Hegel After Derrida provides a much needed insight not only into the importance of Hegel and the importance of Derrida's work on Hegel, but also the very foundations of postmodern and deconstructionist thought. It will be essential reading for all those engaging with the work of Derrida and Hegel today and anyone seeking insight into some of the basic but neglected themes of deconstruction.
This book offers a new materialist interpretation of Derrida's later work, including his engagements with religion and politics. It argues that there is a shift from a context or background motor scheme of writing to what Derrida calls the machinic, and Catherine Malabou calls plasticity.
Reactions to Derrida vary dramatically: some regard him as a charlatan, as simply nihilistic and irrationalist; others as an extraordinarily clear and patient thinker, concerned with the affirmation and elaboration of a new enlightenment. However construed, his work in the field of deconstruction has been a decisive point of reference and orientation for cultural and intellectual debate in the English-speaking world.
This volume charts a new course in animal studies that re-examines Jacques Derrida's enduring thought on the visualization of the animal in his seminal Cerisy Conference from 1997, The Animal That Therefore I Am. Building new proximities with the animal in and through - and at times in spite of - the visual apparatus, Seeing Animals after Derrida investigates how the recent turn in animal studies toward new materialism, speculative realism, and object-oriented ontology prompts a renewed engagement with Derrida's animal philosophy. In taking up the matter of Derrida's treatment of animality for the current epoch, the contributors to this book each present a case for new philosophical approaches and aesthetic paradigms that challenge the ocularcentrism of Western culture.
"Jacques Derrida's career-long engagement with the philosophy of Emmanuel Kant has made possible a sea-change in both the understanding and methods of appraisal of Kant's work. Kant After Derrida is a collection of essays which reflects the breadth of this re-appraisal, assessing the principal points of contact and dissonance between the Derridean deconstructive approach and Kant's 'critical apparatus' ... While explicitly avoiding simple opposition, Derrida's work and its influence has intimately effected reconfigurations on familiar Kantian subjects such as beauty, nature, freedom, the transcendental, the categories, casting anew the ethical, aesthetic, physical and metaphysical systems with which Kant blazed his 'Copernican revolution'. The richness and diversity of these essays is evidence both of the strength and enduring power of Kant's achievement some two hundred years after his death, and tribute to the value of the very Derridean notion of 'reading with'." -- From back cover.
“Cultural Graphology” could be the name of a new human science: this was Derrida’s speculation when, in the late 1960s, he imagined a discipline that combined psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and a commitment to the topic of writing. He never undertook the project himself but did leave two brief sketches of how he thought cultural graphology might proceed. In this book, Juliet Fleming picks up where Derrida left off. Using both his early and later thought, and the psychoanalytic texts to which it is addressed, to examine the print culture of early modern England, she drastically unsettles some key assumptions of book history. Fleming shows that the single most important lesson to survive from Derrida’s early work is that we do not know what writing is. Channeling Derrida’s thought into places it has not been seen before, she examines printed errors, spaces, and ornaments (topics that have hitherto been marginal to our accounts of print culture) and excavates the long-forgotten reading practice of cutting printed books. Proposing radical deformations to the meanings of fundamental and apparently simple terms such as “error,” “letter,” “surface,” and “cut,” Fleming opens up exciting new pathways into our understanding of writing all told.
Many commentators have remarked in passing on the resonance between deconstructionist theory and certain ideas of quantum physics. In this book, Arkady Plotnitsky rigorously elaborates the similarities and differences between the two by focusing on the work of Niels Bohr and Jacques Derrida. In detailed considerations of Bohr's notion of complementarity and his debates with Einstein, and in analysis of Derrida's work via Georges Bataille's concept of general economy, Plotnitsky demonstrates the value of exploring these theories in relation to each other. Bohr's term complementarity describes a situation, unavoidable in quantum physics, in which two theories thought to be mutually exclusive are required to explain a single phenomenon. Light, for example, can only be explained as both wave and particle, but no synthesis of the two is possible. This theoretical transformation is then examined in relation to the ways that Derrida sets his work against or outside of Hegel, also resisting a similar kind of synthesis and enacting a transformation of its own. Though concerned primarily with Bohr and Derrida, Plotnitsky also considers a wide range of anti-epistemological endeavors including the work of Nietzsche, Bataille, and the mathematician Kurt Gödel. Under the rubric of complementarity he develops a theoretical framework that raises new possiblilities for students and scholars of literary theory, philosophy, and philosophy of science.
A critical anthology that re-examines Jacques Derrida’s thought by way of theory and praxis, this volume reflects on his striking legacy and the future of theory. Among contemporary thinkers, Derrida challenges not only our ways of thinking but also hitherto methods of critical inquiry. In the attempt to renovate and re-energise philosophy, Derrida questions the fundamental assumptions of Western philosophical thought, and, in turn, exposes the intricate lie behind binaries, such as, speech/writing, nature/culture, male/female, black/white, literature/criticism, etc., which have continued to shape our worldview — where a hegemonic centre is always already in place dominating/marginalising the ‘other’. This book explores not only the status of Derrida’s contribution as a critical thinker but also the status of critical theory as such in the contemporary milieu. The central question that it asks is whether we should dismiss Derrida as a thinker who espoused an extreme form of relativism, bordering on nihilism, or has he something fundamental to contribute to the future of theory. Could it be that deconstruction is not destruction but a possibility that casts doubts on whether the present can have faith in future? The volume addresses some important concerns of our times, such as, religious practice, art and aesthetics, translation, sociology of philosophy, and democracy, making a significant contribution to literary theory. Scholars of English literature, philosophy, sociology and cultural studies will find this work particularly appealing.