This paper approaches the problem of the relation between Deleuze and Derrida by focusing on their respective readings of Heidegger's interpretation of Nietzsche's eternal return. It argues that the difference between Deleuze and Derrida cannot be measured in terms of their explicit statements about Heidegger, but in terms of how they relate their own readings of Nietzsche to Heidegger's positioning of him as the last metaphysician. The paper focuses on Deleuze's brief analyses of Heidegger in Difference and Repetition and Derrida's (...) numerous references to the eternal return throughout his oeuvre, particularly in the essay Différance. I argue that Deleuze and Derrida articulate two different relations to the simulacrum through the way in which they position their own work in relation to Heidegger's understanding of Nietzsche. (shrink)

“Where did this unexpected mobility of epistemological arrangements come from…? What event, what law, do these mutations obey, these mutations that suddenly decide that things are no longer perceived, described, expressed, characterized, classified, and known in the same way…?” The recent wave of interest in the work of Jacques Rancière in North America can likely be traced back to the unique status he gives to the category of the aesthetic in its relation to the political. Coming after the exhaustion of (...) debates surrounding the notion of “aesthetic ideology,”1 and expressing dissatisfaction with familiar arguments about the aestheticization of politics, Rancière’s oeuvre seems to offer the promise of a.. (shrink)

This essay argues that David Wills’s work re-articulates the relation between technology and language by treating language as a form of mechanicity engendered by tropological substitution. This tropological machinery, Wills suggests, operates automatically while producing and subtending supposedly ‘natural’ phenomena. The essay traces this argument through Wills’s early work up to his book Inanimation, arguing that these tropological dimensions of language become an increasingly important part of his account of how technology operates reflexively. The essay closes with an argument for (...) how tropological language is a central figure for what Wills calls ‘inanimation’, the constantly displaced border between life and its others—death and the inanimate. It concludes that Wills’s conception of the relation between language and technology produces a unique ‘zone of indistinction’ between the animate and the inanimate, a form of ‘life’ that is no longer purely biological. (shrink)

It is rare these days to read a book as ambitious as Irving Goh's The Reject. Taking up the question that Jean-Luc Nancy posed in 1988—"Who comes after the subject?"—Goh's study proposes a theory of "the reject" as a crucial figure through which to reconceptualize modern critical and political theory's reliance on the centrality of the subject. Engaging in a reading that charts this figure through a range of contemporary French philosophers, the study simultaneously attempts to articulate how "the reject" (...) might help to posit, as Goh puts it, "another ethics, another 'religion without religion,' and another politics, all 'without the subject'". Not content merely to articulate a coherent theory of "the reject,"... (shrink)