Michael Naas | DePaul University (original) (raw)
Papers by Michael Naas
The Journal of continental philosophy, 2023
This essay takes as its point of departure Jacques Derrida’s analysis of the phantasm of a mother... more This essay takes as its point of departure Jacques Derrida’s analysis of the phantasm of a mother tongue in his recently published seminar from 1995–1996 on hospitality (Hospitalité I, Éditions du Seuil, 2021). The essay begins by showing that Derrida’s analysis of this phantasm is perfectly consistent with several of his most important works of the 1960s (from Of Grammatology to Voice and Phenomenon) on the auto-affection of speech and the phantasm of self-presence to which it gives rise. But the essay then demonstrates how those earlier analyses of language and voice are supplemented in Hospitalité by important reflections on what were then very new teletechnologies—including the cell or mobile phone—that do not, as we might have thought, deflate the phantasm of self-presence and of a natural mother tongue but actually lend themselves to it. What these teletechnologies thus end up underscoring, according to Derrida, is the original exappropriation at the heart of all language, including the so-called mother tongue.
Fordham University Press eBooks, Jun 23, 2020
Abbreviations of Works by Jacques Derrida Acknowledgments Introduction: Derrida's Other Corpu... more Abbreviations of Works by Jacques Derrida Acknowledgments Introduction: Derrida's Other Corpus 1 1. Derrida's Flair (For the Animals to Follow ...) 2. "If you could take just two books ...": Derrida with Heidegger and Robinson Crusoe at the Ends of the World 3. To Die a Living Death: Phantasms of Burial and Cremation in Derrida's Final Seminar 4. Reinventing the Wheel: Of Sovereignty, Autobiography, and Deconstruction 5. Pray Tell: Derrida's Performative Justice 6. Derrida's Preoccupation with the Archive 7. "World, Finitude, Solitude": Derrida's Walten Conclusion: Desormais Notes Name and Subject Index
Fordham University Press eBooks, Nov 17, 2008
In one of his final works (Voyous, 2003), Jacques Derrida expresses in a playful aside his admira... more In one of his final works (Voyous, 2003), Jacques Derrida expresses in a playful aside his admiration for the craft of the potter, and he compares the potter's work to that of the philosopher. This essay attempts to develop Derrida's aside in the same playful spirit, following the theme or trope of the potter and his products in Western literature (from Homer to Wallace Stevens), religion (from Genesis to Romans), and philosophy (from Plato through Heidegger). ********** (Ah, the wheel [le tour]! Let me confide in you here ... (1) On the threshold, on the cusp, on the lip of what I had hoped to be a singular, incomparable testimony, a unique offering--though I now have no illusions, for the lid is already ajar, the gift inexorably doubled and doomed--I too would like to begin with a parenthetical word of confidence or confession: Jacques Derrida has been so many things to so many of us--instructor and inspiration, master and mentor, philosopher and friend--and he has written so much on so many subjects (I won't even begin to enumerate) that it seems ill-advised, even indecent, to try to reduce him here to any one of these figures or to focus on any one of these subjects. My sole consolation in what follows will thus be that the single figure or conceit I have chosen, the single representation of Jacques Derrida to which I shall limit myself, is one for which Derrida himself expressed an avowed preference in one of his very last works. Near the beginning of Rogues, Derrida confides this image to us in an aside: ("Ah, the wheel [le tour]! Let me confide in you here how much I love this image of the potter, his art, the turns of someone who [...]" [13]). Derrida the potter, then, Derrida "at the wheel," not driving along by turning the wheel, as he also loved to do, but more or less immobile, "at his wheel" as one would speak of a philosopher "at his desk," a philosopher a son tour or, rather, philosopher and potter tour a tour, that is, by turns philosopher and potter, philosopher as potter. Throughout Rogues, Derrida likens himself to someone who has been bound, stretched, tortured on the wheel by being pulled in opposite directions by contrary imperatives, and while that image works well for that context, a more appropriate image is, for me here today at least, Derrida not on but at the wheel, driven rather than driving, driven but immobile at the centre of a spinning disk, a master craftsman at his wheel, spinning his materials at the centre of a turning machine: ("[...] how much I love this image of the potter, his art, the turns of someone who, on his wheel, makes a piece of pottery rise up like a tower by sculpting it, moulding it, but without subjecting himself, or herself, to the automatic, rotating movement, by remaining as free as possible with regard to the rotation, putting his or her entire body, feet and hands alike, to work on the machine [...]"). Derrida at the wheel, then, a creator or demiurge moving and shaping the four elements, moulding and fashioning bits of earthen clay by spinning them through the air, mixing in water to make them smooth and pliable, and then firing and vitrifying the sculpted pots, jugs, and urns to be exported to the four corners of the globe. Imagine him, then, Derrida at the wheel ... I am thinking, for example, of that writing desk in the sunroom in Ris-Orangis, Derrida surrounded by his materials, books and articles, dictionaries and lexicons, the Apple at the center of the wheel being worked on, manipulated with both hands, a text moulded and shaped over the course of a morning. Or, better, I think of him at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes on the Boulevard Raspail, teaching, educating, exercising, in truth, the craft of a master potter before a couple hundred students or apprentices who have come not to sit at the master's feet but to learn at his hands ("[...] putting his or her entire body [...] cultivating the art of a sculptor but also that of an architect and composer who imposes on or rather grants to matter differences in height, changes in color and tone, variations in rhythm, accelerations or decelerations [allegro or presto, adagio or lento], in a space as sonorous in the end as a sort of musical transposition or discreet word. …
Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, 2019
Mosaic, Jun 1, 2020
Abstract:In this essay I demonstrate that the theme or trope of clothing is, in Plato, not just s... more Abstract:In this essay I demonstrate that the theme or trope of clothing is, in Plato, not just some rhetorical embellishment of the dialogues but an essential element in Plato's understanding of the relationship between the human, who is in need of the supplement of clothing, and the animal, who is not.
Fordham University Press eBooks, Oct 5, 2021
The first part of this work, under the pretext of a play in three “acts,” looks at three key mome... more The first part of this work, under the pretext of a play in three “acts,” looks at three key moments in Derrida’s confrontation with and development of John Austin’s speech act theory, all three acts taking place, curiously, as if by accident, in Montreal, that is, all three based on public presentations in Montreal that were subsequently published. This first chapter (or “act) in this “play,” titled “Derrida in Montreal (A Play in Three Speech Acts),” follows Derrida as he delivers in August 1971 in Montreal the lecture “Signature Event Context,” the first and most decisive work on speech act theory in Derrida’s corpus. Particular attention is here paid to themes such as presence, intention, repetition, power, and the opposition between speech and writing, themes that are continuous with Derrida’s works prior to 1971 but that, in the context of a rethinking of speech act theory, begin to take on new forms and move in new directions.
Fordham University Press eBooks, Oct 5, 2021
This subchapter (or second “intermission” in the play “Derrida in Montreal”) returns to the 1977 ... more This subchapter (or second “intermission” in the play “Derrida in Montreal”) returns to the 1977 debate between Jacques Derrida and John Searle over the interpretation and inheritance of the speech act theory of John Austin. This chapter focuses on Derrida’s response in the essay “Limited Inc” to John Searle’s criticisms of his 1971 essay “Signature Event Context.” It is argued here that Derrida is, in many ways, the more faithful of Austin’s heirs, even though he will have taken speech act theory in directions that Austin would have no doubt been loath to endorse.
Fordham University Press eBooks, Jan 29, 2018
Fordham University Press eBooks, Oct 5, 2021
This brief coda (or “encore”) to “Derrida in Montreal” follows Derrida for one final appearance i... more This brief coda (or “encore”) to “Derrida in Montreal” follows Derrida for one final appearance in Montreal. The day after the public events that resulted in the publication of “A Certain Impossible Possibility of Saying the Event,” Derrida read in public the quasi-totality of “A Silkworm of One’s Own,” still in manuscript form. This brief chapter underscores the themes of speech act theory (confession, testimony, verdicts) that run through this text, making it a fitting conclusion, it is here argued, to Derrida’s long series of speech acts in Montreal.
Fordham University Press eBooks, Oct 5, 2021
This introduction to the second part of Class Acts, titled “The Open Seminar,” begins with an ove... more This introduction to the second part of Class Acts, titled “The Open Seminar,” begins with an overview of Derrida’s teaching career and of his infamous “seminar” presentations, along with his own explicit reflections on pedagogy and educational institutions beginning in the mid-1970s. It shows how the young student who “never liked school,” and who continued not to like it, would nevertheless go on to spend the rest of his life in educational institutions as either a student or teacher. To explain this apparent contradiction, the chapter attempts to follow both Derrida’s willingness to work within certain educational institutions in France and his attempts to change them, either by offering alternative programs for them or by proposing alternatives to them. The chapter emphasizes the importance of the formation of GREPH (the Groupe de recherches sur l’enseignement philosophique) in 1975 and the foundation of the International College of Philosophy in 1983 for achieving these latter goals. The chapter concludes that, for Derrida, pedagogy is always a question of thinking together and combining the programmatic with the non-programmatic, a curriculum that can be prepared and taught with something that can never be prepared for or put on a syllabus.
Fordham University Press eBooks, Oct 5, 2021
Fordham University Press eBooks, Jun 24, 2020
... ''AO'' &a... more ... ''AO'' ''Abraham, the Other.'' Trans. Gil Anidjar. In Judeities: Questions for Jacques Derrida, ed. Bettina Bergo, Joseph Cohen, and Ra-phael Zagury-Orly, 135. New York: Fordham University Press, 2007. ... Trans. Marian Hobson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. ...
Fordham University Press eBooks, Oct 5, 2021
This chapter begins by looking at the crucial role played by the agrégation exam in the French ac... more This chapter begins by looking at the crucial role played by the agrégation exam in the French academy and, in particular, in the teaching of philosophy in France. The chapter goes on to show how Derrida himself criticized the agrégation—and particularly the notion of the agrégation program—in the very seminars of the mid-1970s at the Ecole Normale Superieure (Life Death in 1975–1976 and Theory and Practice in 1976–1977) in which he was training students for that very exam. The chapter then follows the notion of “program” as it is developed by Derrida throughout the seminar, in particular through his reading of the biologist François Jacob. It ultimately shows the way in which the notion of “program”—both in pedagogy and in genetics—must always try to account for a “chance” or “accident,” a moment of unpredictability, that exceeds every program and yet is essential to the functioning of every program.
Fordham University Press eBooks, Oct 15, 2014
This essay traces the history of Jacques Derrida's engagement with the question of the animal and... more This essay traces the history of Jacques Derrida's engagement with the question of the animal and the methodology Derrida follows in his 2008 The Animal That Therefore I Am. As Derrida demonstrates, the history of philosophy is marked from its inception by an attempt to draw a single, indivisible line between humans and all other animals by attributing some capacity to humans (e.g., language, culture, mourning, a relationship to death) and denying it to animals. Derrida thus begins by questioning the supposed fact that animals do not have such and such a capacity or attribute but then quickly turns to questioning the principle by which philosophers have claimed that humans do. In all his work on the animal, therefore, Derrida questions the confidence with which humans attribute certain capacities to themselves while denying them to animals, all in the name of a pervasive and yet repressed violence against the animal world.
Fordham University Press eBooks, Oct 5, 2021
This chapter focuses on the first volume of Derrida’s seminar Perjury and Pardon (1997–1998), whe... more This chapter focuses on the first volume of Derrida’s seminar Perjury and Pardon (1997–1998), where Derrida returns, more than a quarter of a century after “Signature Event Context,” to questions of contingency and the speech act and, especially, the possibility of a speech act in writing. The chapter shows the way in which this displacement from speech to writing, this move to a “speech” act in writing, to what Derrida often calls here an oeuvre, ends up challenging many of the assumptions of speech act theory as articulated by Austin and Searle. For such a work or “act” in writing would be essentially detached or detachable from its context, severed right from the start from anything like the intention or the living presence of the author or actor of the act, in a word, severed from the life that would have supposedly produced it. Hence the emphasis here on the “machine,” and thus the question of whether the text as machine can “produce” something like a speech act and whether it can lead—beyond life—to a sort of grace.
Fordham University Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2022
Fordham University Press eBooks, Oct 5, 2021
Bain's " Education as a Science." Chap. I. White's " Elements of Pedagogy.'' Introduction. Compay... more Bain's " Education as a Science." Chap. I. White's " Elements of Pedagogy.'' Introduction. Compayre's " Psychology Applied to Education." Chap. I. McKeever's " Psychologic Method in Teaching." Chap. I. Roark's " Psychology in Education." Introduction. Keith's " Tilementary Education." Chap. II. Putnam's " A Manual of Pedagogics." Chap. I.
Fordham University Press eBooks, Oct 5, 2021
Class Acts looks at two often neglected aspects of Jacques Derrida’s work as a philosopher, namel... more Class Acts looks at two often neglected aspects of Jacques Derrida’s work as a philosopher, namely, his public presentations and his teaching, along with the question of the “speech act” that links them, that is, the question of what one is doing when one speaks in public in these ways. The work is divided into two parts, each of which follows Derrida’s itinerary with regard to speech act theory from the 1970s through the 1990s. Part I, titled “Derrida in Montreal,” analyzes Derrida’s critique of John Austin and his own subsequent redefinition of speech act theory over the course of three public lectures or events (in 1971, 1979, and 1997), all three, for reasons I try to identify and explain, in Montreal. Part II. “The Open Seminar,” begins with an overview of Derrida’s teaching career and his famous “seminar” presentations, along with his own explicit reflections on pedagogy and educational institutions beginning in the mid-1970s. It then turns to the way Derrida interrogated and himself redeployed speech act theory in three recently published seminars (on life-death, theory and practice, and forgiveness). We ultimately come to see through this juxtaposition that, whether he was in a conference hall or a classroom, Derrida was always interested in the way in which spoken or written words might not just communicate some meaning or intent but give rise to something like an event. This is a book about the possibility of such events in Derrida’s work as a pedagogue and public intellectual.
Studies in practical philosophy, 1999
The Journal of continental philosophy, 2023
This essay takes as its point of departure Jacques Derrida’s analysis of the phantasm of a mother... more This essay takes as its point of departure Jacques Derrida’s analysis of the phantasm of a mother tongue in his recently published seminar from 1995–1996 on hospitality (Hospitalité I, Éditions du Seuil, 2021). The essay begins by showing that Derrida’s analysis of this phantasm is perfectly consistent with several of his most important works of the 1960s (from Of Grammatology to Voice and Phenomenon) on the auto-affection of speech and the phantasm of self-presence to which it gives rise. But the essay then demonstrates how those earlier analyses of language and voice are supplemented in Hospitalité by important reflections on what were then very new teletechnologies—including the cell or mobile phone—that do not, as we might have thought, deflate the phantasm of self-presence and of a natural mother tongue but actually lend themselves to it. What these teletechnologies thus end up underscoring, according to Derrida, is the original exappropriation at the heart of all language, including the so-called mother tongue.
Fordham University Press eBooks, Jun 23, 2020
Abbreviations of Works by Jacques Derrida Acknowledgments Introduction: Derrida's Other Corpu... more Abbreviations of Works by Jacques Derrida Acknowledgments Introduction: Derrida's Other Corpus 1 1. Derrida's Flair (For the Animals to Follow ...) 2. "If you could take just two books ...": Derrida with Heidegger and Robinson Crusoe at the Ends of the World 3. To Die a Living Death: Phantasms of Burial and Cremation in Derrida's Final Seminar 4. Reinventing the Wheel: Of Sovereignty, Autobiography, and Deconstruction 5. Pray Tell: Derrida's Performative Justice 6. Derrida's Preoccupation with the Archive 7. "World, Finitude, Solitude": Derrida's Walten Conclusion: Desormais Notes Name and Subject Index
Fordham University Press eBooks, Nov 17, 2008
In one of his final works (Voyous, 2003), Jacques Derrida expresses in a playful aside his admira... more In one of his final works (Voyous, 2003), Jacques Derrida expresses in a playful aside his admiration for the craft of the potter, and he compares the potter's work to that of the philosopher. This essay attempts to develop Derrida's aside in the same playful spirit, following the theme or trope of the potter and his products in Western literature (from Homer to Wallace Stevens), religion (from Genesis to Romans), and philosophy (from Plato through Heidegger). ********** (Ah, the wheel [le tour]! Let me confide in you here ... (1) On the threshold, on the cusp, on the lip of what I had hoped to be a singular, incomparable testimony, a unique offering--though I now have no illusions, for the lid is already ajar, the gift inexorably doubled and doomed--I too would like to begin with a parenthetical word of confidence or confession: Jacques Derrida has been so many things to so many of us--instructor and inspiration, master and mentor, philosopher and friend--and he has written so much on so many subjects (I won't even begin to enumerate) that it seems ill-advised, even indecent, to try to reduce him here to any one of these figures or to focus on any one of these subjects. My sole consolation in what follows will thus be that the single figure or conceit I have chosen, the single representation of Jacques Derrida to which I shall limit myself, is one for which Derrida himself expressed an avowed preference in one of his very last works. Near the beginning of Rogues, Derrida confides this image to us in an aside: ("Ah, the wheel [le tour]! Let me confide in you here how much I love this image of the potter, his art, the turns of someone who [...]" [13]). Derrida the potter, then, Derrida "at the wheel," not driving along by turning the wheel, as he also loved to do, but more or less immobile, "at his wheel" as one would speak of a philosopher "at his desk," a philosopher a son tour or, rather, philosopher and potter tour a tour, that is, by turns philosopher and potter, philosopher as potter. Throughout Rogues, Derrida likens himself to someone who has been bound, stretched, tortured on the wheel by being pulled in opposite directions by contrary imperatives, and while that image works well for that context, a more appropriate image is, for me here today at least, Derrida not on but at the wheel, driven rather than driving, driven but immobile at the centre of a spinning disk, a master craftsman at his wheel, spinning his materials at the centre of a turning machine: ("[...] how much I love this image of the potter, his art, the turns of someone who, on his wheel, makes a piece of pottery rise up like a tower by sculpting it, moulding it, but without subjecting himself, or herself, to the automatic, rotating movement, by remaining as free as possible with regard to the rotation, putting his or her entire body, feet and hands alike, to work on the machine [...]"). Derrida at the wheel, then, a creator or demiurge moving and shaping the four elements, moulding and fashioning bits of earthen clay by spinning them through the air, mixing in water to make them smooth and pliable, and then firing and vitrifying the sculpted pots, jugs, and urns to be exported to the four corners of the globe. Imagine him, then, Derrida at the wheel ... I am thinking, for example, of that writing desk in the sunroom in Ris-Orangis, Derrida surrounded by his materials, books and articles, dictionaries and lexicons, the Apple at the center of the wheel being worked on, manipulated with both hands, a text moulded and shaped over the course of a morning. Or, better, I think of him at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes on the Boulevard Raspail, teaching, educating, exercising, in truth, the craft of a master potter before a couple hundred students or apprentices who have come not to sit at the master's feet but to learn at his hands ("[...] putting his or her entire body [...] cultivating the art of a sculptor but also that of an architect and composer who imposes on or rather grants to matter differences in height, changes in color and tone, variations in rhythm, accelerations or decelerations [allegro or presto, adagio or lento], in a space as sonorous in the end as a sort of musical transposition or discreet word. …
Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, 2019
Mosaic, Jun 1, 2020
Abstract:In this essay I demonstrate that the theme or trope of clothing is, in Plato, not just s... more Abstract:In this essay I demonstrate that the theme or trope of clothing is, in Plato, not just some rhetorical embellishment of the dialogues but an essential element in Plato's understanding of the relationship between the human, who is in need of the supplement of clothing, and the animal, who is not.
Fordham University Press eBooks, Oct 5, 2021
The first part of this work, under the pretext of a play in three “acts,” looks at three key mome... more The first part of this work, under the pretext of a play in three “acts,” looks at three key moments in Derrida’s confrontation with and development of John Austin’s speech act theory, all three acts taking place, curiously, as if by accident, in Montreal, that is, all three based on public presentations in Montreal that were subsequently published. This first chapter (or “act) in this “play,” titled “Derrida in Montreal (A Play in Three Speech Acts),” follows Derrida as he delivers in August 1971 in Montreal the lecture “Signature Event Context,” the first and most decisive work on speech act theory in Derrida’s corpus. Particular attention is here paid to themes such as presence, intention, repetition, power, and the opposition between speech and writing, themes that are continuous with Derrida’s works prior to 1971 but that, in the context of a rethinking of speech act theory, begin to take on new forms and move in new directions.
Fordham University Press eBooks, Oct 5, 2021
This subchapter (or second “intermission” in the play “Derrida in Montreal”) returns to the 1977 ... more This subchapter (or second “intermission” in the play “Derrida in Montreal”) returns to the 1977 debate between Jacques Derrida and John Searle over the interpretation and inheritance of the speech act theory of John Austin. This chapter focuses on Derrida’s response in the essay “Limited Inc” to John Searle’s criticisms of his 1971 essay “Signature Event Context.” It is argued here that Derrida is, in many ways, the more faithful of Austin’s heirs, even though he will have taken speech act theory in directions that Austin would have no doubt been loath to endorse.
Fordham University Press eBooks, Jan 29, 2018
Fordham University Press eBooks, Oct 5, 2021
This brief coda (or “encore”) to “Derrida in Montreal” follows Derrida for one final appearance i... more This brief coda (or “encore”) to “Derrida in Montreal” follows Derrida for one final appearance in Montreal. The day after the public events that resulted in the publication of “A Certain Impossible Possibility of Saying the Event,” Derrida read in public the quasi-totality of “A Silkworm of One’s Own,” still in manuscript form. This brief chapter underscores the themes of speech act theory (confession, testimony, verdicts) that run through this text, making it a fitting conclusion, it is here argued, to Derrida’s long series of speech acts in Montreal.
Fordham University Press eBooks, Oct 5, 2021
This introduction to the second part of Class Acts, titled “The Open Seminar,” begins with an ove... more This introduction to the second part of Class Acts, titled “The Open Seminar,” begins with an overview of Derrida’s teaching career and of his infamous “seminar” presentations, along with his own explicit reflections on pedagogy and educational institutions beginning in the mid-1970s. It shows how the young student who “never liked school,” and who continued not to like it, would nevertheless go on to spend the rest of his life in educational institutions as either a student or teacher. To explain this apparent contradiction, the chapter attempts to follow both Derrida’s willingness to work within certain educational institutions in France and his attempts to change them, either by offering alternative programs for them or by proposing alternatives to them. The chapter emphasizes the importance of the formation of GREPH (the Groupe de recherches sur l’enseignement philosophique) in 1975 and the foundation of the International College of Philosophy in 1983 for achieving these latter goals. The chapter concludes that, for Derrida, pedagogy is always a question of thinking together and combining the programmatic with the non-programmatic, a curriculum that can be prepared and taught with something that can never be prepared for or put on a syllabus.
Fordham University Press eBooks, Oct 5, 2021
Fordham University Press eBooks, Jun 24, 2020
... ''AO'' &a... more ... ''AO'' ''Abraham, the Other.'' Trans. Gil Anidjar. In Judeities: Questions for Jacques Derrida, ed. Bettina Bergo, Joseph Cohen, and Ra-phael Zagury-Orly, 135. New York: Fordham University Press, 2007. ... Trans. Marian Hobson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. ...
Fordham University Press eBooks, Oct 5, 2021
This chapter begins by looking at the crucial role played by the agrégation exam in the French ac... more This chapter begins by looking at the crucial role played by the agrégation exam in the French academy and, in particular, in the teaching of philosophy in France. The chapter goes on to show how Derrida himself criticized the agrégation—and particularly the notion of the agrégation program—in the very seminars of the mid-1970s at the Ecole Normale Superieure (Life Death in 1975–1976 and Theory and Practice in 1976–1977) in which he was training students for that very exam. The chapter then follows the notion of “program” as it is developed by Derrida throughout the seminar, in particular through his reading of the biologist François Jacob. It ultimately shows the way in which the notion of “program”—both in pedagogy and in genetics—must always try to account for a “chance” or “accident,” a moment of unpredictability, that exceeds every program and yet is essential to the functioning of every program.
Fordham University Press eBooks, Oct 15, 2014
This essay traces the history of Jacques Derrida's engagement with the question of the animal and... more This essay traces the history of Jacques Derrida's engagement with the question of the animal and the methodology Derrida follows in his 2008 The Animal That Therefore I Am. As Derrida demonstrates, the history of philosophy is marked from its inception by an attempt to draw a single, indivisible line between humans and all other animals by attributing some capacity to humans (e.g., language, culture, mourning, a relationship to death) and denying it to animals. Derrida thus begins by questioning the supposed fact that animals do not have such and such a capacity or attribute but then quickly turns to questioning the principle by which philosophers have claimed that humans do. In all his work on the animal, therefore, Derrida questions the confidence with which humans attribute certain capacities to themselves while denying them to animals, all in the name of a pervasive and yet repressed violence against the animal world.
Fordham University Press eBooks, Oct 5, 2021
This chapter focuses on the first volume of Derrida’s seminar Perjury and Pardon (1997–1998), whe... more This chapter focuses on the first volume of Derrida’s seminar Perjury and Pardon (1997–1998), where Derrida returns, more than a quarter of a century after “Signature Event Context,” to questions of contingency and the speech act and, especially, the possibility of a speech act in writing. The chapter shows the way in which this displacement from speech to writing, this move to a “speech” act in writing, to what Derrida often calls here an oeuvre, ends up challenging many of the assumptions of speech act theory as articulated by Austin and Searle. For such a work or “act” in writing would be essentially detached or detachable from its context, severed right from the start from anything like the intention or the living presence of the author or actor of the act, in a word, severed from the life that would have supposedly produced it. Hence the emphasis here on the “machine,” and thus the question of whether the text as machine can “produce” something like a speech act and whether it can lead—beyond life—to a sort of grace.
Fordham University Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2022
Fordham University Press eBooks, Oct 5, 2021
Bain's " Education as a Science." Chap. I. White's " Elements of Pedagogy.'' Introduction. Compay... more Bain's " Education as a Science." Chap. I. White's " Elements of Pedagogy.'' Introduction. Compayre's " Psychology Applied to Education." Chap. I. McKeever's " Psychologic Method in Teaching." Chap. I. Roark's " Psychology in Education." Introduction. Keith's " Tilementary Education." Chap. II. Putnam's " A Manual of Pedagogics." Chap. I.
Fordham University Press eBooks, Oct 5, 2021
Class Acts looks at two often neglected aspects of Jacques Derrida’s work as a philosopher, namel... more Class Acts looks at two often neglected aspects of Jacques Derrida’s work as a philosopher, namely, his public presentations and his teaching, along with the question of the “speech act” that links them, that is, the question of what one is doing when one speaks in public in these ways. The work is divided into two parts, each of which follows Derrida’s itinerary with regard to speech act theory from the 1970s through the 1990s. Part I, titled “Derrida in Montreal,” analyzes Derrida’s critique of John Austin and his own subsequent redefinition of speech act theory over the course of three public lectures or events (in 1971, 1979, and 1997), all three, for reasons I try to identify and explain, in Montreal. Part II. “The Open Seminar,” begins with an overview of Derrida’s teaching career and his famous “seminar” presentations, along with his own explicit reflections on pedagogy and educational institutions beginning in the mid-1970s. It then turns to the way Derrida interrogated and himself redeployed speech act theory in three recently published seminars (on life-death, theory and practice, and forgiveness). We ultimately come to see through this juxtaposition that, whether he was in a conference hall or a classroom, Derrida was always interested in the way in which spoken or written words might not just communicate some meaning or intent but give rise to something like an event. This is a book about the possibility of such events in Derrida’s work as a pedagogue and public intellectual.
Studies in practical philosophy, 1999