Phenomenology of Art: Overcoming the Specters of Platonism, Newtonism, and Cartesianism (original) (raw)
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The other of Derridean deconstruction: Levinas, phenomenology and the question of responsibility
Minerva-An Internet Journal of Philosophy, 2001
Derrida has been rather frequently acclaimed for his conception of alterity, which we are told is irrecuperable and beyond the dialectic. However, this essay will argue that his attempts to instantiate an ethics of responsibility to the "otherness of the other" are more problematic than is commonly assumed. Much of Derrida's work on alterity palpably bears a tension between his emphasis upon an absolute and irrecuperable notion of alterity that is always deferred and always 'to come', and his simultaneous insistence that the other is somehow always already within the self. These two aspects of his treatment of alterity do not necessarily contradict one another, but they represent an important tension between a Levinasian inclined account of alterity (the other is that which can never be known), and a more traditionally phenomenological conception of alterity (i.e. the imperialism of the same, in which the other is always partially domesticated by the self's horizons of significance).
Derrida’s Specter – Abraham’s Phantom, or Psychoanalysis as the Uncanny Kernel of Deconstruction
The aim of this paper is to trace the haunting effect of two texts by Jacques Derrida and disclose the cause of that effect. First I discuss J. Hillis Miller’s bafflement and subsequent misreading of Derrida’s rather enigmatic text, “Fors,” and then read it in tandem with a similarly haunting-haunted text, Specters of Marx. This forms the basis of my endeavor to disclose the silenced traces that lead to the work of Nicolas Abraham, an old friend of Derrida’s, whose name is simply foreclosed from the French philosopher’s oeuvre even though he wrote two prefaces to Abraham’s works (one of them being “Fors” – which curiously turns into an enigma for Miller). My aim, in other words, is to let the foreclosed trace speak and to see what it does to Derrida’s deconstructionist project culminating in his later project of “hauntology.”
Derrida's Specter, Abraham's Phantom
The AnaChronisT
The aim of this paper is to trace the haunting effect of two texts by Jacques Derrida and disclose the cause of that effect. First I discuss J. Hillis Miller's bafflement and subsequent misreading of Derrida's rather enigmatic text, "Fors," and then read it in tandem with a similarly haunting-haunted text, Specters of Marx. This forms the basis of my endeavor to disclose the silenced traces that lead to the work of Nicolas Abraham, an old friend of Derrida's, whose name is simply foreclosed from the French philosopher's oeuvre even though he wrote two prefaces to Abraham's works (one of them being "Fors" - which curiously turns into an enigma for Miller). My aim, in other words, is to let the foreclosed trace speak and to see what it does to Derrida's deconstructionist project culminating in his later project of "hauntology."
Derrida and Agamben: Spectrality, Contemporaneity and the Role of Intellectuals
Derrida and Agamben: Spectrality, Contemporaneity, and the Role of Intellectuals What authorizes a comparative analysis of Agamben"s Nudities and Derrida"s Specters of Marx besides the meagre fact the two theorists and their respective books concern themselves with ghosts? The two books are intertextual by way of their mutual object of analysis (spectrality) and their opposed theoretical position with regards to the status of the "end of history": Specters of Marx rejects the premise of history"s closure while Nudities implies that the recognition of history"s completion is necessary for a way of life that is contemporary to the present. The two books present competing paradigms of justice and conceptualizations of the present and its exigencies. The quality of being "out of joint" unifies both works and decisively, albeit in dramatically different ways, orients each theorist to the present. The texts are separated by nearly two decades but a certain reading of Agamben"s Nudities cannot fail to recognize the sense of urgency it manifests in addressing what appear to be the major claims of Derrida"s Specters of Marx. This belated response, assuming it is a response, neatly implies that the "time" of the two texts is already collapsed or out of joint. However, if Agamben is truly in dialogue with Derrida, if there is a goal to his urgent reconceptualization of the specter, than it is to oppose Derrida"s anti-Fukuyamian gesture of refusing history"s closure. It is a repost accomplished by the subversion, reversal and appropriation of Derrida"s theoretical apparatus in the service of certain not-necessarily-disinterested partisans attesting to history"s completion.
Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies, 2011
In the spirit of the stated topic, “Angel of the New,” this article addresses the question of the modern—in art, politics, and social thought—in terms deriving from Benjamin’s, and subsequently Adorno’s, experience of art in its fullest truth claims in the face of catastrophe. The article explores a certain contemporary questioning of the limits of representation and the truth-value of representations, above all art works. Making reference to Agamben and the notion of “bare life” as a key figure of modern bio-politics, it addresses several contemporary issues at the limits of aesthetic, conceptual, and political “representation” (though shying away from a full engagement with contemporary political theory proper and its concerns): death, the sublime, catastrophe. Beginning with modern changes in the understanding of death (and life) and the role of technology, instrumental rational control, and economic reason, in the formation of modern society, it discusses the catastrophic limit cases of Hiroshima and Auschwitz, arguing ultimately that a modernist commitment to art truth, even with respect to the most difficult human events, is necessary still today, despite a seeming movement beyond the modern in the reigning cultural dominant.
According to Ethan Kleinberg, historians are still living in fear of the specter of deconstruction; their attempted exorcisms have failed. In Haunting History: For a Deconstructive Approach to the Past (2017), Kleinberg fruitfully “conjures” this spirit so that historians might finally confront it and incorporate its strategies for representing elusive pasts. Despite decades of scholarship undermining the nineteenth-century, Rankean foundations of the historical discipline, the regime of what Kleinberg calls “ontological realism” apparently still reigns. His book is not simply the latest in a long line of criticism of such work, but rather a manifesto for a positive theory of historical writing that employs deconstruction’s linguistic and epistemological insights.
Dis)Figures of Death: Taking the Side of Derrida, Taking the Side of Death
Derrida Today, 2010
If the dominant ethico-philosophical thinking of responsibility in the West is founded upon, or tied to a certain figure of death, it is because this ethical notion of responsibility is also a certain econo-ontothanatology. Here the notion of the gift to the other is always already inscribed within a certain economic equivalence of value, or an economic determination of temporality as the geometric figure of the circle, or a certain economy of the experiences of abandonment and mourning, through which the event-character of the gift, its excess and its infinite surplus is economised, reduced, repressed, or even annulled. Reading Jacques Derrida's deconstruction of this econo-onto-thanatology, and relating him to Schelling, Heidegger, Levinas and Kierkegaard, this article attempts to reveal this very complex relationship of the ethical notion of responsibility and the gift with death, in order to think anew -in the spirit of Derrida -a responsibility in relation to mourning and abandonment, and in relation to a death that does not figure in any figuration of self-figuration and self-presence, but -to speak with Maurice Blanchot -as interminable, incessant worklessness, as endless ruination and abandonment of itself. This impossible aporia of the notion of responsibility is itself a dis-figuring of death, which is also an aporia of an instant which escapes, in its event character, the geometric figure of time as circle.
ATHENA: Journal of Philosophical Studies, 2018
In the given article, I would like to address a few texts of Jacques Derrida, written by him in the 1990s, namely: Back from Moscow, in the USSR (1993), Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International (1994) and Marx & Sons (1999). The close reading of Back from Moscow, in the USSR will allow me to examine the first series of questions, in particular: what the role of the genre of “autobiographical-travel-testimony”, constituted by the texts of European intellectuals who visited USSR in different periods of its history, in the intellectual biography of Derrida, was; how the travel diary can turn into a political diagnosis and what Deconstruction and Perestroika have in common. Two other texts are important for the analysis of more general, yet interrelated questions: how and why the untimely / contretemps thoughts of Derrida on the fate of Marxism, become relevant dans l’ici-maintenant – here (in Eastern Europe) and now (thirty years after the collapse of socialism) and how the studies of “spectralities” contribute to our understanding of the Postsocialist condition.