Archive for the 'Reading' Category
The Aussie dollar at the moment is on rather good terms with the UK pound and the US$, so I’ve splashed out for quite a few books. Recently arrived are Roudinesco’s Philosophy in Turbulent Times, and Matthias Fritsch’s The Promise of Memory. Now, if only I can find time amidst a new baby, a research [...]
A suggestion by one of my supervisors sent me back to Derrida’s little essay on cosmopolitanism (an address delivered in 1996 to the International Parliament of Writers). In it Derrida, briefly, schematically, but very lucidly, draws out his thinking on hospitality with respect to the European tradition of cosmopolitanism.
I happened to have a copy of [...]
Now, we finished the last post off with the geometrical object acquiring a “living linguistic body”, and with this being the manner in which it became there for everybody. Now we need to have a closer look at this process.
Husserl not only lists the objects of science as ideal bodies, but, interestingly, the “constructions of [...]
Before we get on to Derrida’s commentary on the Origin, lets take a look at Husserl’s text.
The opening reference to Galileo puts us within the thinking of The Crisis. The specific question of the piece, ‘the origin of geometry’ is an unexpectedly historical one’. Husserl has no interest in the ‘historical’ first geometers, even if [...]
Hegel makes some interesting comments, distinctions and criticisms with respect to the respective domains of history and philosophy in the Introduction to the Philosophy of Right:
s3. Montesquieu proclaimed the true historical view, the genuinely philosophical position, namely that legislation both in general and in its particular provisions is to be treated not as something isolated [...]
Time for a little systematic reading. Derrida’s 1962 Introduction to the Origin of Geometry is an extremely important book for understanding the development of Derrida’s work, and the unity of his overall oeuvre. From memory (don’t have the book in front of me), he describes it in Positions as the first half to Speech and [...]
By no longer treating the posts as a metaphor of the envoi of Being, one can account for what essentially and decisively occurs, everywhere, and including language, thought, science, and everything that conditions them, when the postal structure shifts, Satz if you will, and posits or posts itself otherwise. This is why this history of [...]
Carolyn Steedman on Derrida’s Archive Fever:
“Many English-speaking readers – this one, too – have assumed that ‘Archive Fever’ has something to do with archives (rather than with psycho-analysis, or memory, or finding things); and even when the reaction has been more philosophical, Derrida has been addressed through his archon and the arkheion. But commentators have [...]
My friend Byron has been asking questions around the question of how we relate to, and among, such things as the future, memory, anticipation and happiness and joy. Here are a few. He comments that “imaginative anticipation and memory are crucial elements in our deliberations and in the shaping of the loves and hopes that [...]
Spent some time flicking through the opening pages of Writing and Difference today. Was struck by just how much Derrida uses history – and historicity – as a springboard into his philosophy. It’s a critical theme through a few of the essays, and notably Violence and Metaphysics.
If it recedes one day, leaving behind its works [...]
