Derrida TodayPub Date : 2024-02-01DOI: 10.3366/drt.2024.0327
Kristian Olesen Toft
{"title":"Translating Khora","authors":"Kristian Olesen Toft","doi":"10.3366/drt.2024.0327","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/drt.2024.0327","url":null,"abstract":"Khora, as it figures in Plato’s Timaeus, as read by Jacques Derrida, poses a singular translation problem, not only for having more than one meaning, but also for having less than one. This might be thought of in terms of Derrida’s distinction between ‘polysemy’ and ‘dissemination’, in so far as any concept of translation will ‘re-mark’ a translation or reception of something like khora, the ‘all-receiving’. This means both that khora is untranslatable and that its translation into every language is inevitable, which has implications for the question of a ‘politics of khora’, as becomes particularly apparent in Derrida’s unpublished seminar from 1985–86.","PeriodicalId":42836,"journal":{"name":"Derrida Today","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139688184","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Derrida TodayPub Date : 2024-02-01DOI: 10.3366/drt.2024.0328
Eftichis Pirovolakis
{"title":"Law, Violence and Justice in Derrida’s ‘Force of Law’","authors":"Eftichis Pirovolakis","doi":"10.3366/drt.2024.0328","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/drt.2024.0328","url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":42836,"journal":{"name":"Derrida Today","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139686427","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Derrida TodayPub Date : 2024-02-01DOI: 10.3366/drt.2024.0324
Joanna Hodge
{"title":"Experience, Excription, Existence: Nancy with Derrida, between Kant and Bataille","authors":"Joanna Hodge","doi":"10.3366/drt.2024.0324","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/drt.2024.0324","url":null,"abstract":"This essay locates Jean-Luc Nancy's analyses, developed in relation to three invented terms, expeausition, excription, sexistence, in a threefold context: between Immanuel Kant on experience and Heidegger on existence; with Derrida on rethinking life and death ( lavielamort); and as a response to the alteration in phenomenology consequent on a transposition of key themes out of the German speaking context of the analyses of Husserl and Heidegger into the French language context of the French reception. An intensification ( survie) of life forces may arrive in a ‘living on’ ( survivre) where thought processes only partially brought to expression in the lifetimes of their originators acquire precision and definition in moments of extremity, danger and horror, adding a fourth dimension to the initial three.","PeriodicalId":42836,"journal":{"name":"Derrida Today","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139685562","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Derrida TodayPub Date : 2024-02-01DOI: 10.3366/drt.2024.0325
Amir Jaima
{"title":"(Re)Situating Geschlecht 3: The Political Stakes of Jacques Derrida’s Reading of Martin Heidegger’s Reading of Georg Trakl","authors":"Amir Jaima","doi":"10.3366/drt.2024.0325","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/drt.2024.0325","url":null,"abstract":"In his 1985 lecture, Geschlecht III, Derrida sought to ‘situate Geschlecht within Heidegger’s path of thought’. Having identified a political disclosure of sorts in Heidegger’s discussion of the significance of Trakl’s poetic invocation of the polysemic, German word ‘Geschlecht’, Derrida intimates that Heidegger betrays ideas and presumptions concerning the ‘problematic of philosophical nationalism’. Given the contentious political context of Heideggerian thought, some scholars might hope that Derrida’s intervention here would bear upon the divisive scholarly concern referred to as the ‘Heidegger Question’. While Geschlecht III does not provide a resolution, a close reading betrays productive political implications to his manner of engagement. In this brief study, I will survey the political stakes of various methodological approaches to reading Heidegger, with Derrida’s manner of reading Heidegger’s ‘Language in the Poem’ at the centre. Ultimately, I argue that Derrida and Heidegger both appeal to a particular sense of the political that must be respected, though not necessarily accepted.","PeriodicalId":42836,"journal":{"name":"Derrida Today","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139683825","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Derrida TodayPub Date : 2024-02-01DOI: 10.3366/drt.2024.0323
Abigail Culpepper
{"title":"Everything Decomposes: Survivance Beyond the Human-Animal","authors":"Abigail Culpepper","doi":"10.3366/drt.2024.0323","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/drt.2024.0323","url":null,"abstract":"The notion of survivance is central to Derrida’s later thinking. Much of that thinking, for example in addressing the non–human in The Animal That Therefore I Am and The Beast and the Sovereign, is more precisely a thinking of the human in relation to the animal. Taking inspiration from the recent turn towards biodeconstruction, this essay works through the implications of survivance beyond the human-animal by considering the synergy between biological and textual survivance. And in so doing, this essay outlines a new way of conceptualizing the living self as a composite form made up of many non-human and even textual others.","PeriodicalId":42836,"journal":{"name":"Derrida Today","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139685082","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Derrida TodayPub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.3366/drt.2023.0315
Naomi Waltham-Smith
{"title":"Life, Would That it Might Be To Say – Power, Metaphor, <i>Tragen</i>, <i>Épuis(s)ement</i>","authors":"Naomi Waltham-Smith","doi":"10.3366/drt.2023.0315","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/drt.2023.0315","url":null,"abstract":"In Insister – À Jacques Derrida Cixous declares that she will have to write ‘the book of words’, among which ‘words of power’ will be vermögen (to be able), together with Unvermöglickeit (impossibility), and tragen (to carry), along with austragen (to bear to term) and übertragen (to transfer, translate, also in the sense of metaphor). By examining Derrida's reading of Cixous in H. C. pour la vie, c'est à dire … this article deepens the association of tragen with life and power that fascinates Derrida in the second year of his final seminar where he tracks a thread between Austrag, Walten, Trieb, and Vermögen. Its point of departure is a passage towards the end of H. C. pour la vie where Derrida speaks of the trap of metalanguage or, rather, metaphrasis that lurks in the c’est of c'est à dire. I link this passage both to the discussion of metaphorization in the earlier ‘Le puits et la pyramide’ and the characterization of puisse as ‘the exhaustion [ l'épuisement] of the sun before its time’ in the essay on Cixous to associate puissance with the wearing-out of the world and its usure in the double sense elaborated in ‘La mythologie blanche’.","PeriodicalId":42836,"journal":{"name":"Derrida Today","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135111277","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Derrida TodayPub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.3366/drt.2023.0311
Jonathan Basile
{"title":"The Epic of Genesis: Catherine Malabou and the <i>gêne</i> of Epigenetics","authors":"Jonathan Basile","doi":"10.3366/drt.2023.0311","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/drt.2023.0311","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the conflicting representations of plasticity and epigenetics in the work of philosopher Catherine Malabou and evolutionary theorists Mary Jane West-Eberhard and Eva Jablonka. In order to speak of a new biological ‘paradigm’ and to attribute values of novelty or inventiveness to life itself, Malabou has to suppress the unsettled debates within the life sciences. The aporias of evolutionary narrative and causality reveal a necessary differentiality and textuality that belongs neither to life nor science itself, but leaves a haunting remanence within every corpus. New materialism resists this necessity of life-science, which calls for a deconstructive reading.","PeriodicalId":42836,"journal":{"name":"Derrida Today","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135111440","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Derrida TodayPub Date : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.3366/drt.2023.0313
Adam R. Rosenthal
{"title":"Artificial Life, Feeling Machines, and the Text of Deconstruction","authors":"Adam R. Rosenthal","doi":"10.3366/drt.2023.0313","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/drt.2023.0313","url":null,"abstract":"Recent efforts in soft robotics and Artificial Life are attempting to construct homeostatically functioning machines with ‘feeling’ analogues. Such robots are designed to be ‘vulnerable’ and, thus, depart from traditional approaches to machine design and construction. In this paper, I explore a representative proposal by Antonio Damasio and Kingson Man, and ask how we can understand the deconstruction of ‘life’ in Derrida, Stiegler, Malabou and Wills to relate to such efforts. I argue that the adoption of biological and phenomenological principles in machine design calls for attention to the precise extent that it may not result in robots that adhere either to biological or to mechanical models. It is with this admission, of the essentially unknowable character of what may result from these efforts, that deconstruction can assist roboticists and synthetic biologists today.","PeriodicalId":42836,"journal":{"name":"Derrida Today","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135111439","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}