LOVE AND FORGIVENESS

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LOVE AND FORGIVENESS
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• 1. DECONSTRUCTIVISM
• What is Derridas conception of philosophy?
• 2. THE LETTER A
• How does Derrida conceive of difference?
• 3. THE POLITICS OF JUSTICE
• Does Derrida introduces a new messianism?

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1. DECONSTRUCTIVISM
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JACQUES DERRIDA (1930-2004)

• BIOGRAPHICAL NOTIONS
• 15 July 1930 born in El-Bia (Algeria).
• 1942 as Jew expelled from school.
• 1952-1954 École Normale Superiéure.
• 1967 an annus mirabilis because of the
  publication of three influential books.
• 1965 - 1984 professor of the history of
  philosophy at the École Normale Superiéure.
• 1982 one of the founders of the Collège
  Internationale de Philosophie.
• 1983 Director of Studies in Philosophical
  Institutions at the École des Hautes Études et
  Sciences Sociales.
• From the seventies onwards appointments in
  several American universities.
• 2001 Theodor W. Adorno Award.
• 2002 A documentary on Derrida.
• 8 October 2004 death.

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IMPORTANT PUBLICATIONS

• De la grammatologie (1967).
• La Voix et le phénomène (1967).
• Lécriture et la différence (1967).
• Marges de la philosophie (1972).
• Glas (1974).
• La Carte postale. De Socrate à Freud et au-delà
  (1980).
• Limited Inc (1990).
• Sauf le nom (1993).
• Les spectres de Marx (1993).
• Force de loi. Le Fondement mystique de
  lautorité (1994).
• Cosmopolites de tous les pays, encore un effort!
  (1997).
• De lhospitalité (1997).
• Philosophy in a time of terror. Diaglogues with
  Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (2003).

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PHILOSOPHICAL STYLE

• More evocative than argumentative.
• More circular than linear.
• Examples
• - Glas gt two columns (Hegel and Genet).
• - La Carte postale gt opening with love letters
  with no address.
• Criticism mystification because of the illogical
  and imprecise style.

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REITERATION AND DECONSTRUCTION

• Reiterate gt putting old things into new contexts.
• Deconstructivism gt a way of criticizing texts and
  institutions.
• Neither negative, nor positive.
• Aim to open texts up to alternative readings,
  i.e. to look for neglected elements in texts.
• Moral drive to render justice and to prevent the
  use of violence.

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A CRITIQUE OF WESTERN PHILOSOPHY

• Metaphysics as object of criticism.
• Philosophical activity to subvert various binary
  oppositions that dominate different ways of
  thinking.
• Binary oppositions reproduce hierarchies and
  forms of subordination.
• An insistence upon the importance of the other,
  the marginal, that what is different.

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2. THE LETTER A
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THE WRITTEN AND SPOKEN WORD

• The most famous founders of Christianity and
  Philosophy have one thing in common gt they have
  never written a single word.
• The denigration of the written word and the
  valorisation of the spoken word.
• The spoken word gt purity and authenticity.
• Why?
• Whereas the spoken word is a symbol of the mental
  experience, the written word is a symbol of the
  already existing symbol.

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SIGNS OF SIGNS

• Logocentrism metaphysics of the presence to
  oneself.
• The written word is not a derivate of the spoken
  word.
• Writing is not a sign of a sign, except if one
  says it of all signs, which would be more
  profoundly true.

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SAMENESS AND DIFFERENCE

• The difference between différance and différence
  is inaudible.
• If one wants distinguish différance and
  différence one needs the written world.
• Because this kind of ambiguity is inherent to the
  spoken word one has to analyze the written word.
• To read texts in different directions.
• What are the traces?

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LOVE IS A BATTLE FIELD
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3. THE POLITICS OF JUSTICE
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JUSTICE

• Justice can not be grasped, objectified.
• One can only speak in an indirect way about
  justice.
• The aporia of law and justice gt fixed rules and
  unfixed morality.
• The general and the particular gt application of
  the law to concrete issues.
• Justice as a deconstruction of law.

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MESSIANISM

• Messianism gt stories about the arrival of a hero
  (the Messiah) in the future.
• The transfiguration of utopia.
• There is often no clear description of the hero
  that will come.
• Central question does the hero really comes?
• Deconstruct various messianisms.
• There is no identifiable other.

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WHETHER OR NOT TO FORGIVE, THAT IS THE QUESTION!

• Truth and reconciliation commissions gt about
  forgiveness.
• The impossibility forgiving something that
  cannot be forgiven.
• The state cannot organize in a proper way the
  reconciliation.

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HEURISTIC VALUE

• Literary theory (Paul de Man).
• Feminism (Luce Irigaray).
• Architecture (Frank Gehry).
• Cultural studies (Stuart Hall).
• Philosophy (Christophe Menke).