Toward an Exergue on the Future of Différance

Derrida Today 13 (1):48-71 (2020)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

In Of Grammatology, Derrida discusses Leroi-Gourhan in relating différance to memory, the ‘program’, and the history of life. In Technics and Time, 1, Stiegler argues that Derrida failed to draw all the philosophical implications of linking différance to the questions of life and retention. Derrida returned to the life sciences in 1975, in a seminar not published in its entirety until 2019. There, Derrida attempts to deconstruct the geneticist François Jacob's account of the ‘logic of life’, but Derrida's analysis of different kinds of memory and programs seems confused, suggesting that the Derridean text remains haunted by the deficiencies of his earlier reading of Leroi-Gourhan. Later in the seminar, Derrida shows foresight concerning the problems arising from seeing the genetic molecule as akin to a computer program, despite Jacob making this link via Schrödinger and Wiener's discussions of negentropy. When Derrida turns to a reading of Freud and libidinal energy, however, he ‘assumes’ a reading of Laplanche but ignores the latter's critique of Freud's own preoccupations with the second law of thermodynamics. The limitations of Derrida's attempts to bring deconstruction together with scientific understanding expose the need for the kind of ‘organological’ and ‘neganthropological’ approach that Stiegler will ultimately pursue.

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 90,616

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

The Ghost of the Unnameable.Roy Sellars - 2012 - Derrida Today 5 (2):248-263.
The trace of legal idealism in Derrida's grammatology.William E. Conklin - 1996 - Philosophy and Social Criticism 22 (5):17-42.
Derrida’s Differance and Plato’s Different.Iii Samuel C. Wheeler - 1999 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 59 (4):999-1013.
Derrida's Differance and Plato's Different.Samuel C. Wheeler - 1999 - Philosophical and Phenomenological Research 59 (4):999-1013.
Derrida’s Differance and Plato’s Different.I. I. I. Wheeler - 1999 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 59 (4):999-1013.

Analytics

Added to PP
2020-05-13

Downloads
18 (#711,533)

6 months
3 (#445,838)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Citations of this work

On significative exergy: Toward a logomachics of education.Joel White - 2021 - Educational Philosophy and Theory 54 (5):477-488.

Add more citations

References found in this work

Technics and time.Bernard Stiegler - 1998 - Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.
Of Grammatology.Jacques Derrida - 1982 - Philosophy and Rhetoric 15 (1):66-70.
15. Pharmacology and Critique after Deconstruction.Daniel Ross - 2013 - In Christina Howells & Gerald Moore (eds.), Stiegler and Technics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. pp. 243-258.

Add more references