Derrida And The Economy Of Differance

First published in 1967, Writing and Difference, a collection of Jacques Derrida's essays written between 1959 and 1966, has become a landmark of contemporary French thought. In it we find Derrida at work on his systematic deconstruction of Western metaphysics. The book's first half, which includes the celebrated essay on Descartes and Foucault, shows the development of Derrida's method of deconstruction. In these essays, Derrida demonstrates the traditional nature of some purportedly nontraditional currents of modern thought—one of his main targets being the way in which "structuralism" unwittingly repeats metaphysical concepts in its use of linguistic models. The second half of the book contains some of Derrida's most compelling analyses of why and how metaphysical thinking must exclude writing from its conception of language, finally showing metaphysics to be constituted by this exclusion. These essays on Artaud, Freud, Bataille, Hegel, and Lévi-Strauss have served as introductions to Derrida's notions of writing and différence—the untranslatable formulation of a nonmetaphysical "concept" that does not exclude writing—for almost a generation of students of literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. Writing and Difference reveals the unacknowledged program that makes thought itself possible. In analyzing the contradictions inherent in this program, Derrida foes on to develop new ways of thinking, reading, and writing,—new ways based on the most complete and rigorous understanding of the old ways. Scholars and students from all disciplines will find Writing and Difference an excellent introduction to perhaps the most challenging of contemporary French thinkers—challenging because Derrida questions thought as we know it.

A Society of the Friends of Difference would have to include Heraclitus, Nietzsche, Saussure, Freud, Adorno, Heidegger, Levinas, Deleuze, and Lyotard among its most prominent members. It is tempting to think of these figures as constituting a distinct philosophical tradition, one which would emphasize dissonance, separation, disparity, plurality, distinction, change, over against those who would continue the search for unity, identity, presence, permanence, foundations, structures, and essences.

Prodigiously influential, Jacques Derrida gave rise to a comprehensive rethinking of the basic concepts and categories of Western philosophy in the latter part of the twentieth century, with writings central to our understanding of language, meaning, identity, ethics and values. In 1993, a conference was organized around the question, 'Whither Marxism?’, and Derrida was invited to open the proceedings. His plenary address, 'Specters of Marx', delivered in two parts, forms the basis of this book. Hotly debated when it was first published, a rapidly changing world and world politics have scarcely dented the relevance of this book.

The virulent anti-Hegelianism of French poststructuralism and its (difficult) confrontation with Jürgen Habermas has long obscured the closeness of Jacques Derrida’s “différance” to Theodor W. Adorno’s “Nonidentical.” Taking the overarching theme of “identity and difference” as a guide, we can peel apart what unites and separates these two thinkers. In so doing, certain “de-realizing” effects of Derrida’s entrapment in signs reveal themselves. By contrast, Adorno’s social and cultural diagnosis, when extrapolated to a post-Fordian context is astonishingly fruitful. Attempts to trivialize negative dialectics as a model of intellectual self-understanding from a past age or as an esthetic reserve of ways of life are untenable.

Examines independent documentary film production in India within a political context.

Poststructuralists hold Hegel responsible for giving rise to many of modern philosophy's problematic concepts—the authority of reason, self-consciousness, the knowing subject. Yet, according to Simon Lumsden, this animosity is rooted in a fundamental misunderstanding of Hegel's thought, and resolving this tension can not only heal the rift between poststructuralism and German idealism but also point these traditions in exciting new directions. Revisiting the philosopher's key texts, Lumsden calls attention to Hegel's reformulation of liberal and Cartesian conceptions of subjectivity, identifying a critical though unrecognized continuity between poststructuralism and German idealism. Poststructuralism forged its identity in opposition to idealist subjectivity; however, Lumsden argues this model is not found in Hegel's texts but in an uncritical acceptance of Heidegger's characterization of Hegel and Fichte as "metaphysicians of subjectivity." Recasting Hegel as both post-Kantian and postmetaphysical, Lumsden sheds new light on this complex philosopher while revealing the surprising affinities between two supposedly antithetical modes of thought.

This volume collects and revises the key essays of Gunther Teubner, one of the world?s leading sociologists of law. Written over the past twenty years, these essays examine the?dark side? of functional differentiation and the prospects of societal constitutionalism as a possible remedy. Teubner?s claim is that critical accounts of law and society require reformulation in the light of the sophisticated diagnoses of late modernity in the writings of Niklas Luhmann, Jacques Derrida and select examples of modernist literature. Autopoiesis, deconstruction and other post-foundational epistemological and political realities compel us to confront the fact that fundamental democratic concepts such as law and justice can no longer be based on theories of stringent argumentation or analytical philosophy. We must now approach law in terms of contingency and self-subversion rather than in terms of logical consistency and rational coherence.

Labyrinths of Exemplarity presents the first comprehensive, in-depth study of the problem of exemplarity—or how we move between the general and the particular in order to try to understand our world. The author's focus ranges from the most basic and fundamental issues of what examples are and where they come from to the complex key issues of how examples function in the discourses they inhabit and what this functioning tells us about the nature of examples or exemplarity itself. The problem is treated especially in connection to Rousseau and Aristotle, with reference to deconstruction (especially Derrida) and the range of Western metaphysics. Ultimately, a new theory of examples is offered, one not drawn from the assumptions made by earlier philosophers but rather from the usage and functioning of examples in philosophical discourse.