Derrida: History

I distinguish two senses of the word “deconstruction.” Then I quote a passage by a critic from the 1860s which, together with trends of that time, gives rise to the question of whether deconstructive interpretation existed in the nineteenth century.

This paper explores the relationship between Fukuyama’s account of history and Derrida’s theory of hauntology. Initially, I use Derrida’s idea of hauntology tocritique Fukuyama’s account of an end of history. I argue that Derrida’s idea of a hauntology is a valuable theoretical tool for theorising about politics, sinceDerrida shows that the death of a particular social/political system (e.g. Communism) does not entail the death/devaluing of the thinker(s) who inspired that system, since critics of the contemporary social and political order may (...) have something valuable to offer contemporary political thought. However, I do notendorse the view that history cannot reach an end point just because there are specters waiting to return. Instead, I argue that it is possible to bridge theapparent dualistic binary between Derrida’s hauntology and Fukuyama’s end of history, since the specter is something which must be recognised and realised atthe end of history. (shrink)

This paper will address the topic of “tradition” by exploring the ways that Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques Derrida each looked to return to traditional texts in order to overcome a perceived crisis or delimiting fault in the contemporary thought of their respective presents. For Heidegger, this meant a return to the pre-Socratics of “early Greek thinking.” For Levinas, it entailed a return to the sacred Jewish texts of the Talmud. For Derrida, it was the return to texts that (...) embodied the “Western metaphysical tradition,” be it by Plato, Descartes, Rousseau, or Marx. I then want to ask whether these reflections can be turned so as to shed light on three resilient trends in the practice of history that I will label positivist, speculative or teleological, and constructivist. By correlating the ways that Heidegger, Levinas, and Derrida utilize and employ “tradition” with the historical trends of positivism, speculative/teleological history, and constructivism, I hope to produce an engagement between theorists whose concerns implicate history even though they may not be explicitly historical, and historians who may not realize the ways that their work coincides with the claims of these theorists. (shrink)

This book promises a ‘radical reappraisal’ of Derrida, concentrating particularly on the relationship of Derrida to philosophy, one of the most vexed questions in the reception of his work. The aim of the book is to provide the grounds for this reappraisal through a reinterpretation in particular of two of the major works Derrida published in 1967: Speech and Phenomena and Of Grammatology. However the study of the development of Derrida's work is the real achievement of the book as Kates (...) discusses major works dating from the 1954 study of genesis in Husserl's phenomenology through to the essays on Levinas and Foucault in the early 1960's as part of his story of how Derrida arrived at the writing of the two major works from 1967. (shrink)

Introduction: Fielding Derrida -- Jacques Derrida's early writings : alongside skepticism, phenomenology -- Analytic philosophy, and literary criticism -- Deconstruction as skepticism -- Derrida, Husserl, and the commentators : a developmental approach -- A transcendental sense of death : Derrida and the philosophy of language -- Literary theory's languages : the deconstruction of sense vs. the deconstruction of reference -- Jacques Derrida and the problem of philosophical and political modernity -- Jacob Klein and Jacques Derrida : the problem of modernity (...) -- Jacob Klein and Jacques Derrida : historicism and history in two interpretations of Husserl's late writings -- Derrida's contribution to phenomenology : a problem of no species -- Foretellese : futures of Derrida and Marx. (shrink)

The article examines the inter-implication between Foucault's and Derrida's representations of one another's work in the debate over Histoire de la folie and discovers a chiasmic structure between them, an inverted mirroring of each in the other, in which philosophy and historicity alternately encompass and exceed one another. At the heart of this is a problem of language (and the reason that accompanies it), which defines the limitations of the historian's work.

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

However widely--and differently--Jacques Derrida may be viewed as a "foundational" French thinker, the most basic questions concerning his work still remain unanswered: Is Derrida a friend of reason, or philosophy, or rather the most radical of skeptics? Are language-related themes--writing, semiosis--his central concern, or does he really write about something else? And does his thought form a system of its own, or does it primarily consist of commentaries on individual texts? This book seeks to address these questions by returning to (...) what it claims is essential history: the development of Derrida's core thought through his engagement with Husserlian phenomenology. Joshua Kates recasts what has come to be known as the Derrida/Husserl debate, by approaching Derrida's thought historically, through its development. Based on this developmental work, Essential History culminates by offering discrete interpretations of Derrida's two book-length 1967 texts, interpretations that elucidate the until now largely opaque relation of Derrida's interest in language to his focus on philosophical concerns. A fundamental reinterpretation of Derrida's project and the works for which he is best known, Kates's study fashions a new manner of working with the French thinker that respects the radical singularity of his thought as well as the often different aims of those he reads. Such a view is in fact "essential" if Derrida studies are to remain a vital field of scholarly inquiry, and if the humanities, more generally, are to have access to a replenishing source of living theoretical concerns. (shrink)

In this study, Paola Marrati approaches—in an extremely insightful, rigorous, and well-argued way—the question of the philosophical sources of Derrida's thought through a consideration of his reading of both Husserl and Heidegger. A central focus of the book is the analysis of the concepts of genesis and trace as they define Derrida's thinking of historicity, time, and subjectivity. Notions such as the contamination of the empirical and the transcendental, dissemination and writing, are explained as key categories establishing a guiding thread (...) that runs through Derrida's early and later works. Whereas in his discussion of Husserl Derrida problematizes the relationship between the ideality of meaning and the singularity of its historical production, in his interpretation of Heidegger he challenges the very idea of the originary finitude of temporality. This book is essential reading not only for those interested in the philosophical roots of deconstruction, but for all those interested in the central questions of history and temporality, subjectivity and language, that pervade contemporary debates in cultural, literary, and visual theory alike. (shrink)

In this article I begin to explore Friedrich Nietzsche’s and Jacques Derrida’s philosophies of history in terms of the persistence of forgetting within (non-subjective) memory. In section I, I shall outline the totalizing production of history understood as an unsuccessful attempt to erase the indifference of animality and the difference of madness. The following two sections are concerned with the particular kinds of non-subjective memories—memorials—that arise in the aftermath of this erasure and include writing and the archive (section II), as (...) well as the ghostly and genealogical confusions (section III). Throughout these sections I shall argue that each of the externalizations of memory in non-subjective memorials is contaminated by forgetting, both shaping and shaking up the foundations of history. Finally, section IV revisits the memorials and states of forgetting discussed in the previous sections in light of the (im)possibility of justice. (shrink)

In this paper I examine important texts by Jacques Derrida in which, either implicitly or explicitly, the Shoah, the catastrophe of the Holocaust is signified, interrupting, disrupting, even disfiguring the texture of the text. The question is how appropriately to remember and mourn the dead within philosophical discourse, how to remember what happened and how to understand it as a question not only of ethical and political responsibility but also as an evil deeply and pervasively reflected in the ontology and (...) epistemology of the philosophical tradition—an evil circulating within the very substance of philosophical thought, and in such a way that Derrida will make this philosophical complicity in the violence and evil of the Holocaust register its painfully oppressive guilt in textual configurations haunted by the presence of the victims, remembered in traces of their absence. Thus we see how Derrida lets the question of an appropriate form of historical memory, a fitting way to remember the Shoah, invade his texts—how he lets the texts of his thought be exposed to its radical evil and exposed to the pain of an impossible mourning. We also see how the deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence implies a contestation of historicism, a writing of history that betrays the past in the very process of making it present. (shrink)

Celebrated by some, abused by others, Derrida is the most discussed philosopher at the end of this century.

The topic of the present thesis is the conception of thinking in Michel Foucault, in both its theoretical and practical dimension, from the archaeological works of the Sixties to the ethical problems of the last years. The text is organized in two parts. The first part (chapp. I-II) investigates the connections between thinking, philosophy and history in the archaeological works. Starting from Madness and Civilization and from a comparison with Bataille and Derrida, it is possible to identify the difference as (...) a central concept (chap. I). In the following, the chap. II clarifies the theoretical structure of the archaeology on the basis of Order of Things and Raymond Roussel (concepts of visibility and repetition). The chap. III discusses the transition from archaeology to genealogy and it introduces to the second part about the political problem. The chap. IV is focused on the analytics of power develpoed by Foucault in the mid-Seventies (dispositifs, resistance). On this basis we get to the later foucauldian research (chap. V). This last chapter deals with two intimately connected questions developed in the lectures Security, Territory, Population and Birth of the Biopolitical and from the book The Use of Pleasure: the connection government - governmentality (with particular care to the theme of the liberal government) and its relationship with the ethical problematization. (shrink)