Deconstruction without Derrida (Bloomsbury Studies in Continental Philosophy)

Deconstruction without Derrida (Bloomsbury Studies in Continental Philosophy)

Martin McQuillan

Language: English

Pages: 224

ISBN: 1472534301

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


The future of deconstruction lies in the ability of its practitioners to mobilise the tropes and interests of Derrida's texts into new spaces and creative readings. In Deconstruction without Derrida, Martin McQuillan sets out to do just that, to continue the task of deconstructive reading both with and without Derrida.

The book's principal theme is an attention to instances of deconstruction other than or beyond Derrida and thus imagining a future for deconstruction after Derrida. This future is both the present of deconstruction and its past. The readings presented in this book address the expanded field of deconstruction in the work of Jean-Luc Nancy, Helene Cixous, Paul de Man, Harold Bloom, J. Hillis Miller, Judith Butler, Gayatri Spivak and Catherine Malabou. They also, necessarily, address Derrida's own readings of this work. McQuillan accounts for an experience of otherness in deconstruction that is, has been and always will be beyond Derrida, just as deconstruction remains forever tied to Derrida by an invisible, indestructible thread.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Consequently, insofar as the shift from ‘we’ to ‘I’ can effectively be determined as the moment when the democratic mask falls down and when Robespierre openly asserts himself as a Master . . . the term Master has to be given here its full Hegelian weight: the Master is the figure of sovereignty, the one who is not afraid to die, who is ready to risk everything. In other words, the ultimate meaning of Robespierre’s firstperson singular (‘I’) is: I am not afraid to die. (xvii) At this point I am

(and those that we call ‘phenomenology’ in particular) are repeatedly and consistently caught up in and caught out by the assumption of the immediate material presence of the sense of touch. This account in relation to Nancy and so many others takes him some three hundred pages. It is curious then that having done precisely this ‘work’, touching on all the canonical touchstones, that in these seemingly fleeting paragraphs towards the end of the book he hails these ‘facts of the day’ (as Christine

risk.39 Thus, faith and belief are not so easily distinguished or necessarily tied to religion. Who can say, authentically, I believe literature and art can be distinguished from religion? Are the images that Nancy addresses in this book ‘art’ or are they ‘religion’? And why is that Modern literature and art are said to be essentially linked to the parable, while art and literature in general are to be distinguished from religion? Nancy should hear himself, as the English idiom puts it. This

cattle under the yoke, no ‘Frenchmen’ without wogs, no Nazis without Jews, no property without exclusion – an exclusion that has its limits and is part of the dialectic. If there were no other, one would invent it. Besides, that is what masters do: they have their slaves made to order. Line for line. They assemble the machine and keep the alternator supplied so that it produces all the oppositions that make economy and thought run. The paradox of otherness is that, of course, at no moment in

two deviations to make the point that Derrida’s deconstruction of Hegel’s Antigone in fact goes considerably further than Butler is prepared to do in her post-structuralism of kinship. Later he will say that ‘there is also no purely human family’ (170) because the family is always exceeded by the Divine and the animal. To return to the right hand column, two important points to note about the sister. First, that while through the sister femininity reaches the highest presentiment of the ethical

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