Posts Tagged ‘Derrida’
History is a science of ghosts—just ask Michelet. Or Hegel, for that matter. But the problem with adopting the vocabulary of Derrida’s Specters of Marx (for example, like Ethan Kleinberg does) is that one feels like Haley Joel Osment in The Sixth Sense, seeing ghosts all the time. Not untrue, but unsatisfying. It took very [...]
In about a month, I’ll be trialling a few of my ideas at the United States Intellectual History conference in New York. It’ll be a great forum to trot out my work on the reception of Derrida for a few reasons: 1. Intellectual historians were the only subset of US historians who moved towards taking [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Here’s something I’m currently grappling with. Any thoughts would be appreciated.
On the one hand, I am dealing with the empirical history of the reception of Derrida. This is interesting insofar as it provides a kind of anthropology of academic disciplines – the way academics respond (or not) to philosophical innovation, and the way this is [...]
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 [...]
