Il la faut (la logique), "Yes, yes": Deconstruction's Critical Force

Derrida Today, 2011

Derrida always stipulates that deconstruction is not a ‘method’. But deconstruction nevertheless involves a certain strategy and protocol: terms that both designate a process and serve as an example of that process. Derrida’s deployment of these terms clarifies how his analyses of logocentrism anticipate the political texts of his later career. In his early texts, Derrida famously shows how the dyad of speech and writing is a ‘violent hierarchy’ in which speech is everywhere privileged. I show how, by contrast, his later analysis of law and force necessarily redoubles this strategy because each of these terms is privileged in rival traditions of political thought.

Word and Text A Journal of Literary Studies and Linguistics, 2024

In The Politics of Friendship, through the Nietzschean vision of a ‘new species of philosophers’ to come, the ‘philosophers of the dangerous perhaps’, Jacques Derrida sees the nascent possibility of an entirely new experience and thus an equally new thought: the experience and thought of the ‘perhaps’. Given the context, this reference to the experience and thought of the ‘perhaps’ has always been interpreted in an ethical-political key, but another text, ‘Perhaps or Maybe’, explicitly dedicated to the experience and thought of the ‘perhaps’, could allow us to grasp its more radical affirmation over and above its demonstrated effectiveness in the context of the deconstruction of the political.

Shanlax International Journal of Arts, Science and Humanities, 2021

This paper is designed to reveal some of the philosophical ideas of Algerian-born philosopher Jacques Derrida. Jacques Derrida, a leading figure of Post-structuralism and Postmodernism is best known as the founding father of ‘Deconstruction’ but many of his philosophical ideas such as, logocentrism, differance, phonocentrism, aporia, anti-representationalism, etc. still remain rarely focused. Therefore, in this paper the researcher has tried to explore various philosophical ideas of Derrida before the readers to get acquainted with Derrida’s contribution to the world of knowledge. This research work has done with the help of both primary sources i.e., original writings of Derrida and secondary sources including the texts written by others. Here, all of Derrida’s ideas are explicitly described and justified by an inductive method. Finally, a concluding remark on deconstruction has been made by comparing Derrida’s idea of “Differance” with Nagarjuna’s concept of “Emptiness” which left...

Cambridge History of French Thought

This chapter offers an overview of Jacques Derrida’s contributions to philosophy and related disciplines. Following a brief biographical résumé, the chapter provides an overview of some of the central ideas running through Derrida’s philosophy of deconstruction. Looking especially to Derrida’s conception of alterity, it offers an assessment of the ethics of deconstruction as well as a summation of Derrida’s reflections on politics and political philosophy. The chapter further provides an account of the reception of Derrida’s work, both in France and internationally. It looks in particular to key debates with John R. Searle, Jurgen Habermas, and Michel Foucault as well as more recent arguments centred upon the political limitations of Derrida’s work amongst some contemporary neo-Marxist political theorists. It is argued that Derrida’s corpus is amongst the most influential bodies of work for twentieth century Humanities and Social Sciences scholarship.

My goal in this chapter is twofold. I track the ethics of deconstruction as it moves through The Beast and the Sovereign, to see where it leads us and where it leaves us; and I examine the role of the machine in Derrida's deconstructive project, particularly as it operates in this seminar. I show how machine is another nickname for the operation of difference insofar as it is an undecidable figure or concept that both works for and against the binary oppositions and dichotomies so popular in our culture, most especially Nature and Culture, Mind and Body, and Man and Animal. Derrida's invocation of the machine has powerful implications for thinking about ethics and what I call the distinction between morality and ethics, a distinction that ultimately cannot be maintained but is nevertheless necessary to make, for the sake of thinking through ethics itself and for the hope of ethical thinking (see Oliver 2007).

This article considers the legacies of Jacques Derrida in and for Anglo-American sociocultural anthropology. It begins with a survey of Derrida's own engagement with themes that have historically been foundational to the field: (a) the critique of sign theory and, with it, the questions of language and law in Lévi-Straussian structuralism; (b) the question of the unconscious; (c) the critique of the performative and its consequences for the idea of ritual; (d ) the rereading of Marcel Mauss's concept of the gift, and of economy more generally; and (e) the analysis of the metaphysical basis of law, in both religious and ostensibly secular formations. It then considers the state of the field at the time when it was being infused with different forms of poststructuralism and explores the competing claims made by these discourses in relation to deconstruction. Finally, after tracing the convergences and divergences between Derridean deconstruction and theory in sociocultural anthropology, it treats two main examples of works produced against and under the influence of Derrida's thought, respectively.

2013

Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) is undoubtedly one of the most influential thinkers in the history of western thought. Derrida is responsible for the pervasive phenomenon in modern literary and cultural theory known as "deconstruction." While Derrida himself has insisted that Deconstruction is not a theory unified by any set of consistent rules or procedures, it has been widely regarded as a way of reading, a mode of writing, and, above all, a way of challenging interpretations of texts based upon conventional notions of the stability of the human self, the external world, and of language and meaning. Often deconstruction, a French word is described as a 'method' of 'analysis,' a 'type' of 'critique,' and 'act' of 'reading' as a 'way' of 'writing,' deconstruction as a broad phenomenon has become all of the things. Like the New Criticism in the 1940's and Structuralism thereafter, Deconstruction is the most influential critical movement of our time. According to the theoru of Deconstruction, no work of literature whatsoever has been able to express exactly what it wanted to say and thus the critics' business is to deconstruct and recreate them, taking their words as not the outward form of their meaning but only the 'trace of a quest.' (Das 31) The purpose of this paper is to show what the theory of deconstruction means and how it is different from earlier theories of literary criticism particularly New Criticism and Structuralism. The deconstructive philosophy of Derrida is a reaction to the structural anthropology of Claude Levi-Strauss. Derrida moved from a text oriented deconstructive approach through analysis of politics and institution. The work of Jacques Derrida in the 1960's is generally considered of crucial moment in the rise of post structuralism. In three seminal works-"Of Grammatology," "Speech and Phenomenon" and "Writing and Difference." Derrida calls into question the notion of centres, unity, identity, signification working at a point where he is intensely self-conscious and self-critical of his own writings, Derrida demolishes the boundaries between literature and non-literature. Derrida's transatlantic influence can be traced to an important seminar held at John Hopkins University in 1966. A number of leading French theorists, such as Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, and Lucien Goldmann, spoke at this conference. Derrida himself presented what was quickly recognized as a pioneering paper entitled "Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," a text which shows both what Derrida owes to structuralism and his paths of

Philosophy and Society , 2024

The starting point of the paper is Derrida’s early discussion of Lévinas, focusing on the suggestion that violence is paradoxically magnified in Lévinas’s attempt to articulate ethics as first philosophy within a metaphysics ostensibly free of violence. The next step is an examination of Derrida’s thoughts on Lévi-Strauss and Rousseau in Of Grammatology. Derrida’s comments on names and violence in Lévi-Strauss establish that ethics emerges through a distinction between the “good” interior and the “bad” exterior. Derrida’s subsequent remarks on Rousseau bring up his view of pity as a pre-social morality and the emergence of a social world that enacts violence upon the fullness of nature and the spontaneity of pity within a system of organized, competitive egotism. In his engagement with Celan, Derrida explores a poetics that conveys the sense of a particular, singular self as essential to ethics—defining itself in its separation yet inevitably caught up in universality. This theme develops into an examination of mass slaughter around the Hebrew Bible story of the “shibboleth”, highlighting the violent consequences of exclusionary conceptions of identity. In The Gift of Death, Derrida discusses the relationship between Paganism, Platonism, and Christianity through Patočka’s perspective, then returns to Judaism via Kierkegaard’s discussion of Abraham and Isaac. Derrida’s reflections on secrecy, the sacred, ethical paradox, the violence of ethical absolutism, and the aporetic nature of ethical decisions converge around a discussion of political decisionism in Schmitt and the broader ethical significance of decisionism, as it also appears in Benjamin.

Princípios: Revista de Filosofía, 2013

Asbtract: This paper retraces two crucial displacements in the history of the notion of the "performative" in Derrida's thought, and the effects of this notion in his attempt to rethink the contours of ethical and political action, and of the "subject" of this action. First, Judith Butler's distinctive appropriation of the notion of "iterability" employed by Derrida to describe the performative force of writing, and of language in general. And second, Derrida's own remodulation of the notion of the "performative", in his late reflections on the aporetic structure of "decision" through which he attempts to reflect on the breach between "justice" and "normativity". Through an examination of the differences at stake in these two possible trajectories for thinking the "performativity" of language and selfhood the paper tries to show, first, the connection between Derrida's early analysis of "writing" and his late reflections on the gap between "justice" and normativity; and second, it attempts in a rather preliminary way to understand why Derrida, in his attempt to re-think ethical and political action in this way, reopens a certain "religious" register constitutive of this action, a register, we suggest, connected to the problem of affectivity.