Originally published as section 19 of his 1997 doctoral dissertation L'Inexistence divine, 'Being and Nothingness' engages Derrida in an early formulation of what Meillassoux would come to call the 'principle of factiality', the principle famously proclaiming the necessity of contingency. This early work defines the factial by rearticulating Heidegger's ontological difference between being and beings across necessity and contingency themselves. The factial is shown to operate according to a doubling in negation across a necessary nothingness, le n & eacute;ant, and the contingent nothing, le rien. 'Being and Nothingness' contrasts Hegel's subordination of the contingent nothing to necessary nothingness with Heidegger's subordination of necessary nothingness to the contingent nothing, and concludes with some fascinating reflections on Derrida's diff & eacute;rance, givenness and withdrawal. Meillassoux ultimately refuses both Heidegger and Derrida's conceptions of the ontological difference, accusing the latter of turning the ontological difference into merely one intra-ontic difference among others, produced by the movement of diff & eacute;rance.
This article contends that Derrida makes the wrong decision when radicalizing Heidegger's critique of the metaphysics or presence into a critique of identity tout court. Quite aside from the philosophical problems inherent in any rejection of classical identity (as noted from Aristotle forward), such a step also interprets the direction of Heideggerian philosophy incorrectly. When Heidegger says in Identity and Difference that identity requires mediation, this has much less in common with a Derridean critique of identity than with the Lacanian model of the split subject. Thus Lacan was also wrong when he claimed, during a dinner at the famous 1966 Johns Hopkins University conference, that Derrida had taken his critique of the self-identical subject from Lacan. In fact, the two critiques are altogether different. In closing, the article points to a harmful stylistic consequence of the Derridean notion of "play" as non-identity: namely, the overly hesitant and non-committal style that Derrida celebrates in Positions.
Discovered in Fran & ccedil;ois Laruelle's archives shortly before his passing, this 2006 text sharpens the reading of deconstruction begun in Machines textuelles: D & eacute;construction et libido d'& eacute;criture (1976), a work which deeply impressed Derrida and featured one of the first instances of what came to be called 'non-philosophy'. 'Derrida, Mediator' interprets Derrida and deconstruction as mediations between the Greek philosophical tradition and the Judaic tradition as represented by Levinas. Laruelle defends Derrida from those who interpret deconstruction as texualist sophistry (the Nietzschean Foucault, the Spinozist Deleuze, the Platonist Badiou), as well as from those who seek to affirm the infinite against deconstruction's alleged emphasis on finitude. Contemporaneous with works such as Future Christ (2010) and Mystique non-philosophique & agrave; l'usage des contemporains (2007), however, 'Derrida, Mediator' invokes the 'messianity' of the Real against the Greek priority of Being and the Judaic priority of the Other, as well as their mediation.
This paper explores Maurizio Ferraris's philosophical dialogue with Jacques Derrida, tracing the evolution from deconstruction to documentality and the emergence of a realist ontology suited for the digital age. While acknowledging Derrida's influence, Ferraris distances himself from postmodernism's obsession with overcoming metaphysics, proposing instead that social reality is grounded not in collective intentionality but in recording, summarized by the formula Object = Recorded Act. Through the concept of documentality, Ferraris reconceives Derrida's dictum 'there is nothing outside the text' as 'nothing social exists outside the text'. The paper situates this theory within the rise of digital technologies and big data, arguing that the proliferation of documentation has transformed the social world into a vast network of recorded behaviours. Ferraris identifies this transformation as both the foundation of contemporary capitalism - producing what he calls 'documedia surplus value' - and the key to its political reform. He thus advocates for 'digital communism' and Webfare, systems that redistribute the immense value generated by users' online data. Finally, Ferraris expands his theory into a technosophy, conceiving human intelligence as both embodied and technologically equipped. The result is a constructive, political, and realist reappropriation of Derrida's legacy for the age of artificial intelligence.
The victim, the enemy. The victim or the enemy, if there is a difference. But how many are these? Against the expected odds, I have counted more than one, plus d'un. I count the Jew, the Arab and more, in any case, too many enemies. Here and elsewhere, there is always more, increasingly more than one enemy, few of which are identified or identifiable along state lines, much less confined to the state of nature, or even to the state of war, to the not-so secure difference between external war or internal war. Like the emergency, the enemy is never one. Never only one war; never only in war. The problem may well begin, if it ever begins, with counting (majority and minority, the living and the dead), or else it begins with the host, hospes or hostis, with what Derrida called so very aptly 'hostipitality', for which the stranger and the foreigner, 'the concept and experience of the foreign body, of an incalculable number of figures given the foreign body', emerge as paradigmatic, yet above nor less counted or countable, calculable, figure. For, ever mindful of 'maternal solicitude', upon which Derrida insists from beginning to end, the mother is, after all, 'an absolute figure', a figure of hospitality, which must be 'reconciled', Derrida says, 'with the figure of power and of the master or mistress' of the house, and therefore, as we shall have to the mother and the master, mothers as sovereign masters (whence, no less inevitably, mothers and slaves). Or, to repeat: Plus d'une m & egrave;re, plus d'un ennemi.
In Politics of Friendship Derrida characterises his extended discussion as a contribution to a genealogical deconstruction of the link that ties democracy to autochthony. In Rogues a few years later, he adds to this work by articulating what might be figured as an extensionist hypothesis, raising the question of 'how far' 'the people of democracy' is to be extended. Here, I read these two lines of problematisation alongside each other, seeing in each a certain decentring of the place of 'people' in the formation of democracy. Reading the later gesture for its potential to usher in a 'more-than-human' politics in view of anthropogenic climate change, I take recent efforts to develop a program of a multispecies, environmental justice as indicative of this impulse. At stake here is what Derrida characterises as an ambivalent logic of 'fraternisation' whose operation in theories of more-than-human politics I trace with reference to the Schmittian concept of the political. Driving the investigation from the beginning, however, is a more speculative question of what happens to the very idea of democracy when the place of 'people' is doubly decentred in this way. In what sense, moreover, could a deconstruction along these lines be engaged and still keep the old name of democracy?
In his 2001 Theodor W. Adorno Prize speech, 'Fichus', Jacques Derrida imagines a book on the German philosopher that he would never have the opportunity to write. Its last chapter would concern animals, which for Derrida constitute the most important future direction in reading Adorno. This article takes this moment as its point of departure to suggest that among the many threads that connect deconstruction with critical theory, the question of the animal takes on central significance. Reconsidering 'Fichus' as a reflection on the responsibilities of thinking about and after the end, I argue that for both philosophers, animals point to an alternative form of thought, one that is not only concerned but imbued with finitude. Non-coercive and anti-totalitarian, it is a thinking without ends, a form of contemplation that arises from and in response to other animals but is not limited to them. Reading Adorno and Derrida through, with, and after each other, I interpret 'Fichus' as an exercise in such poetic thinking, exploring its implications in and beyond Derrida's speech.
This paper examines how Jacques Derrida's concept of the crypt challenges Catherine Malabou's notion of destructive plasticity. Reading Derrida's 'Fors' (1976), the Life Death seminar (1975-76), and Of Spirit (1987) alongside Malabou's The Future of Hegel (2005), The Ontology of the Accident (2012), and The Heidegger Change (2011), I argue that Malabou misreads supplementarity's 'play in form' as writing's capacity to convert trace into form, when plasticity merely supplements supplementarity with the trace of form. Because plasticity does not recognise the structural redundancy of diff & eacute;rance/supplementarity that blinds writing to its operations, the trace incorporates plasticity as the supplement that dissimulates itself in form. Reading Derrida's reading of Abraham's and Torok's The Wolf Man's Magic Word, I demonstrate how the crypt's three pleonastic functions ('topos', 'death', and 'cipher') correspond to the three senses of origin-heterogeneity: heterogeneous from the origin, with respect to the origin, and at the origin. After the accident, after the trace is supplemented by plasticity, it dissimulates its legibility in the historicity of forms. Because of Malabou's supplementation, the trace can now be read as plasticity, opening deconstruction's capacity to move between materiality and conceptuality.
In a key chapter from Of Grammatology, '"... That Dangerous Supplement ... "', Derrida describes the strange operation of the supplement in Rousseau's work, tracing its chain of associations with writing, masturbation, and blindness. In the same chapter, Derrida goes on to formulate his deconstructive approach to textuality by explaining that the supplement forms 'a sort of blind spot' in Rousseau's text. Derrida thus addresses the physical condition of blindness in Rousseau's work while continuing to exploit the literary trope of blindness in his own writing, the 'blind spot' forming another 'blind spot' of the text en abyme. In this paper, I would like to offer a reading of blindness in Derrida's work. Drawing from some selected texts in disability studies, I want to attend to the trope of blindness in Derrida's Of Grammatology and Memoirs of the Blind as well as in Paul de Man's Blindness and Insight and Louis Althusser's Reading Capital. This reading of blindness in Derrida's work, then, not only broaches the intellectual affinity between Derrida and his contemporaries but also demonstrates the crucial part that the trope of blindness has played in the emergence of deconstruction and other critical practices of reading.
This study confronts Sartre and Derrida's interpretations of Genet. It argues that it is incorrect to assume that Sartre applies Hegelian logic to Genet, while Derrida frees him from it. Both contend that Genet's writing is antithetical to absolute idealism, albeit in different ways. To elucidate this variation, I examine, in particular, Derrida's interpretation of Genet's signature. According to Derrida, Genet does not resist dialectics because he is a pederast, thief or traitor, as Sartre claims, but rather because of the way he places his signature on everything he writes. However, my analysis of Derrida's attempt to sign Genet's text indicates that it constitutes a subtle critique of Genet. Drawing on some often-overlooked analyses by Derrida, I suggest that even Genet's writing may not be able to escape dialectics because no signature is absolutely singular.
This paper discusses Catherine Malabou's critique of Jacques Derrida's economy of domination. The central concern that emerges from this discussion is the deconstruction of an isomorphism between power and domination that, according to Malabou's reading, is not fully, or at least not clearly, achieved in Derrida's work. The first part of this article describes the chain of possible substitutions through which the word power acquires meaning in Derrida's work, one that places nonpower at the heart of power and one that gives central importance to Freud's Bem & auml;chtigungstrieb. The second part of the article offers a reception of the philosophical discussion on the deconstruction of the relationship between power and domination. First, Malabou's critique of the quasi-transcendental status of mastery in Derrida's reading of Freud is considered, from which it follows that in Derrida's deconstruction there is no power beyond domination. Secondly, alternative readings are presented that offer different insights into the possibility of other experiences of power in Derrida's work that are not reducible to domination, and more so, other experiences of power that subvert predetermined authoritarian and cruel sovereignties. In the concluding section, by contrasting these different readings of Derrida's texts on power, the possible relations between Malabou's insightful notion of the non-governable and Derrida's notion of nonpower in relation to experiences of power detached from domination are discussed.
Fran & ccedil;ois Laruelle's Non-philosophy project is renowned for its critique of the universal principle of sufficiency in philosophy. However, introductions to Non-philosophy in the English-speaking academic world have often overlooked Laruelle's preparatory research in the 1970s, focusing too heavily on the bizarre neologisms developed in Non-philosophy from the 1980s onwards. This paper aims to address Laruelle's works from the 1970s to the early 1980s, in which he attempted to oppose the concept of 'dialectical' with the concept of 'machinic'. This theme is also the key thread in his interpretations of Derrida's deconstruction. Given Laruelle's unique writing style-as Jean-Luc Nancy pointed out in an interview (Laruelle 1977b, 245), Laruelle's texts are highly self-referential, offering fierce critiques of certain ideas without providing an overarching definition of them, and the same holds true for the concepts of 'dialectics' or 'dialectical' - this paper will first trace the use of the concepts of dialectics and dialectical materialism in post-war French thought, and will then examine early Derrida's engagement with the concept of dialectics and its influence on the project of deconstruction. Based on this intellectual background, the paper specifically explores Laruelle's critique of dialectics in the 1970s, focusing on two of his works Machines textuelles and Le D & eacute;clin de l'& eacute;criture, and discuss the profound impact of this critique on the conception of non-philosophy. The author believes that the insights presented in this paper will offer a fresh perspective for comparative studies of Deleuze and Derrida, as well as research on Laruelle's Non-philosophy.
This paper stages an interdisciplinary dialogue between deconstruction and feminist Science and Technology Studies (STS) through Jacques Derrida's theorization of the trace. Deploying Deborah Goldgaber's reading of the iterability of generalized writing in Speculative Grammatology, I show potential ways of intervening into Jane Bennett's notion of vital matter and Deboleena Roy's analysis of bacterial writing in order to formulate a more rigorous understanding of life processes and materiality. Pushing against STS critiques of deconstruction as a correlationist philosophy of language, I read Derrida's Life Death alongside the works of Dawne McCance and Francesco Vitale to demonstrate how Derrida's conception of the iterability of the trace succeeds precisely where it is presumed to fail: as a robust theorization of both matter and ideology.
Taking its point of departure from a thread of references to Palestine in Derrida's writings, from Glas to his last texts, this essay seeks to demonstrate that these writings can be a resource for us as we navigate our way through the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It traces Derrida's complicated relation to his own Jewishness and argues that it is this complexity that enables him to guide us through the thicket of the present war in Gaza. My title, 'No Occupation', aims to evoke not only the slogan of the anti-war movement against Israel's occupation of Gaza and the West Bank - and Derrida's relation to this movement - but also Israel's 2023 campaign to declare that there is 'no occupation'. The instrumentalisation of the phrase 'no occupation' in different directions permits me to exploit this conflicting resonance, moving one use against another.
Taking its point of departure from a thread of references to Palestine in Derrida's writings, from Glas to his last texts, this essay seeks to demonstrate that these writings can be a resource for us as we navigate our way through the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It traces Derrida's complicated relation to his own Jewishness and argues that it is this complexity that enables him to guide us through the thicket of the present war in Gaza. My title, ‘No Occupation’, aims to evoke not only the slogan of the anti-war movement against Israel's occupation of Gaza and the West Bank – and Derrida's relation to this movement – but also Israel's 2023 campaign to declare that there is ‘no occupation’. The instrumentalisation of the phrase ‘no occupation’ in different directions permits me to exploit this conflicting resonance, moving one use against another.
