Joanna Hodge

Derrida on time

This is a comprehensive investigation into the theme of time in the work of Jacques Derrida and shows how temporality is one of the hallmarks of his thought.

Excription at the Edge of Sense: Reading Jean-Luc Nancy

This paper explores the encounter in the writings of Jean-Luc Nancy (1940-) between two traditions important for aesthetics, the critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1724- 1804), and the reinvention of phenomenology by Edmund Husserl (1859-1938). It marks the importance for Nancys readings of a disruption of the notions of ”world” and ”worldhood” in the writings of Nietzsche (1844-1900). It traces the arrival in Nancys writings of a neologism, ”excription,” which marks up an effect of writing taken to its limit. Thereby the Husserlian thematics of sense are put in question, and Nancy reconfigures Kants transcendental aesthetics, concerning space and time, as a thematisation of place and rhythm, body and gravity. In the paper, the excription of gravity and body are considered, with those of place and rhythm held over for another occasion.

Phenomenological futures in dispute: Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy

This discussion consists of five sections, beginning with a pair of citations marking up a politics of inclusion, and exclusion in philosophical discussion. The second section, focusing on the first part of this essays title, ‘Phenomenological futures in dispute’, locates three inflections of the notion of the future, in the context of an encounter between phenomenology and Marxism. The third section proposes two rewritings of the subtitle, in terms of thematics, as opposed to using proper names as indices for theoretical orientations. The first rewriting retrieves Heideggers notions of tradition, as both transmission and inheritance. This opens up a givenness of a futural horizon to alternating versions of futures; the second rewriting then offers modes of evaluating these alternating futures, in a contestation between a patriarchal, a differentiated, and a neutral mode of transmission. A fourth section raises some further questions of methodology, indicating the manner in which a rethinking of religion and of theology returns within phenomenology. In an inconclusive summary, the paper returns to the point of departure, the first version of a relation of non-relation, in a disputed connection to be set out between philosophy, a politics of exclusion, and psychoanalytical accounts of political investment. The paper seeks to locate a relation of non-relation, both in the failed encounters between Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy, with respect to phenomenology and its futures, and in the re-emergence, as non-relation, of the formative function within phenomenology of religious precursors, preconditions and commitments.

Phenomenologies of Faith and Hope

What has this statement from Paul’s Epistle to the Corinthians to do with phenomenology? That is my question, and I shall frame my response to it primarily in terms of Heidegger’s take on phenomenology, for it is Heidegger who, in 1921, lectures on the Epistles of St. Paul, if not on those to the Corinthians, and it is Heidegger for whom the subordination of eternity to a temporality of finitude is an issue. My understanding is that his attempt to mobilise elements from a phenomenology of religious life, for the construction of an analytics of finitude in Being and Time, requires him to succeed in separating off a finite time of phenomenological experience, from the non-finite time of the object of theology, divinity, in which attempt the writing of that text founders. I am, however, also intrigued by the impact on Husserl, of his conversion to Christianity, which I think has to be taken as more than simply a token gesture. The question then would be whether Husserl’s exposure to the question of faith, as distinctive of Christianity among religions, and to a distinction between Offenbarung (the revelation of divinity to human beings) and Enthüllung (the revealing of what is at first concealed to human beings), has any role in the articulation of phenomenology, as the interrogation of that which is implicitly contained within the formal indications of pre-predicative experience. The transformation of the Kantian question of experience into the Heideggerian notion of facticity goes by way of Husserl’s notion of the primacy of sensory givenness, which Husserl, with the aid of Landgrebe, reworks in Experience and Judgment (1938) as the notion of the prepredicative. Heidegger’s studies of religious texts facilitate this transformation, and the status of the latter, the emergence of the notion of facticity, may turn out to depend on the validity of the studies of religious texts. As is well known, Heidegger offers the analysis of facticity as the site for registering a givenness of states of affairs in the world to Dasein, determinate existence, in place of Husserl’s earlier descriptive account of the givenness of what there is in intuition, and in place of Husserl’s later transformation of that notion of intuition in the descriptions of the priority of pre-predicative experience. This transition from a description of what is given, to an analysis of existence definitively cuts phenomenology loose from any residual positivism or naturalism. It also constructs an obstacle to any re-appropriation of

Husserl, Freud, A Suivre: Derrida on Time

That which seems, then, to make the belonging – a belonging without interiority – of death to pleasure more continuous, more immanent, and more natural too, also makes it more scandalous as concerns a dialectics or a logic of opposition, of position, or of thesis. There is no thesis of this differance. The thesis would be the death sentence of differance. The syntax of this arrêt de mort, which arrests death in two differant senses (a sentence which condemns to death and an interruption suspending death), will be in question elsewhere (in Survivre, forthcoming).1

Derrida’s Specters: Futurity, Finitude, Forgetting

Derrida’s text, Specters of Marx (1994) carries a triple sub-title, the structure of which is worthy of more attention than so far has been given to it. The sub-title invokes the State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. The intent of these remarks is to open out a discussion of these both as distinct elements, and as a single structure. The intent of this paper is to relocate the discussion of Marx and his New International back into the analyses of temporality invoked in the notions of debt and mourning, of the gift and the transmission of identity across actual deaths in the continuity, the ‘survivre’, the survival or living on, which is constituted in the rituals of mourning. The remarks in this paper are designed to re-situate Derrida’s analysis of futurity, of an ‘a-venir’, of the ‘to-come’, as a modification of and challenge both to Heidegger’s insistence on the priority of the future, over past and present, and to Levinas’ dedication of what there is to his god, in an ‘a-dieu’, in relation to an emphasis on finitude and on forgetting.

Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Kant and Derrida

This paper considers a need to combine discussions of an affect, or affects called terror, of political events, known as terroristic, and of the adoption of political strategies, called terrorism. The method of phenomenology, as one in which distinct temporal characteristics are made salient is suggested to have much to contribute. The writings of Kant, of Arendt and of Derrida are considered, as given in the mode of futurity; and a posthumous status is assigned especially to the thought of Kant, as not yet fully developed and received.

Queering Hegel: three incisions

The selection of this citation from Feuerbach is designed to suggest that a certain Young Hegelianism, in its dispute over the Hegelian inheritance with more strictly scholarly readings, has already queered Hegel, long before other more obviously queer candidates for the task and the honor can come on the scene: Michel Foucault, for example, or indeed Judith Butler. The embodiment of the philosopher, the diversity of human embodiments queers the model of abstract absolute reason. The writings of Derrida might seem as unlikely a source for a queering Hegel as those of Feuerbach. Certainly, the trajectory of Specters ofMtzrx, The State of the Debt, the Work of ‘Mourning and the New International (1993), of Politics of Friendship (1994), and of Rogues: Two Essays on Reason (2001)3 looks rather more like an intervention within and on the margins of political theory and political economy, than like contributions to the increasingly sophisticated discussions of gender and queer theory. The argument to be developed here, however, will follow a return from these more recent writings of Jacques Derrida, to propose a re-reading of Glas: What Remains of Absolute Knowing (1974).4 This is designed to demonstrate the radical nature of Derrida’s rethinking of politics, and thereby to demonstrate that this text from 1974 affects at least the first stage of queering Hegel.

Jacques Derrida: 1930–2004 a Critical Appreciation

The name of Nietzsche is perhaps today, for us in the West, the name of someone who (with the possible exceptions of Freud and, in a different way, Kierkegaard) was alone in treating both philosophy and life, the science and the philosophy of life, with his name and in his name. He has perhaps been alone in putting his name – his names – and his biographies on the line, running thus most of the risks this entails: for “him”, for “them”, for his lives, his names and their future, and particularly for the political future of what he left to be signed. How can one avoid taking all this into account when reading these texts? One reads only by taking it into account. To put one’s name on the line (with everything a name involves and which cannot be summed up in a self) to stage signatures, to make an immense bio-graphical paraph out of all that one has written on life or death – this is perhaps what he has done and what we have to put on active record. Not so as to guarantee him a return, a profit. In the first place, he is dead – a trivial enough piece of evidence, but incredible enough when you get right down to it and when the name’s genius or genie is still there to make us forget the fact of his death. At the very least, to be dead means that no profit or deficit, no good or evil, whether calculated or not, can ever return again to the bearer of the name. Only the name can inherit, and this is why the name, to be distinguished from the bearer, is always and a priori a dead man’s name, a name of death. What returns to the name never returns to the living. Nothing ever comes back to the living.” (Derrida 1985, pp. 6-7)

Why Aesthetics Might be Several

Art disengages the senses from signification, or rather, it disengages the world from signification, and that is what we call Òthe sensesÓ when we give to the (sensible, sensuous) senses the sense of being external to signification. But it is what one might just as correctly name the Òsense of the worldÓ. The sense of the world as suspension of signification Ð but we now understand that such a ÒsuspensionÓ is touch itself. Nancy, The Muses 222