'Genealogical misfortunes': Achille Mbembe's (re-)writing of postcolonial Africa

In his latest work, Sortir de la grande nuit, the Cameroonian social theorist, Achille Mbembe nuances his description of the ontological status of the postcolonial African subject, which he had theorized extensively in his best-known text, On the Postcolony, and at the same time exploits the conceptual resources of a number of Jean-Luc Nancy’s lexical innovations. This recent text is also a reprise of an earlier autobiographical essay, and the gesture of this ‘reinscription’ is critical to our understanding of Mbembe’s status as a contemporary ‘postcolonial thinker’, and the way in which he positions himself within a certain intellectual genealogy of postcolonial theory. Within this trajectory, I argue that we can read fruitfully his relationship to three influential figures: Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy and Ruben Um Nyobè

The Gift and the meaning-giving subject: A Reading of Given Time

In this essay the relation between justice and the gift in Derrida’s thinking is explored. The essay shows that an understanding of the ontological difference or the relation between Being and beings in Heidegger’s thinking as well as Freud’s speculations on the death drive are essential to comprehend the ‘concept’ or ‘notion’ of différance as well as the gift in Derrida’s thinking. The analysis points to the complexity of Derrida’s thinking in his contemplation of the relation between justice and law and the need for a broader investigation to understand what is at stake in this regard. An exploration of the gift shows that Derrida’s thinking on justice is not ‘relativistic’ as is often assumed and that the gift can in a certain way function as a ‘guide’ in questions of constitutional interpretation

The Logic of the ‘As If’ and the Existence of God: An Inquiry into the Nature of Belief in the Work of Jacques Derrida

The religious thematics at play in the work of Jacques Derrida have often provided an ongoing platform from which to struggle with the entire scope of his work, thus moving the seemingly peripheral discourses on religion within his oeuvre to the center stage. Despite repeated attempts to come to terms both theologically and philosophically with the conditional nature of representations, the problematics of representation are perhaps nowhere more forcefully demonstrated than in the work of Derrida. Indeed, for Derrida, the ‘as if’, as a regulative principle directly appropriated and modified from its Kantian context, becomes the central lynchpin for understanding, not only Derrida’s philosophical system as a whole, but also his numerous seemingly enigmatic references to his ‘jewishness’, as I intend to demonstrate in what follows. Through an analysis of the function of the ‘as if’ within the history of thought, from Greek tragedy to the poetry of Wallace Stevens, I hope to show how Derrida can only appropriate his Judaic roots as an act of mourning that seeks to render the lost object as present, ‘as if’ it were incorporated by the subject for whom this act nevertheless remains an impossibility. As Derrida discerns within the poetry of Paul Celan, bringing a sense of presence/presentness to our experiences, and as a confirmation of the subject which the human being struggles to assert, is the poetic task par excellence. It is seemingly also, if Derrida is to be understood on this point, the only option left to a humanity wherein poetry comes to express what religious formulations can no longer justify

Madness and the law: The Derrida/Foucault debate revisited

In this article the Derrida/Foucault debate is scrutinised with two closely related aims in mind: (1) reconsidering the way in which Foucault’s texts, and especially the more recently published lectures, should be read; and (2) establishing the relation between law and madness. The article firstly calls for a reading of Foucault which exceeds metaphysics with the security it offers, by taking account of Derrida’s reading of Foucault as well as of the heterogeneity of Foucault’s texts. The article reflects in detail on a text of Derrida on Foucault (‘Cogito and the History of Madness’) as well as a text of Foucault on Blanchot (‘Maurice Blanchot: The Thought from Outside’). The latter text shows that Foucault was at times acutely aware of the difficulty involved in exceeding metaphysics and that he realised the importance in this regard of a reflection on literature. These reflections tie in closely with Foucault’s History of Madness as well as with Derrida’s reflections on literature and on madness. Both Derrida and Foucault contend that law has much to learn from literature in understanding the relation between itself and madness. Literature more specifically points to law’s ‘origin’ in madness. The article contends that a failure to take seriously this origin, also in the reading of Foucault’s lectures, would amount to a denial by law of itself

Derrida's 'The Purveyor of Truth' and constitutional reading

In this article the author explores Jacques Derrida’s reading in ‘The Purveyor of Truth’ of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Purloined Letter’. In his essay, Derrida proposes a reading which differs markedly from the interpretation proposed by Lacan in his Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’. To appreciate Derrida’s reading, which is not hermeneutic-semantic in nature like that of Lacan, it is necessary to look at the relation of Derrida’s essay to his other texts on psychoanalysis, more specifically insofar as the Freudian death drive is concerned. The present article explores this ‘notion’ as elaborated on by Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle as well as Derrida’s reading of this text. It also investigates the importance of the ‘notion’ of the death drive as well as the significance of Derrida’s reading of The Purloined Letter for constitutional interpretation

The art of everyday haunting

peer-reviewedThe question of where ghosts live can hardly be addressed without speaking of a haunted house. This essay reads Don DeLillo s novel The Body Artist, in which there is a ghost called Mr. Tuttle who haunts the house of Lauren Hartke, the body artist, as a text grafted onto Jacques Derrida s Dissemination. The essay takes as its starting point the first words spoken in DeLillo s text, I want to say something but what , a quasi question directed to Lauren by her husband Rey, in order to ask if it can ever be said what lies on the other side of what , or if it remains forever unknowable, or unheard, at an infinite remove , even if it is one s self.  It is Rey s suicide, and Lauren s subsequent work of mourning, which locates DeLillo s phrase within the context of Derrida s efforts, again and again, to give words to those whose voices are absent: the lost friend, the other self, the dead. To Lauren s question, What am I supposed to say? Derrida replies, Speaking is impossible, but so too would be silence or absence . Through the ghostly form of Mr. Tuttle, DeLillo s work tells of the various mimetisms by which the silent speaker is heard and remembered.PUBLISHEDpeer-reviewe

Oligarchies: Naming, Enumerating Counting

The following text is the first chapter of Jacques Derrida’s book Politiques de l’amitié [The Politics of Friendship], being the exemplary and standard case of deconstruction, in this particular case, of philosophical texts (Cicero, Plato and, notably, Aristotle). The starting point for the discussion is the performative contradiction inscribed in the wellknown fragment On friendship from Essays by Michel de Montaigne: “O mes amis, il n’y a nul amy” (O my friends, there is no friend). Apparently, everything here is well-known and obvious, even the very notion of friendship, but as we proceed in the argument provided by Derrida, the obvious becomes less obvious to us and takes on new shades and hues in meaning, acquires new values. What is objective mixes in this fascinating argument with what is subjective. What is friendship? What is friendship today? Is friendship limited to just private sphere of interpersonal relations? The answer to the latter question is, according to Derrida, clearly negative. In the course of his argument he states: “There is no democracy without a community of friends”. This argument provides clues to understand a particular archeology of the notion, revealing oblique senses and contexts of the word “friendship”, its istory shown from the antiquity to the present day

Tempo e pena di morte. Un seminario triestino

During the seminar 'Time and Death penalty', which took place on November 14th 2000 in Triest's Department of Philosophy, Jacques Derrida presented a summary of his lectures of Paris and Irvine: 'Responsibility Problems. Forgiveness, Perjury and Death Penalty'. In Derrida's opinion the philosophical thought has never been - historically - against death penalty. Philosophy has either shown agreement towards its principle or it has remained silent. The aim of deconstruction is to confute the philosophical principles in favour of death penalty (in partucular the concept of sovereignity), therefore producing a philosophically relevant thought capable of facing such a complex and delicate ethical-political situation. For this purpose Derrida relates the issue of reason to the issue of a 'supernatural world', in which the philosophical responsibility of a different form of reasoning is located. The obvious and immediate comparison is with Kant's position, whose inner contradictions are closely analysed by Derrida. The second reference is the psychoanalytical tradition, which Derrida profusely uses in order to show the equivocal nature of concepts such as 'cruelty' and 'exception' that characterise the juridical and political discourse on death penalty; opaque concepts which constitute its hidden foundation