Derrida's Modernism

Parrhesia, 2009

International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 2011

Derrida Today, 2022

Deconstruction and duration are arguably the two most important theories of time to emerge from French philosophy in the twentieth century. Yet, despite the resurgence of interest in Bergson, scholars have ignored Derrida's own discussions of Bergson, both positive and negative, throughout his career. This lack of attention obscures an important influence on Derrida's early thought, and hampers our ability to understand the nature of Derrida's relationship to fields such as new materialism, posthumanism, and affect studies, that frequently turn to Bergson for inspiration. This paper addresses this gap by tracking Derrida's readings of Bergson and comparing two related pairs of their concepts: duration and différance, and intuition and spacing. The paper concludes by arguing that Derrida's critical engagement with Bergson leads to an anti-presentist model of life, which gains new relevance in the Anthropocene.

Journal of Speculative Philosophy, vol. 27, no. 3 (2013): 253–64., 2013

2014

The term "deconstruction" decisively enters philosophical discourse in 1967, with the publication of three books by Jacques Derrida: Writing and Difference, Of Grammatology, and Voice and Phenomenon. Indeed, "deconstruction" is virtually synonymous with Derrida's name. Nevertheless, the event of Derridean deconstruction developed out of the phenomenological tradition. On the one hand, as is often noted, Derrida appropriated the term from Heidegger's idea, in Being and Time, of a "destruction" of the history of Western ontology (Heidegger 2010, 19-25 [ §6]), that is, a dismantling of the historical concepts of being in order to lay bare the fundamental experience from which these concepts originated (PSY2, 2). On the other, and less often noted, Derrida took constant inspiration from Husserl's idea of the epoché (Husserl 2012, 59-60 [ §32]), that is, from the universal suspension of the belief in a world having existence independent from experience (see, e.g., SM, 59). Both Heidegger's historical destruction and Husserl's universal suspension amounted to critical practices in regard to accepted beliefs and sedimented concepts. Likewise, Derridean deconstruction criticizes structures, concepts, and beliefs that seem selfevident. In this regard, deconstructive critique is classical (or traditional, Kantian), aiming to demonstrate the limited validity of concepts and beliefs, even their falsity, aiming, in other words, to dispel the illusions they have generated. In general, deconstructive critique targets the illusion of presence, that is, the idea that being is simply present and available before our eyes. For Derrida, the idea of presence implies selfgivenness, simplicity, purity, identity, and stasis. Therefore, deconstruction aims to demonstrate that presence is never given as such, never simple, never pure, never self-identical, and never static; it is always given as something other, complex, impure, differentiated, and generated.

Mosaic, 2015

This essay asks whether or not Martin Hägglund’s reassessment of the Derridean project of deconstruction, as a project defending diachronic temporality, is amenable to thinking the peculiar temporalities of literature and fiction that Derrida, in “Demeure: Fiction and Testimony,” detects in Maurice Blanchot’s The Instant of My Death.

Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice, 2019

This article’s chief contention is that the decisive context of Jacques Derrida’s 1988 Critical Inquiry essay on Paul de Man’s past was the oscillation between the collapse of the historicist chronotype (deconstruction) and the emergence of the chronotype of simultaneities (presence). To demonstrate this thesis, this essay (1) examines the ways Derrida’s highlighting of the deconstruction of Western metaphysics, by continually producing world-interpretations, was the definitive instantiation—and subversion—of the historicist chronotype; and (2) establishes that Derrida’s inquiry into and engagement with de Man’s past marked the limits of the historicist chronotype and what Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht identifies as the rise of the chronotype of simultaneities. Evidence of the oscillation between chronotypes includes the several amalgamations of presence and language that shaped Derrida’s readings of de Man’s collaborationist articles as well as his postwar silence. Signs of these interpenetrations between language and presence suggest that Derrida momentarily halted his willingness to unfold endless, conflicting narratives about de Man, and this fleeting arrest in Derrida’s commitment to perspectivism ultimately caused his arguments to lose their persuasiveness; Derrida’s interpretations gave way to presence. This presence rendered in Derrida’s readings not only generated controversy, but also offers historians the chance, today, to consider the interpretive space opened by the chronotype of simultaneities.

According to Ethan Kleinberg, historians are still living in fear of the specter of deconstruction; their attempted exorcisms have failed. In Haunting History: For a Deconstructive Approach to the Past (2017), Kleinberg fruitfully “conjures” this spirit so that historians might finally confront it and incorporate its strategies for representing elusive pasts. Despite decades of scholarship undermining the nineteenth-century, Rankean foundations of the historical discipline, the regime of what Kleinberg calls “ontological realism” apparently still reigns. His book is not simply the latest in a long line of criticism of such work, but rather a manifesto for a positive theory of historical writing that employs deconstruction’s linguistic and epistemological insights.

International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 2020

One of the starting points of Derrida's deconstruction is the idea that metaphysics is dominated by an ontological primacy of the present. It is well known that Derrida took up this thesis of the "privilege of the present" in metaphysics from Heidegger. However, this thesis is mentioned without being developed by Heidegger. What is the meaning of this ontological position? How did it originate? Should we try to go beyond it? And if so, how? In this paper, I would like to start out from Heidegger's view that the understanding of Being, in the metaphysical tradition, is dominated by the ontological primacy of the present: according to this approach, which goes back to Aristotle's theory of substance (ousia), Being means constant presence; only that which is constantly present really exists. I will then show that Heidegger himself, in his conception of the past, has renewed the privilege of the present, favoring the 'having been' (Gewesenheit) over the past as 'by-gone-ness' (Vergangenheit). Finally, I will show how Derrida's concept of trace may help us to go beyond the privilege of the present.

2009