Concentric: Studies in English Literature and Linguistics

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

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    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.”
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    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.