This new edition of Drucilla Cornell's highly acclaimed book includes a substantial new introduction by the author, which situates the book within current feminist debates. In Beyond Accommodation, Drucilla Cornell offers a highly original vision of what feminist theory can give contemporary women. She challenges essentialist and naturalist accounts of feminine sexuality, arguing that any attempt to affirm woman's value and difference by either emphasizing her maternal role or repudiating the feminine only entraps women, once again, in a container that (...) curtails feminine sexual difference, legitimates the masculine fantasy of woman, and reinstates, rather than dismantles, the gender hierarchy. (shrink)

This book review symposium aims to open a space for discussions and questions responded to the book Education between Speech and Writing: Crossing the Boundaries of Dao and Deconstruction, which is...

Jacques Derrida est l’un des philosophes qui a continué à remettre en cause sérieusement les rapports théoriques et pratiques entre la philosophie et l’éducation, tout en restant hors des institutions universitaires traditionnelles en France. Dans les années 1970, il organise le GREPH (Groupe de recherches surl’enseignement philosophique) avec des enseignants et des étudiants contre la réduction de l’enseignment philosophique au lycée par le gouvernement français, et pour faire les recherches théoriques sur le lien essentiel de la philosophie à l’enseignement en (...) général. Puis, en 1983, Derrida a déployé tous ses efforts pour créer le Collège internatinal de Philosophie, institution tendant à ouvrir la nouvelle possibilité de la philosophie. Enfin, dans ses dernières années, ilintérroge l’avenir de l’université ou des Humanités à cette époque de mondialisation dans les textes comme L’Université sans condition, etc. Pour Derrida qui n’a cessé de donner ses séminaires depuis 1964, la question de l’éducation est important pour l’élaboration de sa propre philosophie. Selon lui, « je n’imagine pas de philosophie ni de recherche dissociée de son enseignement. J’ai essayé d’introduire dans cet enseignemtn de nouvelles pédagogie, de nouvelles mises en scènes, de changer la politique de l’enseignement et son rapport à la société » (Sur parole : instantanés philosophiques, Aube, 1999, p. 36). L’enseignement n’est pas un thème secondaire, mais plutôt un des questions centrales pour ses recherches philosophiques. Dans cette communication, nous allons mettre en lumière la théorie et la pratique de Derrida sur la philosphie et l’éducation, comme l’exemple le plus effectif et concret de sa conception de déconstruction. (shrink)

The dissertation seeks to locate a post-Hegelian response to the question of orientation. Such a response would neither return to the "totalizing drive" of dialectic nor yield to the "nihilistic gestures" of deconstruction but would traverse and transfigure both modes of thought. Part 1 isolates non-dialectical tropes which implicitly orient crucial transitions in Hegel's Logic, Phenomenology, and Aesthetics. Textual analyses of these tropes suggest that dialectical movement depends paradoxically upon the systematic undoing of the Hegelian demand for total knowledge. Part (...) 2 finds that the same orienting tropes reappear in texts of Derrida's where they now work against the paralyzing effects of deconstruction. These tropic movements prefigure a deconstructive notion of orientation which would exceed the inversions of undecidability. (shrink)

In this interview, which took place in Center City in Philadelphia in September 2020, I ask Jean-Michel Rabaté to reflect on his personal and writerly relationship with Jacques Derrida, and to assess the legacies of Derrida and deconstruction across the globe today. In the last five years, Rabaté has published three books on Derrida: Les Guerres de Derrida, After Derrida, and Understanding Derrida, Understanding Modernism. In response to this flurry of publications, I ask Rabaté what has prompted his recent and (...) vigorous turn to Derrida and what his intentions were with these books. As we review their organising principles, the central thematic of this discussion is thus concerned with Derrida's relevance to the Humanities and Social Sciences as we enter the third decade of the twenty-first century. (shrink)

My focus is the ‘logico-rhetorical module’. This mental module, Sperber hypothesizes, is an evolved ability of human beings to examine critically what someone is saying, for example, to detect inconsistency or inadequate evidence in an argument. On the assumption that we have this natural ability, Chilton questions the need for Critical Discourse Analysis; in contrast, on his reading of Sperber’s work, Hart argues the opposite. In this article, I agree with Chilton’s stance to the extent that the competence of the (...) logico-rhetorical module is, generally speaking, adequate for enabling critical engagement with verbal input. That said, I highlight two limitations of the logico-rhetorical module for detecting inconsistency in arguments. To address these limitations, I hold a new approach is needed in Critical Discourse Analysis. This is one which draws on the corpus linguistic method; I refer to it as Electronic Deconstruction. (shrink)

Stimulated by these three brilliant target essays this commentary raises a few questions about the universality of the “emotions,” the cultural psychology of “natural kinds,” and the analytic deconstruction of the idea of an emotion.

This theoretical psychological study comprises an illustration and analysis of the experience of "unknowing" described in contemplative and mystical literature. Materials examined were drawn from exponents of the West's "via negativa" and from the Japanese Zen master, Eihei Dosen. Although ultimately a non-discursive and ineffable mode of experience, the accounts of contemplative unknowing are shown in this study to bear a number of discernible common features. Psycho-spiritual techniques enjoined to inculcate the experience of unknowing are also examined. This study proposes (...) that the latter can be productively understood as forms of deconstruction, finding that "contemplative deconstruction" is effectively the deconstruction of the self, arrived at in an experienced shift in one's relationship to one's own experiencing . As an elucidating contrast and comparison, an extended discussion is provided of the postmodern deconstructionism of Jacques Derrida. Discussion is also included of currents within contemporary Western psychological discourse which show some promise for further aiding our understanding of contemplative experiences, namely, social constructivist psychology's investigations of the self and transpersonal psychology's valorization of East/West mysticism. It is suggested that, despite the extreme worth and impress on the lives of those who have such experiences , the discourse of contemporary mainstream psychology has yet to give adequate space in its investigations to the phenomena of contemplative praxis. (shrink)

However widely--and differently--Jacques Derrida may be viewed as a "foundational" French thinker, the most basic questions concerning his work still remain unanswered: Is Derrida a friend of reason, or philosophy, or rather the most radical of skeptics? Are language-related themes--writing, semiosis--his central concern, or does he really write about something else? And does his thought form a system of its own, or does it primarily consist of commentaries on individual texts? This book seeks to address these questions by returning to (...) what it claims is essential history: the development of Derrida's core thought through his engagement with Husserlian phenomenology. Joshua Kates recasts what has come to be known as the Derrida/Husserl debate, by approaching Derrida's thought historically, through its development. Based on this developmental work, Essential History culminates by offering discrete interpretations of Derrida's two book-length 1967 texts, interpretations that elucidate the until now largely opaque relation of Derrida's interest in language to his focus on philosophical concerns. A fundamental reinterpretation of Derrida's project and the works for which he is best known, Kates's study fashions a new manner of working with the French thinker that respects the radical singularity of his thought as well as the often different aims of those he reads. Such a view is in fact "essential" if Derrida studies are to remain a vital field of scholarly inquiry, and if the humanities, more generally, are to have access to a replenishing source of living theoretical concerns. (shrink)

This article takes its inspiration from Jacques Derrida to consider how deconstructionism can be done inadvertently. This possibility is underscored when one considers how a very significant phrase in Ifá texts— “A díá fún...” has been construed away from its transliteration as “Ifá divination was performed for...” by each of Oluwole and Karenga. Oluwole justifies her “deconstruction” on the grounds that such transliteration does not capture the philosophic cogs gravid within Ifá verses. Karenga, through his Kawaida methodology, “improvises” to suit (...) the ethical inferences he seeks to deduce out of the corpus. On this showing, this research infers that each of these scholars have engaged in a reflective activity that passes, on Derrida’s reading, as deconstruction, unbeknownst to them. Would they admit that their intellectual drudgeries amount to postmodern philosophy? This is the primary research question that this disquisition interrogates. (shrink)

The author argues that Günter Figal sheds novel light on language in his recent Objectivity: The Hermeneutical and Philosophy through a debate he appears to stage with the position Jacques Derrida develops in some of his early essays on deconstruction. Figal describes language as a form of showing and emphasizes the openness and flexibility of expression involved in determining significance. Yet, he rejects the idea he finds in Derrida that such flexibility should lead us to wholesale suspicion of the capacity (...) of language to fix significance. Whereas Derrida concludes that all attempts to fix significance through supplementation of our expressions can only end in the need for further supplementation, Figal stresses the dialectical mien of language that allows supplementation to yield genuinely determinate significances. (shrink)

This article aims to explore the philosophical approach to faith after deconstruction as manifested in the work of Jean-Luc Marion and Jean-Luc Nancy. By taking the saturated phenomenon as its focus, the analysis seeks to demonstrate that whilst Marion’s thinking proves to be an innovative re-imagining of the possibilities of phenomenology, its problematic recourse to a supplementary hermeneutic means that saturation can never be adequately applied to faith without simultaneously compromising the excessive intuition upon which it relies. The article then (...) explores whether Nancy’s suggestion that saturation be re-framed as faith can offer a viable alternative approach. Whilst the post-phenomenological modality within which Nancy operates means it may be problematic to retain the term ‘saturation’ in the exact sense Marion gives it, it is argued that Nancy’s version of saturated faith allows us to approach the binary divide between philosophy and theology from a different direction, resulting in a vision of faith that cuts across theism and atheism, destabilising them from within. Although Nancy’s thought in this area certainly does nothing to respond to persistent questions surrounding the place of institutionalized religion within secular modernity, it nevertheless serves as a powerful tool for thinking the possibilities of faith in the twenty-first century. (shrink)

It is tempting to represent anthropology at home versus anthropology in exotic places like so: “Whereas the latter is obviously legitimate and of interest to the discipline, the former is a borderline phenomenon at best and no department could function with just it. It is probably parasitic.” This paper offers a deconstruction of this portrait, but not a spectacular one, in which anthropology at home is presented as essential for accountability.

This book offers a vigorous and constructive challenge to relativism by examining a wide range of anti-realist theories, and in response offering a variety of arguments amounting to a strong defence of critical realism in the natural and social sciences.

Explores the ethical and political possibilities of philosophy after deconstruction.

ABSTRACTIn the literature on Derrida’s philosophical formation, the name of Eugen Fink is usually forgotten. When it is recalled, it is most often because of his 1930s articles on phenomenology. In this paper, I claim on the contrary that Fink’s writings exerted a lasting influence on Derrida’s thought, well beyond his early phenomenological works. More specifically, I focus on a 1957 paper presented at a conference on Husserl’s thought where Fink formulates an important distinction between operative and thematic concepts. By (...) adopting both historical and theoretical perspectives, I show how this couple of notions can help to understand Derrida’s singular way of reading philosophical texts. In particular, I present the Derridean concept of supplement as a reworking of Fink’s notion of operative concept. I conclude by suggesting that deconstruction can be understood in part as a radicalization of Fink’s theses. (shrink)

From the twentieth century into the twenty-first, psychoanalysis and deconstruction have challenged, and continue to challenge, our conceptions of subjectivity and selfhood. This book argues that taking forward this heritage we must retrace the subject and the self as undergoing perpetual auto-deconstruction, through the lens of solitude.

The environmental crisis, one of the great challenges of our time, tends to disenfranchise those who come after us. Arguing that as temporary inhabitants of the earth, we cannot be indifferent to future generations, this book draws on the resources of phenomenology and poststructuralism to help us conceive of moral relations in connection with human temporality. Demonstrating that moral and political normativity emerge with generational time, the time of birth and death, this book proposes two related models of intergenerational and (...) environmental justice. The first entails a form of indirect reciprocity, in which we owe future people both because of their needs and interests and because we ourselves have been the beneficiaries of peoples past; the second posits a generational taking of turns that Matthias Fritsch applies to both our institutions and our natural environment, in other words, to the earth as a whole. Offering new readings of key philosophers, and emphasizing the work of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida in particular, Taking Turns with the Earth disrupts human-centered notions of terrestrial appropriation and sharing to give us a new continental philosophical account of future-oriented justice. (shrink)

A fascinating account of exemplarity in the context of deconstruction.

An exploration of the occurrence of the words “safe” and “intact” in the writings of Derrida and Nancy, the author likes to suggest, allows us to catch a glimpse of some of the fundamental differences between the late works of these two thinkers as well as to distinguish the most salient features of their divergent interpretations of deconstruction. This chapter concentrates on the intersection of the later writings of Derrida and Nancy concerning the general topic of “religion”. What is of (...) particular interest is the significant role that the interpretation of the term salut ‐ which in French has two meanings “greeting, salutation” as well as “salvation” ‐ plays in this interaction. In broad outlines, for Derrida, the goal of “religion”, if it can be said to have one, is to keep the living – the adherents of “religion” ‐ safe, unscathed, and intact. (shrink)

Thomas McCarthy has provided a trenchant critique of the deconstructionist turn in recent philosophy and has outlined a program of reconstruction in its aftermath. He develops his version of reconstructionist philosophy against the backdrop of Kant's doctrine of critical reason and the critical theory of Jürgen Habermas. However, McCarthy's reconstructionist design is not simply an appropriation and defense of Habermas. He provides a critical reformulation of the Habermasian position, deftly using Habermas against himself. The author is in accord both with (...) McCarthy's disposition to problematize the premises of deconstruction and his call for philosophical reconstruction. In continuing the conversation, however, he distances himself farther than does McCarthy from the criteriological concept of rationality that was proposed by Kant and which continues to inform Habermas's requirement for the grounding of validity claims. In the process the author proposes a new approach to the resources of reason along the lines of what he has come to call the dynamics of transversal rationality. (shrink)

It is intended that a large Academy be erected, capable of containing nine thousand seven hundred forty and three persons, which, by modest computation, is reckoned to be pretty near the current nu...

(1991). Can feminism politicize hermeneutics and reconstruct deconstruction? Social Epistemology: Vol. 5, Postmodern Social Epistemology, pp. 361-369.

Don't look for the meaning; look for the use. A few years back the Yale deconstructionist Paul de Man wasposthumously discovered to have written repeatedly for a Belgiancollaborationist journal during the Nazi occupation. So far as I amaware, de Man in his American period espoused no particular politics. Indeed, the Left frequently regarded this as a cause for complaint, since most of them thought of de Man and deconstruction as being their natural allies.

The last few years have seen the emergence of a more political, ‘post-Derridean’ generation, critical of the impotent messianism of the politics of deconstruction. As Žižek would have it: ‘Derrida's notion of ‘deconstruction as ethics’ seems to rely on a utopian hope which sustains the spectre of ‘infinite justice’, forever postponed, always to come’ (Žižek 2008: 225). The promise of redemption, it follows, would reside in an insubstantial promissory value, in the writing of irredeemable cheques that, if cashed in, could (...) only ever lead to default. With its ethos of play and over-investment in an empty promise, deconstruction starts to look symptomatic of the now-bankrupt age of excess. Does the current financial crisis not entail a crisis of Derrida? This reading contrives to elide what is genuinely political in Derrida, and thereby fails to recognise the deconstruction of economic theodicy implicit in his work. Jean-Luc Nancy has argued that the concept of sacrifice is irreducibly linked to the short-circuiting of the political. We see in Derrida, however, that sacrifice is at the heart of politics, a response to undecidability that is precisely opposed to the fantasy of economics without sacrifice. Furthermore, sacrificial politics is the condition of possibility of the promise, which is constructed and contingent, rather than a priori. If there is a problem with this, it is that Derrida does not sufficiently entertain the prospect of the promise becoming so distant as to be effectively meaningless. Drawing on Bernard Stiegler, this article argues for an expansion of Derrida's account, to show not only that politics is sacrifice, but moreover that the promise of redemption cannot live on in the absence of sacrifice. (shrink)