scholarly journals The Seduction of the Name: Universal Marranism and the Secret of Being-in-Language

Religions ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (11) ◽  
pp. 359
Author(s):  
Adam Lipszyc

The author combines Walter Benjamin’s speculations on language, naming, and horror with Jean Laplanche’s general theory of seduction and his notion of the enigmatic signifier in order to reconstruct what he identifies as the primal scene of initiation into language. Further, the author develops this construction by linking it to a similar structure which he extracts by means of interpretation from Jacques Derrida’s commentaries to the Biblical stories of the Tower of Babel and of the Binding of Isaac. Finally, the author shows how the primal scene thus reconstructed should be seen as the transcendental condition of being in language as described by Derrida in his seminal essay on Monolingualism of the Other and how this very condition should be understood as a universalized form of the Marrano condition. The most far-reaching conclusion of the argument is, then, that at least for Jacques Derrida, every subject of language is a Marrano.

Author(s):  
Karin Littau

In After Babel, George Steiner recounts ‘two main conjectures’ in mythology which explain ‘the mystery of many tongues on which a view of translation hinges.’ One such mythic tale is the tower of Babel, which not only Steiner, but also Jacques Derrida after him, take as their starting point to approach the question of translation; the other conjecture tells of 'some awful error [which] was committed, an accidental release of linguistic chaos, in the mode of Pandora’s Box' (Steiner). This paper will take this other conjecture, the myth of Pandora, first woman of the Greek creation myth, as its point of departure, not only to offer a feminized version of the primal scattering of languages, but to rewrite in a positive light and therefore also toreverse the negative and misogynist association of Pandora with "man’s" fall. But, rather than exposing the entrenched patriarchal bias in mythographers’ interpretations of Pandora, my foremost aim is to pose, through her figure, questions about language and woman, and, by extension, the mother tongue and female sexuality.


Author(s):  
Rawad Alhashmi

The paradox of the Tower of Babel and the underlying story behind the confusion of tongues are inextricably intertwined with various linguistic differences across the world. The tool of language, regardless of whether it is a gift of God, or a purely human artifact, or whatever one may choose to believe regarding its origins, is a tool that allows us to communicate with each other, thereby opening the door for dialogue with the ‘Other.’ As the myth of Babel began influencing several scholars in the twentieth century, linguistic theories inevitably elicited great interest among many acclaimed scholars, including Franz Kafka (1883–1924), Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) and Jacques Derrida (1930–2004). To that end, the fragmented mode of languages is a fundamental principle in their discourse on the confusion of tongues. In this article, I argue that Kafka’s writing, particularly the notion of the “piecemeal construction” in “The Great Wall of China,”1 has influenced Benjamin’s theory of translation and echoed Derrida’s respective view thereof.


Derrida Today ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-36
Author(s):  
Grant Farred

‘The Final “Thank You”’ uses the work of Jacques Derrida and Friedrich Nietzsche to think the occasion of the 1995 rugby World Cup, hosted by the newly democratic South Africa. This paper deploys Nietzsche's Zarathustra to critique how a figure such as Nelson Mandela is understood as a ‘Superman’ or an ‘Overhuman’ in the moment of political transition. The philosophical focus of the paper, however, turns on the ‘thank yous’ exchanged by the white South African rugby captain, François Pienaar, and the black president at the event of the Springbok victory. It is the value, and the proximity and negation, of the ‘thank yous’ – the relation of one to the other – that constitutes the core of the article. 1


Author(s):  
Geoffrey Bennington

Scatter 2 identifies politics as an object of perennial difficulty for philosophy—as recalcitrant to philosophical mastery as is philosophy’s traditional adversary, poetry. That difficulty makes it an attractive area of attention for any deconstructive approach to the tradition from which we inevitably inherit our language and our concepts. Scatter 2 pursues that deconstruction, often starting, and sometimes departing, from the work of Jacques Derrida, by attending to the concepts of sovereignty on the one hand, and democracy on the other. Part I follows the fate of a line from Book II of Homer’s Iliad, where Odysseus asserts that “the rule of many is no good thing, let there be one ruler, one king,” as it is quoted and misquoted, and progressively Christianized, by authors including Aristotle, Philo Judaeus, Suetonius, the early Church Fathers, Aquinas, Dante, Ockham, Marsilius of Padua, Jean Bodin, Etienne de la Boétie, up to Carl Schmitt and Erik Peterson, and even one of the defendants at the Nuremberg Trials, before being discussed by Derrida himself. Part II begins again, as it were, with Plato and Aristotle, and tracks the concept of democracy as it regularly impacts and tends to undermine that sovereignist tradition, and, more especially in detailed readings of Hobbes and Rousseau, develops a notion of “proto-democracy” as a possible name for the scatter that underlies and drives the political as such, and that will always prevent politics from achieving its aim of bringing itself to an end.


English Today ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Reinier Salverda

A description and discussion of the vast linguistic diversity in the capital of the United Kingdom.LONDON today is an enormous Tower of Babel, where in addition to the common language, English, many other languages are spoken. On Tuesday 13 March 2001, as part of the Lunch Hour Lecture Series at University College London, Professor Reinier Salverda discussed the linguistic diversity of contemporary London, presenting recent data on the other languages spoken there, as well as focussing on the social aspects of this linguistic diversity, in particular issues of language policy and language management. The following is a slightly adapted version of that presentation.


1996 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-164 ◽  
Author(s):  
Norman Calder

AbstractThis essay offers, in Section 2, a translation of al-Nawawī's presentation of the hierarchy of Muftīs. The context of the passage and its terminology and arguments are explored in the other Sections in order to assess their implications for the general character of Islamic juristic activities. Section 1 identifies two themes central to the text, namely loyalty to madhhab and differentiation of the task of the teaching jurist and the muftī. The first of these is elaborated in Section 3, which points to formal qualities of presentation and argument which assert the hermeneutical continuity of the school tradition; and in Section 4, which deals with the pivotal role of the founding imām in the legitimation of the school tradition. Section 5 takes up the terms taqlīd and ijtihād and shows that al-Nawawī's usage points towards a complex resolution of the recent debate about the open/closed door of ijtihād. The last Section returns to the original two themes to make two suggestions: (1) that taqlīd may be assessed as a principal of vitality within a hermeneutical tradition; (2) that the author-jurist (not the practising muftī) is the dominant creative agent within the ongoing juristic traditions.


2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 57-76
Author(s):  
Manoel Uchoa ◽  
José Tadeu Batista De Souza

Discorrer sobre a proximidade entre os trabalhos de Jacques Derrida e Emmanuel Lévinas perpassa pela amizade e a interlocução que mantiveram durante toda a vida. Como um referencial caro a Derrida, a ética levinasiana surgiu como uma alternativa a tradição fi losófi ca do Ocidente. Assim, nos caminhos heterogêneos que suas obras traçaram, pode-se marcar uma profunda intercessão: a alteridade é constitutiva no pensamento. Logo, o último moralista de nossa época tem uma contribuição pertinente ao pensador da desconstrução. Pretende-se nesse artigo analisar a relação do pensamento desses fi lósofos em relação à categoria de Justiça a partir da alteridade.


2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Franco Masciandaro

The principal aim of this study is to participate in the current renewed discourse on the meaning of friendship, initiated in 1994 by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida with his Politics of Friendship, by combining the philosophical method of inquiry with the hermeneutical approach to poetic representations of friendship in the Iliad, the Divine Comedy, and the Decameron. It examines friendship not only as the unique love between two persons based on familiarity and proximity, but as the love for the one who is far away, the stranger, for this is a natural extension of the implicit love of the distant other, of the other-as-stranger – what Emmanuel Levinas has called "the infinity of the Other" – which is concealed in our friend, and which, in the words of Maurice Blanchot, puts us "authentically in relation" with him or her.


2020 ◽  
pp. 91-102
Author(s):  
LUIS MARTÍN BRAVO SENMACHE

Con base en la teoría general del proceso, la investigación determina que en el Procedimiento de Investigación y Sanción del Hostigamiento Sexual (PISHS)es identificable la estructura del contradictorio, por lo que su naturaleza es la de un proceso. Sin embargo, la revisión del tratamiento normativo que el PISHS ha dedicado al derecho a la prueba de la parte acusada pone en evidencia que, en la estructura de dicho proceso, el contradictorio no ha sido implementado más que parcialmente, dado que su dimensión sustancial (específicamente, el poder de influencia) no ha sido cabalmente asegurada a favor del presunto/a hostigador/a. Dos escenarios se erigen como posible solución al problema: uno a través de la vía de hecho (preferencia del principio del debido proceso) y otro mediante la reforma legislativa del art. 17.2 del reglamento. Based on the general theory of the process, the investigation determines that in the Investigation and Sanction Procedure for Sexual Harassment (PISHS) the structure of the contradictory is identifiable, so its nature is that of a process. However, the review of the normative treatment that the PISHS has dedicated to the right to proof of the accused party shows that, in the structure of said process, the contradictory has only been partially implemented, given that its substantial dimension (specifically, the power of influence) has not been fully secured in favor of the alleged harasser. Two scenariosare erected as a possible solution to the problem: one through the facto route (preference for the principle of due process of law) and the other through the legislative reform of the art. 17.2 of the reglament.


2008 ◽  
Vol 144 (3) ◽  
pp. 673-688 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francisco Javier Gallego ◽  
Miguel González ◽  
Bangere P. Purnaprajna

AbstractIn this paper we prove that most ropes of arbitrary multiplicity supported on smooth curves can be smoothed. By a rope being smoothable we mean that the rope is the flat limit of a family of smooth, irreducible curves. To construct a smoothing, we connect, on the one hand, deformations of a finite morphism to projective space and, on the other hand, morphisms from a rope to projective space. We also prove a general result of independent interest, namely that finite covers onto smooth irreducible curves embedded in projective space can be deformed to a family of 1:1 maps. We apply our general theory to prove the smoothing of ropes of multiplicity 3 on P1. Even though this paper focuses on ropes of dimension 1, our method yields a general approach to deal with the smoothing of ropes of higher dimension.


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