‘Disastrologies’ explores Derrida's fascination with dates and how that fascination reveals a secret correspondence, in every sense of the word, with Walter Benjamin – a man who has the same birth-date as Derrida. It is, though, the date of Benjamin's death and indeed its infamous mise-en-scène, the cheap hotel on the Franco-Spanish border, that dominates this text which takes the form of a dramatic monologue delivered by the hotel manager, Juan Suñer, a man known to be both a manipulator of (...) dates and, indeed, close to the Gestapo. As the monologue unfolds, Suñer advances an elaborate calendrical re-reading of a host of Derrida texts which probes at the mystery not only of Benjamin's last night but also of living with both Jewish and Christian calendars. Finally, we see how this last of nights puts under unbearable pressure the infinite promise of both the Jewish Sabbath and the Christian Sunday. (shrink)

It was originally suggested that the Anthropocene began in 1784, the date of James Watt’s patent for the rotative steam engine. Patent dates are interesting artefacts. They owe their existence to the chronopoietic technique of patent jurisprudence, which generates temporal sequences out of synchronous states of knowledge. This may not be geological time, but it informs the experience of time that is proper to the culture whose deposits of Pu-239 now mark the onset of the Anthropocene. Patent jurisprudence makes a (...) crucial contribution to what might be called the ethos of the Anthropocene: the sense of society as having an inexhaustible capacity for innovation, for endless self-renewal. And, as it turns out, the steam engine yields some interesting insights into this mode of enchantment. (shrink)

Rapid urbanization has meant that cities around the world must deal with problems like traffic congestion, aging infrastructure, affordable housing, and climate change. Increasingly, policymakers are turning to investments in technology and digital infrastructure to address these problems. Yet the move towards so-called smart cities is not simply responsive, and policymakers increasingly advocate for smart city initiatives as a necessary step towards objective, efficient, and rational governance. This understanding of technological interventions as inherently progressive, however, causes many to overlook the (...) erasures, biases, and limitations that emerge from trying to leave the past behind. As the problems associated with this enthusiasm become more apparent, the smart city movement must therefore recalibrate its relationship to not just technology but time itself. Building on deconstructive temporalities emerging out of quantum physics, I argue that cities must begin drawing from alternative temporalities more open to the intersections between past, present, and future. As such, I suggest that the time has come to replace the ideal of the smart city with that of the spectral city – an incomplete city haunted by the ghosts of the past. (shrink)

Rapid urbanization has meant that cities around the world must deal with problems like traffic congestion, aging infrastructure, affordable housing, and climate change. Increasingly, policymakers are turning to investments in technology and digital infrastructure to address these problems. Yet the move towards so-called smart cities is not simply responsive, and policymakers increasingly advocate for smart city initiatives as a necessary step towards objective, efficient, and rational governance. This understanding of technological interventions as inherently progressive, however, causes many to overlook the (...) erasures, biases, and limitations that emerge from trying to leave the past behind. As the problems associated with this enthusiasm become more apparent, the smart city movement must therefore recalibrate its relationship to not just technology but time itself. Building on deconstructive temporalities emerging out of quantum physics, I argue that cities must begin drawing from alternative temporalities more open to the intersections between past, present, and future. As such, I suggest that the time has come to replace the ideal of the smart city with that of the spectral city – an incomplete city haunted by the ghosts of the past. (shrink)

Rapid urbanization has meant that cities around the world must deal with problems like traffic congestion, aging infrastructure, affordable housing, and climate change. Increasingly, policymakers are turning to investments in technology and digital infrastructure to address these problems. Yet the move towards so-called smart cities is not simply responsive, and policymakers increasingly advocate for smart city initiatives as a necessary step towards objective, efficient, and rational governance. This understanding of technological interventions as inherently progressive, however, causes many to overlook the (...) erasures, biases, and limitations that emerge from trying to leave the past behind. As the problems associated with this enthusiasm become more apparent, the smart city movement must therefore recalibrate its relationship to not just technology but time itself. Building on deconstructive temporalities emerging out of quantum physics, I argue that cities must begin drawing from alternative temporalities more open to the intersections between past, present, and future. As such, I suggest that the time has come to replace the ideal of the smart city with that of the spectral city – an incomplete city haunted by the ghosts of the past. (shrink)

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

Writing remains. One could argue that it is precisely because of this uncanny and unpredictable survival that inscription holds an inextricable influence on culture. Deconstructive theory posits this as the ‘biodegradability’ of writing — that culture consumes writing's intended meaning, employing it as fuel for its own survival. In this article, I argue for Michel Houellebecq's awareness of this survival, suggesting that his texts stage their — and their author's — own biodegradability to interweave truth and fiction. Particularly, he utilizes (...) the ‘untranslatability’ of the proper name — its brief resistance to cultural biodegradability — to intercept and write into the future inscription is tied to. This draws attention to the vital paradox of proper names, and suggests that their untranslatability forces every reader to conjure different, contradicting and often ‘out-of-sync’ histories. Houellebecq's names, which necessitate an interminable coining, gesture to the inevitable translation of finitude. (shrink)

ArgumentThis article explores historical sociology as a complementary source of knowledge for scientific research, considering barriers and facilitators to this work through reflections on one project. This project began as a study of the emergence and reception of the infant disorganized attachment classification, introduced in the 1980s by Ainsworth’s student Mary Main, working with Judith Solomon. Elsewhere I have reported on the findings of collaborative work with attachment researchers, without giving full details of how this came about. Here, I will (...) offer personal reflections arising from the process, and my work in what Hasok Chang has called history as “complementary science.”. (shrink)

The notion of survivance is central to Derrida’s later thinking. Much of that thinking, for example in addressing the non–human in The Animal That Therefore I Am and The Beast and the Sovereign, is more precisely a thinking of the human in relation to the animal. Taking inspiration from the recent turn towards biodeconstruction, this essay works through the implications of survivance beyond the human-animal by considering the synergy between biological and textual survivance. And in so doing, this essay outlines (...) a new way of conceptualizing the living self as a composite form made up of many non-human and even textual others. (shrink)

Avanzar hacia un pensamiento de la materialidad que no tenga por finalidad definir un _modo de ser _de la materia, no es tarea fácil. Sin embargo, en el contexto de una lectura estereográfica de Jacques Derrida y Werner Hamacher se pretende _experimentar_ la materialidad como la venida de un elemento imposible, indecidible y anárquico que, al objetar la pregunta por la esencia, se inscribe en el sistema especulativo para trastornarlo y desencadenar _en_, y _desde_ él, un «razonamiento bastardo» capaz de (...) atravesar las envolturas con que la _metafísica _había separado en lo inteligible mismo lo empírico de lo trascendental. (shrink)

This paper examines Castoriadis’ concept of time as ontological creation in relation to the activation of the project of autonomy. We argue that since Castoriadis presents as a practitioner of the creation of time as radical autonomous thinking, this is the standpoint from which to assess his claims. Through an examination of Castoriadis’ claim that the practice of autonomy depends upon it being activated by a willing singularity who accepts the Chaos of society and of the world, we argue that (...) Castoriadis’ position presupposes an effective contrast between the autonomy of significance that he advocates and the heteronomy of insignificance that he laments. If, as we suggest, both these orientations accept the Groundlessness of the world, then Castoriadis’ appeal to the awareness of a willing singularity is not sufficient to distinguish the practice of radical autonomy. To this extent, his elucidation of the radical imaginary time of ontological creation remains incomplete. (shrink)

Amy Allen presents Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment as a productive movement between a commitment to the project of reason and a sensitivity to the effects on reason of power and domination. Agreeing with the thrust of her paper, my response considers two questions that Allen’s paper opens up. The first asks how individuals might seek emancipation through reason, knowing that their reason cannot transcend contexts of power. The second asks how best to practise critical theory, given that its (...) analyses and categories cannot rid themselves of contexts of domination. To the first, I answer that Allen’s account of creative individual effort needs to be supplemented by the cultivation of an accommodating and welcoming culture, marked by the sorts of civic attitudes that Derrida and Habermas bring to their maturing relationship. Regarding the second, I extend Allen’s hopes for a post-Habermasian phase of critical theory, indicating four resources in contemporary French philosophy for its further development. (shrink)

This dissertation investigates conceptions of responsibility at work in contemporary intergenerational nuclear waste policy. It argues that articulations of responsibility at work in current policy unduly privileges resemblance to the present as a condition for that responsibility holding as an intergenerational relation. The dissertation begins by arguing that current waste disposal practices depend on a view of responsibility contingent on the presumption that future generations will be minimally epistemologically, socially, and politically continuous with present generations. Extant policy is therefore found (...) to place an asymmetric and unjust burden on future generations. The dissertation thus concludes that responsibilities to future generations require that responsibility be thought prior to particular determinations of the possible identity of our inheritors. (shrink)