Vivian Nun Halloran, Performative Mourning: Remembering Derrida Through (Re)reading

○ Abstract: This essay argues that because he recognized that the death of a friend brought about the end of reciprocity inherent within friendship, Derrida turns to (re)reading his dead friends’ texts to publicly perform the work of mourning in The Work of Mourning and The Gift of Death. The essay analyzes Derrida’s performative (re)readings of Barthes’s, de Man’s, and Louis Marin’s texts about death and mourning to trace how much their collective thoughts on these themes shaped Derrida’s own thinking about the debt of mourning that friends owe one another.— vnh

Megan Kerr, Passions: A Tangential Offering

○ Abstract: I read Derrida’s “Passions: An Oblique Offering” in translation: enacting and defending this sentence creates a challenge to the new orthodoxies that there are no binaries in Derrida’s work, that the undecidable must remain so, that translating meaning is impossible, and that his secret is unknowable. In so doing, the sentence becomes a declaration of heresy and of love. Using “What Is A ‘Relevant’ Translation” and Richard Cytowic’s work on neuropsychology, this paper invokes passion and the khôra to refute Derrida’s theorizations of friendship, duty, politeness, morality, and invitations. These codes, it argues, are derivative hypotheses; the passions are chronologically and neurologically anterior, rather than in opposition. The problem of “comment répondre,” which seems to invite a similar refutation, returns to issues of translation: “how to respond” or “how to answer?” Drawing on the code/passions relationship, the signified and meaning are separated with meaning as the passions anterior to the code which are never fully translated by the code/signified. This proposes that Derrida’s “secret” is meaning, and that the more expotential meanings are opened up, the more the secret impassions us, for that is the point at which we can insert ourselves into the text. Translation is possible as a “reincarnation” of meaning which opens up such possibilities. —mk

Michael Marder, Sure Thing? On Things and Objects in the Philosophy of Jacques Derrida

○ Abstract: If there is anything that silently underlies the whole corpus of Derrida’s writings and, at the same time, tacitly dialogues with the Western philosophical tradition, it is the notion of the thing. But what is “thinghood” in Derridian philosophy? How does it differ from subjectivity on one hand and objectivity on the other? Under what conditions does it pass into and occupy the places of both subjects and objects? This paper takes up such questions, paying particular attention to the role “the thing” plays in ethics, aesthetics, and political economy.—mm

Jan Mieszkowski, Derrida, Hegel, and the Language of Finitude

○ Abstract: This article explores Jacques Derrida’s far-reaching challenge to the notion that introspection is the grounds of self-determination. Beginning with the claim of Hegel’s philosophy to anticipate any readings—or misreadings—with which we confront it, I focus on Derrida’s unique understanding of linguistic positing as both the ultimate dynamic of performance and the most systematic critique of any claim for the power of language to act. In Hegel’s Aesthetics, the self’s discursive nature is distinguished not by its auto-interpretive or auto-generative capacities, but by its failure to establish itself as the foundation of its own operations. From the perspective of what Derrida will describe as the experience of linguistic finitude, we find that similar problems arise in Aristotle—where reference to negation cannot be subsumed under a theory of something and nothing—and in Benjamin—for whom denomination ironically fails to serve as a comprehensive theory of what language can claim, i.e., name, as its own. From “White Mythology” to his latest texts, Derrida thus demands that we conceptualize verbal events less in terms of agents who act and more with reference to modalities of expression that are impossible to assimilate to traditional propositional logic. Revealing language to be a dynamic whose irreducibly limited resources are not unfailingly devoted to its own self-fashioning, Derrida’s oeuvre provides a vantage point from which to assess the ideological pitfalls of any theoretical project that would base its critical authority on...