Provocations and Improvisations Concerning Reality: The Encounters of Jacques Derrida and Jean Luc-Nancy

Derrida Today ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-101
Author(s):  
Joanna Hodge
Keyword(s):  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
The Real ◽  
Michel Henry

This essay responds to the Nancean account of presentation, evoked in the opening citation, in order to trace out in Nancy's enquiries a disruption of Husserlian presentation, and a re-thinking of materiality on the edge of classical phenomenology. It stages a non-encounter between the writings of Jean-Luc Nancy and of Jacques Derrida in relation to a third term, the Lacanian conception of the ‘real’. Thereby it can be shown how these writings touch on each other, in response to phenomenology and to psychoanalytical theory, but do not engage. All the same, the claim to be made is that the writings of Nancy and Derrida converge in forming a third option, alongside the secularised phenomenologies of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty and the Christian phenomenologies of Jean-Luc Marion and Michel Henry, by marking up the event of Lacan's reformulation of Freud's psychoanalytical theorising.

Joshua Kates, Essential History: Jacques Derrida and the Development of Deconstruction (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2005), 352pp, $29.95 (USD), ISBN 10: 0810123274, ISBN-13: 978-0810123274

Derrida Today ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 131-133
Author(s):  
Gary Banham
Keyword(s):  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
The Real ◽  
Northwestern University ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

This book promises a ‘radical reappraisal’ (Kates 2005, xv) of Derrida, concentrating particularly on the relationship of Derrida to philosophy, one of the most vexed questions in the reception of his work. The aim of the book is to provide the grounds for this reappraisal through a reinterpretation in particular of two of the major works Derrida published in 1967: Speech and Phenomena and Of Grammatology. However the study of the development of Derrida's work is the real achievement of the book as Kates discusses major works dating from the 1954 study of genesis in Husserl's phenomenology through to the essays on Levinas and Foucault in the early 1960's as part of his story of how Derrida arrived at the writing of the two major works from 1967.

scholarly journals Adorno and Phenomenology

2019 ◽  
Vol 63 (2) ◽  
pp. 403-425
Author(s):  
Joanna Hodge ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Edmund Husserl ◽  
Transcendental Idealism ◽  
Michel Henry ◽  
Material Evidence

Adorno develops critiques in parallel of the phenomenologies of G. W. F. Hegel and of Edmund Husserl. While respecting their differences, he rehearses conjoined objections to their accounts of philosophy, and of progress, of history, and of nature. Critical of Hegel’s idealist dialectics, and of Husserl’s transcendental idealism, Adorno also in his readings of their texts reveals a textual materiality of their philosophical enquiries, which provides material evidence in support of his critique. This essay seeks to reveal the dynamic of this process, and show certain parallels with results supplied in the phenomenological enquiries of Michel Henry, and in the deconstructions of Jacques Derrida. If an epoch may still be captured in the concept, then the negative dialectical conceptuality developed by Adorno must capture a condition common to that epoch, and, in part, shared by other such thinkers.

The Animal That Therefore I Am (Not): Marx as Subjectivity Theorist

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (6) ◽  
pp. 309-330 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The Real ◽  
General Line ◽  
Michel Henry ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Given ◽  
The Way

The article centers on a discussion of Frank Ruda’s chapter in the anthology Reading Marx, in which he argues that the history of emancipatory thought is a series of footnotes to Plato’s Cave. In considering emancipation to be a way out of the non- or pre-human state, Marx becomes the thinker closest to Plato. According to Ruda, a critique of capitalism must be based on the refutation of the myth of the (unconditional) given, which he identifies with the ideological operation of naturalization. Capitalist naturalization dependent on abstraction and abstraction from abstraction ends by reducing the worker to the state of an animal. However, this is a strange animal that has nothing to do with real animals, and therefore should be called a non-animal. The way out of the Cave turns out to be the realization that the figure of the non-animal does not conceal within itself an unalienated substance and that no positive utopia lies beyond the Cave - on the contrary, the path to liberation leads to the Real of the shadows themselves, to a kind of negative utopia. Accepting Ruda’s general line of reasoning, the author of the article nevertheless wonders whether this interpretation that Ruda has put forward is the kind of new way to read Marx to which Reading Marx aspires. The author compares this interpretation with one from the Marxist legacy proposed by Michel Henry and with François Laruelle’s non-Marxism (which is an extension of Henry’s thought). Their example shows that naturalization could be not only a target in the criticism of capitalism but also a method for that criticism. The myth of the unconditional given has been countered by Henry with a myth about the given which coincides with its condition. Then according to non-Marxism, the myth of the givenness conditions is what is be overcome instead of the myth about the given. That argument is illustrated by Katerina Kolozova’s denunciation of the anthropocentric orientation of the critique of capitalism, which holds that the animal has been reduced to the non-animal in capitalism in exactly the same way as human beings have been and draws the conclusion that in the last instance both animal and human are generically identical.

On Being Haunted by the Future

2019 ◽  
pp. 175-201
Author(s):  
David Wood
Keyword(s):  
Black Hole ◽  
Real World ◽  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Hard Work ◽  
The Real ◽  
The Road ◽  
The Future ◽  
Universal Structure ◽  
To Come ◽  
Taking Responsibility

This chapter discusses the future as another site of contestation. Jacques Derrida insists that people understand the “to-come” not as a real future “down the road” but rather as a universal structure of immanence. However, such a structure is no substitute for the hard work of taking responsibility for what are often entirely predictable and preventable disasters. It is important to steer clear of the utopian black hole, the thought—or shape of desire—that the future would need to bring a future perfection or completion. To avoid the trap set by such a shape of desire, it is not necessary—indeed is necessary not—to reduce the future to a universal structure of immanence. What is equally disturbing is not people's inability to expect the unexpected but the failure of the institutions to prevent the all-too-predictable. Too many of the institutions have conditions of sustainability that are unhealthily insulated from the real world, or indeed coconspirators in the fantasy that people can go on like this.

The (anti-)social gift? Mauss’s paradox and the triad of the gift

2020 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 631-648
Author(s):  
Seung Cheol Lee
Keyword(s):  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Gift Exchange ◽  
Gift Giving ◽  
The Real ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Gift

Marcel Mauss’s discussion of the gift relies on a paradox: although gift-giving is the foundational act of building a society, in order for a gift to be circulated, society must be always-already presupposed so that the gift can reach and be recognized by its destination. This article focuses on how this paradox has been addressed in anthropological and philosophical studies of the gift, by reviewing work by Claude Lévi-Strauss, Maurice Godelier and Jacques Derrida. By illuminating each position through the lens of the Lacanian triad of the symbolic, the imaginary and the real, I first show how Lévi-Strauss and Godelier, respectively, focus on the symbolic and imaginary economies of the gift and how their perspectives are still bound by Mauss’s paradox in assuming the totality of society as the ultimate basis of gift exchange. I then read Derrida’s critique of Mauss as an attempt to explore the space for the aneconomic that grounds but simultaneously threatens the symbolic and imaginary economies of society. In doing so, I argue that the gift always includes the effaceable negativity and uncertainty that serve as the condition of (im)possibility for the social.

scholarly journals Being on the Brink of the Future: Jacques Derrida and Poetics of Waiting

2019 ◽  
Vol 79 (2) ◽  
pp. 347-356
Author(s):  
Luka Trebežnik
Keyword(s):  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
The Other ◽  
Formal Scheme ◽  
The Real ◽  
The Future

Religious anticipations are generally manifested in the form of a messianic promise or an apocalyptic warning in a vision of impending judgment. The majority of the so-called secular philosophies mirror this kind of religious prognosis as well, sometimes resulting in a utopic or dystopic vision of the future and other times in a purely formal scheme that remains endlessly open towards the other, but practically does not offer any content at all. The future is often regarded (quasi)religiously since it cannot appear as such and become present. That is why Jacques Derrida methodically distinguishes between two modes of the future – for him, the established future (le future), the future of the timetables that could be represented and anticipated, belongs to the present, while the »real« future (l'avenir) always remains and must remain in deferral. That is the reason that he almost exclusively describes the relation of expectation towards the absent future in religious terms: promise, call, covenant, and prayer. This paper contrasts his use of a messianic vocabulary with some influential contemporary philosophers, and takes into account a linguistic background of messianic thinking.

Unpolitical Life: Michel Henry and the Real Limits of Biopolitics

diacritics ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 84-113
Author(s):  
Inna Viriasova
Keyword(s):  
The Real ◽  
Michel Henry

Scanning electron microscopy of human iliac bone by a simple preparation method

1990 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 226-227
Author(s):  
Toshihiko Takita ◽  
Tomonori Naguro ◽  
Toshio Kameie ◽  
Akihiro Iino ◽  
Kichizo Yamamoto
Keyword(s):  
Electron Microscopy ◽  
Scanning Electron Microscopy ◽  
Preparation Method ◽  
Specimen Preparation ◽  
Real Surface ◽  
Public Attention ◽  
Preparation Methods ◽  
The Real ◽  
Simple Preparation ◽  
Scanning Electron

Recently with the increase in advanced age population, the osteoporosis becomes the object of public attention in the field of orthopedics. The surface topography of the bone by scanning electron microscopy (SEM) is one of the most useful means to study the bone metabolism, that is considered to make clear the mechanism of the osteoporosis. Until today many specimen preparation methods for SEM have been reported. They are roughly classified into two; the anorganic preparation and the simple preparation. The former is suitable for observing mineralization, but has the demerit that the real surface of the bone can not be observed and, moreover, the samples prepared by this method are extremely fragile especially in the case of osteoporosis. On the other hand, the latter has the merit that the real information of the bone surface can be obtained, though it is difficult to recognize the functional situation of the bone.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document