Interpretative violence and Jacques Derrida's professed love of ruins (original) (raw)
Related papers
8. The Original Polemos: Phenomenology and Violence in Jacques Derrida –Valeria Campos-Salvaterra
The Meanings of Violence: From Critical Theory to Biopolitics, 1st Edition. Edited by Gavin Rae, Emma Ingala, 2018
Violence is a permanent and central feature of Jacques Derrida’s philosophy. While various commentators have noted the role it plays in his later works, in this chapter, I argue that these build on his early notions of ‘originary violence,’ ‘arche-violence,’ and ‘transcendental violence.’ I state that the relationship between violence and origin is found in Derrida’s analysis of the normative structure of Husserlian phenomenological discourse with this providing the ‘ground’ for Derrida’s subsequent critical readings of Levinas and Lévi-Strauss. Through his engagements with Husserl, Levinas, and Lévi-Strauss, Derrida unfolds a philosophical strategy that aims to question the very possibility of fully determining what is right and wrong, good and evil, violent and non-violent, and so on. If violence is originary, as Derrida concludes, then any attempt to criticize it must always be based on the arche-violence of meaning, with the consequence that any planned escape from violence and hence a pure non-violence is simply not possible. * This document is the proof Routledge sent me to correct, so is not the final publish version. To get the final paper go to https://www.routledge.com/The-Meanings-of-Violence-From-Critical-Theory-to-Biopolitics/Rae-Ingala/p/book/9781138570207
Review of Rodolphe Gasché, 'Deconstruction, Its Force, Its Violence.' Law, Culture and the Humanities, 2018, Vol. 14(2) 339– 341, 2018
Deconstruction, Its Force, Its Violence, together with “Have We Done with the Empire of Judgment?” By Rodolphe Gasché. New York: State University of New York Press, 2016. 144 pp. $23.95 (paper). ISBN: 978-1-4384-6000-0 2017 celebrated fifty years since the publication of Jacques Derrida’s celebrated original trio of books De la grammatologie, La voix et le phénomène, and L’écriture et la différance. This anniversary was marked with various events reflecting on the influence and significance of Derrida’s work. Just prior to this anniversary came a timely publication from Rodolphe Gasché, a towering figure amidst esteemed scholars of Derrida’s work. Gasché’s work engages with aspects of Derrida’s thought which have long been of interest to legal scholars: the force and possibility of deconstruction, the relationship between law and justice, judgment, and the infamous declaration that “[d]econstruction is justice.”
"Law, Violence and Justice in Derrida’s ‘Force of Law’" (author's original version)
Published in "Derrida Today" 17.1, pp. 97-112, 2024
In ‘Force of Law’, Derrida’s discussion of the ‘unstable’ distinction between law and justice exemplifies the deconstructive double bind and makes this a very significant text in virtue of its juridical, political and ethical import. The first section focuses on Derrida’s deployment of the polysemous term ‘force’. ‘Force’ refers to the enforceability of the law but also to the performative and interpretative foundational violence at the moment when a new order of legality is instituted. In the second section, I argue that Derrida’s insistence on the differential relation between law and justice and on the corollary deconstructibility of the law leads to a critique of the current legal system and its axiomatics. I show that deconstruction appeals to unconditional justice in order to call for an excessive responsibility on the part of the legal system, to broaden the category of subject of law, and to have an impact on the lives of others in the margins of the established political order.
Introductory Editorial - Jacques Derrida: Before, Through, Beyond (the) Law
German Law Journal
On the 8 th of October 2004, Jacques Derrida died. By all accounts, whether sympathetic or unsympathetic to the philosopher, and understanding or not of his work, Derrida had, by the time of his death, gained the status of one of the most influential thinkers of the second half of the 20th century. He combined an essentially philosophical endeavour with an affinity for literary criticism, and a commitment to the venerable French tradition of the public, and, thus, political, intellectual. Unlike Habermasian and post-Habermasian critical theorists, he was not a self-conscious bridge-builder, though his thought nevertheless came to occupy sizeable and highly articulate niches across the world's academies, and most notably in North America, thereby "disseminating" his always quintessentially francophone word far beyond the French and European scene.
The All-Seeing Sovereign: Blindness and Vision in Derrida's Death Penalty Seminars
Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy, 2016
This article explores an intriguing, yet underdeveloped line of inquiry in Derrida’s late Death Penalty Seminars concerning the inherent visibility or spectacle of the death penalty. Showing how this inquiry surfaces in Derrida’s engagement with Foucault, the article argues that Derrida’s Seminars offer crucial resources for critically analyzing, and thus rethinking, sovereignty and the principle of capital punishment. In particular, it demonstrates how visibility forms a key component of the structural scaffolding around the death penalty put under pressure by deconstruction. It then develops this claim by drawing salient connections between the Seminars and Derrida’s work on other visual forms. Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy 20.2 (Fall 2016).
Violence, Justice, Deconstruction
German Law Journal, 2005
In his famous talk “The Force of Law,” given at Cardozo Law School in 1989, Derrida linked his work with the Critical Legal Studies movement. This lecture signposted a change of direction in deconstruction. Early deconstruction had been criticized for formalism, aestheticism and scant recognition of political realities. Derrida's (in)famous statement that “there is nothing outside of the text,” was a rare philosophical sound-bite meaning that language, communication and social interaction cannot avoid, as commonly assumed, the uncertainties and ambiguities of the written text. But the aphorism was often misinterpreted to signify extreme idealism, disregard for the real world and literary and philosophical reductionism. But the “Force of Law” signified a clear turn towards political and ethical engagement, symbolized by the discussion of law and justice. After that talk, deconstruction became obsessed with questions of ethical responsibility, the meaning of friendship and the com...
A Law unto Himself Derrida and the Force of Justice
This chapter examines Derrida's distinction between law and justice, looking at the heritage of Pascal and Montaigne and examining issues of ethical and political responsibility in the process, taking some examples from contemporary American political discourse ________________________________________________________________________________ One of the strongest criticisms aimed at the project of Jacques Derrida in particular, and indeed at literary and cultural theory in general, is the relativistic and apolitical nature of its epistemological position. Derrida has been seen as a nihilist and a relativist and as someone for whom anything goes in terms of ethics and politics. One of the most celebrated examples of this was the Cambridge affair where Derrida's putative award of an honorary doctorate from Cambridge University became a point of contestation among the fellows of that college, and later among the wider academic community.