Derrida The Subject And The Other

The book contributes to the critical evaluation of deconstruction by focusing on the problematic of writing, self and other in the thought of the influential and controversial thinker Jacques Derrida. It examines how these concepts relate to one another in order to analyse systematically the influence that the concept of alterity had in deconstructing a certain idea of subjectivity in Western metaphysics.

This book presents the relation between the subject and the other in the work of Jacques Derrida as one of ‘surviving translating’. It demonstrates the key role of translation in thinking difference rather than identity, beginning with the work of Martin Heidegger and Emmanuel Levinas. It describes how translation, and its ethical demands, acts as a leitmotif throughout Derrida’s writing; from his early work on Edmund Husserl to his last texts on politics and hospitality. While for both Heidegger and Levinas translation is always possible, Derrida’s account is marked by the challenge of impossibility. Expanding translation beyond a merely linguistic operation, Foran explores Derrida’s accounts of mourning, death and ‘survival’ to offer a new perspective on the ethics of subjectivity.

Poststructuralists hold Hegel responsible for giving rise to many of modern philosophy's problematic concepts—the authority of reason, self-consciousness, the knowing subject. Yet, according to Simon Lumsden, this animosity is rooted in a fundamental misunderstanding of Hegel's thought, and resolving this tension can not only heal the rift between poststructuralism and German idealism but also point these traditions in exciting new directions. Revisiting the philosopher's key texts, Lumsden calls attention to Hegel's reformulation of liberal and Cartesian conceptions of subjectivity, identifying a critical though unrecognized continuity between poststructuralism and German idealism. Poststructuralism forged its identity in opposition to idealist subjectivity; however, Lumsden argues this model is not found in Hegel's texts but in an uncritical acceptance of Heidegger's characterization of Hegel and Fichte as "metaphysicians of subjectivity." Recasting Hegel as both post-Kantian and postmetaphysical, Lumsden sheds new light on this complex philosopher while revealing the surprising affinities between two supposedly antithetical modes of thought.

First published in 1967, Writing and Difference, a collection of Jacques Derrida's essays written between 1959 and 1966, has become a landmark of contemporary French thought. In it we find Derrida at work on his systematic deconstruction of Western metaphysics. The book's first half, which includes the celebrated essay on Descartes and Foucault, shows the development of Derrida's method of deconstruction. In these essays, Derrida demonstrates the traditional nature of some purportedly nontraditional currents of modern thought—one of his main targets being the way in which "structuralism" unwittingly repeats metaphysical concepts in its use of linguistic models. The second half of the book contains some of Derrida's most compelling analyses of why and how metaphysical thinking must exclude writing from its conception of language, finally showing metaphysics to be constituted by this exclusion. These essays on Artaud, Freud, Bataille, Hegel, and Lévi-Strauss have served as introductions to Derrida's notions of writing and différence—the untranslatable formulation of a nonmetaphysical "concept" that does not exclude writing—for almost a generation of students of literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. Writing and Difference reveals the unacknowledged program that makes thought itself possible. In analyzing the contradictions inherent in this program, Derrida foes on to develop new ways of thinking, reading, and writing,—new ways based on the most complete and rigorous understanding of the old ways. Scholars and students from all disciplines will find Writing and Difference an excellent introduction to perhaps the most challenging of contemporary French thinkers—challenging because Derrida questions thought as we know it.

In the spring of 2003, Jacques Derrida sat down for a public debate in Paris with Algerian intellectual Mustapha Chérif. The eminent philosopher arrived at the event directly from the hospital where he had just been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, the illness that would take his life just over a year later. That he still participated in the exchange testifies to the magnitude of the subject at hand: the increasingly distressed relationship between Islam and the West, and the questions of freedom, justice, and democracy that surround it. As Chérif relates in this account of their dialogue, the topic of Islam held special resonance for Derrida—perhaps it is to be expected that near the end of his life his thoughts would return to Algeria, the country where he was born in 1930. Indeed, these roots served as the impetus for their conversation, which first centers on the ways in which Derrida’s Algerian-Jewish identity has shaped his thinking. From there, the two men move to broader questions of secularism and democracy; to politics and religion and how the former manipulates the latter; and to the parallels between xenophobia in the West and fanaticism among Islamists. Ultimately, the discussion is an attempt to tear down the notion that Islam and the West are two civilizations locked in a bitter struggle for supremacy and to reconsider them as the two shores of the Mediterranean—two halves of the same geographical, religious, and cultural sphere. Islam and the West is a crucial opportunity to further our understanding of Derrida’s views on the key political and religious divisions of our time and an often moving testament to the power of friendship and solidarity to surmount them.

Like a navigator, Derrida sets out from a Europe that has always defined itself as the capital of culture, the headland of thought, in whose name and for whose benefit exploration of other lands, other peoples, and other ways of thinking has been carried out. If such Eurocentric biases are not to be repeated, Derrida warns, the question of Europe must be asked in a new way; it must be asked by recalling another heading. Not only is it necessary for Europe to be responsible for the other, but its own identity is actually constituted by the other. Rejecting the easy or programmatic solutions of Euruocentrism or anti-Eurocentrism, of total unification or complete dispersion, Derrida argues for the necessity of working with and from the Enlightenment values of liberal democracy while at the same time recalling that these values do not themselves ensure respect for the other.

Features a reconstruction of an unfinished text by Jacques Derrida from his most penetrating series of readings of Heidegger’s philosophy. During the 1980s Jacques Derrida wrote and published three incisive essays under the title Geschlecht,aGerman word for “generation” and “sexuality.” These essays focused on the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, taking up the rarely discussed issue of sexual difference in Heidegger’s thought. A fourth essay—actually the third in the series—was never completed and never published. In Phantoms of the Other, David Farrell Krell reconstructs this third Geschlecht on the basis of archival materials and puts it in the context of the entire series. Touching on the themes of sexual difference, poetics, politics, and criticism as practiced by Heidegger, Derrida’s unfinished third essay offers a penetrating critical analysis of Heidegger’s views on sexuality and Heidegger’s reading of the love poems of Georg Trakl, one of the greatest Expressionist poets of the German language, who died during the opening days of the First World War. “A major contribution to Derrida studies, to Heidegger studies, and to philosophy.” — Walter Brogan “This study of Derrida’s several engagements with Heidegger under the title of Geschlecht shows Krell’s remarkable scholarship, linguistic ability, philosophical insight, and subtlety at their very best.” — Charles E. Scott