Apparitions-Of Derrida's Other (Perspectives in Continental Philosophy)
Kas Saghafi
Language: English
Pages: 200
ISBN: 0823231631
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The chapters of this book revolve around the notion of the other in Jacques Derrida's work. How does Derrida write of and on the other? Arguing that Derrida offers the most attentive and responsible thinking about the undeniable experience of the alterity of the other,Apparitions--of Derrida's Other examines exemplary instances of the relation to the other--the relation of Moses to God, Derrida's friendship with Jean-Luc Nancy, Derrida's relation to a recently departed actress caught on video, among others--to demonstrate how Derrida forces us to reconceive who or what the other may be. For Derrida, the singularity of the other, always written in the lower case, includes not only the formal or logical sense of alterity, the otherness of the human other, but also the otherness of the nonliving, the no longer living, or the not yet alive. The book explores welcoming and hospitality, salutation and greeting, approaching,and mourning as constitutive facets of the relation to these others. Addressing Derrida's readings of Husserl, Levinas, Barthes, Blanchot, and Nancy, among other thinkers, and ranging across a number of disciplines, including art, literature, philosophy, and religion, this book explores the apparitions of the other by attending to the mode of appearing or coming on the scene, the phenomenality and visibility of the other. Analyzing some of Derrida's essays on the visual arts, the book also demonstrates that video and photography display an intimate relation to spectrality,as well as a structural relation to the absolute singularity of the other.
which ever increases the neutrality of the other [l’autre] . . . even though it is the very disorder of conceptuality” (ED 154/104–105). Next, in a difficult passage, Derrida highlights the relation of Autrui to heteron, the Greek genre or category of alterity relative to a point or term: We should have to examine patiently [Il faudrait réfléchir patiemment] what emerges in language when the Greek thought of heteron seems to run out of breath [semble s’essoufler] when faced by the alter-huic, seems
Press, 1996. Maurice Blanchot, L’arrêt de mort. Paris: Gallimard, 1948. Translated by Lydia Davis as Death Sentence. Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1978. Maurice Blanchot, L’amitié. Paris: Gallimard, 1971. Translated by Elizabeth Rottenberg as Friendship. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997. Maurice Blanchot, L’attente l’oubli. Paris: Gallimard, 1962. Translated by John Gregg as Awaiting Oblivion. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997. Jacques Derrida, Apories. Paris:
190/110) The third and the face so thoroughly belong to each other that “it is as if the unicity of the face were, in its irrecusable and absolute singularity, a priori plural” (A 190/110; emphasis added). It is as if the face in its singularity always bore the trace of others, as if the face-to-face already belonged to the domain of “the political.” In the remarkable passage that follows, Derrida argues for an unprecedented hospitality—a notion that has been the subject of much misunderstanding
this distance without mediation and without community, and even in sustaining the infinite distance of distance— its irreprocity, its irrectitude or dissymmetry” (EI 566/386). The neutre is precisely this greatest or infinite distance where dissymmetry governs. Moreover, “neutral speech [la parole neutre]” does not reveal or conceal; its signification is not in the manner of illuminating or obscuring, thus it falls outside the regimes of the visible and the invisible (EI 566/386).39 The
hostile flavor, being applied to an “enemy.” 25. Henri Joly, Etudes platoniciennes: La question des étrangers (Paris: J. Vrin, 1992). For a discussion of the role of foreigners in Plato’s dialogues, see also Pierre Vidal-Naquet, “La société platonicienne des dialogues,” in La démocratie grecque vue d’ailleurs (Paris: Flammarion, 1990). 26. It is often the Greek word épēlus that is rendered into French as “arrivant.” It refers to the nonautochthonous, the immigrant, the invader (l’ intrus).