Politics of Deconstruction: A New Introduction to Jacques Derrida - Hardcover

Lüdemann, Susanne

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0804784124 ISBN 13: 9780804784122

Verlag: STANFORD UNIV PR, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

The book offers a new introduction to Jacques Derrida and to Deconstruction as an important strand of Continental Philosophy. From his early writings on phenomenology and linguistics to his later meditations on war, terrorism, and justice, Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) achieved prominence on an international scale by addressing as many different audiences as he did topics. Yet despite widespread acclamation, his work has never been considered easy. Rendering accessible debates that marked more than four decades of engagement and inquiry, Susanne Lüdemann traces connections between the philosopher's own texts and those of his many interlocutors, past and present.

Unlike conventional introductions, Politics of Deconstruction offers a number of personal approaches to reading Derrida and invites readers to find their own. Emphasizing the relationship between philosophy and politics, it shows that, with Deconstruction, there is much more at stake than an "academic" discussion, for Derrida's work deals with all the burning political and intellectual challenges of our time. The author's own professional experience in both the United States and in Europe, which particularly inform her chapter on Derrida's reception in the United States, opens a unique perspective on a unique thinker, one that rewards specialists and newcomers alike.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Susanne Lüdemann is Professor of Germanic Studies at the University of Munich. She was previously a professor at the University of Chicago.

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Politics of Deconstruction

A New Introduction to Jacques Derrida

By Susanne Lüdemann, Erik Butler

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2011 Junius Verlag, Hamburg
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8047-8412-2

Contents

Preface: Derrida's Legacy, 
First Approach: Generations, Genealogies, Translations, and Contexts, 
Second Approach: The Metaphysics of Presence and the Deconstruction of Logocentrism, 
Third Approach: There Are "Undeconstructibles" (Are There?), 
Fourth Approach: Deconstruction and Democracy, 
Epilogue: Deconstruction in America / America in Deconstruction, 
Appendix: Biography of Jacques Derrida, 
Notes, 
Selected Bibliography, 

CHAPTER 1

First Approach: Generations, Genealogies, Translations, and Contexts

I believe that this difficulty with belonging, one would almost say of identification, affects the whole of Jacques Derrida's oeuvre, and it seems to me that 'the deconstruction of the proper' is the very thought of this, its thinking affection.

1.1 From the "Three-H Generation" to the "Three Masters of Suspicion"

Jacques Derrida was born July 15, 1930, in El-Biar, near Algiers. His parents were assimilated Sephardic Jews, which inscribed the question of belonging into his life in multiple ways. Having grown up French among Arabs, and Jewish among Maghreb Muslims, Derrida first arrived in Paris at the age of twenty-two, shortly before the Algerian War of Independence; as a French Algerian (or pied-noir —"blackfoot" in colloquial parlance), he did not belong to the establishment there, either. Even when he had achieved worldwide fame, Derrida's position in the French university system remained relatively modest, although ultimately this was due more to his controversial philosophical theses than to his origins. Before relocating to Paris, Derrida—who did not know Hebrew and never attended a yeshiva—experienced his connection to Judaism primarily through anti-Semitic ascriptions from without. Under the Vichy regime, Algerian Jews had lost their French citizenship, and Jewish children had been turned away from schools (as one principal explained: "French culture is not made for little Jews"). Perhaps it is not unwarranted to see in these biographical facts an important motor of Derrida's thought, which can be designated—in an initial, summary fashion—as a thinking of difference in all its forms.

Derrida came to Paris in 1952 as a student at the École Normale Supérieure, where he also taught from 1965 until 1984. The Parisian philosophical landscape was shaped by the so-called "Three-H Generation"—that is, French disciples and interpreters of Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger. At the time, the dominant orientations in philosophy were existentialism (Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus), French phenomenology (Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Emmanuel Levinas, Paul Ricoeur), and structuralism (Claude Lévi-Strauss's structural anthropology and Jacques Lacan's structural psychoanalysis). Politically, engagement with the Algerian War and Stalinist Communism set the tone of the day. Subsequently, especially in the 1960s, a transition occurred from the "Three-H Generation" to the "three masters of suspicion": Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. This shift is associated with the emergence of what has come to be known as poststructuralism, a grouping that includes—besides Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Jean Baudrillard, Jean-François Lyotard, and others—Jacques Derrida himself. (To be sure, such classifications are not easy: one may rightfully hesitate to call Ricoeur a phenomenologist, and Lacan is every bit as much a "poststructuralist" as he is a "structuralist"—or maybe neither. Roland Barthes, who is counted among poststructuralists in standard reference works, understood himself as a structuralist. Many teachers and fellow travelers of Derrida and his contemporaries—for example, Maurice Blanchot—defy such categorizations altogether.)

It is remarkable that the "triumvirates" French philosophy uses to count its generations consist exclusively of German-language thinkers. However, this in no way means that French philosophy of the twentieth century lacks originality and independence. Rather, it is in France that the most important consequences of the grand philosophical projects of modernity—from Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit to Nietzsche's "transvaluation of all values," Heidegger's fundamental ontology, and Freud's metapsychology—have been drawn. After the Second World War, French philosophers took up radical ways of thinking about modernity that began in Germany and were interrupted—to lasting effect—by National Socialism, and they followed them through to their "postmodern" consequences. Post-war German philosophy, on the other hand, produced Frankfurt School Critical Theory, which drew chiefly on Hegel and Marx, until, in the mid-1980s, readings of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Freud from France introduced changes to the intellectual horizon.

It is significant, for the productive appropriation of the German "triumvirate" that occurred in France, that the most important texts often were not readily accessible. In some cases, they had only recently been translated (the first French edition of Phenomenology of Spirit appeared in 1947; the first complete translation of Being and Time did not come out until the 1980s). In other cases, key works had not been published at all—for example, many writings by Husserl. Instead of having complete editions laden with the interpretations of academic authorities, French readers dealt with a quarry of fragments, partial translations, manuscripts, and works in the German original; inevitably, differences of culture and language were inscribed in the fabric of every translation.

Derrida's path through this multi-faceted intellectual and political landscape did not follow a straight line. His first years in Paris were also shaped by profound personal crises. The only constant, from the beginning, was a rejection of Sartre's existentialism, from which Heidegger had also distanced himself in the Letter on Humanism (addressed to the French philosopher and Germanist Jean Beaufret in 1946). The Letter marks a decisive date for the intellectual debate in France, because it not only includes a self-interpretation (Heidegger's account of his so-called turn [Kehre] in the 1930s), but also, immediately "after Auschwitz," initiated the discussion on humanism. Beaufret had asked Heidegger whether, after what had happened, it was still possible to find a new sense for the term. Heidegger responded by roundly critiquing humanism as an essentially metaphysical enterprise that, because of its built-in limitations, missed the "essence" of human existence. His reply was also directed against Sartre, who, in a polemical piece from the previous year—Is Existentialism a Humanism? —had unequivocally answered his own question in the affirmative. This debate stands at the origin of much talk—which has been as popular as it has been mistaken—about the "end of man" and the "death of the subject" (most often attributed to Foucault). In Germany, the discourse has contributed to characterizations of French poststructuralism not only as anti-humanist but as antihuman (i.e., as irrationalist and hostile to Enlightenment).

Among other things, this introduction means to combat such simplifications—at least as far as...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: STANFORD UNIV PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2014
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0804784124
• ISBN 13: 9780804784122
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 176
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland