Raphael Zagury-Orly

The Future of Deconstruction: Beyond the Impossible

The “…limits of truth” – this passage, retrieved from Diderot’s Essay on the Life of Seneca, opens Jacques Derrida’s Aporias. With this expression, Derrida is not simply placing his reflection under the tutelage of a philosophical heritage, in this case that of Diderot’s and Seneca’s; but also pointing towards the unsettling, ambiguous and equivocal, nature of this tradition. The unsettling nature of this tradition means, as always for Derrida, the aporetic movement which incessantly punctuates any tradition. We shall see that, for Derrida, our own “Western” philosophical tradition– its concepts, motives, intentions and meanings – is always and already engaged in an aporetic movement, never simply resolving or accomplishing itself, never capable of limiting itself to what it manifests or presents itself as. It is thus persistently and incessantly supplementing its ownmost determinations. We must hence assert from the outset of this essay: Derrida does not, as does Hegel or even, to a certain extent, Heidegger, philosophize from a signified endpoint of metaphysical thought or history.

On Election: Levinas and the Question of Ethics as First Philosophy

Abstract The idea of ‘election’ cannot be approached, it seems, through traditional or classical philosophical conceptuality. This idea requires another type of discourse. Not simply because this idea refers to an entirely other body of texts, that of the Biblical tradition, but more radically since it commands another modality of thought which must at once suspend and pursue philosophical concepts to the point where they express themselves otherwise than according to the rationality of their own deployment. In truth, the idea of ‘election’ calls thus for a redefinition of the rapport between singularity and universality, one no longer structured and circumscribed by ‘truth’, but rather inspired by a novel and irreducible modality of ‘justice’. A ‘justice’ which opens to the possibility for an ‘ethics’, not as ‘communicative dialogue’, ‘mutual recognition’ or a series of established and rationally grounded laws, but a ‘place’ of incessant and irresolute, non-intentional and unconditional exposition to the Other.