Derrida: Writing and Difference

Khurana distinguishes different ways in which Derrida’s deconstruction can be understood as an attempt at transforming the transcendental question. Derrida’s essay “Cogito and the History of Madness” might lead us to the assumption that Derrida’s primary interest lies in a move of radicalization: in identifying conditions that are even more fundamental or basic than the conditions of the acts of our theoretical and practical cognition that transcendental philosophy has highlighted. He suggests, however, that instead of a mere radicalization, Derrida’s decisive (...) move in the transformation of the transcendental question resides rather in complicating the way we understand these conditions of possibility: (i) in an attempt to reveal conditions of the possibility of a certain type of act as being simultaneously the conditions of the impossibility of the purity of this act (a project that is sometimes termed “quasi-transcendental”); and (ii) an attempt to complicate the distinction between empirical and transcendental conditions (an investigation that is sometimes called “ultra-transcendental”). (shrink)

Is writing about peace after the Rwandan Genocide self-defeating? Whether it is the intensity of the massacres, the popularity of the genocide, or the imaginary forms of cruelty, however one looks at it, everything in the Rwandan Genocide appears to defy once again the possibility of thinking peace anew. In order to address this problem, this book investigates the work of specific French and Rwandese philosophers in order to renew our understanding of peace today. Through this path-breaking investigation, peace no (...) longer stands for an ideal in the future, but becomes a structure of inter-subjectivity that guarantees that the violence of language always prevails over any other form of violence. This book is the very first monograph in philosophy related to the events of 1994 in Rwanda. (shrink)

Machine generated contents note: Introduction; Part I. Derrida Post-Existentialist: 1. Humanist pretensions: Catholics, Communists and Sartre's struggle for existentialism in post-war France; 2. Derrida's 'Christian' existentialism; 3. Normalization: the École Normale Supe;rieure and Derrida's turn to Husserl; 4. Genesis as a problem: Derrida reading Husserl; 5. The God of mathematics: Derrida and the origin of geometry; Part II. Between Phenomenology and Structuralism: 6. A history of diffe;rance; 7. L'ambiguite; du concours: the deconstruction of commentary and interpretation in Speech and Phenomena; (...) 8. The ends of man: reading and writing at the ENS; Epilogue. (shrink)

In the 1960s a radical concept emerged from the great French thinker Jacques Derrida. Read the book that changed the way we think; read "Writing and Difference," the classic introduction.