D. Perpich: Universality, Singularity, and Sexual Difference: Reflections on Political Community

This article is useful for any of you seeking to bring dimensions of gender into Derrida’s discussions of political community, specifically the impasse between universality and singularity, and the undecidability of justice. For Diane Perpich, critical engagement with the notion of sexual difference in relation to political desire opens up possibilities to move beyond (if [...]

Read Full Post »

P. Damai: Messianic City: Ruins, Refuge and Hospitality in Derrida

Central to Puspa Damai’s article on the Messianic-City is the concept of hospitality. It is inextricable from the Derridian concept of a “city of refuge” and what Derrida sees as the intent of a city. Ruin, the threat of ruin and asylum are [...]

Read Full Post »

R. Benjamin, H. Chang: ‘Jacques Derrida, The Last European’

This article can be separated into two parts, the masculine argument about Europe and the components that define European, within the context of the last European, and the feminine argument about globalization and the new international. This doesn’t suppose one is superior or inferior, but it is an essentialist claim [...]

Read Full Post »

E. Popke: ‘Postructuralist Ethics: Subjectivity, Responsibility, Community’

E. Jeffrey Popke advocates that poststructuralist ethics needs to be taken more seriously in human geography. He believes that poststructuralist theory “offers the potential to break down existing categories of power and knowledge, and thereby to foster alternative narratives, which have the [...]

Read Full Post »

L. Lawlor: ‘From the Trace to the Law: Derridean Politics’

Leonard Lawlor’s “From the Trace to the Law: Derridean Politics,” aims to situate Derrida’s later political engagements in terms of his earlier work on language, namely how Derrida’s work in political theory is informed by his critique of metaphysics. By focusing on Derrida’s insistence on the irreducible metaphoricity of language, as well as his concepts [...]

Read Full Post »

Regarding those who decide

Although Derrida devotes a great deal of attention to an urgent period of undecidability that precedes any decision and the coinciding sense of betrayal that follows such a decision he only hints at what characterizes the subjectivity of the decider(s).

Read Full Post »

Derrida: Event-as-Herald or Event-as-Promise?

So on class Wednesday I tried to raise the point that Derrida is subject to his own criticism. I would like to develop that point in this post. First I will go over my argument in terms of the discussion in class, and then I will try to ground it more in the text (which [...]

Read Full Post »

Ghost Conjurer, Ghost Conqueror

I’m glad we’re talking about ghosts. I really am. I think the meaning and significance of ghosts might tell us nearly everything we need to know.
It is also an occasion for reopening a question about Derrida’s specific meditations in Specters of Marx: is the consideration largely, or even completely, Eurocentric?

Read Full Post »

Tasing a Bro

You’ve surely seen it, but it is worth seeing with the conceptual tools of this course (thus far). And maybe asking some disconcerting questions about the inability of justice to speak itself in a way that mobilizes, rather than unnerves. Of course I’m talking about the UFlorida student who was handcuffed and tasered by security [...]

Read Full Post »

Love and Justice?

Take a few minutes to listen to and watch this short exchange with Derrida on love. Aside from the rather comical beginning (the interviewer’s French slurs amour to it sounds like mort – love sounds like death!), as well as Derrida’s strangely unsuccessful attempt to get a specific question, Derrida’s thoughts are really interesting.

Read Full Post »