The Politics of Deconstruction: Jacques Derrida And The Other Of Philosophy - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0745326749 ISBN 13: 9780745326740

Verlag: Pluto Press, 2007

Inhaltsangabe

'The best book so far about Derrida's politics of the future.' J. Hillis Miller, University of California

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

James Penney teaches cultural theory at Trent University, Canada. He is the author of The Structures of Love: Art and Politics beyond the Transference (2012), and The World of Perversion: Psychoanalysis and the Impossible Absolute of Desire (2006).

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The Politics of Deconstruction

Jacques Derrida and the Other of Philosophy

By Martin McQuillan

Pluto Press

Copyright © 2007 Martin McQuillan
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-7453-2674-0

Contents

Acknowledgements, vii, 
List of Abbreviations, viii, 
Introduction: The Day After Tomorrow ... or, The Deconstruction of the Future Martin McQuillan, 1, 
Part One: Philosophy of Politics, 
1. Demo Geoffrey Bennington, 17, 
2. On the Multiple Senses of Democracy Jean-Luc Nancy, 43, 
3. The Art of the Impossible? Derek Attridge, 54, 
4. Impossible Speech Acts Andrew Parker, 66, 
Part Two: Politics of Philosophy, 
5. The Crisis of Critique and the Awakening of Politicisation in Levinas and Derrida Robert Bernasconi, 81, 
6. The Popularity of Language: Rousseau and the Mother-Tongue Anne Berger, 98, 
7. In Light of Light: on Jan Patocka's Notion of Europe Rodolphe Gasché, 116, 
8. Phenomenology to Come: Derrida's Ellipses Joanna Hodge, 137, 
Part Three: Otherwise, 
9. From (Within) Without: the Ends of Politics Marc Froment-Meurice, 157, 
10. Thinking (Through) the Desert (la pensée du désert) With(in) Jacques Derrida Laurent Milesi, 173, 
11. Graphematics, Politics and Irony Claire Colebrook, 192, 
12. The Irony of Deconstruction and the Example of Marx Richard Beardsworth, 212, 
13. Karl Marx and the Philosopher's Stone, or, On Theory and Practice Martin McQuillan, 235, 
Notes on Contributors, 255, 
Index, 257, 

CHAPTER 1

Demo

Geoffrey Bennington

'... no doubt more serious for what is called democracy, if at least we still understand by that the name of a regime, which, as is well known, will always have been problematical' (Derrida, Politiques de l'amitié, p. 12).

DEMO

'Demo' here refers in the first instance to democracy, as a sort of possible nickname (like some people used to refer to postmodernism as 'pomo', post-colonial studies as 'poco', and even deconstruction as 'decon', I think) and I will indeed be talking essentially about democracy. But I use 'demo' here too in the sense of demonstration. This second sense hangs between the strong philosophical or logical sense in which a point might be demonstrated, that is, proven; the slightly weaker sense in which someone might provide a demonstration, an exemplary execution of some more or less difficult technique or trick that a reader or spectator might then want to try for themselves; the music-industry sense of a trial or sample recording designed to show off one's talent or potential, and the computer sense of a limited version of a program, designed to give a sense of its capacities and capabilities without providing what is called 'full functionality'. This is only a demo, lacking full functionality and, I fear, still full of bugs. The point of the demo (about 'demo', then) is to approach Derrida's slogan, in Politiques de l'amitié: 'no deconstruction without democracy, no democracy without deconstruction', but also the claim that what he calls the limit between the conditional and the unconditional inscribes

an auto-deconstructive force in the very motif of democracy, the possibility and the duty for democracy to de-limit itself. Democracy is the autos of deconstructive auto-delimitation. A delimitation not only in the name of a regulative Idea and an indefinite perfectibility, but each time in the urgency of a here and now.

And this demo about demo can then connect with a third sense of demonstration, as Derrida lays it out in Le monolinguisme de l'autre, playing a little uncertainly across French and English:

I have perhaps just performed a 'demonstration', though perhaps not, but I don't know which language to hear this word in. Without an accent, demonstration is not a logical argumentation imposing a conclusion, but primarily a political event, a street demonstration (I said a little earlier how I take to the street every morning, not on the road but in the street), a march, an act, an appeal, a demand.

And that earlier moment here referred to comes in an almost lyrical passage where Derrida describes how his writing throws down a challenge of invention to translators, and ends with this:

Compatriots of all nations, translator-poets, revolt against patriotism! Every time I write a word, you hear me, a word I love and that I love to write, for the time of that word, the instant of a single syllable, the song of this new international rises up in me. I never resist it, I take to the street when it calls, even if, apparently, from dawn, I have been working silently at my desk.

This, then, will try to be a demonstration version of what would be an argumentative demonstration about the concept of democracy: and thereby a demonstration, with luck, in a more directly political sense, a response, however muted or modest, to the call of that 'new international'.

METAPHYSICS AND POLITICS

Metaphysics cannot decide whether it or politics has philosophical priority. This is a well-known tension at least since Aristotle, and probably indeed since Plato's attempted resolution of the relation between philosophy and government by the combination of the two in the ideal constitution of The Republic. I do not think that this tension can ever be resolved, if only because the traditional concepts of metaphysics and politics are defined in part by just that tension.

This uncertainty needs to be read in both directions, as it were. On the one hand, we might say that 'politics' just is a metaphysical concept, defined by metaphysics just by being defined against metaphysics, and that therefore any attempted political reduction of metaphysics (along the lines of the other positive reductions attempted by the so-called human sciences, or by what is now most generally called 'cultural studies') is doomed to failure, however tempting it remains. The general logic of transcendental contraband always means that the very concept put up by such reductions to operate the reduction remains unthought and inexplicable in the terms of the reduction – just as the last thing the historicist reduction of metaphysics can understand is history, and the last thing the linguisticist reduction can understand is language, so the last thing the political reduction can understand is politics.

But reading the situation in the other direction, as it were (remembering that, although politics might well be a metaphysical concept, there are no metaphysical concepts as such, because the logic of différance and the trace means that there are no concepts as such, in themselves, independent of their differential definition), we might want to say that metaphysics is already a political concept. But saying this will only be possible by extending the range of the concept 'politics' so that it can describe all conceptual dealings and relations whatsoever. I want to say that deconstruction operates just such a radical politicisation of conceptuality in general. But this radical politicisation of all conceptual relations (including of course those affecting the metaphysical concept of 'politics' itself) naturally cannot produce results simply recognisable or exploitable by the metaphysical concept of politics. One way of putting this situation, in the terms of Martin McQuillan's title for this book, is that deconstruction reads politics as part of a more general politics of reading that...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Pluto Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2007
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0745326749
• ISBN 13: 9780745326740
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 272
• Herausgeber: McQuillan Martin
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland