Article Derrida’s Turn to (original) (raw)

J. Derrida, La vie la mort (A Critical Review - M. Senatore)

Phenomenological Reviews, 2019

trace, and différance-that allow for a differential account of all living beings, of all sorts of relationships between the living and the dead. It is to this story, Derrida goes on, that one should retrace his early project of grammatology-the project of replacing the notions of word (parole), sign, and signifier, with the aforementioned figures (see Of Grammatology, 1967). Since then, he had re-elaborated the oppositional account of life, based on the humanist conception of language, into the differential account made possible by the analogical code of grammē. For Derrida, the humanist and oppositional account of life hinges on an axiomatic demarcation. On the one hand, we have animal autorelation (the animal ability to move, feel and affect itself with traces of itself, which is traditionally opposed to inorganic inertia); on the other hand, we have human selfreference or autodeicticity (one's power to refer to oneself in a deictic way, that is, by saying "this is me," 131-2). The logical matrix of Derrida's argument for a critical re-elaboration of the humanist account of life consists in calling into question this axiomatic demarcation of animal autoaffection and human self-reference. Building on his early work (above all, Voice and Phenomenon, 1967), Derrida rethinks autorelation as the minimal condition of life, including human life, and thus self-reference as an effect of autorelation, with all that this implies-to begin with, the departure from phenomenology as a thinking of the self-referent living present.

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.

" Remembrance of the Future " : Derrida on Mourning

In Memoires for Paul de Man Derrida articulates a new model of mourning as an ongoing conversation with the dead who are both within us and beyond us and continue to look at us with a look that is a call to responsibility and transformation. Derridean mourning significantly revises classic psychoanalytic accounts of mourning, reworking and combining conceptual apparatus from psychoanalysis, philosophy and literature: incorporation (Abraham and Torok), gedachtnis (Hegel), rhetoricity and aporia (de Man).

Lessons to Live (1): Posthumous Fragments, for Jacques Derrida

Derrida Today, 2008

Written as a last, long posthumous letter to Jacques Derrida, the essay turns to the philosopher's last and, for the living, most important lesson -on 'learning to live.' In particular, it addresses -as constitutive of his unique 'heterodidactics' -two discrete communications on the subject. The first, in Spectres de Marx (1993), declares the lesson to be at once impossible and necessary, that is, 'ethics itself'; in the second, the last interview 'Je suis en guerre contre moi-même' published just before his death in 2004, Derrida confesses to 'have remained uneducable' on the subject. The essay reflects on the performative significance of this contradiction in the context of Derrida's intimacy with death, his taste for mourning, and his practice of writing as an experience of dying and resurrection.

Cut to the Quick, les mains ensanglotées: the Quick and the Dead in Respect to Derrida

Tropismes, 2007

Hereafter "La langue" plus page number. 2 Philippe Romanski and I translated "La Langue n'appartient pas" and other interviews and essays by Jacques Derrida, published in Jacques Derrida's Sovereignties in Question (Fordham University Press, 2005), edited by myself and another person. After having sent back copy-edited pages with my final corrections, I discovered the book published in a bookstore without my ever having seen the galley proofs. Fordham copy-editor, Helen Tartar and others unbeknownst to me introduced thousands of changes, of the order of taking the impersonal expression in French, "il faut," for a "he must," or changing aberrantly the translation of vif, disfiguring scandalously the book. 3 A key moment in the history of philosophy for this expulsion of ghosts and of literature from philosophy is the movement Kant travels from his Dreams of a Ghostseer (1766) to his Critique of Pure Reason (1781), where "ghosts" are made to be the stuff of fictio or Erdichtung, off realms for philosophy. On this exclusion, see T. Dutoit, "Ghost Stories, the Sublime and Fantastic Thirds in Kant and Kleist," 225-254.