Powell on Derrida’s notion of writing deconstructing subject,author,Being

“‘Force and Signification’ calls on Heidegger and Nietzsche, with Derrida’s own view of how writing constitutes meaning in the absence of its author. For him, a written text is one without author, while the world as a structure of interpretations is an interpretation without origin.Nietzsche wrote for others, and in others his meaning was realized, as his Zarathustra found in his down-going. Writing is the original Valley of the Other within Being, and it is from the Other that writing comes. This critique is applied to literary writing, for it, like Zarathustra, speaks to others, and makes a valley in the harsh inhuman landscape of Being, exiting Being as Holderlin’s poet exits Being, to join the god.” (54)

“In the Barthesian era of the death of the author, and birth of the text, and the reader, Derrida spoke of the trace-language, the Other, repetition as constitutive of meaning, but no ‘death of the author’. The end of the subject is only the reverse of the dominance of the subject and the mastery of meaning.” (55)

Derrida (Deconstructing Religion, Paradoxical Faith)

“For me, there is no such thing as ‘religion’. Within what one calls religions — Judaism, Christianity, Islam, or other religions — there are again tensions, heterogeneity, disruptive volcanos — sometimes texts, especially those of the prophets, which cannot be reduced to an institution, to a corpus, to a system. I want to keep the right to read these texts in a way which has to be constantly reinvented. It is something which can be totally new at every moment.

Then I would distinguish between religion and faith. If by religion you mean a set of beliefs, dogmas, or institutions — the church, e.g. — then I would say that religion as such can be deconstructed, and not only can be but should be deconstructed, sometimes in the name of faith. For me, as for you, Kierkegaard is here a great example of some paradoxical way of contesting religious discourse in the name of a faith that cannot be simply mastered or domesticated or taught or logically understood, a faith that is paradoxical.” (21-22)

(D.I.A.N)

Derrida (Citizenship, Hospitality, Heterogeneity, Justice, The Other)

(a “New International”): ” Not a new way of associating citizens belonging to given nation-states, but a new concept of citizenship, of hospitality, a new concept of the state, of democracy. In fact, it is not a new concept of democracy, but a new determination of the given concept of democracy, in the tradition of the concept of democracy.” (12)

“Of course, deconstruction — that has been its strategy up to now — insisted not on multiplicity for itself but on heterogeneity, the difference, the disassociation, which is absolutely necessary for the relation to the other. What disrupts the totality is the condition for the relation to the other. The privilege granted to unity, to totality, to organic ensembles, to community as a homogenized whole — this is a danger for responsibility, for decision, for ethics, for politics. That is why I insisted on what prevents unity from closing upon itself, fro being closed up.” (13)

“The identity of a culture is a way of being different from itself; a culture is different from itself; language is different from itself; the person is different from itself. Once you take into account this inner and other difference, then you pay attention to the other and you understand that fighting for your own identity is not exclusive of another identity, is open to another identity. And this prevents totalitarianism, nationalism, egocentrism, and so on … in the case of culture, person, nation, language, identity is a self-differentiating identity, an identity, different from itself, having an open gap within itself. That totally affects structure, but it is a duty, an ethical and political duty, to take into account this impossibility of being one with oneself. It is because I am not one with myself that I can speak with the other and address the other. That is not a way of avoiding responsibility. On the contrary, it is the only way for me to take responsibility and to make decisions.” (14)

“Once you grant some privilege to gathering and not to dissociating, then you leave no room for the other, for the radical otherness of the other, for the radical singularity of the other. I think, from that point of view, separation, dissociation is not an obstacle to society, to community, but the condition. Dissociation, separation, is the condition of my relation to the other. I can address the Other only to the extent that there is a separation, a dissociation, so that I cannot replace the other and vice versa.” (14)

“I cannot reach the other. I cannot know the other from the inside and so on. That is not an obstacle but the condition of love, of friendship, and of war, too, a condition of the relation to the other.” (14)

“You cannot calculate justice … justice is the relation to the other. That is other. Once you relate to the other as the other, then something incalculable comes on the scene, something which cannot be reduced to the law or to the history of legal structures. That is what gives deconstruction its movement, that is, constantly to suspect, to criticize the given determinations of culture, of institutions, of legal systems, not in order to destroy them or simply to cance them, but to be just with justice, to respect this relation to the other as justice.” (18)

Powell on Derrida’s Archi-writing, Word, World, Traces, Differance)

“Derrida does not mean ‘ordinary writing’ , such as one carries out everyday, but archi-writing, which uses ‘writing’ only as a quasi-metaphor … the most direct way of broaching the issue of the spectrality of the body, of ideas, of authors, and of readers … Derrida’s theory of what words are — that is, that they are ‘traces’ — has, as is well known, an uncanny resemblance to Heidegger’s formulation of words and poetry … in which the word is ‘sent’ , ‘posted’ , destined, and in which the word is the means by which the world is created and ruled by its Origin (Anfang); the purpose of the word is to divide the world into its fourfold unity, with a word which divides and binds. It is clear that this is not a ‘philosophy of language’, but a philosophy of the divisive unity of the world, which is affected by time, and the historical pathway of man, and in which language is constitutive of how Being is broken up. Words are essential to it because poetry and philosophy have to use words.” (50)

” … the idea of revaluating the dismissed and forbidden part of a binary set of concepts … ” (51)

“Derrida never sided with the opposite pole of a binary set, but always got to the place which superseded them — in this case the fact that they were different, and that the truest essence of language, differance (the absence within presentness) was hidden beneath the opposition.” (51)

“Derrida’s new notion was to find this imposed settlement on the play to be an imposition, underneath which was a reality which is never secure, but is ghostly. the ghost reality is constituted by traces, not words, difference, not meaning. (51)

“the problematic of writing emerged and was bound to the irreducible structure of the deferrer in its relationships to consciousness, science, history of science, the disappearance or deferral of the origin.” (51)

 

Derrida (Deconstruction on the inside, Greek origins of Christianity, the West)

 

“Deconstruction is not a method or some tool that you apply to something from the outside. Deconstruction is something which happens and which happens inside.”

“We have to go back constantly to the Greek origin, not in order to cultivate the origin, or in order to protect the etymology, the etymon, the philological purity of the origin, but in order first of all where we came from. Then we have to analyze the history and the historicity of the breaks which have produced our current world out of Greece, for instance, out of Christianity, out of this origin, and breaking and transforming this origin, at the same time. So there is this tension.” (10)

(D.I.A.N.)

Derrida (Affirmative Deconstruction of Institutions, Interdisciplinarity)

“However affirmative deconstruction is, it is affirmative in a way that is not simply positive, not simply conservative, not simply a way of repeating the given institution. I think that the life of an institution implies that we are able to criticize, to transform, to open the institution to its own future. The paradox in the instituting moment of an institution is that, at the same time that it starts something new, it also continues something, is true to the memory of the past, to a heritage, to something we receive from the past, from our predecessors, from the culture. If an institution is to be an institution, it must to some extent break with the past, keep the memory of the past, while inaugurating something absolutely new.” (6)

“That is what deconstruction is made of: not the mixture but the tension between memory, fidelity, the preservation of something that has been given to us, and, at the same time, heterogeneity, something absolutely new, and a break. The condition of this performative success, which is never guaranteed, is the alliance of these to newness.” (6)

“There should be philosophy across the borders, not only in philosophy proper, but in other fields, such as law, medicine, and so forth.”

“… we need at the same time interdisciplinarity, crossing the borders, establishing new themes, new problems, new ways, new approaches to new problems, all the while teaching the history of philosophy, the techniques, professional rigor, what one calls discipline”

“… audacious philosophers who cross the borders and discover new connections, new fields, not only interdisciplinary researches but themes that are not even interdisciplinary.” (7)

“When you discover a new object, an object that up until now has not been identified as such, or has no legitimacy in terms of academic fields, then you have to invent a new competency, a new type of research, a new discipline.” (8)

“I try to dismantle not institutions but some structures in given institutions which are too rigid or are dogmatic or which work as an obstacle to future research.” (8)

(D.I.A.N.)

Powell On Derrida’s Unconscious

“Derrida’s vision of the true Unconscious as a really pure ‘unknown’ was stronger than Freud’s, but his vision of what constitutes a self, or the psyche, was to become, especially in Of Grammatology, quite Freudian, picturing it as a set of forces and traces, but written, archived ones rather machine-like. a process in which the self, the whole psyche, is seen to be specialized, shot through with traces, rather than substantial and whole.” (33)

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Powell on Derrida’s trace/ghost

“Every ‘thing’ which exists does so only in a distant manner, as if it were a ghost itself.”

“Derrida’s reason for pointing out that all writing is trace, each public person a ghost, and each tradition a history of spectres, is that for each ghost there is the promise of something truly real. The truly real is not in a distinct realm, however, but it a promise which the ghostly existent thing holds out, the promise of a purer version, a non-existent, better version of itself, which is hoped for, but not to be realized.”

“This means that it is very rare that a real ‘event’ ever takes place. In such a technological world (and deconsrtuction is also an attempt to reform technology), most existent things are therefore just spectres of what they could be, and we must await the truer coming of things.” (4)