Concentric: Studies in English Literature and Linguistics

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://rportal.lib.ntnu.edu.tw/handle/20.500.12235/219

Browse

Subject: search.filters.subject.Derrida

Search Results

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
  • No Thumbnail Available
    Item
    Managing the Unmanageable: Agamben’s The Kingdom and the Glory and the Dance of Political Economy
    (英語學系, 2014-09-??) Anthony Curtis Adler
    While The Kingdom and the Glory addresses the specifically economic dimension of modern biopolitical forms of governmentality, it goes even farther than earlier volumes of Homo Sacer in obscuring the specific dynamic of modern capitalism. Rather than simply challenging Giorgio Agamben’s conclusions from an external perspective, the following paper proposes an immanent, “deconstructive” critique, showing that Agamben’s neglect of the problem of “economic value,” and of its close filiation to the circular movement of glory, is intimately related to his attempt, through the signature, to effectively neutralize the Derridean play of the signifier. While Agamben introduces the signature alongside the example as a second, economic-theological rather than political-theological paradigm for understanding paradigmicity as such, he seeks to stabilize the relation between the two. Contesting such stabilization, this paper develops a logic of surplementarity, positing the impossibility of keeping the “play of the signature” from disrupting the ideality of semantic value. Special attention will be given to Agamben’s tendency, neglecting the relation between oikonomia and dance, to identify the “acclamatory” aspect of glory with song alone. Thus he seeks to understand the economy as ordering into unison, rather than as a more complex, differential relation of singularities. This goes hand in hand with the failure to address the graphic, chrematistic dimension of modern capitalism. But it is ultimately when, turning to Hölderlin, he stresses the “national” essence of poetry, that the full consequences of his suppression of dance emerge. Attending to the role of dance in Hölderlin will nevertheless suggest another way to think the glorious economy.
  • No Thumbnail Available
    Item
    On Violence, Justice and Deconstruction
    (英語學系, 2003-01-??) Chung-hsiung Lai
    In this paper, I will first explore the chiasmus relation between violence and metaphysics in the thought of Levinas1 and Derrida. Then, I will move to examine “the aporia2 of justice” in Derrida’s reinterpretation of Benjamin’s critique of violence with respect to law-making and law-preserving. Finally, by problematizing the aporia of deconstruction, I will attempt to provide a critique of Derrida’s “Plato’s Pharmacy” in order to place Derrida’s ethical account of deconstruction under erasure. My core contention is: if de- construction is, as Derrida claims, ethical and just, it must be unethical and unjust in the first place in what he calls an “economy of violence.” Violence per se lies at the heart of both deconstructive justice and injustice. Yet, to achieve the former, the latter paradoxi- cally must be accomplished first—a betrayal which functions as the condition of possibility and thus of impossibility of deconstructive justice—thereby making the very moment of deconstructive decision an anxious and painful experience of aporia, or in Kierkegaard’s phrase, “a moment of madness.”
  • No Thumbnail Available
    Item
    The Writing of the Dionysian
    (英語學系, 2001-01-??) Tsu-chung Su
  • No Thumbnail Available
    Item
    Derrida and the Problem of Ethics
    (英語學系, 2003-01-??) Shyh-jen Fuh
    An increasing number of literary critics and theorists have come to investigate Derri- da’s contribution to ethics in recent years. This trend both challenges an earlier tendency to attack Derrida for being ethically irrelevant and complicates the discussion of the relationship between deconstruction and ethics. In response to the on-going debates over the ethical significance of Derrida’s works, this paper attempts to trace the relationship between Levinas and Derrida with regard to the thinking or problematizing of ethics: while Levinas foregrounds ethics as “first philosophy,” seeing the ethical relation as a fundamental openness to the other that precedes subjective being, Derrida—seeing de- constructive “reading” as an opening out of the text (of “writing”)—is aware of the danger (and perhaps impossibility) of clearly “naming” that which is “ethics” (or “ethic- al”), as well as the need to be open to its “possibilities.” My contention then is that, if Levinas’s ethics involves moving beyond the totality of being to the infinity of otherness, deconstruction is simultaneously ethical and non-ethical, exceeding incessantly the boundary of the ethical.