The Invention of Deconstruction

The Invention of Deconstruction PDF

Author: M. Currie

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2013-05-29

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 113730703X

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Why did deconstruction emerge when it did? Why did commentators in literary studies seem to need to look back on it from the earliest moments of its emergence? This book argues that the invention of deconstruction was spread across several decades, conducted by many people, and focused on its two central figures, Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man.

Inventions of Difference

Inventions of Difference PDF

Author: Rodolphe Gasché

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 1994

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 9780674464438

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Nine essays written over a dozen years explore problems of engaging the ideas of the contemporary French philosopher and their reception in the US. Deconstruction as criticism, the eclipse of difference, structural infinity, and responding responsibly are among the perspectives. Several of the essays have been previously published. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Deconstruction

Deconstruction PDF

Author: Gregory Jones-Katz

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2021-09-03

Total Pages: 379

ISBN-13: 022653619X

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The basic story of the rise, reign, and fall of deconstruction as a literary and philosophical groundswell is well known among scholars. In this intellectual history, Gregory Jones-Katz aims to transform the broader understanding of a movement that has been frequently misunderstood, mischaracterized, and left for dead—even as its principles and influence transformed literary studies and a host of other fields in the humanities. ? Deconstruction begins well before Jacques Derrida’s initial American presentation of his deconstructive work in a famed lecture at Johns Hopkins University in 1966 and continues through several decades of theoretic growth and tumult. While much of the subsequent story remains focused, inevitably, on Yale University and the personalities and curriculum that came to be lumped under the “Yale school” umbrella, Deconstruction makes clear how crucial feminism, queer theory, and gender studies also were to the lifeblood of this mode of thought. Ultimately, Jones-Katz shows that deconstruction in the United States—so often caricatured as a French infection—was truly an American phenomenon, rooted in our preexisting political and intellectual tensions, that eventually came to influence unexpected corners of scholarship, politics, and culture.

Essential History

Essential History PDF

Author: Joshua Kates

Publisher: Northwestern University Press

Published: 2005-11-11

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 0810123274

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However widely—and differently—Jacques Derrida may be viewed as a "foundational" French thinker, the most basic questions concerning his work still remain unanswered: Is Derrida a friend of reason, or philosophy, or rather the most radical of skeptics? Are language-related themes--writing, semiosis--his central concern, or does he really write about something else? And does his thought form a system of its own, or does it primarily consist of commentaries on individual texts? This book seeks to address these questions by returning to what it claims is essential history: the development of Derrida's core thought through his engagement with Husserlian phenomenology. Joshua Kates recasts what has come to be known as the Derrida/Husserl debate, by approaching Derrida's thought historically, through its development. Based on this developmental work, Essential History culminates by offering discrete interpretations of Derrida's two book-length 1967 texts, interpretations that elucidate the until now largely opaque relation of Derrida's interest in language to his focus on philosophical concerns. A fundamental reinterpretation of Derrida's project and the works for which he is best known, Kates's study fashions a new manner of working with the French thinker that respects the radical singularity of his thought as well as the often different aims of those he reads. Such a view is in fact "essential" if Derrida studies are to remain a vital field of scholarly inquiry, and if the humanities, more generally, are to have access to a replenishing source of living theoretical concerns.

Psyche

Psyche PDF

Author: Jacques Derrida

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 472

ISBN-13: 9780804747981

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A twenty-eight essay collection that is published in two volumes. This work includes translations of seminal essays such as "Psyche: Invention of the Other," "The Retrait of Metaphor," "At This Very Moment in This Work Here I Am," "Tours de Babel" and "Racism's Last Word"; as well as three essays that appear in English.

Burning with Desire

Burning with Desire PDF

Author: Geoffrey Batchen

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 1999-03-15

Total Pages: 294

ISBN-13: 9780262522595

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In an 1828 letter to his partner, Nicéphore Niépce, Louis Daguerre wrote, "I am burning with desire to see your experiments from nature." In this book, Geoffrey Batchen analyzes the desire to photograph as it emerged within the philosophical and scientific milieus that preceded the actual invention of photography. Recent accounts of photography's identity tend to divide between the postmodern view that all identity is determined by context and a formalist effort to define the fundamental characteristics of photography as a medium. Batchen critiques both approaches by way of a detailed discussion of photography's conception in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He examines the output of the various nominees for "first photographer," then incorporates this information into a mode of historical criticism informed by the work of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. The result is a way of thinking about photography that persuasively accords with the medium's undeniable conceptual, political, and historical complexity.

EPZ Deconstruction and Criticism

EPZ Deconstruction and Criticism PDF

Author: Harold Bloom

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2004-12-23

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 9780826476920

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Five essential and challenging essays by leading post-modern theorists on the art and nature of interpretation: Jacques Derrida, Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman, Paul de Man, and J. Hillis Miller.

Writing and Difference

Writing and Difference PDF

Author: Jacques Derrida

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2021-01-27

Total Pages: 363

ISBN-13: 0226816079

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First published in 1967, Writing and Difference, a collection of Jacques Derrida's essays written between 1959 and 1966, has become a landmark of contemporary French thought. In it we find Derrida at work on his systematic deconstruction of Western metaphysics. The book's first half, which includes the celebrated essay on Descartes and Foucault, shows the development of Derrida's method of deconstruction. In these essays, Derrida demonstrates the traditional nature of some purportedly nontraditional currents of modern thought—one of his main targets being the way in which "structuralism" unwittingly repeats metaphysical concepts in its use of linguistic models. The second half of the book contains some of Derrida's most compelling analyses of why and how metaphysical thinking must exclude writing from its conception of language, finally showing metaphysics to be constituted by this exclusion. These essays on Artaud, Freud, Bataille, Hegel, and Lévi-Strauss have served as introductions to Derrida's notions of writing and différence—the untranslatable formulation of a nonmetaphysical "concept" that does not exclude writing—for almost a generation of students of literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. Writing and Difference reveals the unacknowledged program that makes thought itself possible. In analyzing the contradictions inherent in this program, Derrida foes on to develop new ways of thinking, reading, and writing,—new ways based on the most complete and rigorous understanding of the old ways. Scholars and students from all disciplines will find Writing and Difference an excellent introduction to perhaps the most challenging of contemporary French thinkers—challenging because Derrida questions thought as we know it.

A Companion to Critical and Cultural Theory

A Companion to Critical and Cultural Theory PDF

Author: Imre Szeman

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2017-07-07

Total Pages: 608

ISBN-13: 1118472306

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This Companion addresses the contemporary transformation of critical and cultural theory, with special emphasis on the way debates in the field have changed in recent decades. Features original essays from an international team of cultural theorists which offer fresh and compelling perspectives and sketch out exciting new areas of theoretical inquiry Thoughtfully organized into two sections – lineages and problematics – that facilitate its use both by students new to the field and advanced scholars and researchers Explains key schools and movements clearly and succinctly, situating them in relation to broader developments in culture, society, and politics Tackles issues that have shaped and energized the field since the Second World War, with discussion of familiar and under-theorized topics related to living and laboring, being and knowing, and agency and belonging

Deconstruction and Democracy

Deconstruction and Democracy PDF

Author: Alex Thomson

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2005-02-15

Total Pages: 237

ISBN-13: 1847141439

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'No democracy without deconstruction': Deconstruction and Democracy evaluates and substantiates Derrida's provocative claim, assessing the importance of this influential and controversial contemporary philosopher's work for political thought. Derrida addressed political questions more and more explicitly in his writing, yet there is still confusion over the politics of deconstruction. Alex Thomson argues for a fresh understanding of Derrida's work, which acknowledges both the political dimension of deconstruction and its potential contribution to our thinking about politics. The book provides cogent analysis and exegesis of Derrida's political writings; explores the implications for political theory and practice of Derrida's work; and brings Derrida's work into dialogue with other major strands of contemporary political thought. Deconstruction and Democracy is the clearest and most detailed engagement available with the politics of deconstruction, and is a major contribution to scholarship on the later works of Jacques Derrida, most notably his Politics of Friendship.