No one who reads Derrida closely could accuse him of “technophobia.” More than any other contemporary thinker, on the contrary, he has shown the limit of attempts to protect thinking and even being itself from technē. Yet, Derrida nevertheless insists that “deconstruction” is neither a “technique” nor the technology of thinking that modern philosophy calls “method.” What allows Derrida to exclude “technique” and “method” when he himself shows, in relation to Heidegger above all, that a certain technicity and methodicity always (...) remain irreducible? After outlining its stakes (§I), this article seeks to raise this question by reconstructing Derrida’s engagement with Heidegger concerning the questions of technology (§II) and of method (§III) before turning to the techno-methodicity that Derrida attempts to dissociate from deconstruction in turn (§IV). (shrink)

Traditionally, ‘René Descartes’ is synonymous with ‘method.’ The so-called father of modern science, he is perhaps the systematic and methodological philosopher par excellence, a fundamental motivation for his attempt to secede from contemporary thought being the possibility of establishing a universally valid method in the search for truth. In a passage in the Rules for the Direction of the Mind, Descartes contrasts his method with what he calls scholastic “[r]iddles,” verbal equivocations that hinder the acquisition of knowledge. In this paper (...) I analyze this notion of riddling and the Cartesian method to posit that, finally, Descartes cannot avoid replicating the very riddles he criticizes, that his ‘revolutionary’ method only generates more riddles to be methodically solved. In short, Descartes’ method is dependent upon words but also calls for the effacement of the very words that constitute it. Words are both a methodological necessity and limitation; a double bind, there is no method without words, but, at the same time, there can be no method with words, that is, no methodo-logos. In its broadest formulation, Descartes must always at once say too much and too little. (shrink)

This paper orchestrates various moments in which Derrida makes recourse to the notion of anachrony – in analyses of khōra and demiurgic creation in the Timaeus and of the trace in Husserl – in order to describe a structural law according to which philosophy attempts to determine some ‘thing’ with the very categories that it makes possible and that are therefore structurally derivative, both too early and too late, in a word, anachronous.

This article analyzes Heidegger’s Paris lecture, “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking,” in an attempt to understand the historical “task” that Heidegger seeks to examine when confronted with the agony of philosophy today. I attempt to valorize the understanding of time and history that Heidegger stages in his reading by demonstrating its entrance to be radical and novel with respect to other moments in Heidegger’s production: history here is not of “destiny”, that is, it does not coincide (...) with the appropriating orientation of man in time already presented in Heidegger’s other texts; rather, it is understood on the basis of the opening to the future that fragilizes and suspends all hope and all historical resolution. History is thought here as the desertification of present times, the completion of metaphysical nihilism, in which there opens at the same time a “perhaps” that, repeated many times throughout the lecture, takes up in all its complexity the problem of the future’s coming, of the extraordinary, of the opening, that is, of what, from the future, exceeds destiny. (shrink)