Essential History: Jacques Derrida and the Development of Deconstruction (Northwestern University Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy) - Softcover

Kates, Joshua

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0810123274 ISBN 13: 9780810123274

Verlag: NORTHWESTERN UNIV PR, 2005

Inhaltsangabe

However widely—and differently—Jacques Derrida may be viewed as a "foundational" French thinker, the most basic questions concerning his work still remain unanswered: Is Derrida a friend of reason, or philosophy, or rather the most radical of skeptics? Are language-related themes--writing, semiosis--his central concern, or does he really write about something else? And does his thought form a system of its own, or does it primarily consist of commentaries on individual texts? This book seeks to address these questions by returning to what it claims is essential history: the development of Derrida's core thought through his engagement with Husserlian phenomenology. Joshua Kates recasts what has come to be known as the Derrida/Husserl debate, by approaching Derrida's thought historically, through its development. Based on this developmental work, Essential History culminates by offering discrete interpretations of Derrida's two book-length 1967 texts, interpretations that elucidate the until now largely opaque relation of Derrida's interest in language to his focus on philosophical concerns.

A fundamental reinterpretation of Derrida's project and the works for which he is best known, Kates's study fashions a new manner of working with the French thinker that respects the radical singularity of his thought as well as the often different aims of those he reads. Such a view is in fact "essential" if Derrida studies are to remain a vital field of scholarly inquiry, and if the humanities, more generally, are to have access to a replenishing source of living theoretical concerns.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

JOSHUA KATES is a tenured faculty member at St. John's College in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

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ESSENTIAL HISTORY

Jacques Derrida and the Development of DeconstructionBy Joshua Kates

Northwestern University Press

Copyright © 2005 Northwestern University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8101-2327-4

Contents

Acknowledgments...........................................................................................................................................xiList of Abbreviations of Works by Jacques Derrida.........................................................................................................xiiiIntroduction..............................................................................................................................................xv1 The Success of Deconstruction: Derrida, Rorty, Gasch, Bennington, and the Quasi-Transcendental.........................................................32 "A Consistent Problematic of Writing and the Trace": The Debate in Derrida/Husserl Studies and the Problem of Derrida's Development.....................323 Derrida's 1962 Interpretation of Writing and Truth: Writing in the "Introduction" to Husserl's Origin of Geometry.......................................534 The Development of Deconstruction as a Whole and the Role of Le problme de la gense dans la philosophie de Husserl....................................835 Husserl's Circuit of Expression and the Phenomenological Voice in Speech and Phenomena..................................................................1156 Essential History: Derrida's Reading of Saussure, and His Reworking of Heideggerean History.............................................................158Notes.....................................................................................................................................................219Bibliography..............................................................................................................................................297Index.....................................................................................................................................................307

Chapter One

The Success of Deconstruction: Derrida, Rorty, Gasch, Bennington, and the Quasi-Transcendental

The ultimate aim of this book is to set out a new interpretation of Derrida's core thought, in particular his two book-length 1967 works, Speech and Phenomena and Of Grammatology-the works for which Derrida remains best known even today. In this chapter, I begin from some of Derrida's best interpreters in order to demonstrate the need for this new approach. I take up the debate between Derrida's quasi-transcendental interpreters (primarily Rodolphe Gasch, but also Geoff Bennington) and Richard Rorty in order to show that deconstruction in the way it has been taken to operate-as it is described by Derrida himself and by his readers, seemingly in conformity with some of Derrida's best-known texts-does not fully function as Derrida intended. Deconstruction, at least in its usual constructions, is not able to maintain the various sides of its operation that Derrida wished to bring into play, and this demonstration, in turn, motivates and orients the project I subsequently bring forward. Due to the inability of Derrida's work to fully perform as he had hoped, a new way of treating Derrida's key texts proves to be needed: one that approaches deconstruction through its development.

The eventual site on which this breakdown is exposed in this chapter will be Derrida's discussion of Saussure in Of Grammatology's first half. This remains the signature topos of Derridean deconstruction-the text of Derrida most widely cited and read, for better or worse. However, before turning to Of Grammatology and to the debate in the commentary-to Gasch, Bennington, and Rorty-I must begin by briefly making clear what is at stake in Derrida's own enterprise. Indeed, not only is it necessary to show that deconstruction does not function as Derrida himself wished, in order to reframe our understanding of this operation and our approach to Derrida's text and corpus-but since I am about to criticize Derrida's project in certain respects, while devoting the remainder of this book to its explication, it ought to be made clear first of all what in my eyes remains urgent about Derrida's thought: what remains compelling about Derrida's project as a whole.

I will thus start by briefly distinguishing Derrida's views on deconstruction from the sort of radical undecidable skepticism with which it is most often identified, in order to show what Derrida intended deconstruction to accomplish and why such work potentially remains so pressing. Derrida, I will argue, wished deconstruction to remain far closer to philosophy than many acknowledge even today, in the sense that he wanted deconstruction to fulfill that "responsibility to thought" that philosophy alone from Derrida's perspective so far has instantiated.

To be sure, this is a tricky matter, since the interpretation of deconstruction I am contrasting with this one, deconstruction as an undecidably radical skepticism, itself demands ongoing contact with philosophy, with fundamental thinking, and its traditions, just as would the honoring of real responsibility to them. Deconstruction, in fact, has long been seen as undecidable on just this account: due to this apparent retention of thought, due to the appearance of recognizing both the rights of thought and their renunciation at once.

On this construal of deconstruction, Derrida's work indeed is believed to continually find itself speaking from a position of philosophical authority and knowledge, even while aiming to leave these behind. Because reason, thought, and philosophy brook no stable or permanent opposition, according to this account, because they allow for no permanent escape, no authoritative other, Derridean deconstruction must necessarily have repeated recourse to thought's authority, to philosophy's positions, in order to take leave from them radically, to break decisively with reflection and philosophy (albeit only for a time). Compressing an account of deconstruction that is today widely known, and hence readily recognizable: thought, reason, are believed to be a sort of enclosure or trap-such that only by remaining within them in the right way, by acknowledging the inevitability of ongoing recourse to them and recontainment by them, is any sort of meaningful escape to be had.

These are the claims and premises of the most common construal of Derridean deconstruction: deconstruction as undecidable, and therefore truly radical, skepticism. Yet so far from such a scenario retaining any real recognition of thought's claims, all genuine contact with thought and genuine responsibility to it is hollowed out by this construal in advance, it must be seen. Compelled to turn to reason, while already wishing to escape from it, the appeal to reason and thought here originates on a wholly irrational ground. The demand to turn to reason from the first is an unjustified and violent one-reason being known not to be authoritative, but only impossible to avoid. Making reason, or thought, compulsory or unavoidable in this way thus removes any trace of genuine responsibility from recourse to thought, since interaction with reason or thought in this scenario can indeed only represent "an unwarrantable involvement" with them-as Jonathan Culler puts it, in his treatment of the workings of this same undecidable radical skepticism (Culler 1982, 88).

Here, then, the continuing appeal to...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: NORTHWESTERN UNIV PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2005
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0810123274
• ISBN 13: 9780810123274
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 318
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
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