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Memorial Address to the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy
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Memorial Address to the Andover Newton Theological School
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"One Nation … Indivisible": Jacques Derrida on the Autoimmunity of Democracy and the Sovereignty of God
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During the final decade of his life, Jacques Derrida came to use the trope of autoimmunity with greater and greater frequency. Indeed it today appears that autoimmunity was to have been the last iteration of what for more than forty years Derrida called deconstruction. This essay looks at the consequences of this terminological shift for our understanding not only of Derrida's final works (such as Rogues) but of his entire corpus. By taking up a term from the biological sciences that describes the process by which an organism turns in quasi-suicidal fashion against its own self-protection, Derrida was able to rethink the very notion of life otherwise and demonstrate the way in which every sovereign identity, from the self to the nation-state to, most provocatively, God, is open to a process that both threatens to destroy it and gives it its only chance of living on.
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Derrida and the Question of Presence
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It has often been considered that the most important part of Derrida's work consisted in the five books published between 1967 and 1972. This paper intends, by way of a re-reading of Derrida's most powerful text from this period, Speech and Phenomena, to bring to light Derrida's specific manner of uniting the question of the disruption of presence to the question of writing. What is therefore questioned is Derrida's emphasis on death, considered as the very condition of possibility of language and writing. As Derrida rightfully shows, Husserl, in spite of the importance he conferred upon writing in the process of idealization, was not aware of the fact that the relationship to death constitutes the concrete structure of the living present. But on the other hand, by still opposing in a too dualistic manner presence and absence, life and death, Derrida himself was not able to see that the condition of language is not so much the death of the subject as the being toward death and the finitude of Dasein.
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Oversights
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Addressed here are addressing and the address of the here and the there: the direction and indirection of words, whether written or spoken in prayer; but also of pictures, one of them sent to Derrida, one of them an icon presumably destined from God, and a third, the one reproduced on the cover of The Post Card from Socrates to Freud and Beyond, that attends to the difficulty of locating the threshold between the to and the from, perhaps a secular version of the problem of grace—unless that is not a problem but an aporia, wherever the threshold between these has its place. The chance of oversight, επισκoπη, is addressed, and the words Derrida addressed to his friends from the grave.
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Life after Derrida: Anacoluthia and the Agrammaticality of Following
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Written on Derrida's "'Le Parjure,' Perhaps: Storytelling and Lying," this essay takes the concept of the anacoluthon from Derrida's text (as he has done from J. Hillis Miller, as he did from Proust) and—commenting on the figure of the woman in this male lineage—further invents the concept of the anacoluthon by demonstrating how its formal linguistic definition provides a model for the event of reading and writing—of thinking—that Derrida so admires in Hillis Miller's work and practices in his own. By employing this same reading practice in its own thinking, this essay does not respond to Derrida's death in mourning, nor in thinking about mourning, but in the memory of thought. Produced out of Derrida's work, the essay remains faithful to him only by simultaneously being faithful and unfaithful, thereby enacting the agrammaticality of following represented in and by the anacoluthon.
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Another Possibility
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We try to explore here the Derridean concept of "possibility." Such a concept has no contraries. It does not oppose effectivity or necessity, or even impossibility, but stays what it is in any case: possible. Trying to negate it or to contradict it only leads to denial. To Derrida, this strange status of possibility is addressed as the question of faith as such, as it appears in "Faith and Knowledge." Every belief is always, at its foundation, belief in the possibility of a completely different history altogether, in what Derrida calls the "utterly other chance." Is deconstruction the legible form of this otherness?
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All You Can't Eat: Derrida'S Course, "Rhétorique Du Cannibalisme" (1990–1991)
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In 1990–1991 Jacques Derrida taught a seminar in Paris involving the scientific-philosophical notebooks of the German Romantic writer and thinker Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg, 1772–1801). The present article offers an account of that seminar, which was entitled, "The Rhetoric of Cannibalism."
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Reading: Derrida in Hegel's Understanding
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Hegel's dialectic "Consciousness," Part A from the Phenomenology of Spirit, is interpreted in light of the concept of "reading." The logic of reading is especially helpful for interpreting the often misunderstood dialectic of understanding, as that is described in chapter 3 of the Phenomenology, "Force and Understanding: Appearance and the Supersensible World." Hegel's concept of "the Inverted World" in particular is clarified, and from it Hegel's notion of originary difference is developed. Derrida's notion of "differance" is used to illuminate Hegel's use of difference and to interpret the Hegelian metaphysics that is developed in "Force and Understanding" and in the opening moves of Hegel's Science of Logic. It is argued that the philosophical projects of Hegel and Derrida are ultimately indistinguishable.
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Derrida and the Truth of Drawing: Another Copernican Revolution?
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I begin with the hypothesis that Jacques Derrida's Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins is in a way the illustration of Speech and Phenomena and therefore Derrida's critique of phenomenology, intuition, perception, and seeing. I also want to show in this regard parallels with both Husserl and Kant. I emphasize that what is at issue in Memoirs of the Blind is art, visual arts; and in the great thematic richness of this text, I note the high points as well as the low points concerning the arts of the "visible." The fundamental question is: Does Derrida "see" the drawing, the painting, and indeed listen to the music?
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Notes on the Augenblick in and Around Jacques Derrida's Reading of Paul Celan's "The Meridian"
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Jacques Derrida wrote twice, in 1984 in "Shibboleth" and in 2002 for his Paris seminar lectures, about "The Meridian," Paul Celan's Georg Büchner prize speech that forms the most elaborate exposition of the poet's poetics. In both readings Derrida, in one way or the other, deals with the question of time. In "Shibboleth," at stake is the notion of date; in the seminar lectures, the "other's time." Through the Greek, Christian, and Jewish experiences involved, the present article takes the notion of Augenblick as a fil conducteur.
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Universality and Historicity: On the Sources of Religion
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One of the central questions of Jacques Derrida's later writings concerns the sources of religion. At times he gives explicit priority to the universal dimension of religion. In other places, however, he considers the primacy of faith in its concrete, historical context. This paper will clarify Derrida's relationship to universality and historicity by first comparing his notion of "messianicity without messianism" to that of Walter Benjamin's "weak Messianism." After drawing out these differences, I will focus on Derrida's later writings. I will show that much of the ambiguity of Derrida's thinking on religion can be resolved by turning to his work on khōra, the Greek word for "space" or "matter." The rhetoric of khōra can allow us to think through a twofold logic, one that includes the universal/historical distinction and exceeds its alternatives.
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The Events of Morality and Forgiveness: From Kant to Derrida
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In this paper, I will perform a "step back" by showing how Derrida's analysis of forgiveness is rooted in Kantian moral philosophy and in Derrida's interpretation of Kierkegaard's concept of decision. This will require a discussion of the distinction that Kant draws in his Groundwork between price (the economic) and dignity (the incomparable), as well as a discussion of the underlying notion of singularity in Kant's text. In addition, Derrida universalizes Kierkegaard's concept of the agent so that, with this perspective in view, the interpretation of Kantian morality as something that must be described in a paradoxical way, becomes fully transparent. Whereas the interpretation of Kantian morality will provide us with a concept of morality that remains a "blind spot" for the agent, with the help of Derrida's Kierkegaard interpretation we can see that the concept of decision remains ultimately ambivalent. In conclusion, both (a) the deconstructed concept of morality and (b) the concept of decision will finally (c) let us understand Derrida's radical concept of forgiveness, which is both a non-economic act of morality in the sense explained and an unpredictable, uncontrollable decision and event.
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On Being Haunted by the Future
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Derrida insists that we understand the 'to-come' not as a real future 'down the road', but rather as a universal structure of immanence. But such a structure is no substitute for the hard work of taking responsibility for what are often entirely predictable and preventable disasters (9/11, the Iraq war, Katrina, global warming). Otherwise "the future can only be anticipated in the form of an absolute danger". Derrida devotes much attention to proposing, imagining, hoping for a 'future' in which im-possible possibilities are being realized. It is important to steer clear of the utopian black hole, the thought (or shape of desire) that the future would need to bring a future perfection or completion. The future may well exhibit a universal structure of immanence. But what is equally disturbing is not our inability to expect the unexpected, but the failure of our institutions to prevent the all-too-predictable.
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Deconstruction and Translation: The Passage into Philosophy
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In taking up the question of translation as its guiding thread, this essay considers the extent to which deconstruction consists in a radical calling into question of the type of thought and practice of translation implied in what Derrida has called "the passage into philosophy." At the same time, a whole other thought of translation—of the very kind that Derrida put into practice—is demanded insofar as something like the survival of works and the very possibility of a tradition are at stake.
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The Hope of Remembering
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Aristotle's Hermeneutics of Facticity: Heidegger's Early Phenomenological Interpretation of Aristotle
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Recovering Plato in (and against) the Continental Tradition
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Legacy and Pedagogy, or How to Read Derrida
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