida writes about the philosophy of language he refers typically to Rousseau and Condillac, not to mention Plato. And his idea of a 'modern linguist' is Benveniste or even Saussure.'[152] Searle describes Derrida's philosophical knowledge as pre-Wittgensteinian—that is to say, disconnected from analytic tradition—and consequently, in his perspective, naive and misguided, concerned with issues long-since resolved or otherwise found to be non-issues.[152]
Searle also wrote in The New York Review of Books that he was surprised by 'the low level of philosophical argumentation, the deliberate obscurantism of the prose, the wildly exaggerated claims, and the constant striving to give the appearance of profundity by making claims that seem paradoxical, but under analysis often turn out to be silly or trivial.'[153]
Derrida, in his response to Searle ('a b c ..' in Limited Inc), ridiculed Searle's positions. Claiming that a clear sender of Searle's message could not be established, he suggested that Searle had formed with Austin a société à responsabilité limitée (a 'limited liability company') due to the ways in which the ambiguities of authorship within Searle's reply circumvented the very speech act of his reply. Searle did not reply. Later in 1988, Derrida tried to review his position and his critiques of Austin and Searle, reiterating that he found the constant appeal to 'normality' in the analytical tradition to be problematic from which they were only paradigmatic examples.[147][154][155][156][157][158][159][160]
In the description of the structure called 'normal,' 'normative,' 'central,' 'ideal,' this possibility must be integrated as an essential possibility. The possibility cannot be treated as though it were a simple accident-marginal or parasitic. It cannot be, and hence ought not to be, and this passage from can to ought reflects the entire difficulty. In the analysis of so-called normal cases, one neither can nor ought, in all theoretical rigor, to exclude the possibility of transgression. Not even provisionally, or out of allegedly methodological considerations. It would be a poor method, since this possibility of transgression tells us immediately and indispensable about the structure of the act said to be normal as well as about the structure of law in general.
He continued arguing how problematic was establishing the relation between 'nonfiction or standard discourse' and 'fiction,' defined as its 'parasite', 'for part of the most original essence of the latter is to allow fiction, the simulacrum, parasitism, to take place-and in so doing to 'de-essentialize' itself as it were'.[154] He would finally argue that the indispensable question would then become:[154]
what is 'nonfiction standard discourse,' what must it be and what does this name evoke, once its fictionality or its fictionalization, its transgressive 'parasitism,' is always possible (and moreover by virtue of the very same words, the same phrases, the same grammar, etc.)? This question is all the more indispensable since the rules, and even the statements of the rules governing the relations of 'nonfiction standard discourse' and its fictional 'parasites,' are not things found in nature, but laws, symbolic inventions, or conventions, institutions that, in their very normality as well as in their normativity, entail something of the fictional.
In the debate, Derrida praises Austin's work but argues that he is wrong to banish what Austin calls 'infelicities' from the 'normal' operation of language. One 'infelicity,' for instance, occurs when it cannot be known whether a given speech act is 'sincere' or 'merely citational' (and therefore possibly ironic, etc.). Derrida argues that every iteration is necessarily 'citational,' due to the graphematic nature of speech and writing, and that language could not work at all without the ever-present and ineradicable possibility of such alternate readings. Derrida takes Searle to task for his attempt to get around this issue by grounding final authority in the speaker's inaccessible 'intention'. Derrida argues that intention cannot possibly govern how an iteration signifies, once it becomes hearable or readable.[citation needed] All speech acts borrow a language whose significance is determined by historical-linguistic context, and by the alternate possibilities that this context makes possible. This significance, Derrida argues, cannot be altered or governed by the whims of intention.
In 1994, Searle argued that the ideas upon which deconstruction is founded are essentially a consequence of a series of conceptual confusions made by Derrida as a result of his outdated knowledge or are merely banalities. He insisted that Derrida's conception of iterability and its alleged 'corrupting' effect on meaning stems from Derrida's ignorance of the type–token distinction that exists in current linguistics and philosophy of language. As Searle explains, 'Most importantly, from the fact that different tokens of a sentence type can be uttered on different occasions with different intentions, that is, different speaker meanings, nothing of any significance follows about the original speaker meaning of the original utterance token.'[152]
In 1995, Searle gave a brief reply to Derrida in The Construction of Social Reality. He called Derrida's conclusion 'preposterous' and stated that 'Derrida, as far as I can tell, does not have an argument. He simply declares that there is nothing outside of texts..'[161] Searle's reference here is not to anything forwarded in the debate, but to a mistranslation of the phrase 'il n'y a pas de hors-texte' ('there is no outside-text'), which appears in Derrida's Of Grammatology.[162]
According to Searle, the consistent pattern of Derrida's rhetoric is:
(a) announce a preposterous thesis, e.g. 'there is no outside-text' (il n'y a pas de hors-texte);
(b) when challenged on (a) respond that you have been misunderstood and revise the claim in (a) such that it becomes a truism, e.g. 'il n'y a pas de hors-texte' means nothing else: there is nothing outside contexts';[163]
(c) when the reformulation from (b) is acknowledged then proceed as if the original formulation from (a) was accepted. The revised idea—for example that everything exists in some context—is a banality but a charade ensues as if the original claim--nothing exists outside of text [sic]—had been established.
(a) announce a preposterous thesis, e.g. 'there is no outside-text' (il n'y a pas de hors-texte);
(b) when challenged on (a) respond that you have been misunderstood and revise the claim in (a) such that it becomes a truism, e.g. 'il n'y a pas de hors-texte' means nothing else: there is nothing outside contexts';[163]
(c) when the reformulation from (b) is acknowledged then proceed as if the original formulation from (a) was accepted. The revised idea—for example that everything exists in some context—is a banality but a charade ensues as if the original claim--nothing exists outside of text [sic]—had been established.
Cambridge honorary doctorate[edit]
In 1992 some academics at Cambridge University, mostly not from the philosophy faculty, proposed that Derrida be awarded an honorary doctorate. This was opposed by, among others, the university's Professor of Philosophy David Mellor. Eighteen other philosophers from US, Austrian, Australian, French, Polish, Italian, German, Dutch, Swiss, Spanish, and UK institutions, including Barry Smith, Willard Van Orman Quine, David Armstrong, Ruth Barcan Marcus, and René Thom, then sent a letter to Cambridge claiming that Derrida's work 'does not meet accepted standards of clarity and rigour' and describing Derrida's philosophy as being composed of 'tricks and gimmicks similar to those of the Dadaists.' The letter concluded that:
.. where coherent assertions are being made at all, these are either false or trivial. Academic status based on what seems to us to be little more than semi-intelligible attacks upon the values of reason, truth, and scholarship is not, we submit, sufficient grounds for the awarding of an honorary degree in a distinguished university.[164]
In the end the protesters were outnumbered—336 votes to 204—when Cambridge put the motion to a vote;[165] though almost all of those who proposed Derrida and who voted in favour were not from the philosophy faculty.[166] Derrida suggested in an interview that part of the reason for the attacks on his work was that it questioned and modified 'the rules of the dominant discourse, it tries to politicize and democratize education and the university scene.' To answer a question about the 'exceptional violence,' the compulsive 'ferocity,' and the 'exaggeration' of the 'attacks,' he would say that these critics organize and practice in his case 'a sort of obsessive personality cult which philosophers should know how to question and above all to moderate'.[167]
Dispute with Richard Wolin and the NYRB[edit]
Richard Wolin has argued since 1991 that Derrida's work, as well as that of Derrida's major inspirations (e.g., Bataille, Blanchot, Levinas, Heidegger, Nietzsche), leads to a corrosive nihilism. For example, Wolin argues that the 'deconstructive gesture of overturning and reinscription ends up by threatening to efface many of the essential differences between Nazism and non-Nazism'.[168]
In 1991, when Wolin published a Derrida interview on Heidegger in the first edition of The Heidegger Controversy, Derrida argued that the interview was an intentionally malicious mistranslation, which was 'demonstrably execrable' and 'weak, simplistic, and compulsively aggressive'. As French law requires the consent of an author to translations and this consent was not given, Derrida insisted that the interview not appear in any subsequent editions or reprints. Columbia University Press subsequently refused to offer reprints or new editions. Later editions of The Heidegger Controversy by MIT Press also omitted the Derrida interview. The matter achieved public exposure owing to a friendly review of Wolin's book by the Heideggerian scholar Thomas Sheehan that appeared in The New York Review of Books, in which Sheehan characterised Derrida's protests as an imposition of censorship. It was followed by an exchange of letters.[169] Derrida in turn responded to Sheehan and Wolin, in 'The Work of Intellectuals and the Press (The Bad Example: How the New York Review of Books and Company do Business)', which was published in the book Points...[170]
Twenty-four academics, belonging to different schools and groups – often in disagreement with each other and with deconstruction – signed a letter addressed to The New York Review of Books, in which they expressed their indignation for the magazine's behaviour as well as that of Sheenan and Wolin.[171]
Critical obituaries[edit]
Critical obituaries of Derrida were published in The New York Times,[19]The Economist,[172] and The Independent.[173] The magazine The Nation responded to the New York Times obituary saying that 'even though American papers had scorned and trivialized Derrida before, the tone seemed particularly caustic for an obituary of an internationally acclaimed philosopher who had profoundly influenced two generations of American humanities scholars.'[51][174]
Works by Derrida[edit]
See also[edit]
Notes[edit]
- ^John D. Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction, and the Hermeneutic Project, OCLC729013297, Indiana University Press, 1988, p. 5: 'Derrida is the turning point for radical hermeneutics, the point where hermeneutics is pushed to the brink. Radical hermeneutics situates itself in the space which is opened up by the exchange between Heidegger and Derrida..'
- ^ abPeeters, Benoît (2012). Derrida: A Biography. Polity. pp. 12–13.
Jackie was born at daybreak, on 15 July 1930, at El Biar, in the hilly suburbs of Algiers, in a holiday home. [..] The boy's main forename was probably chosen because of Jackie Coogan .. When he was circumcised, he was given a second forename, Elie, which was not entered on his birth certificate, unlike the equivalent names of his brother and sister.
OCLC980688411, 844437566, 818721033 See also Bennington, Geoffrey (1993). Jacques Derrida. The University of Chicago Press. p. 325.1930 Birth of Jackie Derrida, July 15, in El-Biar (near Algiers, in a holiday house).
. - ^ ab'Jacques Derrida'. Encyclopaedia Britannica. Britannica.com. Retrieved 19 May 2017.
- ^Derrida on Religion: Thinker of Differance By Dawne McCance. Equinox. p. 7.
- ^Derrida, Deconstruction, and the Politics of Pedagogy (Counterpoints Studies in the Postmodern Theory of Education). Peter Lang Publishing Inc. p. 134.OCLC314727596, 476972726, 263497930, 783449163
- ^ abBensmaïa, Réda, 'Poststructuralism', in Kritzman (2005), pp. 92–93.
- ^ abPoster (1988), pp. 5–6.
- ^Vincent B. Leitch Postmodernism: Local Effects, Global Flows, SUNY Series in Postmodern Culture (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996), p. 27.
- ^Derrida, Jacques (1992). 'Force of Law'. Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice. translated by Mary Quaintance, eds., Drucilla Cornell, Michael Rosenfeld, and David Gray Carlson (1st ed.). New York: Routledge. pp. 3–67. ISBN978-0810103979.
'A decision that did not go through the ordeal of the undecidable would not be a free decision, it would only be the programmable application or unfolding of a calculable process (..) deconstructs from the inside every assurance of presence, and thus every criteriology that would assure us of the justice of the decision.
- ^'Critical Legal Studies Movement' in 'The Bridge'
- ^GERMAN LAW JOURNAL, SPECIAL ISSUE: A DEDICATION TO JACQUES DERRIDAArchived May 16, 2013, at the Wayback Machine, Vol. 6 No. 1, 1-243, 1 January 2005
- ^'Legacies of Derrida: Anthropology', Rosalind C. Morris, Annual Review of Anthropology, Volume: 36, pages: 355–389, 2007
- ^'Deconstructing History', published 1997, (2nd. Edn. Routledge, 2006)
- ^Busch, Brigitt (2012). 'Linguistic Repertoire Revisited'. Applied Linguistics. 33 (5): 503–523. doi:10.1093/applin/ams056.
- ^'The sociolinguistics of schooling: the relevance of Derrida's Monolingualism of the Other or the Prosthesis of Origin', Michael Evans, 01/2012; ISBN978-3-0343-1009-3 In book: The Sociolinguistics of Language Education in International Contexts, Publisher: Peter Lang, Editors: Edith Esch and Martin Solly, pp. 31–46
- ^'Deconstruction in Music – The Jacques Derrida', Gerd Zacher Encounter, Rotterdam, The Netherlands, 2002
- ^E.g., 'Doris Salcedo', Phaidon (2004), 'Hans Haacke', Phaidon (2000)
- ^E.g. 'The return of the real', Hal Foster, October – MIT Press (1996); 'Kant after Duchamp', Thierry de Duve, October – MIT Press (1996); 'Neo-Avantgarde and Cultural Industry - Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975', Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, October - MIT Press (2000); 'Perpetual Inventory', Rosalind E. Krauss, October - MIT Press, 2010
- ^ abcdKandell, Jonathan (October 10, 2004). 'Jacques Derrida, Abstruse Theorist, Dies at 74'. The New York Times.
- ^ abcLawlor, Leonard. 'Jacques Derrida'. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. plato.stanford.edu. November 22, 2006; last modified October 6, 2016. Retrieved 20 May 2017.
- ^'I took part in the extraordinary transformation of the Algerian Jews; my great-grandparents were by language, custom, etc., still identified with Arabic culture. After the Cremieux Decree (1870), at the end of the 19th c., the following generation became bourgeois', Jacques Derrida The Last InterviewArchived March 5, 2009, at the Wayback Machine, May 2003.
- ^'Haim, Aaron, Prosper, Charles, Aimé Aimé, Mémé - Arbre Familial des Zaffran (Zafran et Safran), Miguéres, Gharbi, Allouche, Safar, Temime etc.. - GeneaNet'. Gw4.geneanet.org. January 18, 2012. Retrieved October 21, 2012.
- ^ Georgette, Sultana, Esther SAFAR (January 18, 2012). 'Georgette, Sultana, Esther SAFAR - Arbre Familial des Zaffran (Zafran et Safran), Miguéres, Gharbi, Allouche, Safar, Temime etc.. - GeneaNet'. Gw4.geneanet.org. Retrieved October 21, 2012.CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
- ^Bennington (1991), p. 325
- ^'Safar surname: occupational name from Arabic saffar which means worker in copper or brass', The Safar surname'
- ^ abPowell (2006), p. 12.
- ^Obituary in The Guardian, accessed August 2, 2007.
- ^Cixous (2001), p. vii; also see this interview with Derrida's long-term collaborator John CaputoArchived 2005-05-24 at the Wayback Machine.
- ^Peeters, Benoît (2012). Derrida: A Biography. Polity. p. 13.
When he was circumcised, he was given a second forename, Elie, which was not entered on his birth certificate, unlike the equivalent names of his brother and sister.
See also Derrida, Jacques (1993). 'Circumfession'. Jacques Derrida. The University of Chicago Press. p. 96.'So I have borne, without bearing, without its ever being written (12-23-76)' the name of the prophet Élie, Elijah in English .. so I took myself toward the hidden name without its ever being written on the official records, the same name as that of the paternal uncle Eugène Eliahou Derrida ..
- ^ abcdDerrida (1989) This Strange Institution Called Literature, pp. 35, 38–9
- ^ abcdAlan D. Schrift (2006), Twentieth-Century French Philosophy: Key Themes And Thinkers, Blackwell Publishing, p. 120.
- ^Marc Goldschmidt, Jacques Derrida : une introduction, 2003, p. 231.
- ^Caputo (1997), p. 25.
- ^Bennington (1991), p. 330
- ^ abPowell (2006) pp. 34–5
- ^ abPowell (2006), p. 58
- ^Leslie Hill, The Cambridge Introduction to Jacques Derrida, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, p. 55.
- ^Jacques Derrida and Geoffrey Bennington, Jacques Derrida, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994, p. 331
- ^ abcPowell (2006), p. 145.
- ^Jacques Derrida - Editions de Minuit
- ^'Obituary: Jacques Derrida', by Derek Attridge and Thomas Baldwin, The Guardian, October 11, 2004. Retrieved January 19, 2010.
- ^UC Irvine drops suit over Derrida's personal papersArchived May 20, 2012, at the Wayback Machine
- ^'The Letter against Derrida's Honorary Degree, re-examined'. Retrieved September 3, 2018.
- ^IMDb
- ^IMDb
- ^philosophybasics.com
- ^Jacques Derrida Dies; Deconstructionist Philosopher, accessed May 9, 2012.
- ^ ab'The University of Heidelberg Mourns the Death of Jacques Derrida'
- ^ abDerrida (1988) Afterword, pp. 130–1
- ^Derrida (1989) This Strange Institution Called Literature, p. 54: Contrary to what some people believe or have an interest in making believe, I consider myself very much a historian, very historicist [..] Deconstruction calls for a highly 'historian's' attitude (Of Grammatology, for example, is a history book through and through).
- ^ abcdRoss Benjamin Hostile Obituary for Derrida, The Nation, November 24, 2004
- ^Derrida (1992) Cambridge Review, pp. 404, 408–13.
- ^Derrida (1976) Where a Teaching Body Begins, English translation 2002, p. 72
- ^Derrida, Jacques (1993). 'Spectres of Marx' (in French): 92.Cite journal requires
|journal=
(help) - ^ abRoyle, Nicholas (2004), Jacques Derrida, pp. 62–63
- ^Derrida and Ferraris (1997), p. 76:I take great interest in questions of language and rhetoric, and I think they deserve enormous consideration, but there is a point where the authority of final jurisdiction is neither rhetorical nor linguistic, nor even discursive. The notion of trace or of text is introduced to mark the limits of the linguistic turn. This is one more reason why I prefer to speak of 'mark' rather than of language. In the first place, the mark is not anthropological; it is prelinguistic; it is the possibility of language, and it is everywhere there is a relation to another thing or relation to another. For such relations, the mark has no need of language.
- ^Saussure, Ferdinand de (1916 [trans. 1959]). Course in General Linguistics. New York: New York Philosophical Library. pp. 121–22.Check date values in:
|year=
(help)In language there are only differences. Even more important: a difference generally implies positive terms between which the difference is set up; but in language, there are only differences without positive terms. Whether we take the signified or the signifier, language has neither ideas nor sounds that existed before the linguistic system, but only conceptual and phonic differences that have issued from the system. The idea or phonic substance that a sign contains is of less importance than the other signs that surround it. [..] A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differences of ideas; but the pairing of a certain number of acoustical signs with as many cuts made from the mass thought engenders a system of values. - ^ abDerrida (1967) Of Grammatology, Part II Introduction to the 'Age of Rousseau,' section 2 '..That Dangerous Supplement..', title The Exorbitant. Question of Method, pp. 158–59, 163
- ^ abDerrida (1988) Afterword, p. 136
- ^Reilly, Brian J. (2005) Jacques Derrida, in Kritzman (2005), p. 500.
- ^Coward, Harold G. (1990) Derrida and Indian philosophy, pp. 83, 137
- ^Pidgen, Charles R. (1990) On a Defence of Derrida, in The Critical review (1990) Issues 30–32, pp. 40–41
- ^Sullivan, Patricia (2004) Jacques Derrida Dies; Deconstructionist Philosopher, in Washington Post, October 10, 2004, p. C11, accessed August 2, 2007.
- ^Glendinning, Simon (2011). Jacques Derrida: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press.
- ^The dissertation was eventually published in 1990 with the title Le problème de la genèse dans la philosophie de Husserl. English translation: The Problem of Genesis in Husserl's Philosophy (2003).
- ^J. Derrida (1967), interview with Henri Ronse, p. 5.
- ^Jacques Derrida, 'Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,' in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 278.
- ^(..) the entire history of the concept of structure, before the rupture of which we are speaking, must be thought of as a series of substitutions of centre for centre, as a linked chain of determinations of the centre. Successively, and in a regulated fashion, the centre receives different forms or names. The history of metaphysics, like the history of the West, is the history of these metaphors and metonymies. Its matrix [..] is the determination of Being as presence in all senses of this word. It could be shown that all the names related to fundamentals, to principles, or to the centre have always designated an invariable presence – eidos, archē, telos, energeia, ousia (essence, existence, substance, subject), alētheia, transcendentality, consciousness, God, man, and so forth.— 'Structure, Sign and Play' in Writing and Difference, p. 353.
- ^Jacques Derrida, 'Genesis' and 'Structure' and Phenomenology,' in Writing and Difference (London: Routledge, 1978), paper originally delivered in 1959 at Cerisy-la-Salle, and originally published in Gandillac, Goldmann & Piaget (eds.), Genèse et structure (The Hague: Morton, 1964), p. 167:All these formulations have been possible thanks to the initial distinction between different irreducible types of genesis and structure: worldly genesis and transcendental genesis, empirical structure, eidetic structure, and transcendental structure. To ask oneself the following historico-semantic question: 'What does the notion of genesis in general, on whose basis the Husserlian diffraction could come forth and be understood, mean, and what has it always meant? What does the notion of structure in general, on whose basis Husserl operates and operates distinctions between empirical, eidetic, and transcendental dimensions mean, and what has it always meant throughout its displacements? And what is the historico-semantic relationship between Genesis and structure in general?' is not only simply to ask a prior linguistic question. It is to ask the question about the unity of the historical ground on whose basis a transcendental reduction is possible and is motivated by itself. It is to ask the question about the unity of the world from which transcendental freedom releases itself, in order to make the origin of this unity appear.
- ^If in 1959 Derrida was addressing this question of genesis and structure to Husserl, that is, to phenomenology, then in 'Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences' (also in Writing and Difference; see below), he addresses these same questions to Lévi-Strauss and the structuralists. This is clear from the very first line of the paper (p. 278):Perhaps something has occurred in the history of the concept of structure that could be called an 'event,' if this loaded word did not entail a meaning which it is precisely the function of structural—or structuralist—thought to reduce or to suspect.Between these two papers is staked Derrida's philosophical ground, if not indeed his step beyond or outside philosophy.
- ^Derrida (1971), Scarpetta interview, quote from pp. 77–8:If the alterity of the other is posed, that is, only posed, does it not amount to the same, for example in the form of the 'constituted object' or of the 'informed product' invested with meaning, etc.? From this point of view, I would even say that the alterity of the other inscribes in this relationship that which in no case can be 'posed.' Inscription, as I would define it in this respect, is not a simple position: it is rather that by means of which every position is of itself confounded (différance): inscription, mark, text and not only thesis or theme-inscription of the thesis.On the phrase 'default of origin' as applied to Derrida's work, cf. Bernard Stiegler, 'Derrida and Technology: Fidelity at the Limits of Deconstruction and the Prosthesis of Faith,' in Tom Cohen (ed.) Jacques Derrida and the Humanities (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Stiegler understands Derrida's thinking of textuality and inscription in terms of a thinking of originary technicity, and in this context speaks of 'the originary default of origin that arche-writing constitutes' (p. 239). See also Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).
- ^It is opposed to the concept of original purity, which destabilises the thought of both 'genesis' and 'structure', cf. Rodolphe Gasché, The Tain of the Mirror (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 146:It is an opening that is structural or the structurality of an opening. Yet each of these concepts excludes the other. It is thus as little a structure as it is an opening; it is as little static as it is genetic, as little structural as it is historical. It can be understood neither from a genetic nor from a structuralist and taxonomic point of view, nor from a combination of both points of view.And note that this complexity of the origin is thus not only spatial but temporal, which is why différance is a matter not only of difference but of delay or deferral. One way in which this question is raised in relation to Husserl is thus the question of the possibility of a phenomenology of history, which Derrida raises in Edmund Husserl's Origin of Geometry: An Introduction (1962).
- ^Cf. Rodolphe Gasché, 'Infrastructures and Systematicity,' in John Sallis (ed.), Deconstruction and Philosophy (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 3–4:One of the more persistent misunderstandings that have thus far forestalled a productive debate with Derrida's philosophical thought is the assumption, shared by many philosophers as well as literary critics, that within that thought just anything is possible. Derrida's philosophy is more often than not construed as a license for arbitrary free play in flagrant disregard of all established rules of argumentation, traditional requirements of thought, and ethical standards binding upon the interpretative community. Undoubtedly, some of the works of Derrida may not have been entirely innocent in this respect and may have contributed, however obliquely, to fostering to some extent that very misconception. But deconstruction which for many has come to designate the content and style of Derrida's thinking, reveals to even a superficial examination, a well-ordered procedure, a step-by-step type of argumentation based on an acute awareness of level-distinctions, a marked thoroughness and regularity. [..] Deconstruction must be understood, we contend, as the attempt to 'account,' in a certain manner, for a heterogeneous variety or manifold of nonlogical contradictions and discursive equalities of all sorts that continues to haunt and fissure even the successful development of philosophical arguments and their systematic exposition.
- ^ abDerrida (1967) interview with Henri Ronse, pp. 4–5: '[Speech and Phenomena] is perhaps the essay which I like most. Doubtless, I could have bound it as a long note to one or the other of the other two works. Of Grammatology refers to it and economizes its development. But in a classical philosophical architecture, Speech.. would come first: in it is posed, at a point which appears juridically decisive for reasons that I cannot explain here, the question of the privilege of the voice and of phonetic writing in their relationship to the entire history of the West, such as this history can be represented by the history of metaphysics and metaphysics in its most modern, critical and vigilant form: Husserl's transcendental phenomenology.'
- ^ abDerrida (1967) interview with Henri Ronse, p. 8
- ^ abOn the influence of Heidegger, Derrida claims in his 'Letter to a Japanese Friend' (Derrida and différance, eds. Robert Bernasconi and David Wood) that the word 'déconstruction' was his attempt both to translate and re-appropriate for his own ends the Heideggerian terms Destruktion and Abbau, via a word from the French language, the varied senses of which seemed consistent with his requirements. This relationship with the Heideggerian term was chosen over the Nietzschean term 'demolition,' as Derrida shared Heidegger's interest in renovating philosophy.
- ^Derrida, J. Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas, Writing and Difference. Chicago: University of Chicago. 97–192.
- ^Caputo (1997), p. 42
- ^Linguistics and Grammatology in Of Grammatology, pp. 27–73
- ^ ab'From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve' in Writing and Difference
- ^ ab'Cogito and the History of Madness' in Writing and Difference
- ^The Violence of the Letter: From Lévi-Strauss to Rousseau in Of Grammatology, pp. 101–140
- ^'Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences' in Writing and Difference
- ^Of Grammatology, pp. 83–86.
- ^'Freud and the Scene of Writing' in Writing and Difference
- ^'Edmond Jabès and the Question of the Book' and 'Ellipsis' in Writing and Difference, pp. 64-78 and 295-300.
- ^'La Parole soufflée' and 'The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation' in Writing and Difference
- ^ abcdLamont, Michele (November 1987). 'How to Become a Dominant French Philosopher: The Case of Jacques Derrida'(PDF). American Journal of Sociology. 93 (3): 584–622. doi:10.1086/228790. JSTOR2780292.
- ^ abcWayne A. Borody (1998) pp. 3, 5 Figuring the Phallogocentric Argument with Respect to the Classical Greek Philosophical TraditionNebula: A Netzine of the Arts and Science, Vol. 13 (pp. 1–27).
- ^Hélène Cixous, Catherine Clément [1975] La jeune née
- ^Spurgin, Tim (1997) Reader's Guide to Derrida's 'Plato's Pharmacy'Archived February 24, 2011, at the Wayback Machine
- ^Graff (1993)
- ^ abSven Ove Hansson 'Philosophical Schools'. Archived from the original on July 18, 2006. Retrieved February 24, 2008.CS1 maint: BOT: original-url status unknown (link) – Editorial From Theoria vol. 72, Part 1 (2006).
- ^Derrida (1989) Of Spirit, pp.vii-1
- ^Derrida (1989) Of Spirit, p. 1
- ^Derrida (1989) Of Spirit, p. 7, 11, 117–118
- ^Derrida (1989) Of Spirit, pp. 8–12
- ^Powell (2006), p. 167.
- ^Nussbaum, Martha C. (1990). 'Form and Content, Philosophy and Literature'. Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (1st ed.). New York: Oxford University Press. p. 29. ISBN978-0195074857.
'[He] chose to address the American Philosophical Association on the topic of Aristotle's theory of friendship ('Journal of Philosophy' 85 (1988), 632-44); Barbara Johnson's 'A World of Difference' (Baltimore, 1987) argues that Deconstruction can make valuable ethical and social contributions; and in general there seems to be a return to the ethical and practical..
- ^Rorty, R. (1995). Habermas, Derrida, and the functions of philosophy. Revue internationale de philosophie, 49(194 (4), 437-459.
- ^Rorty, R. (1989). Is Derrida a transcendental philosopher?. The Yale Journal of Criticism, 2(2), 207.
- ^McCumber, J. (2000). Philosophy and Freedom: Derrida, Rorty, Habermas, Foucault. Indiana University Press.
- ^Jack Reynolds, Jonathan Roffe (2004) Understanding Derrida p. 49
- ^Gift of Death, pp. 57–72
- ^B. L. Ettinger in conversation with Emmanuel Lévinas, 'Que dirait Eurydice?' / 'What would Eurydice Say?' (1991-93). Reprinted to coincide with Kabinet exhibition at Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Paris: BLE Atelier, 1997. This is a reprint of Le féminin est cette différence inouïe (Livre d'artiste, 1994, and it includes the text of Time is the Breath of the Spirit, MOMA, Oxford, 1993.) Reprinted in Athena: Philosophical Studies. Vol. 2, 2006.
- ^The Other Heading, pp. 5–6
- ^Derrida (2008), 15
- ^Derrida (2002) Q&A session at Film Forum
- ^Derrida (2005) [1997]. 'Les Intellectuels' (in French): 39–40Cite journal requires
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(help) - ^Derrida (1991) 'A 'Madness' Must Watch Over Thinking', pp. 347–9.
- ^Bennington (1991), p. 332
- ^Powell (2006), p. 151
- ^Jacques Derrida, 'To Do Justice to Freud': The History of Madness in the Age of Psychoanalysis,' Resistances of Psychoanalysis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998) pp. 70–1.
- ^Derrida, Jacques. 'No Apocalypse, Not Now (full speed ahead, seven missiles, seven missives)'. Diacritics, 1984
- ^Peeters, Benoit (August 27, 2013). Derrida: A Biography. John Wiley & Sons. ISBN9780745663029.
- ^Gide's Les nourritures terrestres, book IV: «Familles, je vous hais! Foyers clos; portes refermées; possessions jalouses du bonheur.»
- ^1991 Interview with Francois EwaldWahn muß übers Denken wachen published in: Werner Kolk (Translator). Literataz. 1992, p. 1-2. (German), as quoted in http://escholarship.org/uc/item/3891m6db#page-1
- ^Pearson, Roger (May 15, 2010). Stéphane Mallarmé. Reaktion Books. p. 217. ISBN9781861897275.
- ^Silverman, Hugh (Spring 2007). 'Tracing Responsibility: Levinas between Merleau-Ponty and Derrida'. Journal of French Philosophy. 17: 88–89 – via ResearchGate.
- ^Foucault, Michel, History of Madness, ed. Jean Khalfa, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa (London: Routledge, 2006), p. xxiv,573.
- ^ abCarlo Ginzburg [1976], Il formaggio e i vermi, translated in 1980 as The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, trans. Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press), xviii. ISBN978-0-8018-4387-7
- ^'Derrida Seminar Translation Project'. Derridaseminars.org. Retrieved October 21, 2012.
- ^'Derrida Seminar Translation Project'. Derridaseminars.org. Retrieved January 1, 2014.
- ^'Lovely Luton'. Hydra.humanities.uci.edu. Retrieved October 21, 2012.
- ^Speech and Phenomena, Introduction
- ^Of Grammatology, Part I.1
- ^Poster (2010), pp. 3–4, 12–13
- ^Derrida [1982] Excuse me, but I never said exactly so: Yet Another Derridean InterviewArchived April 13, 2016, at the Wayback Machine, with Paul Brennan, On the Beach (Glebe NSW, Australia). No.1/1983: p. 42
- ^Derrida 1972 Signature Event Context
- ^Chora L Works: Jacques Derrida and Peter Eisenman
- ^(Nader El-Bizri, 2004, 2011)
- ^(Nader El-Bizri, 2018)
- ^(Nader El-Bizri, 2001, 2004, 2011, 2015)
- ^Nader El-Bizri, 'Being at Home Among Things: Heidegger's Reflections on Dwelling', Environment, Space, Place Vol. 3 (2011), pp. 47–71; Nader El-Bizri, 'On Dwelling: Heideggerian Allusions to Architectural Phenomenology', Studia UBB. Philosophia, Vol. 60, No. 1 (2015): 5–30; Nader El-Bizri, 'Phenomenology of Place and Space in our Epoch: Thinking along Heideggerian Pathways', in The Phenomenology of Real and Virtual Places, ed. E. Champion (London : Routledge, 2018), pp. 123–143.
- ^Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1995). 'Ghostwriting'. Diacritics. 25 (2): 64–84. doi:10.2307/465145. JSTOR465145.
- ^|Jacques Derrida|Marx & Sons|Sprinker, Michael, ed. (2008). 'Chapter 10: Marx & Sons'. Ghostly Deamarctations: A Symposium On Jacques Derrida's 'Specters of Marx'. chapter by Jacques Derrida. London: Verso. p. 223. ISBN9781844672110.
- ^Sprinker, Michael, ed. (2008). 'Chapter 5: Marxism without Marx'. Ghostly Deamarctations: A Symposium On Jacques Derrida's 'Specters of Marx'. chapter by Terry Eagleton. London: Verso. pp. 83–7. ISBN9781844672110.
- ^Garver, Newton (1991). 'Derrida's language-games'. Topoi. 10 (2): 187–98. doi:10.1007/BF00141339
- ^'Truth and Consequences: How to Understand Jacques Derrida,' The New Republic 197:14 (October 5, 1987).
- ^J.E. D'Ulisse, Derrida (1930–2004), New Partisan, December 24, 2004. Archived March 10, 2016, at the Wayback Machine
- ^Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. ISBN0-521-36781-6. Ch. 6: 'From ironist theory to private allusions: Derrida'
- ^'Deconstructing Jacques'. The Guardian. October 12, 2004.
- ^Chomsky, Noam (August 2012). 'Postmodernism?'. ZCommunications. Retrieved September 27, 2014.
- ^Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt, Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels With Science (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994).
- ^Derrida, Jacques. Limited, Inc. Northwestern University Press, 1988. p. 29: '..I have read some of his [Searle's] work (more, in any case, than he seems to have read of mine)'
- ^Maclean, Ian. 2004. 'un dialogue de sourds? Some implications of the Austin–Searle–Derrida debate', in Jacques Derrida: critical thought. Ian Maclachlan (ed.) Ashgate Publishing, 2004
- ^ abcAlfino, Mark (1991). 'Another Look at the Derrida-Searle Debate'. Philosophy & Rhetoric. 24 (2): 143–152. JSTOR40237667.
- ^Simon Glendinning. 2001. Arguing with Derrida. Wiley-Blackwell. p. 18
- ^Gregor Campbell. 1993. 'John R. Searle' in Irene Rima Makaryk (ed). Encyclopedia of contemporary literary theory: approaches, scholars, terms. University of Toronto Press, 1993
- ^John Searle, 'Reiterating the Différences: A Reply to Derrida', Glyph 2 (Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977).
- ^ abMarian Hobson. 1998. Jacques Derrida: opening lines. Psychology Press. pp. 95-97
- ^ abcSearle, John R. (1994). 'Literary Theory and Its Discontents'. Journal of Humanistic Psychology. 25 (3): 637–67. doi:10.2307/469470. JSTOR469470.
- ^Searle, John R. (October 27, 1983). 'The Word Turned Upside Down'. The New York Review of Books. Archived from the original on October 13, 2012. Retrieved August 21, 2013.
- ^ abcJacques Derrida, 'Afterwords' in Limited, Inc. (Northwestern University Press, 1988), p. 133
- ^Farrell, Frank B. (1988). 'Iterability and Meaning: The Searle-Derrida Debate'. Metaphilosophy. 19: 53–64. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9973.1988.tb00701.x.
- ^Fish, Stanley E. (1982). 'With the Compliments of the Author: Reflections on Austin and Derrida'. Critical Inquiry. 8 (4): 693–721. JSTOR1343193.
- ^Wright, Edmond (1982). 'Derrida, Searle, Contexts, Games, Riddles'. New Literary History. 13 (3): 463–477. doi:10.2307/468793. JSTOR468793.
- ^Culler, Jonathan (1981). 'Convention and Meaning: Derrida and Austin'. New Literary History. 13 (1): 15–30. doi:10.2307/468640. JSTOR468640.
- ^Kenaan, Hagi (2002). Continental Philosophy Review. 35 (2): 117–133. doi:10.1023/A:1016583115826.Missing or empty
|title=
(help) - ^Raffel, Stanley (2011). 'Understanding Each Other: The Case of the Derrida-Searle Debate'. Human Studies. 34 (3): 277–292. doi:10.1007/s10746-011-9189-6.
- ^Searle The Construction of Social Reality (1995) pp. 157–160.
- ^Tr. by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Johns Hopkins University Press. Baltimore, 1976, 158–59
- ^Derrida, Jacques (1988). 'Afterword: Toward An Ethic of Discussion'. Limited Inc (1st ed.). Illinois: Northwestern University Press. p. 136. ISBN978-0810107885.
The phrase which for some has become a sort of slogan, in general so badly understood, of deconstruction ('there is no outside-text' [il n'y a pas de hors-texte]), means nothing else: there is nothing outside context. In this form, which says exactly the same thing, the formula would doubtless have been less shocking. I am not certain that it would have provided more to think about.
- ^Barry Smith et al., 'Open letter against Derrida receiving an honorary doctorate from Cambridge University,' The Times [London], 9 May 1992 [1].
- ^John Rawlings (1999) Presidential Lectures: Jacques Derrida: Introduction at Stanford University
- ^Richmond, Sarah (April 1996). 'Derrida and Analytical Philosophy: Speech Acts and their Force'. European Journal of Philosophy. 4 (1): 38–62. doi:10.1111/j.1468-0378.1996.tb00064.x.
- ^Derrida, Jacques (1995). ''Honoris Causa: 'This is also very funny''. Points . .: Interviews, 1974-1994 (1st ed.). New York: Stanford University Press. pp. 409–413. ISBN978-0810103979.
If it were only a question of 'my' work, of the particular or isolated research of one individual, this wouldn't happen. Indeed, the violence of these denunciations derives from the fact that the work accused is part of a whole ongoing process. What is unfolding here, like the resistance it necessarily arouses, can't be limited to a personal 'oeuvre,' nor to a discipline, nor even to the academic institution. Nor in particular to a generation: it's often the active involvement of students and younger teachers which makes certain of our colleagues nervous to the point that they lose their sense of moderation and of the academic rules they invoke when they attack me and my work.
If this work seems so threatening to them, this is because it isn't simply eccentric or strange, incomprehensible or exotic (which would allow them to dispose of it easily), but as I myself hope, and as they believe more than they admit, competent, rigorously argued, and carrying conviction in its re-examination of the fundamental norms and premises of a number of dominant discourses, the principles underlying many of their evaluations, the structures of academic institutions, and the research that goes on within them. What this kind of questioning does is modify the rules of the dominant discourse, it tries to politicize and democratize the university scene. ..
In short, to answer your question about the 'exceptional violence,' the compulsive 'ferocity,' and the 'exaggeration' of the 'attacks,' I would say that these critics organize and practice in my case a sort of obsessive personality cult which philosophers should know how to question and above all to moderate. - ^Richard Wolin, Preface to the MIT press edition: Note on a missing text. In R. Wolin (ed.) The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 1993, p. xiii. ISBN0-262-73101-0
- ^NYBooks.com: 2658 and NYBooks.com: 2591
- ^Derrida, 'The Work of Intellectuals and the Press (The Bad Example: How the New York Review of Books and Company do Business)', published in the book Points.. (1995; see the footnote about ISBN0-226-14314-7, here) (see also the [1992] French version Points de suspension: entretiens (ISBN0-8047-2488-1) there).
- ^Points, p. 434
- ^The Economist. Obituary: Jacques Derrida, French intellectual, October 21, 2004
- ^The Independent
- ^Jonathan Culler (2008) Why deconstruction still matters: A conversation with Jonathan Culler, interviewed by Paul Sawyer for The Cornell Chronicle, January 24, 2008
Works cited[edit]
- Geoffrey Bennington (1991). Jacques Derrida, University of Chicago Press. Section Curriculum vitae, pp. 325–36. Excerpts. ISBN9780226042626
- Caputo, John D. (ed.) (1997). Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida. New York: Fordham University Press. Transcript (which is also available here at the Wayback Machine (archived September 1, 2006)) of the Roundtable Discussion with Jacques Derrida at Villanova University, October 3, 1994. With commentary by Caputo.
- Cixous, Hélène (2001). Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint (English edition, New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). OCLC1025139739, 265430083, 448343513, 1036830179
- Derrida (1967): interview with Henri Ronse, republished in Positions (English edition, Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1981).
- Derrida (1971): interview with Guy Scarpetta, republished in Positions (English edition, Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1981).
- Derrida (1976). Where a Teaching Body Begins and How It Ends, republished in Who's Afraid of Philosophy?.
- Derrida (1988). Afterword: Toward An Ethic of Discussion, published in the English translation of Limited Inc.
- Derrida (1989). This Strange Institution Called Literature, interview published in Acts of Literature (1991), pp. 33–75
- Derrida (1990). Once Again from the Top: Of the Right to Philosophy, interview with Robert Maggiori for Libération, November 15, 1990, republished in Points..: Interviews, 1974-1994 (1995).
- Derrida (1991). 'A 'Madness' Must Watch Over Thinking', interview with Francois Ewald for Le Magazine Litteraire, March 1991, republished in Points..: Interviews, 1974-1994 (1995).
- Derrida (1992). Derrida's interview in The Cambridge Review 113, October 1992. Reprinted in Points..: Interviews, 1974–1994 Stanford University Press (1995) and retitled as Honoris Causa: 'This is also extremely funny,' pp. 399–421. Excerpt.
- Derrida (1993). Specters of Marx.
- Derrida et al. (1994): roundtable discussion: Of the Humanities and Philosophical Disciplines Surfaces Vol. VI.108 (v.1.0A – August 16, 1996) – ISSN1188-2492 Later republished in Ethics, Institutions, and the Right to Philosophy (2002).
- Derrida and Ferraris (1997). I Have a Taste for Secret, 1993–5 conversations with Maurizio Ferraris and Giorgio Vattimo, in Derrida and Ferraris [1997] A Taste for the Secret, translated by Giacomo Donis.
- Derrida (1997): interview Les Intellectuels: tentative de définition par eux-mêmes. Enquête, published in a special number of journal Lignes, 32 (1997): 57–68, republished in Papier Machine (2001), and translated into English as Intellectuals. Attempt at Definition by Themselves. Survey, in Derrida (2005) Paper machine.
- Derrida (2002): Q&A session at Film Forum, New York City, October 23, 2002, transcript by Gil Kofman. Published in Kirby Dick, Amy Ziering Kofman, Jacques Derrida (2005). Derrida: screenplay and essays on the film.
- Graff, Gerald (1993). Is Reason in Trouble? in Proc. Am. Philos. Soc., 137, no. 4, 1993, pp. 680–88.
- Kritzman, Lawrence (ed., 2005). The Columbia History of Twentieth-Century French Thought, Columbia University Press.
- Mackey, Louis (1984) with a reply by Searle. An Exchange on Deconstruction, in New York Review of Books, February 2, 1984
- Peeters, Benoît (2012). Derrida: A Biography. Polity.
- Powell, Jason (2006). Jacques Derrida: A Biography. London and New York: Continuum.
- Poster, Mark (1988). Critical theory and poststructuralism: in search of a context, section Introduction: Theory and the problem of Context.
- Poster, Mark (2010). McLuhan and the Cultural Theory of Media, MediaTropes eJournal, Vol. II, No. 2 (2010): 1–18.
- Searle (1983). The Word Turned Upside Down, in The New York Review of Books, October 1983.
- Searle (2000). Reality Principles: An Interview with John R. Searle. Reason.com. February 2000 issue, accessed online on 30-08-2010.
Further reading[edit]
Introductory works[edit]
- Adleman, Dan (2010) 'Deconstricting Derridean Genre Theory' (PDF)
- Culler, Jonathan (1975) Structuralist Poetics.
- Culler, Jonathan (1983) On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism.
- Descombes, Vincent (1980) Modern French Philosophy.
- Deutscher, Penelope (2006) How to Read Derrida (ISBN978-0-393-32879-0).
- Mark Dooley and Liam Kavanagh (2007) The Philosophy of Derrida, London: Acumen Press, 2006; Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
- Goldschmit, Marc (2003) Jacques Derrida, une introduction' Paris, Agora Pocket, ISBN2-266-11574-X.
- Hill, Leslie (2007) The Cambridge introduction to Jacques Derrida
- Jameson, Fredric (1972) The Prison-House of Language.
- Leitch, Vincent B. (1983) Deconstructive Criticism: An Advanced Introduction.
- Lentricchia, Frank (1980) After the New Criticism.
- Moati Raoul (2009), Derrida/Searle, déconstruction et langage ordinaire
- Norris, Christopher (1982) Deconstruction: Theory and Practice.
- Thomas, Michael (2006) The Reception of Derrida: Translation and Transformation.
- Wise, Christopher (2009) Derrida, Africa, and the Middle East.
Other works[edit]
- Agamben, Giorgio. 'Pardes: The Writing of Potentiality,' in Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, ed. and trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005. 205-19.
- Beardsworth, Richard, Derrida and the Political (ISBN0-415-10967-1).
- Bennington, Geoffrey, Legislations (ISBN0-86091-668-5).
- Bennington, Geoffrey, Interrupting Derrida (ISBN0-415-22427-6).
- Critchley, Simon, The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas, 3rd Edition. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. March 18, 2014. p. 352. ISBN9780748689323.
- Caputo, John D., The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida.
- Coward, Harold G. (ed) Derrida and Negative theology, SUNY 1992. ISBN0-7914-0964-3
- de Man, Paul, 'The Rhetoric of Blindness: Jacques Derrida's Reading of Rousseau,' in Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, second edition, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983. 102-41.
- El-Bizri, Nader, 'Qui-êtes vous Khôra?: Receiving Plato's Timaeus', Existentia Meletai-Sophias 11 (2001), pp. 473–490.
- El-Bizri, Nader, 'ON KAI KHORA: Situating Heidegger between the Sophist and the Timaeus,' Studia Phaenomenologica 4 (2004), pp. 73–98.
- Fabbri, Lorenzo. 'Chronotopologies of the Exception. Agamben and Derrida before the Camps', 'Diacritics,' Volume 39, Number 3 (2009): 77-95.
- Foucault, Michel, 'My Body, This Paper, This Fire,' in Michel Foucault, History of Madness, ed. Jean Khalfa, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa, London: Routledge, 2006. 550-74.
- Fradet, Pierre-Alexandre, Derrida-Bergson. Sur l'immédiateté, Hermann, Paris, coll. 'Hermann Philosophie', 2014. ISBN9782705688318
- Gasché, Rodolphe, Inventions of Difference: On Jacques Derrida.
- Gasché, Rodolphe, The Tain of the Mirror.
- Goldschmit, Marc, Une langue à venir. Derrida, l'écriture hyperbolique Paris, Lignes et Manifeste, 2006. ISBN2-84938-058-X
- Habermas, Jürgen, 'Beyond a Temporalized Philosophy of Origins: Jacques Derrida's Critique of Phonocentrism,' in Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990. 161-84.
- Hägglund, Martin, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008.
- Hamacher, Werner, Lingua amissa, Buenos Aires: Miño y Dávila editores, 2012.
- Kierans, Kenneth (1997). 'Beyond Deconstruction'(PDF). Animus. 2. ISSN1209-0689. Retrieved August 17, 2011.
- Kopić, Mario, Izazovi post-metafizike, Sremski Karlovci - Novi Sad: Izdavačka knjižarnica, 2007. (ISBN978-86-7543-120-6)
- Kopić, Mario, Nezacjeljiva rana svijeta, Zagreb: Antibarbarus, 2007. (ISBN978-953-249-035-0)
- Mackey, Louis, 'Slouching Toward Bethlehem: Deconstructive Strategies in Theology,' in Anglican Theological Review, Volume LXV, Number 3, July, 1983. 255–272.
- Mackey, Louis, 'A Nicer Knowledge of Belief' in Loius Mackey, An Ancient Quarrel Continued: The Troubled Marriage of Philosophy and Literature, Lanham, University Press of America, 2002. 219–240 (ISBN978-0761822677)
- Magliola, Robert, Derrida on the Mend, Lafayette: Purdue UP, 1984; 1986; rpt. 2000 (ISBN0-911198-69-5). (Initiated what has become a very active area of study in Buddhology and comparative philosophy, the comparison of Derridean deconstruction and Buddhist philosophy, especially Madhyamikan and Zen Buddhist philosophy.)
- Magliola, Robert, On Deconstructing Life-Worlds: Buddhism, Christianity, Culture, Atlanta: Scholars P, American Academy of Religion, 1997; Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000 (ISBN0-7885-0296-4). (Further develops comparison of Derridean thought and Buddhism.)
- Marder, Michael, The Event of the Thing: Derrida's Post-Deconstructive Realism, Toronto: Toronto UP, 2009. (ISBN0-8020-9892-4)
- Miller, J. Hillis, For Derrida, New York: Fordham University Press, 2009.
- Mouffe, Chantal (ed.), Deconstruction and Pragmatism, with essays by Simon Critchley, Ernesto Laclau, Richard Rorty, and Derrida.
- Norris, Christopher, Derrida (ISBN0-674-19823-9).
- Park, Jin Y., ed., Buddhisms and Deconstructions, Lanham: Rowland and Littlefield, 2006 (ISBN978-0-7425-3418-6; ISBN0-7425-3418-9). (Several of the collected papers specifically treat Derrida and Buddhist thought.)
- Rapaport, Herman, Later Derrida (ISBN0-415-94269-1).
- Rorty, Richard, 'From Ironist Theory to Private Allusions: Derrida,' in Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. 121-37.
- Ross, Stephen David, Betraying Derrida, for Life, Atropos Press, 2013.
- Roudinesco, Elisabeth, Philosophy in Turbulent Times: Canguilhem, Sartre, Foucault, Althusser, Deleuze, Derrida, Columbia University Press, New York, 2008.
- Sallis, John (ed.), Deconstruction and Philosophy, with essays by Rodolphe Gasché, John D. Caputo, Robert Bernasconi, David Wood, and Derrida.
- Sallis, John (2009). The Verge of Philosophy. University of Chicago Press. ISBN978-0-226-73431-6
- Salvioli, Marco, Il Tempo e le Parole. Ricoeur e Derrida a 'margine' della fenomenologia, ESD, Bologna 2006.
- Smith, James K. A., Jacques Derrida: Live Theory.
- Sprinker, Michael, ed. Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx, London and New York: Verso, 1999; rpt. 2008. (Includes Derrida's reply, 'Marx & Sons.')
- Stiegler, Bernard, 'Derrida and Technology: Fidelity at the Limits of Deconstruction and the Prosthesis of Faith,' in Tom Cohen (ed.), Jacques Derrida and the Humanities (ISBN0-521-62565-3).
- Wood, David (ed.), Derrida: A Critical Reader, Wiley-Blackwell, 1992.
- Zlomislic, Marko, Jacques Derrida's Aporetic Ethics, Lexington Books, 2004.
External links[edit]
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Jacques Derrida. |
Wikiquote has quotations related to: Jacques Derrida |
- Leonard Lawlor. Entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Gerry Coulter. Passings: Taking Derrida Seriously. Volume 2, Number 1, January 2005
- John Rawlings. Jacques Derrida Stanford Presidential Lectures in the Humanities and Arts
- Jean-Michel Rabaté. Jacques Derrida at the Wayback Machine (archived May 3, 2003) Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory.
- Eddie Yeghiayan. Books and contributions to books at the Library of Congress Web Archives (archived November 15, 2001) (up to 2001), Bibliography and translations list
- Guide to the Jacques Derrida Papers. Special Collections and Archives, The UC Irvine Libraries, Irvine, California.
- Guide to the Saffa Fathy Video Recordings of Jacques Derrida Lectures. Special Collections and Archives, The UC Irvine Libraries, Irvine, California.
- Guide to the Jacques Derrida Listserv Collection. Special Collections and Archives, The UC Irvine Libraries, Irvine, California.
- Mario Perniola, Remembering Derrida, in 'SubStance' (University of California), 2005, n.1, issue 106.
- Rick Roderick, Derrida and the Ends of Man, in 'The Self Under Siege: Philosophy in the 20th Century (1993)' (University of Texas, Austin).
Retrieved from 'https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jacques_Derrida&oldid=918388606'
(Redirected from Jacques Derrida on deconstruction)
Originated by the philosopher Jacques Derrida, deconstruction is an approach to understanding the relationship between text and meaning. Derrida's approach consisted of conducting readings of texts looking for things that run counter to the intended meaning or structural unity of a particular text. The purpose of deconstruction is to show that the usage of language in a given text, and language as a whole, are irreducibly complex, unstable, or impossible. Throughout his readings, Derrida hoped to show deconstruction at work.
Many debates in continental philosophy surrounding ontology, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, hermeneutics, and philosophy of language refer to Derrida's observations. Since the 1980s, these observations inspired a range of theoretical enterprises in the humanities,[1] including the disciplines of law,[2]:3–76[3][4] anthropology,[5]historiography,[6]linguistics,[7] sociolinguistics,[8]psychoanalysis, LGBT studies, and the feminist school of thought. Deconstruction also inspired deconstructivism in architecture and remains important within art,[9] music,[10] and literary criticism.[11][12]
- 2Influences
- 3Deconstruction according to Derrida
- 4Difficulty of definition
- 4.1Derrida's 'negative' descriptions
- 5Application
- 6Development after Derrida
- 7Criticisms
Overview[edit]
Jacques Derrida's 1967 book Of Grammatology introduced the majority of ideas influential within deconstruction.[13]:25 Derrida published a number of other works directly relevant to the concept of deconstruction. Books showing deconstruction in action or defining it more completely include Différance, Speech and Phenomena, and Writing and Difference.
According to Derrida and taking inspiration from the work of Ferdinand de Saussure,[14] language as a system of signs and words only has meaning because of the contrast between these signs.[15][13]:7, 12 As Rorty contends, 'words have meaning only because of contrast-effects with other words..no word can acquire meaning in the way in which philosophers from Aristotle to Bertrand Russell have hoped it might—by being the unmediated expression of something non-linguistic (e.g., an emotion, a sense-datum, a physical object, an idea, a Platonic Form)'.[15] As a consequence, meaning is never present, but rather is deferred to other signs. Derrida refers to the—in this view, mistaken—belief that there is a self-sufficient, non-deferred meaning as metaphysics of presence. A concept, then, must be understood in the context of its opposite, such as being/nothingness, normal/abnormal, speech/writing, etc.[16][17]:26
Further, Derrida contends that 'in a classical philosophical opposition we are not dealing with the peaceful coexistence of a vis-a-vis, but rather with a violent hierarchy. One of the two terms governs the other (axiologically, logically, etc.), or has the upper hand': signified over signifier; intelligible over sensible; speech over writing; activity over passivity, etc. The first task of deconstruction would be to find and overturn these oppositions inside a text or a corpus of texts; but the final objective of deconstruction is not to surpass all oppositions, because it is assumed they are structurally necessary to produce sense. The oppositions simply cannot be suspended once and for all. The hierarchy of dual oppositions always reestablishes itself. Deconstruction only points to the necessity of an unending analysis that can make explicit the decisions and arbitrary violence intrinsic to all texts.[17]:41
Finally, Derrida argues that it is not enough to expose and deconstruct the way oppositions work and then stop there in a nihilistic or cynical position, 'thereby preventing any means of intervening in the field effectively'.[17]:42 To be effective, deconstruction needs to create new terms, not to synthesize the concepts in opposition, but to mark their difference and eternal interplay. This explains why Derrida always proposes new terms in his deconstruction, not as a free play but as a pure necessity of analysis, to better mark the intervals. Derrida called undecidables—that is, unities of simulacrum—'false' verbal properties (nominal or semantic) that can no longer be included within philosophical (binary) opposition, but which, however, inhabit philosophical oppositions—resisting and organizing it—without ever constituting a third term, without ever leaving room for a solution in the form of Hegelian dialectics (e.g., différance, archi-writing, pharmakon, supplement, hymen, gram, spacing).[17]:19
Influences[edit]
Derrida's theories on deconstruction were themselves influenced by the work of linguists such as Ferdinand de Saussure (whose writings on semiotics also became a cornerstone of structuralist theory in the mid-20th century) and literary theorists such as Roland Barthes (whose works were an investigation of the logical ends of structuralist thought). Derrida's views on deconstruction stood in opposition to the theories of structuralists such as psychoanalytic theorist Jacques Lacan, and anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. However, Derrida resisted attempts to label his work as 'post-structuralist'.[citation needed]
Influence of Nietzsche[edit]
In order to understand Derrida's motivation, one must refer to Nietzsche's philosophy.
Nietzsche's project began with Orpheus, the man underground. This foil to Platonic light was deliberately and self-consciously lauded in Daybreak, when Nietzsche announces, albeit retrospectively, 'In this work you will discover a subterranean man at work', and then goes on to map the project of unreason: 'All things that live long are gradually so saturated with reason that their origin in unreason thereby becomes improbable. Does not almost every precise history of an origination impress our feelings as paradoxical and wantonly offensive? Does the good historian not, at bottom, constantly contradict?'.[18]
Nietzsche's point in Daybreak is that standing at the end of modern history, modern thinkers know too much to be deceived by the illusion of reason any more. Reason, logic, philosophy and science are no longer solely sufficient as the royal roads to truth. And so Nietzsche decides to throw it in our faces, and uncover the truth of Plato, that he—unlike Orpheus—just happened to discover his true love in the light instead of in the dark. This being merely one historical event amongst many, Nietzsche proposes that we revisualize the history of the West as the history of a series of political moves, that is, a manifestation of the will to power, that at bottom have no greater or lesser claim to truth in any noumenal (absolute) sense. By calling our attention to the fact that he has assumed the role of Orpheus, the man underground, in dialectical opposition to Plato, Nietzsche hopes to sensitize us to the political and cultural context, and the political influences that impact authorship. For example, the political influences that led one author to choose philosophy over poetry (or at least portray himself as having made such a choice), and another to make a different choice.
The problem with Nietzsche, as Derrida sees it, is that he did not go far enough. That he missed the fact that this will to power is itself but a manifestation of the operation of writing. Therefore Derrida wishes to help us step beyond Nietzsche's penultimate revaluation of all western values, to the ultimate, which is the final appreciation of 'the role of writing in the production of knowledge'.[19] Driver nokia lumia 530 (rm-1017) windows 7.
Influence of Saussure[edit]
Derrida approaches all texts as constructed around elemental oppositions which all discourse has to articulate if it intends to make any sense whatsoever. This is so because identity is viewed in non-essentialist terms as a construct, and because constructs only produce meaning through the interplay of difference inside a 'system of distinct signs'. This approach to text is influenced by the semiology of Ferdinand de Saussure.[20][21]
Saussure is considered one of the fathers of structuralism when he explained that terms get their meaning in reciprocal determination with other terms inside language:
In language there are only differences. Even more important: a difference generally implies positive terms between which the difference is set up; but in language there are only differences without positive terms. Whether we take the signified or the signifier, language has neither ideas nor sounds that existed before the linguistic system, but only conceptual and phonic differences that have issued from the system. The idea or phonic substance that a sign contains is of less importance than the other signs that surround it. [..] A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differences of ideas; but the pairing of a certain number of acoustical signs with as many cuts made from the mass thought engenders a system of values.[14]
Saussure explicitly suggested that linguistics was only a branch of a more general semiology, a science of signs in general, human codes being only one part. Nevertheless, in the end, as Derrida pointed out, Saussure made linguistics 'the regulatory model', and 'for essential, and essentially metaphysical, reasons had to privilege speech, and everything that links the sign to phone'.[17]:21, 46, 101, 156, 164 Derrida will prefer to follow the more 'fruitful paths (formalization)' of a general semiotics without falling into what he considered 'a hierarchizing teleology' privileging linguistics, and to speak of 'mark' rather than of language, not as something restricted to mankind, but as prelinguistic, as the pure possibility of language, working everywhere there is a relation to something else.
Deconstruction according to Derrida[edit]
Etymology[edit]
Derrida's original use of the word 'deconstruction' was a translation of Destruktion, a concept from the work of Martin Heidegger that Derrida sought to apply to textual reading. Heidegger's term referred to a process of exploring the categories and concepts that tradition has imposed on a word, and the history behind them.[22]
Basic philosophical concerns[edit]
Derrida's concerns flow from a consideration of several issues:
- A desire to contribute to the re-evaluation of all Western values, a re-evaluation built on the 18th-century Kantian critique of pure reason, and carried forward to the 19th century, in its more radical implications, by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche.
- An assertion that texts outlive their authors, and become part of a set of cultural habits equal to, if not surpassing, the importance of authorial intent.
- A re-valuation of certain classic western dialectics: poetry vs. philosophy, reason vs. revelation, structure vs. creativity, episteme vs. techne, etc.
To this end, Derrida follows a long line of modern philosophers, who look backwards to Plato and his influence on the Western metaphysical tradition.[19][page needed] Like Nietzsche, Derrida suspects Plato of dissimulation in the service of a political project, namely the education, through critical reflections, of a class of citizens more strategically positioned to influence the polis. However, like Nietzsche, Derrida is not satisfied merely with such a political interpretation of Plato, because of the particular dilemma modern humans find themselves in. His Platonic reflections are inseparably part of his critique of modernity, hence the attempt to be something beyond the modern, because of this Nietzschian sense that the modern has lost its way and become mired in nihilism.
Différance[edit]
Différance is the observation that the meanings of words come from their synchrony with other words within the language and their diachrony between contemporary and historical definitions of a word. Understanding language, according to Derrida, requires an understanding of both viewpoints of linguistic analysis. The focus on diachrony has led to accusations against Derrida of engaging in the etymological fallacy.[23]
There is one statement by Derrida—in an essay on Rousseau in Of Grammatology—which has been of great interest to his opponents.[13]:158 It is the assertion that 'there is no outside-text' (il n'y a pas de hors-texte),[13]:158–59, 163 which is often mistranslated as 'there is nothing outside of the text'. The mistranslation is often used to suggest Derrida believes that nothing exists but words. Michel Foucault, for instance, famously misattributed to Derrida the very different phrase 'Il n'y a rien en dehors du texte' for this purpose.[24] According to Derrida, his statement simply refers to the unavoidability of context that is at the heart of différance.[25]:133
For example, the word 'house' derives its meaning more as a function of how it differs from 'shed', 'mansion', 'hotel', 'building', etc. (Form of Content, that Louis Hjelmslev distinguished from Form of Expression) than how the word 'house' may be tied to a certain image of a traditional house (i.e., the relationship between signified and signifier), with each term being established in reciprocal determination with the other terms than by an ostensive description or definition: when can we talk about a 'house' or a 'mansion' or a 'shed'? The same can be said about verbs, in all the languages in the world: when should we stop saying 'walk' and start saying 'run'? The same happens, of course, with adjectives: when must we stop saying 'yellow' and start saying 'orange', or exchange 'past' for 'present'? Not only are the topological differences between the words relevant here, but the differentials between what is signified is also covered by différance.
Thus, complete meaning is always 'differential' and postponed in language; there is never a moment when meaning is complete and total. A simple example would consist of looking up a given word in a dictionary, then proceeding to look up the words found in that word's definition, etc., also comparing with older dictionaries. Such a process would never end.
Metaphysics of presence[edit]
Derrida describes the task of deconstruction as the identification of metaphysics of presence, or logocentrism in western philosophy. Metaphysics of presence is the desire for immediate access to meaning, the privileging of presence over absence. This means that there is an assumed bias in certain binary oppositions where one side is placed in a position over another, such as good over bad, speech over the written word, male over female. Derrida writes, 'Without a doubt, Aristotle thinks of time on the basis of ousia as parousia, on the basis of the now, the point, etc. And yet an entire reading could be organized that would repeat in Aristotle's text both this limitation and its opposite'.[22]:29–67 To Derrida, the central bias of logocentrism was the now being placed as more important than the future or past. This argument is largely based on the earlier work of Heidegger, who, in Being and Time, claimed that the theoretical attitude of pure presence is parasitical upon a more originary involvement with the world in concepts such as ready-to-hand and being-with.[citation needed]
Deconstruction and dialectics[edit]
In the deconstruction procedure, one of the main concerns of Derrida is to not collapse into Hegel's dialectic, where these oppositions would be reduced to contradictions in a dialectic that has the purpose of resolving it into a synthesis.[17]:43 The presence of Hegelian dialectics was enormous in the intellectual life of France during the second half of the 20th century, with the influence of Kojève and Hyppolite, but also with the impact of dialectics based on contradiction developed by Marxists, and including the existentialism of Sartre, etc. This explains Derrida's concern to always distinguish his procedure from Hegel's,[17]:43 since Hegelianism believes binary oppositions would produce a synthesis, while Derrida saw binary oppositions as incapable of collapsing into a synthesis free from the original contradiction.
Difficulty of definition[edit]
There have been problems defining deconstruction. Derrida claimed that all of his essays were attempts to define what deconstruction is,[26]:4 and that deconstruction is necessarily complicated and difficult to explain since it actively criticises the very language needed to explain it.
Derrida's 'negative' descriptions[edit]
Derrida has been more forthcoming with negative (apophatic) than with positive descriptions of deconstruction. When asked by Toshihiko Izutsu some preliminary considerations on how to translate 'deconstruction' in Japanese, in order to at least prevent using a Japanese term contrary to deconstruction's actual meaning, Derrida began his response by saying that such a question amounts to 'what deconstruction is not, or rather ought not to be'.[26]:1
Derrida states that deconstruction is not an analysis, a critique, or a method[26]:3 in the traditional sense that philosophy understands these terms. In these negative descriptions of deconstruction, Derrida is seeking to 'multiply the cautionary indicators and put aside all the traditional philosophical concepts'.[26]:3 This does not mean that deconstruction has absolutely nothing in common with an analysis, a critique, or a method, because while Derrida distances deconstruction from these terms, he reaffirms 'the necessity of returning to them, at least under erasure'.[26]:3 Derrida's necessity of returning to a term under erasure means that even though these terms are problematic we must use them until they can be effectively reformulated or replaced. The relevance of the tradition of negative theology to Derrida's preference for negative descriptions of deconstruction is the notion that a positive description of deconstruction would over-determine the idea of deconstruction and would close off the openness that Derrida wishes to preserve for deconstruction. If Derrida were to positively define deconstruction—as, for example, a critique—then this would make the concept of critique immune to itself being deconstructed. Some new philosophy beyond deconstruction would then be required in order to encompass the notion of critique.
Not a method[edit]
Derrida states that 'Deconstruction is not a method, and cannot be transformed into one'.[26]:3 This is because deconstruction is not a mechanical operation. Derrida warns against considering deconstruction as a mechanical operation, when he states that 'It is true that in certain circles (university or cultural, especially in the United States) the technical and methodological 'metaphor' that seems necessarily attached to the very word 'deconstruction' has been able to seduce or lead astray'.[26]:3 Commentator Richard Beardsworth explains that
Derrida is careful to avoid this term [method] because it carries connotations of a procedural form of judgement. A thinker with a method has already decided how to proceed, is unable to give him or herself up to the matter of thought in hand, is a functionary of the criteria which structure his or her conceptual gestures. For Derrida [..] this is irresponsibility itself. Thus, to talk of a method in relation to deconstruction, especially regarding its ethico-political implications, would appear to go directly against the current of Derrida's philosophical adventure.[27]
Beardsworth here explains that it would be irresponsible to undertake a deconstruction with a complete set of rules that need only be applied as a method to the object of deconstruction, because this understanding would reduce deconstruction to a thesis of the reader that the text is then made to fit. This would be an irresponsible act of reading, because it becomes a prejudicial procedure that only finds what it sets out to find.
Jacques Derrida Deconstruction Summary
Not a critique[edit]
Derrida states that deconstruction is not a critique in the Kantian sense.[26]:3 This is because Kant defines the term critique as the opposite of dogmatism. For Derrida, it is not possible to escape the dogmatic baggage of the language we use in order to perform a pure critique in the Kantian sense. Language is dogmatic because it is inescapably metaphysical. Derrida argues that language is inescapably metaphysical because it is made up of signifiers that only refer to that which transcends them—the signified.[citation needed] In addition, Derrida asks rhetorically 'Is not the idea of knowledge and of the acquisition of knowledge in itself metaphysical?'[2]:5 By this, Derrida means that all claims to know something necessarily involve an assertion of the metaphysical type that something is the case somewhere. For Derrida the concept of neutrality is suspect and dogmatism is therefore involved in everything to a certain degree. Deconstruction can challenge a particular dogmatism and hence desediment dogmatism in general, but it cannot escape all dogmatism all at once.
Not an analysis[edit]
Derrida states that deconstruction is not an analysis in the traditional sense.[26]:3 This is because the possibility of analysis is predicated on the possibility of breaking up the text being analysed into elemental component parts. Derrida argues that there are no self-sufficient units of meaning in a text, because individual words or sentences in a text can only be properly understood in terms of how they fit into the larger structure of the text and language itself. For more on Derrida's theory of meaning see the article on différance.
Not post-structuralist[edit]
Derrida states that his use of the word deconstruction first took place in a context in which 'structuralism was dominant' and deconstruction's meaning is within this context. Derrida states that deconstruction is an 'antistructuralist gesture' because '[s]tructures were to be undone, decomposed, desedimented'. At the same time, deconstruction is also a 'structuralist gesture' because it is concerned with the structure of texts. So, deconstruction involves 'a certain attention to structures'[26]:2 and tries to 'understand how an 'ensemble' was constituted'.[26]:3 As both a structuralist and an antistructuralist gesture, deconstruction is tied up with what Derrida calls the 'structural problematic'.[26]:2 The structural problematic for Derrida is the tension between genesis, that which is 'in the essential mode of creation or movement', and structure: 'systems, or complexes, or static configurations'.[16]:194 An example of genesis would be the sensoryideas from which knowledge is then derived in the empiricalepistemology. An example of structure would be a binary opposition such as good and evil where the meaning of each element is established, at least partly, through its relationship to the other element.
It is for this reason that Derrida distances his use of the term deconstruction from post-structuralism, a term that would suggest that philosophy could simply go beyond structuralism. Derrida states that 'the motif of deconstruction has been associated with 'post-structuralism'', but that this term was 'a word unknown in France until its 'return' from the United States'.[26]:3 In his deconstruction of Husserl, Derrida actually argues for the contamination of pure origins by the structures of language and temporality. Manfred Frank has even referred to Derrida's work as 'Neostructuralism', identifying a 'distaste for the metaphysical concepts of domination and system'.[28][29]
Alternative definitions[edit]
The popularity of the term deconstruction, combined with the technical difficulty of Derrida's primary material on deconstruction and his reluctance to elaborate his understanding of the term, has meant that many secondary sources have attempted to give a more straightforward explanation than Derrida himself ever attempted. Secondary definitions are therefore an interpretation of deconstruction by the person offering them rather than a summary of Derrida's actual position.
- Paul de Man was a member of the Yale School and a prominent practitioner of deconstruction as he understood it. His definition of deconstruction is that, '[i]t's possible, within text, to frame a question or undo assertions made in the text, by means of elements which are in the text, which frequently would be precisely structures that play off the rhetorical against grammatical elements.'[30]
- Richard Rorty was a prominent interpreter of Derrida's philosophy. His definition of deconstruction is that, 'the term 'deconstruction' refers in the first instance to the way in which the 'accidental' features of a text can be seen as betraying, subverting, its purportedly 'essential' message.'[31][page needed]
- John D. Caputo attempts to explain deconstruction in a nutshell by stating:'Whenever deconstruction finds a nutshell—a secure axiom or a pithy maxim—the very idea is to crack it open and disturb this tranquility. Indeed, that is a good rule of thumb in deconstruction. That is what deconstruction is all about, its very meaning and mission, if it has any. One might even say that cracking nutshells is what deconstruction is. In a nutshell. ..Have we not run up against a paradox and an aporia [something contradictory]..the paralysis and impossibility of an aporia is just what impels deconstruction, what rouses it out of bed in the morning..'[32]
- Niall Lucy points to the impossibility of defining the term at all, stating: 'While in a sense it is impossibly difficult to define, the impossibility has less to do with the adoption of a position or the assertion of a choice on deconstruction's part than with the impossibility of every 'is' as such. Deconstruction begins, as it were, from a refusal of the authority or determining power of every 'is', or simply from a refusal of authority in general. While such refusal may indeed count as a position, it is not the case that deconstruction holds this as a sort of 'preference' '.[33][page needed]
- David B. Allison is an early translator of Derrida and states, in the introduction to his translation of Speech and Phenomena: [Deconstruction] signifies a project of critical thought whose task is to locate and 'take apart' those concepts which serve as the axioms or rules for a period of thought, those concepts which command the unfolding of an entire epoch of metaphysics. 'Deconstruction' is somewhat less negative than the Heideggerian or Nietzschean terms 'destruction' or 'reversal'; it suggests that certain foundational concepts of metaphysics will never be entirely eliminated..There is no simple 'overcoming' of metaphysics or the language of metaphysics.
- Paul Ricœur defines deconstruction as a way of uncovering the questions behind the answers of a text or tradition.[34][page needed]
- Richard Ellmann defines 'deconstruction' as the systematic undoing of understanding.[citation needed]
A survey of the secondary literature reveals a wide range of heterogeneous arguments. Particularly problematic are the attempts to give neat introductions to deconstruction by people trained in literary criticism who sometimes have little or no expertise in the relevant areas of philosophy that Derrida is working in. These secondary works (e.g. Deconstruction for Beginners[35][page needed] and Deconstructions: A User's Guide)[36][page needed] have attempted to explain deconstruction while being academically criticized as too far removed from the original texts and Derrida's actual position.[citation needed]
Application[edit]
Derrida's observations have greatly influenced literary criticism and post-structuralism.
Literary criticism[edit]
Derrida's method consisted of demonstrating all the forms and varieties of the originary complexity of semiotics, and their multiple consequences in many fields. His way of achieving this was by conducting thorough, careful, sensitive, and yet transformational readings of philosophical and literary texts, with an ear to what in those texts runs counter to their apparent systematicity (structural unity) or intended sense (authorial genesis). By demonstrating the aporias and ellipses of thought, Derrida hoped to show the infinitely subtle ways that this originary complexity, which by definition cannot ever be completely known, works its structuring and destructuring effects.[37]
Deconstruction denotes the pursuing of the meaning of a text to the point of exposing the supposed contradictions and internal oppositions upon which it is founded—supposedly showing that those foundations are irreducibly complex, unstable, or impossible. It is an approach that may be deployed in philosophy, in literary analysis, and even in the analysis of scientific writings.[38] Deconstruction generally tries to demonstrate that any text is not a discrete whole but contains several irreconcilable and contradictory meanings; that any text therefore has more than one interpretation; that the text itself links these interpretations inextricably; that the incompatibility of these interpretations is irreducible; and thus that an interpretative reading cannot go beyond a certain point. Derrida refers to this point as an 'aporia' in the text; thus, deconstructive reading is termed 'aporetic.'[39] He insists that meaning is made possible by the relations of a word to other words within the network of structures that language is.[40]
Derrida initially resisted granting to his approach the overarching name 'deconstruction', on the grounds that it was a precise technical term that could not be used to characterize his work generally. Nevertheless, he eventually accepted that the term had come into common use to refer to his textual approach, and Derrida himself increasingly began to use the term in this more general way.
Derrida's deconstruction strategy is also used by postmodernists to locate meaning in a text rather than discover meaning due to the position that it has multiple readings. There is a focus on the deconstruction that denotes the tearing apart of a text to find arbitrary hierarchies and presuppositions for the purpose of tracing contradictions that shadow a text's coherence.[41] Here, the meaning of a text does not reside with the author or the author's intentions because it is dependent on the interaction between reader and text.[41] Even the process of translation is also seen as transformative since it 'modifies the original even as it modifies the translating language.'[42]
Critique of structuralism[edit]
Derrida's lecture at Johns Hopkins University, 'Structure, Sign, and Play in the Human Sciences', often appears in collections as a manifesto against structuralism. Derrida's essay was one of the earliest to propose some theoretical limitations to structuralism, and to attempt to theorize on terms that were clearly no longer structuralist. Structuralism viewed language as a number of signs, composed of a signified (the meaning) and a signifier (the word itself). Derrida proposed that signs always referred to other signs, existing only in relation to each other, and there was therefore no ultimate foundation or centre. This is the basis of différance.[43]
Development after Derrida[edit]
The Yale School[edit]
Between the late 1960s and the early 1980s, many thinkers were influenced by deconstruction, including Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman, and J. Hillis Miller. This group came to be known as the Yale school and was especially influential in literary criticism. Derrida and Hillis Miller were subsequently affiliated with the University of California, Irvine.[44]
Miller has described deconstruction this way: 'Deconstruction is not a dismantling of the structure of a text, but a demonstration that it has already dismantled itself. Its apparently solid ground is no rock, but thin air.'[45]
Critical legal studies movement[edit]
Arguing that law and politics cannot be separated, the founders of the 'Critical Legal Studies Movement' found it necessary to criticize the absence of the recognition of this inseparability at the level of theory. To demonstrate the indeterminacy of legal doctrine, these scholars often adopt a method, such as structuralism in linguistics, or deconstruction in Continental philosophy, to make explicit the deep structure of categories and tensions at work in legal texts and talk. The aim was to deconstruct the tensions and procedures by which they are constructed, expressed, and deployed.
For example, Duncan Kennedy, in explicit reference to semiotics and deconstruction procedures, maintains that various legal doctrines are constructed around the binary pairs of opposed concepts, each of which has a claim upon intuitive and formal forms of reasoning that must be made explicit in their meaning and relative value, and criticized. Self and other, private and public, subjective and objective, freedom and control are examples of such pairs demonstrating the influence of opposing concepts on the development of legal doctrines throughout history.[3]
Deconstructing History[edit]
Deconstructive readings of history and sources have changed the entire discipline of history. In Deconstructing History, Alun Munslow examines history in what he argues is a postmodern age. He provides an introduction to the debates and issues of postmodernist history. He also surveys the latest research into the relationship between the past, history, and historical practice, as well as articulating his own theoretical challenges.[6]
The Inoperative Community[edit]
Jean-Luc Nancy argues, in his 1982 book The Inoperative Community, for an understanding of community and society that is undeconstructable because it is prior to conceptualisation. Nancy's work is an important development of deconstruction because it takes the challenge of deconstruction seriously and attempts to develop an understanding of political terms that is undeconstructable and therefore suitable for a philosophy after Derrida.
The Ethics of Deconstruction[edit]
Deconstruction Theory Pdf
Simon Critchley, an English philosopher, argues, in his 1992 book The Ethics of Deconstruction,[46] that Derrida's deconstruction is an intrinsically ethical practice. Critchley argues that deconstruction involves an openness to the Other that makes it ethical in the Levinasian understanding of the term.
Derrida and the Political[edit]
Deconstruction
Jacques Derrida has had a great influence on contemporary political theory and political philosophy. Derrida's thinking has inspired Slavoj Zizek, Richard Rorty, Ernesto Laclau, Judith Butler and many more contemporary theorists who have developed a deconstructive approach to politics. Because deconstruction examines the internal logic of any given text or discourse it has helped many authors to analyse the contradictions inherent in all schools of thought; and, as such, it has proved revolutionary in political analysis, particularly ideology critiques.[47][page needed]
Richard Beardsworth, developing from Critchley's Ethics of Deconstruction, argues, in his 1996 Derrida and the Political, that deconstruction is an intrinsically political practice. He further argues that the future of deconstruction faces a perhaps undecidable choice between a theological approach and a technological approach, represented first of all by the work of Bernard Stiegler.
Criticisms[edit]
Derrida was involved in a number of high-profile disagreements with prominent philosophers, including Michel Foucault, John Searle, Willard Van Orman Quine, Peter Kreeft, and Jürgen Habermas. Most of the criticism of deconstruction were first articulated by these philosophers and repeated elsewhere.
John Searle[edit]
In the early 1970s, Searle had a brief exchange with Jacques Derrida regarding speech-act theory. The exchange was characterized by a degree of mutual hostility between the philosophers, each of whom accused the other of having misunderstood his basic points.[25]:29[citation needed] Searle was particularly hostile to Derrida's deconstructionist framework and much later refused to let his response to Derrida be printed along with Derrida's papers in the 1988 collection Limited Inc. Searle did not consider Derrida's approach to be legitimate philosophy, or even intelligible writing, and argued that he did not want to legitimize the deconstructionist point of view by paying any attention to it. Consequently, some critics[48] have considered the exchange to be a series of elaborate misunderstandings rather than a debate, while others[49] have seen either Derrida or Searle gaining the upper hand. The level of hostility can be seen from Searle's statement that 'It would be a mistake to regard Derrida's discussion of Austin as a confrontation between two prominent philosophical traditions', to which Derrida replied that that sentence was 'the only sentence of the 'reply' to which I can subscribe'.[50] Commentators have frequently interpreted the exchange as a prominent example of a confrontation between analytic and Continental philosophies.
The debate began in 1972, when, in his paper 'Signature Event Context', Derrida analyzed J. L. Austin's theory of the illocutionary act. While sympathetic to Austin's departure from a purely denotational account of language to one that includes 'force', Derrida was sceptical of the framework of normativity employed by Austin. Derrida argued that Austin had missed the fact that any speech event is framed by a 'structure of absence' (the words that are left unsaid due to contextual constraints) and by 'iterability' (the constraints on what can be said, imposed by what has been said in the past). Derrida argued that the focus on intentionality in speech-act theory was misguided because intentionality is restricted to that which is already established as a possible intention. He also took issue with the way Austin had excluded the study of fiction, non-serious, or 'parasitic' speech, wondering whether this exclusion was because Austin had considered these speech genres as governed by different structures of meaning, or hadn't considered them due to a lack of interest. In his brief reply to Derrida, 'Reiterating the Differences: A Reply to Derrida', Searle argued that Derrida's critique was unwarranted because it assumed that Austin's theory attempted to give a full account of language and meaning when its aim was much narrower. Searle considered the omission of parasitic discourse forms to be justified by the narrow scope of Austin's inquiry.[51][52] Searle agreed with Derrida's proposal that intentionality presupposes iterability, but did not apply the same concept of intentionality used by Derrida, being unable or unwilling to engage with the continental conceptual apparatus.[49] This, in turn, caused Derrida to criticize Searle for not being sufficiently familiar with phenomenological perspectives on intentionality.[53] Searle also argued that Derrida's disagreement with Austin turned on Derrida's having misunderstood Austin's type–token distinction and having failed to understand Austin's concept of failure in relation to performativity. Some critics[53] have suggested that Searle, by being so grounded in the analytical tradition that he was unable to engage with Derrida's continental phenomenological tradition, was at fault for the unsuccessful nature of the exchange.
Derrida, in his response to Searle ('a b c ..' in Limited Inc), ridiculed Searle's positions. Claiming that a clear sender of Searle's message could not be established, Derrida suggested that Searle had formed with Austin a société à responsabilité limitée (a 'limited liability company') due to the ways in which the ambiguities of authorship within Searle's reply circumvented the very speech act of his reply. Searle did not reply. Later in 1988, Derrida tried to review his position and his critiques of Austin and Searle, reiterating that he found the constant appeal to 'normality' in the analytical tradition to be problematic.[25]:133[49][54][55][56][57][58][59]
In the debate, Derrida praised Austin's work, but argued that Austin is wrong to banish what Austin calls 'infelicities' from the 'normal' operation of language. One 'infelicity', for instance, occurs when it cannot be known whether a given speech act is 'sincere' or 'merely citational' (and therefore possibly ironic). Derrida argues that every iteration is necessarily 'citational', due to the graphematic nature of speech and writing, and that language could not work at all without the ever-present and ineradicable possibility of such alternate readings. Derrida takes Searle to task for attempting to get around this issue by grounding final authority in the speaker's inaccessible 'intention'. Derrida argues that intention cannot possibly govern how an iteration signifies, once it becomes hearable or readable. All speech acts borrow from a language whose significance is determined by historical-linguistic context, and by the alternate possibilities that this context makes possible. This significance, Derrida argues, cannot be altered or governed by the whims of intention.
Derrida argued against the constant appeal to 'normality' in the analytical tradition of which Austin and Searle were paradigmatic examples.[25]:133
In the description of the structure called 'normal,' 'normative,' 'central,' 'ideal,'this possibility must be integrated as an essential possibility. The possibility cannot be treated as though it were a simple accident-marginal or parasitic. It cannot be, and hence ought not to be, and this passage from can to ought reflects the entire difficulty. In the analysis of so-called normal cases, one neither can nor ought, in all theoretical rigor, to exclude the possibility of transgression. Not even provisionally, or out of allegedly methodological considerations. It would be a poor method, since this possibility of transgression tells us immediately and indispensably about the structure of the act said to be normal as well as about the structure of law in general.
Derrida argued that it was problematic to establish the relation between 'nonfiction or standard discourse' and 'fiction,' defined as its 'parasite, 'for part of the most originary essence of the latter is to allow fiction, the simulacrum, parasitism, to take place—and in so doing to 'de-essentialize' itself as it were'.[25]:133He would finally argue that the indispensable question would then become:[25]:133
what is 'nonfiction standard discourse,' what must it be and what does this name evoke, once its fictionality or its fictionalization, its transgressive 'parasitism,' is always possible (and moreover by virtue of the very same words, the same phrases, the same grammar, etc.)?
This question is all the more indispensable since the rules, and even the statements of the rules governing the relations of 'nonfiction standard discourse' and its fictional'parasites,' are not things found in nature, but laws, symbolic inventions, or conventions, institutions that, in their very normality as well as in their normativity, entail something of the fictional.
Jacques Derrida Deconstruction Pdf Format
In 1995, Searle gave a brief reply to Derrida in The Construction of Social Reality. He called Derrida's conclusion 'preposterous' and stated that 'Derrida, as far as I can tell, does not have an argument. He simply declares that there is nothing outside of texts..'[60] Searle's reference here is not to anything forwarded in the debate, but to a mistranslation of the phrase 'il n'y a pas dehors du texte,' ('There is no outside-text') which appears in Derrida's Of Grammatology.[13]:158–159
Jürgen Habermas[edit]
In The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Jürgen Habermas criticized what he considered Derrida's opposition to rational discourse.[61]
Further, in an essay on religion and religious language, Habermas criticized Derrida's insistence on etymology and philology[61] (see Etymological fallacy).
Walter A. Davis[edit]
The American philosopher Walter A. Davis, in Inwardness and Existence: Subjectivity in/and Hegel, Heidegger, Marx and Freud, argues that both deconstruction and structuralism are prematurely arrested moments of a dialectical movement that issues from Hegelian 'unhappy consciousness'.[62][page needed]
In popular media[edit]
Popular criticism of deconstruction intensified following the Sokal affair, which many people took as an indicator of the quality of deconstruction as a whole, despite the absence of Derrida from Sokal's follow-up book Impostures Intellectuelles.[63]
Chip Morningstar holds a view critical of deconstruction, believing it to be epistemologically challenged. He claims the humanities are subject to isolation and genetic drift due to their unaccountability to the world outside academia. During the Second International Conference on Cyberspace (Santa Cruz, California, 1991), he reportedly heckled deconstructionists off the stage.[64] He subsequently presented his views in the article 'How to Deconstruct Almost Anything', where he stated, 'Contrary to the report given in the 'Hype List' column of issue #1 of Wired ('Po-Mo Gets Tek-No', page 87), we did not shout down the postmodernists. We made fun of them.'[65]
See also[edit]
References[edit]
- ^'Deconstruction'. Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved 8 September 2017.
- ^ abAllison, David B.; Garver, Newton (1973). Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs (5th ed.). Evanston: Northwestern University Press. ISBN978-0810103979. Retrieved 8 September 2017.
A decision that did not go through the ordeal of the undecidable would not be a free decision, it would only be the programmable application or unfolding of a calculable process..[which] deconstructs from the inside every assurance of presence, and thus every criteriology that would assure us of the justice of the decision.
- ^ ab'Critical Legal Studies Movement'. The Bridge. Retrieved 8 September 2017.
- ^'German Law Journal - Past Special Issues'. 16 May 2013. Archived from the original on 16 May 2013. Retrieved 8 September 2017.
- ^Morris, Rosalind C. (September 2007). 'Legacies of Derrida: Anthropology'. Annual Review of Anthropology. 36 (1): 355–389. doi:10.1146/annurev.anthro.36.081406.094357.
- ^ abMunslow, Alan (1997). 'Deconstructing History'(PDF). Institute of Historical Research. Retrieved 8 September 2017.
- ^Busch, Brigitta (1 December 2012). 'The Linguistic Repertoire Revisited'. Applied Linguistics. 33 (5): 503–523. doi:10.1093/applin/ams056. Retrieved 8 September 2017.
- ^Esch, &; Solly, Martin (2012). The Sociolinguistics of Language Education in International Contexts. Bern: Peter Lang. pp. 31–46. ISBN9783034310093.
- ^'Deconstruction – Art Term'. Tate. Retrieved 16 September 2017.
Since Derrida’s assertions in the 1970s, the notion of deconstruction has been a dominating influence on many writers and conceptual artists.
- ^Cobussen, Marcel (2002). 'Deconstruction in Music. The Jacques Derrida – Gerd Zacher Encounter'(PDF). Thinking Sounds. Retrieved 8 September 2017.
- ^Douglas, Christopher (31 March 1997). 'Glossary of Literary Theory'. University of Toronto English Library. Retrieved 16 September 2017.
- ^Kandell, Jonathan (10 October 2004). 'Jacques Derrida, Abstruse Theorist, Dies at 74'. The New York Times. Retrieved 1 June 2017.
- ^ abcdeDerrida, Jacques; Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1997). Of Grammatology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN978-0801858307.
- ^ abSaussure, Ferdinand de (1959). 'Course in General Linguistics'. Southern Methodist University. New York: New York Philosophical Library. pp. 121–122. Retrieved 8 September 2017.
In language there are only differences. Even more important: a difference generally implies positive terms between which the difference is set up; but in language there are only differences without positive terms. Whether we take the signified or the signifier, language has neither ideas nor sounds that existed before the linguistic system, but only conceptual and phonic differences that have issued from the system.
- ^ ab'Deconstructionist Theory'. Stanford Presidential Lectures and Symposia in the Humanities and Arts. 1995. Retrieved 8 September 2017.
- ^ abDerrida, Jacques; Bass, Alan (2001). '7 :Freud and the Scene of Writing'. Writing and Difference (New ed.). London: Routledge. p. 276. ISBN978-0203991787. Retrieved 8 September 2017.
The model of hieroglyphic writing assembles more strikingly—though we find it in every form of writing—the diversity of the modes and functions of signs in dreams. Every sign—verbal or otherwise—may be used at different levels, in configurations and functions which are never prescribed by its 'essence,' but emerge from a play of differences.
- ^ abcdefgDerrida, Jacques (1982). Positions. University of Chicago Press. ISBN9780226143316.
- ^Nietzsche, Friedrich; Clark, Maudemarie; Leiter, Brian; Hollingdale, R.J. (1997). Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press. pp. 8–9. ISBN978-0521599634.
- ^ abZuckert, Catherine H. (1996). '7'. Postmodern Platos: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Gadamer, Strauss, Derrida. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN978-0226993317.
- ^Royle, Nick (2003). Jacques Derrida (Reprint ed.). London: Routledge. pp. 6–623. ISBN9780415229319. Retrieved 8 September 2017.
- ^Derrida, Jacques; Ferraris, Maurizio (2001). A Taste for the Secret. Wiley. p. 76. ISBN9780745623344.
I take great interest in questions of language and rhetoric, and I think they deserve enormous consideration; but there is a point where the authority of final jurisdiction is neither rhetorical nor linguistic, nor even discursive. The notion of trace or of text is introduced to mark the limits of the linguistic turn. This is one more reason why I prefer to speak of 'mark' rather than of language. In the first place the mark is not anthropological; it is prelinguistic; it is the possibility of language, and it is every where there is a relation to another thing or relation to an other. For such relations, the mark has no need of language.
- ^ abHeidegger, Martin; Macquarrie, John; Robinson, Edward (2006). Being and Time (1st ed.). Oxford: Blackwell. pp. 21–23. ISBN9780631197706. Retrieved 8 September 2017.
- ^Soskice, Janet Martin (1987). Metaphor and Religious Language (Paperback ed.). Oxford: Clarendon. pp. 80–82. ISBN9780198249825.
- ^Foucault, Michel; Howard, Richard; Cooper, David (2001). Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (Reprint ed.). London: Routledge. p. 602. ISBN978-0415253857.
- ^ abcdefDerrida, Jacques (1995). Limited Inc (4th ed.). Evanston: Northwestern University Press. ISBN978-0810107885.
- ^ abcdefghijklmWood, David; Bernasconi, Robert (1988). Derrida and Sifférance (Reprinted ed.). Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press. ISBN9780810107861.
- ^Beardsworth, Richard (1996). Derrida & The Political. London: Routledge. p. 4. ISBN978-1134837380.
- ^Frank, Manfred (1989). What is Neostructuralism?. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ISBN978-0816616022.
- ^Buchanan, Ian. A dictionary of critical theory. OUP Oxford, 2010. Entry: Neostructuralism.
- ^Moynihan, Robert (1986). A Recent imagining: interviews with Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman, J. Hillis Miller, Paul De Man (1st ed.). Hamden, Connecticut: Archon Books. p. 156. ISBN9780208021205.
- ^Brooks, Peter (1995). The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism: From Formalism to Poststructuralism (1st ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN9780521300131.
- ^Caputo, John D. (1997). Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida (3rd ed.). New York: Fordham University Press. p. 32. ISBN9780823217557.
- ^Lucy, Niall (2004). A Derrida DIctionary. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing. ISBN978-1405137515.
- ^Klein, Anne Carolyn (1994). Meeting the Great Bliss Queen: Buddhists, Feminists, and the Art of the Self. Boston: Beacon Press. ISBN9780807073063.
- ^Powell, Jim (2005). Deconstruction for Beginners. Danbury, Connecticut: Writers and Readers Publishing. ISBN978-0863169984.
- ^Royle, Nicholas (2000). Deconstructions: A User's Guide. New York: Palgrave. ISBN978-0333717615.
- ^Sallis, John (1988). Deconstruction and Philosophy: The Texts of Jacques Derrida (Paperback ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. pp. 3–4. ISBN978-0226734392.
One of the more persistent misunderstandings that has thus far forestalled a productive debate with Derrida's philosophical thought is the assumption, shared by many philosophers as well as literary critics, that within that thought just anything is possible. Derrida's philosophy is more often than not construed as a license for arbitrary free play in flagrant disregard of all established rules of argumentation, traditional requirements of thought, and ethical standards binding upon the interpretative community. Undoubtedly, some of the works of Derrida may not have been entirely innocent in this respect, and may have contributed, however obliquely, to fostering to some extent that very misconception. But deconstruction which for many has come to designate the content and style of Derrida's thinking, reveals to even a superficial examination, a well-ordered procedure, a step-by-step type of argumentation based on an acute awareness of level-distinctions, a marked thoroughness and regularity. [..] Deconstruction must be understood, we contend, as the attempt to 'account,' in a certain manner, for a heterogeneous variety or manifold of nonlogical contradictions and discursive equalities of all sorts that continues to haunt and fissure even the successful development of philosophical arguments and their systematic exposition
- ^Hobson, Marian (2012). Jacques Derrida: Opening Lines. Routledge. p. 51. ISBN9781134774449. Retrieved 8 September 2017.
- ^Currie, M. (2013). The Invention of Deconstruction. Springer. p. 80. ISBN9781137307033. Retrieved 8 September 2017.
- ^Mantzavinos, C. (2016). 'Hermeneutics'. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. Retrieved 8 September 2017.
- ^ abO'Shaughnessy, John; O'Shaughnessy, Nicholas Jackson (2008). The Undermining of Beliefs in the Autonomy and Rationality of Consumers. Oxon: Routledge. p. 103. ISBN978-0415773232.
- ^Davis, Kathleen (2014). Deconstruction and Translation. New York: Routledge. p. 41. ISBN9781900650281.
- ^Derrida, 'Structure, Sign, and Play' (1966), as printed/translated by Macksey & Donato (1970)
- ^Tisch, Maude. 'A critical distance'. The Yale Herald. Retrieved 2017-01-27.
- ^Miller, J. Hillis (1976). 'STEVENS' ROCK AND CRITICISM AS CURE: In Memory of William K. Wimsatt (1907-1975)'. The Georgia Review. 30 (1): 5–31. ISSN0016-8386. JSTOR41399571.
- ^Critchley, Simon (2014). The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas (3rd ed.). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. p. 352. ISBN9780748689323. Retrieved 8 September 2017.
- ^McQuillan, Martin (2007). The Politics of Deconstruction: Jacques Derrida and the Other of Philosophy (1st ed.). London: Pluto Press. ISBN978-0745326740.
- ^Maclachlan, Ian (2004). Jacques Derrida: Critical Thought. Aldershot: Ashgate. ISBN978-0754608066.
- ^ abcAlfino, Mark (1991). 'Another Look at the Derrida-Searle Debate'. Philosophy & Rhetoric. 24 (2): 143–152. JSTOR40237667.
- ^Simon Glendinning. 2001. Arguing with Derrida. Wiley-Blackwell. p. 18
- ^Gregor Campbell. 1993. 'John R. Searle' in Irene Rima Makaryk (ed). Encyclopedia of contemporary literary theory: approaches, scholars, terms. University of Toronto Press, 1993
- ^John Searle, 'Reiterating the Différences: A Reply to Derrida', Glyph 2 (Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977).
- ^ abMarian Hobson. 1998. Jacques Derrida: opening lines. Psychology Press. pp. 95-97
- ^Farrell, Frank B. (1 January 1988). 'Iterability and Meaning: The Searle-Derrida Debate'. Metaphilosophy. 19 (1): 53–64. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9973.1988.tb00701.x. ISSN1467-9973.
- ^Fish, Stanley E. (1982). 'With the Compliments of the Author: Reflections on Austin and Derrida'. Critical Inquiry. 8 (4): 693–721. JSTOR1343193.
- ^Wright, Edmond (1982). 'Derrida, Searle, Contexts, Games, Riddles'. New Literary History. 13 (3): 463–477. doi:10.2307/468793. JSTOR468793.
- ^Culler, Jonathan (1981). 'Convention and Meaning: Derrida and Austin'. New Literary History. 13 (1): 15–30. doi:10.2307/468640. JSTOR468640.
- ^Kenaan, Hagi (2002). 'Language, philosophy and the risk of failure: rereading the debate between Searle and Derrida'. Continental Philosophy Review. 35 (2): 117–133. doi:10.1023/A:1016583115826.
- ^Raffel, Stanley (28 July 2011). 'Understanding Each Other: The Case of the Derrida-Searle Debate'. Human Studies. 34 (3): 277–292. doi:10.1007/s10746-011-9189-6.
- ^Searle, John R. (1995). The Construction of Social Reality (3rd ed.). New York: Free Press. pp. 157–160. ISBN978-0029280454.
- ^ abHabermas, Jürgen; Lawrence, Frederick (2005). The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures (Reprinted ed.). Cambridge: Polity Press. pp. 185–210. ISBN978-0745608303.
- ^Davis, Walter A. (1989). Inwardness and Existence: Subjectivity In/and Hegel, Heidegger, Marx, and Freud (1st ed.). Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press. ISBN978-0299120146.
- ^Sokal, Alan D. (May 1996). 'A Physicist Experiments With Cultural Studies'. www.physics.nyu.edu. Retrieved 3 April 2007.
- ^Steinberg, Steve (1 January 1993). 'Hype List'. WIRED. Retrieved 19 May 2017.
- ^Morningstar, Chip (1993-07-05). 'How To Deconstruct Almost Anything: My Postmodern Adventure'. Retrieved 2017-05-19.
Further reading[edit]
- Derrida, Jacques. Positions. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981. ISBN978-0-226-14331-6
- Derrida [1980], The time of a thesis: punctuations, first published in: Derrida [1990], Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy 2, pp. 113–128.
- Montefiore, Alan (ed., 1983), Philosophy in France Today Cambridge: Cambridge UP, pp. 34–50
- Breckman, Warren, 'Times of Theory: On Writing the History of French Theory,' Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 71, no. 3 (July 2010), 339–361 (online).
- Culler, Jonathan. On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism, Cornell University Press, 1982. ISBN978-0-8014-1322-3.
- Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction, University of Minnesota Press, 1996. ISBN978-0-8166-1251-2
- Ellis, John M. Against Deconstruction, Princeton: Princeton UP, 1989. ISBN978-0-691-06754-4.
- Johnson, Barbara. The Critical Difference: Essays in the Contemporary Rhetoric of Reading. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981. ISBN978-0-801-82458-6
- Reynolds, Simon, Rip It Up and Start Again, New York: Penguin, 2006, pp. 316. ISBN978-0-143-03672-2. (Source for the information about Green Gartside, Scritti Politti, and deconstructionism.)
- Stocker, Barry, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Derrida on Deconstruction, Routledge, 2006. ISBN978-1-134-34381-2
- Wortham, Simon Morgan, The Derrida Dictionary, Continuum, 2010. ISBN978-1-847-06526-1
Jacques Derrida Deconstruction Pdf Free
External links[edit]
- Quotations related to Deconstruction at Wikiquote
- The dictionary definition of deconstruction at Wiktionary
- Video of Jacques Derrida attempting to define 'Deconstruction'
- 'Deconstruction: Some Assumptions' by John Lye
- A Bibliography of Literary Theory, Criticism, and Philology by José Ángel García Landa (Deconstruction found under: Authors & Schools - Critics & Schools - Poststructuralism - On Deconstruction)
- Ten ways of thinking about deconstruction by Willy Maley
- Archive of the international conference 'Deconstructing Mimesis - Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe' about the work of Lacoue-Labarthe and his mimetic version of deconstruction, held at the Sorbonne in January 2006
- How To Deconstruct Almost Anything - My Postmodern Adventure by Chip Morningstar; a cynical introduction to 'deconstruction' from the perspective of a software engineer.
- Jacques Derrida: The Perchance of a Coming of the Otherwoman. The Deconstruction of Phallogocentrism from Duel to Duo by Carole Dely, English translation by Wilson Baldridge, at Sens Public
- Deconstruction of fashion; La moda en la posmodernidad by Adolfo Vasquez Rocca
- Derrida: Deconstrucción, différance y diseminación; una historia de parásitos, huellas y espectros Academia.Edu
Derrida Deconstruction
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