Derrida

L Foran, 'Who’s Afraid of the Irish Language? The National-Philosophical Possibilities of a Lost Tongue' in C Fischer and A Mahon  (eds) "Philosophical Perspectives on Contemporary Ireland" (Routledge, 2019) pp.230-245

Ireland is an unusual post-colonial country in that few of its citizens speak its original language as their first tongue. On a daily basis just 1.7 percent of Irish residents speak Irish, whereas 12 % speak a language other than Irish or English.  What does this mean?  It would be crass to suggest that national or cultural identity rests only on the ability to speak one’s language, but it would be equally facile to pretend that the loss of a national language has no impact on one’s identity. Why did the (already small) number of Irish speakers rapidly decline with Irish independence from British rule? Why has a de jure bilingual state produced a de facto monolingual population?  And, more importantly what are the consequences of this situation: what does being Irish without Irish mean? 

Jacques Derrida describes nationalism as a ‘philosopheme’ and one that cannot be separated from questions of linguistic identity.  In this paper I draw on the work of Derrida and Barbara Cassin to describe the connection between nationalism, language and philosophy. I then go on to examine the role of the Irish language in imaginings of Irish identity and nationalism. I argue that Ireland’s strange and disjointed relationship to its own tongue provides hope for the most hospitable kind of nationalism and the most philosophical kind of identity.

Przysługujący widmom wywrotowy, niemalże rewolucyjny potencjał został odsunięty oraz zagubiony poprzez pozbycie się tej kontrowersyjnej kategorii z terytorium metafizyki i zbyt pośpieszne odesłanie jej do przestrzeni badań nad literaturą, sprowadzając ją jedynie do roli użytecznego, bezpiecznego narzędzia interpretacji.

Książka Andrzeja Marca odzyskuje niepokojący charakter widmontologii i ponownie wprowadza widma do myśli metafizycznej. Czym nawiedzona i przeniknięta jest tradycyjna metafizyka, co właściwie ją dręczy, nie daje spokoju oraz nieustannie podmywa jej stabilność?

Kategoria widma Derridy posłużyła Marcowi przede wszystkim do rozważań nad charakterem współczesności i przeobrażeń, jakie dokonały się w obrębie myśli ponowoczesnej. Współczesna kultura, zdaniem Marca, stała się miejscem powstawania widm, nieustannie powracających z przeszłości. Uznając, że nie jesteśmy już w stanie tworzyć utopijnych wizji przyszłości, autor stara się zdać sprawę z widmowego charakteru współczesnej kultury, analizując m. in. strategie vintage, retro, nurt no future w kulturze lat 70. czy nurt fantastyki naukowej w literaturze.

Enclosed is the syllabus and course notes from the upper division course I teach in PostModernism and Post-Marxist Critical Theory. It occurs to me that some of these essays--ranging from Horkheimer and Adorno, Baudrillard, Foucault, and the feminist post-modern theorist Donna Haraway may offer some insight and some tools for comprehending the dark times in which we live. While these essays may not be directly aimed at understanding the rise of phenomena like the Alt-Right, toxic masculinity, and particularly violent forms of patriarchy, I think they can show us something about the ideological trends that set us on out current morally troubling path.

“Power is war, the continuation of war by other means”: Foucault’s reversal of Clausewitz’s formula has become a staple of critical theory — but it remains highly problematic on a conceptual level. Elaborated during Foucault’s 1976 lectures (“Society Must Be Defended”), this work-hypothesis theorises “basic warfare” [la guerre fondamentale] as the teleological horizon of socio-political relations. Following Boulainvilliers, Foucault champions this polemological approach, conceived as a purely descriptive discourse on “real” politics and war, against the philosophico-juridical conceptuality attached to liberal society (Hobbes’s Leviathan being here the prime example).
However, in doing so, Foucault did not interrogate the conceptual validity of notions such as power and war, therefore interlinking them without questioning their ontological status. This problematic conflation was partly rectified in 1982, as Foucault proposed a more dynamic definition of power relations: “actions over potential actions”.
I argue, somewhat polemically, that Foucault’s hermeneutics of power still involves a teleological violence, dependent on a polemological representation of human relations as essentially instrumental: this resembles what Derrida names, in “Heidegger’s Ear”, an “anthropolemology”. However, I show that all conceptualisation of power implies its self-deconstruction. This self-deconstructive (or autoimmune) structure supposes an archi-originary unpower prior to power: power presupposes an excess within power, an excessive force, another violence making it both possible and impossible. There is something within power located “beyond the power principle” (Derrida). This (self-)excess signifies a limitless resistantiality co-extensive with power-relationality. It also allows the reversal of pólemos into its opposite, as unpower opens politics and warfare to the messianic call of a pre-political, pre-ontological disruption: the archi-originary force of différance. This force, unconditional, challenges Foucault’s conceptualisations of power, suggesting an originary performativity located before or beyond hermeneutics of power-knowledge, disrupting theoreticity as well as empiricity by pointing to their ontological complicity.
The bulk of this essay is dedicated to sketching the theoretical implications of this deconstructive reading of Foucault with respect to the methodology and conceptuality of political science and social theory.

In early 17th-century Virginia, three people constructed houses unlike anything built in the Chesapeake before or since. These earthfast structures, owned by men of the "better sort" and framed at the bottom of cellar holes, have thus far defied explanation because of interpretive constraints inherent in the positivist underpinnings of archaeological analysis. This article challenges these constraints by engaging the rich contexts highlighted in recent work by "storytelling" archaeologists through poststructural semiotics. Rather than search for a single driving factor that explains these houses, it is argued that it is only when one grapples with the complexity of the context that one can understand how these houses were constituted by/constitutive of their context. Historical Archaeology, 2000, 34(4):3245. Permission to reprint required.

El objetivo de este texto es presentar el modo en que Jacques Derrida desarrolla una política de la filosofía singular. Para ello, en primer lugar, a partir de ciertos textos de Derrida abordo la expresión " copertenencia de filosofía y política " para pensar un vínculo inmanente entre filosofía y política. En segundo lugar, desde su libro Del derecho a la filosofía analizo cómo se piensa el carácter institucional de la filosofía. En tercer lugar, establezco algunos lineamientos breves sobre cómo la deconstrucción es un cierto modo de entender la práctica filosófica que se focaliza ante todo en qué se entiende por lectura. Todo esto en vistas a preguntar cuáles son los desafíos que surgen contemporáneamente al asumir la filosofía como práctica política.

Is Marx a zombie? Capitalism seems to have vanquished it's warring twin; yet the fall of Communism has been followed by a decline in the free market. Perhaps Western culture is pervaded by ghosts and omens of death because it is built on the exorcism of any alternative to itself. This paper applies Derrida's Specters of Marx thesis to art, film and cultural theory to explain just why the undead refuse to leave us alone.

We are a binary consciousness. Perhaps the most striking outcome of psychoanalysis is the formalization of this fact in the notion of the distinction between the conscious and the unconscious. Whether we follow orthodox Freudian readings of the unconscious as the repressed remainder of all that is rejected from consciousness, or the Jungian line of thought which sees the unconscious as the primary ground from which the conscious sense of self we call the ego emerges, we are left with the simple fact of a bifurcation between what we consider us, and what is not us, but nevertheless lives within and through us. Descartes was not yet psychological. His famous formula for the supremacy of the ego, ​ cogito, ergo sum​ , is to be understood as the declaration of our sense of self-regard as being correct — there is nothing else, besides what we know of ourselves. Nietzsche was perhaps the first depth psychologist, and from his time to ours, we have entered into a decidely psychological era. We might distinguish between pre-psychological and psychological views of self and world: ​ pre-psychological​ asserting that it is what we know of ourselves which is ultimately true, and ​psychological asserting that our vastness, or depths, to use the popular metaphor, can only be known in glimpses. It is not simply that the unconscious remains repressed. The bar of repression is a swinging door. Psychic contents emerge from unconsciousness into consciousness, as if through this door, or, to use the metaphor Jacques Siboni, a student of Jacques Lacan's, provides: a conveyor belt. This conveyor belt from the "other half" of our consciousness can get stuck. It can move too quickly, or too slowly, or not at all. When it moves too quickly, we may suffer from an inflation of consciousness — by identifying with affect-laden psychic contents being delivered up into consciousness, we may lose our reasonableness — that same reasonableness which is the hallmark of the ego.

In what follows, I bring two "loose cannons"-Jacques Derrida and Toni Morrison-into conversation with one another. In doing so, I hope to sketch what their critical theories might bring to bear on "The Western Canon." This essay is not simply concerned with the texts that make up this canon (or those which are denied admittance) but, rather, with our very relationship to the concept of canon. How does this relationship situate our reading of texts, our formulating of curricula, and-to the central question of this conference-our advocacy for diversity in higher education? In pursuit of these questions, I attempt to break away from any canon debate that would be con ned to "the advocacy of diversi cation within the canon and/or a kind of benign coexistence near or within reach of the already sacred texts." 2 This project arose from my encounter with Toni Morrison's Whiteness and the Literary Imagination while I was a student in the Torrey Honors Institute (a "Great Books" program at Biola University). Morrison helped me realize that I'd been caught up in some common presumptions about the supposed transcendence of canonical (often whitemale-authored) texts. I found that-even while I was thinking about my own blackness 3 in relation to the African-American literary tradition-I was gravitating towards the explicitly political texts of W.E.B. DuBois, Malcolm X, and others. Morrison's profound attention to detail (particularly on matters of race) in the texts of Herman Melville, Edgar Allen Poe, and Willa Cather clearly opens up new (and faithful) interpretations. She also reveals how avoidance of "race matters" only constrains and constricts the meaning of 1 Naas, Taking on the Tradition , xvii. 2 Morrison, Unspeakable Things Unspoken , 135. 3 "When matters of race are located and called attention to in American literature, critical response has tended to be on the order of a humanistic nostrum-or a dismissal mandated by the label 'political'" ( Morrison, Whiteness and the Literary Imagination , 12).

Apocalyptic fictions abound in contemporary culture, multiplying end-of-the-world fantasies of environmental collapse. Meanwhile, efforts toward global sustainability extrapolate from deep-past trends to predict and manage deep-future scenarios. These narratives converge in " eco-eschatologies, " which work as phantasms that construct our identities, our understanding of the world, and our sense of responsibility in the present. I critique eco-eschatology's reliance on an interpretation of deep time that treats every temporal moment as interchangeable and projects the future as a chronological extension of the past. This enacts what Jean-Luc Nancy calls the " catastrophe of equivalence " by domesticating the future and obscuring the incommensurability of what resists substitution, conversion, or exchange. By contrast, the renewal of our responsibility toward the future, without apocalypse or apotheosis, requires an intuition of deep time that respects the singular anachronicity of the present and refuses the framing of existence against a background of annihilation.

This paper describes explorations of the relevance of narrative practices to working with communities which are facing various concerns and predicaments. These explorations have been undertaken in the context of community assignments that have been initiated in response to approaches from communities. In describing these explorations, this paper highlights the assumptions that have oriented our participation in these initiatives and some of the principles of narrative practice that we have found to be of particular importance in them. As well, this paper presents some special considerations in regard to addressing the psychological pain and emotional distress that is the outcome of trauma; discusses the priority given to the development of partnerships between the members of our team and between team members and community members; and provides an account of the structure of the community-wide gathering phase of these assignments.

The concept of “return” is an apparent phantasm throughout Derrida’s work with each new notion introduced, returning to the question alluded from the start of “Faith and Knowledge”: what is it, to talk of a “return”?  Derrida asks, “when we speak, we Europeans, so ordinarily and so confusedly today about “a return of the religious”, what do we thereby name?” . In this paper, I attempt to answer Derrida’s question by reversing it into “what we do not name” to discuss how is the “return” religious and what is religious in the “return”. Firstly then, the paper will focus on religious character of the “return” and then explore religious elements: how it comes to mean faith, promise and messianicity – a blind awaiting of a “to-come” that we do not name.

Putting the question of the long development and inheritance of immune functions (phylogenesis) in touch with that of cultural inheritance (epiphylogenesis), the article questions lines of continuity between somatic mutation, consciousness, technics, time, and media. For instance, drawing on a tradition that acknowledges Immanuel Kant, Edmund Husserl, Theodor Adorno, and Martin Heidegger, Bernard Stiegler’s attempt to mobilize the structure of the trace in the philosophy of Jacques Derrida results in a profound challenge to a technics that can be regarded as a powerful complement to biological evolutionary inheritance.

RESUMEN:
La deconstrucción irrumpe en el pensamiento de la escritura, como una escritura de la escritura, que por lo pronto obliga a otra lectura: no ya imantada a la comprensión hermenéutica del sentido que quiere-decir un discurso, a su fondo de ilegibilidad y de deseo de idioma–, a las fuerzas no intencionales inscritas en los sistemas significantes de un discurso que hacen de éste propiamente un “texto”, es decir, algo que por su propia naturaleza o por su propia ley se resiste a ser comprendido como expresión de un sentido, o más bien “expone” éste como efecto –y con su legalidad y necesidad específica– de una ilusión para la conciencia.
Dr. Adolfo Vásquez Rocca
/derridadeconstruccion.htm
VERSIONES [Ediciones]
1. VÁSQUEZ ROCCA, Adolfo, “DERRIDA: DECONSTRUCCIÓN, DIFFÉRANCE Y DISEMINACIÓN; UNA HISTORIA DE PARÁSITOS, HUELLAS Y ESPECTROS”. En Revista OBSERVACIONES FILOSÓFICAS - Nº 19 / 2014 – ISSN 0718-3712. http://www.observacionesfilosoficas.net/derridadeconstruccion.htm
2.  VÁSQUEZ ROCCA, Adolfo, “DERRIDA : DECONSTRUCTION, DIFFERANCE AND SPREAD; A HISTORY OF PARASITES, FOOTPRINTS AND SPECTRA”, En CASA LITTERAE, Universidad de Concepción, Abril de 2015,
http://www.casalitterae.cl/index.php/estadistica/83-derrida-deconstruction-differance-and-spread-a-history-of-parasites-footprints-and-spectra
3. VÁSQUEZ ROCCA, Adolfo, “DERRIDA: DECONSTRUCCIÓN, DIFFÉRANCE Y DISEMINACIÓN; UNA HISTORIA DE PARÁSITOS, HUELLAS Y ESPECTROS”, En REDAZIONE ROSEBUD –Critica, Scrittura, Giornalismo– Enero 2015, Dublin, Ireland, http://rinabrundu.com/2015/01/05/derrida-deconstruccion-differance-y-diseminacion-una-historia-de-parasitos-huellas-y-espectros/
ADOLFO VÁSQUEZ ROCCA D.Phil

Derrida: a cena da escritura. Tradução: Raul Fiker. Coleção Grandes Filósofos. São Paulo: UNESP, 2001. Biblioteca PUC-Rio, número de entrada: 194 J66 D RESUMO A proposta do autor é deixar mais claro como Derrida desdobra, em sua obra Gramatologia, a partir do texto de Lévi-Strauss uma teoria da escritura, expandindo esse texto para além do estruturalismo. CRÍTICA A critica se encontra ao longo do texto e principalmente no final do fichamento. ESTRUTURA O livro é curto, possui 51 páginas, pode ser considerado um artigo estendido. Apesar de denso, é uma leitura mais fácil que a leitura de Gramatologia. FICHAMENTO O livro inicia apresentando quem foi Derrida e a razão de estudá-lo. Derrida se atribui a tarefa de questionar e contestar a tradição do pensamento ocidental que coloca a escritura em um papel subordinado ao da fala. "Enquanto a fala é habitualmente associada à razão e à racionalidade (a noção grega de logos) e a voz é percebida como mais próxima da verdade interior da consciência individual, a escritura é considerada uma extensão secundária ou suplemento da voz, uma tecnologia auxiliar empregada pela razão humana, mas não essencial a ela" (Johnson, 2001: 8). SUGESTÃO: Acho que seria interessante ler o original do Derrida sobre essa questão. Como não sou especialista no Derrida (Gramatologia), penso que a noção "voz", especialmente como extensão de uma verdade interior deve ser visitada. Mas antes de você sair correndo para ler, reflita se o esforço dessa leitura vale à penas. Talvez você possa resolver essa questão por escrito, nesse parágrafo, colocando que você não fez essa leitura e está se baseando apenas no que o Johnson disse.

Most contemporary scholarly work on posthumanism and transhumanism rests on the idea that both perspectives are part of an ontological continuum. This article, however, acknowledges and explores the differences between them. In order to prove that evident theoretical –and, therefore, practical– differences exist between both positions, a genealogy of their development from the 1980s is proposed. The definition of the two different ontologies associated to each of the discussed positions is followed by an analysis of the consequences that this theoretical separation would have for research. This paper also lays out a revision of their epistemologies and their ethical and practical implications. To conclude, we offer a contextualized justification of why the two discussed positions are actually antithetic, and how considering them as such would be useful for future research in the field.

Derrida’s seminar on the death penalty is a deconstructive reading of the debate over the abolition of the death penalty beginning in eighteenth century Europe. The main imperative of the reading is to address the limits of abolitionist discourses, which historically have been based on natural law conceptions of the right to life. Derrida’s interest in undertaking such a reading is to develop an abolitionist argument that would hold up in principle against the death penalty. However, in this paper I take Derrida’s insights into the meaning of the death penalty to explore what they reveal about political sovereignty, and in particular its relation to violence. The paper begins by addressing several relevant moments in Derrida’s reading of texts on both sides of the death penalty debate and shows how the arguments are each limited by some ‘unavowed’ interest that conditions the fundamental principles upon which they are based. These unavowed interests relate to what Derrida describes as the ‘compromise’ on the question of cruelty in the context of the death penalty. Based on these readings, the paper develops a concept of the death penalty defined as a relation to time, specifically, a relation of mastery over the time of the life of the other. It then connects this concept to Derrida’s analysis of political sovereignty found in Rogues (2005) and ‘Force of Law’ (2002) to make two arguments. First, the conception of the death penalty as a relation to time redefines so-called ‘death penalty alternatives’, such as life imprisonment without the possibility of parole as manifestations of the death penalty through other means; and, second, changes in the appearance of the death penalty reflect changes in the institution of political sovereignty, and in turn the status of the state.

The author argues that Günter Figal sheds novel light on language in his recent Objectivity: The Hermeneutical and Philosophy through a debate he appears to stage with the position Jacques Derrida develops in some of his early essays on deconstruction. Figal describes language as a form of showing and emphasizes the openness and flexibility of expression involved in determining significance. Yet, he rejects the idea he finds in Derrida that such flexibility should lead us to wholesale suspicion of the capacity of language to fix significance. Whereas Derrida concludes that all attempts to fix significance through supplementation of our expressions can only end in the need for further supplementation, Figal stresses the dialectical mien of language that allows supplementation to yield genuinely determinate significances.

The concept of “hegemony” in political thought has different philosophical-theoretical foundations and semantic dimensions. This concept should not be perceived merely and necessarily in a way which discloses another ways of perception. This concept should not be perceived in a way which traps us in the abyss of metaphysical disclosure. There is not one way of perception which overcomes other alternatives. Therefore, this article deconstructs this tendency to “the One” and lightens the way of perceiving this concept in “one of the possible ways”. Hence, this article concentrates on the political thought of Ernesto Laclau and hereby probes the philosophical foundations of this concept in the philosophy of Jacques Derrida and reveals the signifiers which construct the articulation of this concept as its semantic dimensions. As we will see, the mentioned signifiers are articulated among a master signifier or a nodal point which is contingency of hegemony. “The undecidable” and “the untouchable” are two Derridean concepts which are the philosophical foundations of these signifiers. However, this contingency does not mean inaccuracy or instability or lack of an ontological basis. Therefore, the contingency, undecidability and untouchability of hegemony should be understood as lack of an "ultimate foundation" and not "the foundation". Contingency and lack of an ultimate foundation have relationship with the aporetic nature of hegemony and its presence in the absence and its absence in the presence.

In 2017, Mexican transfeminist artist and activist Lia García (La Novia Sirena) made weekly visits to dorm 10Bis of the prison Reclusorio Norte, engaging in performative actions with a group of cis-male prisoners. Sprouting from images of Proyecto 10Bis (2017), this article argues that, within conditions of increasing violence and impunity, Lia transgenders touch in ways that, by (re)pro-ducing hypertenderness, serve as a balm for a hyperviolent state. Unpacking the haptics in the mechanics of production, and considering the Derridian impossibility of tact and of the law, the author argues that by placing herself - cuerpo y corazón - between the state and the body, Lia engenders a haptic tactic that, through a transgendered hypertender touch, activates transaffective resistances that contend with the law and the state.

Even though the legitimizing intents of both the modern penitentiary and the archive—the latter understood as the physical deposit of memory—are radically different, could the principles central to their founding discourses and eventual consequences be similar? Opened in 1900, Lecumberri Palace is, in the morphological sense, a modern penitentiary, the material result of an Occidentalization of dominant discourse. During its lifetime it has housed both types of institutions. It initially served as the Mexico City Penitentiary and is currently Mexico’s General National Archive (AGN, by its acronym in Spanish), both institutions perceived as attempts to Enlighten a Nation. Through the analysis of operations carried out in both facilities and with the help of Michel Foucault’s writings on discipline and domination, Jacques Derrida’s work on the concept of the archive, and existing historiography on Lecumberri Palace, this article proposes the possibility that both the archive and the penitentiary are doomed in as much as they both suffer the same ailment. Could Derrida’s Archive Fever also be rightfully called Penitentiary Fever?

Ever get the feeling that life's a game with changing rules and no clear sides, one you are compelled to play yet cannot win? Welcome to gamespace. Gamespace is where and how we live today. It is everywhere and nowhere: the main chance, the best shot, the big leagues, the only game in town. In a world thus configured, McKenzie Wark contends, digital computer games are the emergent cultural form of the times. Where others argue obsessively over violence in games, Wark approaches them as a utopian version of the world in which we actually live. Playing against the machine on a game console, we enjoy the only truly level playing field--where we get ahead on our strengths or not at all.

Gamer Theory uncovers the significance of games in the gap between the near-perfection of actual games and the highly imperfect gamespace of everyday life in the rat race of free-market society. The book depicts a world becoming an inescapable series of less and less perfect games. This world gives rise to a new persona. In place of the subject or citizen stands the gamer. As all previous such personae had their breviaries and manuals, Gamer Theory seeks to offer guidance for thinking within this new character. Neither a strategy guide nor a cheat sheet for improving one's score or skills, the book is instead a primer in thinking about a world made over as a gamespace, recast as an imperfect copy of the game.

In this essay, I analyse the ideological relationship between Tim O’Brien’s short story “How to Tell a True War Story” (1990) and Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy. I argue that the postmodern message of O’Brien’s story revindicates Nietzsche’s late nineteenth century view that Truth can never be obtained, because people are unable to interpret things, actions or thoughts objectively.

Jacques Derridas Verständnis von Dekonstruktion und Demokratie erschließt mit der Temporalität des Futur antérieur (Futur II) ein Kriterium politischen Handelns, das es erlaubt auch scheinbar "demokratische Politik" dort zu entlarven, wo sie unbemerkt bereits begonnen hat sich selbst, d.h. die demokratische Öffnung als Überwindung klassischer Souveränität, außer Kraft zu setzen. Derridas Verständnis einer "democratie à-venir", einer Demokratie-im-Kommen, bezeichnet somit keineswegs eine Verzögerung und einen ewigen Aufschub, sondern formuliert ein Kriterium, inwiefern die Zukunft schon-jetzt das Handeln und seine Institutionen zu bestimmen vermag. "Demokratie ist für Derrida die einzige Verfassungsform, die aus sich selbst heraus jeder Ideologisierung Widerstand leistet und so auch die noch unabgegoltenen Möglichkeiten ausstehender Zukunft selbstkritisch offenhält."

Ghost Writing in Contemporary American Fiction is about the appearance of the specter in the work of five major US authors, and argues from this work that every one of us is a ghost writing, haunting ourselves and others. The book’s innovative structure sees chapters on Paul Auster, Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison, Marilynne Robinson, and Philip Roth alternating with shorter sections detailing the significance of the ghost in the work of French philosopher Jacques Derrida, author of Specters of Marx. Together, these accounts of phantoms, shadows, haunts, spirit, the death sentence, and hospitality provide a compelling theoretical context in which to read contemporary US literature. Ghost Writing in Contemporary American Fiction argues at every stage that there is no self, no relation to the other, no love, no home, no mourning, no future, no trace of life without the return of the specter, that is, without ghost writing.

In Memoires for Paul de Man Derrida articulates a new model of mourning as an ongoing conversation with the dead who are both within us and beyond us and continue to look at us with a look that is a call to responsibility and transformation. Derridean mourning significantly revises classic psychoanalytic accounts of mourning, reworking and combining conceptual apparatus from psychoanalysis, philosophy and literature: incorporation (Abraham and Torok), gedachtnis (Hegel), rhetoricity and aporia (de Man).

It is often said that the ethical, political and religious writings of the later Derrida aren’t phenomenological in nature. Contrary to that widespread view, the present essay argues that the central motive of all these writings – Derrida’s concept of the event – is driven by the attempt to show the limits of the phenomenological concept of intentionality. This critique revolves around three key-notions: the concepts of teleology, of horizon, and the phenomenological als-Struktur. An event, Derrida maintains, has no horizon and resists every teleological reappropriation, for it never appears as such. It is in that very special, Derridian sense ‘im-possible’. This impossibility is nevertheless not to be understood as a logical or metaphysical impossibility, for the impossible, Derrida affirms, happens (in the case of an invention, for example) and when it happens, it leaves traces and produces manifest effects. Indeed, when an event takes place, it affects our world and provokes thereby a reconfiguration of the possible. The impossible is in that sense a condition of possibility (of the possible). This axiomatic principle of Derrida’s thinking – impossibility as possibility – lead Derrida to speak occasionally of the quasi transcendental status of deconstruction. The present essay shows how his theory of the event fits in this description and why Derrida should be regarded as a quasi transcendental philosopher.

I outline the core notions of "deconstruction" and "differance" in Derrida's philosophy.  I then address how these notions have ethical significance.  I ultimately argue that Derrida's ethics is simulataneously a version of deontology and a version of virtue ethics.

The necessity of questioning the privileged spaces of
power—be it personal, social, political, or religious—is a
demand intrinsic to philosophy’s very own structure. In
this paper, an identification of the thinking and the
practice of subversion with the essence of philosophy is
undertaken as a response to the challenge of intellectual
sterilization brought about by the insidious effects of an
omnipresent techno-capitalism and academic complicity.
In particular, I will discuss Jacques Derrida’s
deconstruction as a fertile example of a subversive ethos
that refuses to be complicit with the powers-that-be but
transgresses the complacent order of the present so as to
achieve an opening for a more just relation to the “other”
of thinking that has always been marginalized by history
and the philosophical tradition.

If philosophy is to remain true to its originary inspiration,
then, it must remain vigilant to the various moments and
forms of fossilizations of power and truth. The
achievement of a critical position ownmost to philosophy is
incumbent to us: i.e., as a radical refusal to be complicit
with the present effects of power and a continuous
cultivation of an ethos of writing and thinking that does
not concede its loyalty to anything, even to philosophy.

Keywords: Jacques Derrida, deconstruction, politics,
subversion, ethos of thinking