fuckyeahDerrida

"Voyager avec! With me? With me, really? You're joking! I'm trusting but I expect the worst, I can't predict a thing. Isn't that what travelling is all about? Is it viable, pathworthy? Isn't it impossible?"

[fuckyeahjacques]

If right or law stems from justice or vengeance, as Hamlet seems to complain that it does [...] can one not yearn for a justice that one day, a day belonging no longer to history, a quasi-messianic day, would finally be removed from the fatality of vengeance?

Specters of Marx (Trans. Peggy Kamuf)

[fuckyeahjacques]

Juliet says to him: Why are you Romeo? She knows it: detachable and dissociable, aphoristic though it be, his name is his essence. Inseparable from his being. And in asking him to abandon his name, she is no doubt asking him to live at last, and to live his love (for in order to live oneself truly, it is necessary to elude the law of the name, the familial law made for survival and constantly recalling me to death), but she is just as much asking him to die, since his life is his name.

"23", Aphorism Countertime (Trans. Nicholas Royle)

[fuckyeahjacques]

Even if the name of the other does not appear, it is there, it swarms and maneuvers, sometimes it howls, and it becomes all the more authoritarian. It is better to be aware of it and to say it. And besides, other people are so much more interesting. In whom should we be interested otherwise, tell me? In ourselves?

A Certain Madness must Watch over Thinking (trans. Denise Egéa-Kuehne)

[sexistentialisms]

For me, there is always, and I believe that there must be more than one language, mine and that of the other (I am greatly simplifying) and I must try to write in such a way that my language does not make the language of the other suffer [souffrir],that he/she puts up with me [me souffre] without suffering [sans souffrir] [because of it], receives the hospitality of my language without losing or integrating himself/herself in it.

Jacques Derrida, A Certain ‘Madness’ Must Watch Over Thinking (via sexistentialisms)

[fuckyeahjacques]

To write is to know that what has not yet been produced within literality has no other dwelling place, does not await us as prescription in some topos ouranios, or some divine understanding. Meaning must await being said or written in order to inhabit itself, and in order to become, by differing from itself, what it is: meaning. This is what Husserl teaches us to think in The Origin of Geometry. The literary act thus recovers its true power at its source... It is because writing is inaugural, in the fresh sense of the word, that it is dangerous and anguishing. It does not know where it is going, no knowledge can keep it from the essential precipitation toward the meaning that it constitutes and that is, primarily, its future. However, it is capricious only through cowardice. There is thus no insurance against the risk of writing.

Jacques Derrida, Force and Signification (trans. Alan Bass)

[fuckyeahjacques]

Paradoxical consequence of all phallocentrism: the hardworking and determining male sex enjoys mastery only in losing it, in subjugating itself to the feminine slave. The phallocentric hierarchy is a feminism: man submits dialectically to Femininity and Truth, both capitalised, making man the subject of woman.

Jacques Derrida - Glas, Hegel column (on the "sexual" appendix to Hegel's Philosophy of Nature)

[autohebung]

[“Invoking this name brings into play the future of God – God as the one ‘who sees (himself) coming” - Malabou] What can it possibly mean, here, ‘into play’? There would then be for God a more truthful name than God. There would be, in any case, a predicate that ‘would be more just’ in order to define the essence of God, the negative or the passive donation of form. Plasticity would be the best word for this donation. And to say this ‘future of God’ as ‘seeing (himself) coming’. So here is the question (and it is always, as in the word farewell, that of the name of God and of the ‘schema’ that we give it or that it gives itself, that we hear or pronounce this word ‘schema’ as we wish, in Greek or in Hebrew where it names the name and appeals to the appellation itself): if God is dead, is it an accident? Is he dead by accident? Such an accident, would he have seen it, and seen it come – or not? Would or could he have seen it come in this sense (foresight) or in this other sense (unexpectedness) of the plasticity inherent to the expression ‘to see (what is) coming’? If this accident becomes essential, the expression ‘to see (what is) coming’ would have been the future anterior of some sort of providence or of theodicy (the felix culpa is not very far, and it is a good example for the expression ‘to see (what is) coming’): no more explosive surprise, no more letting come, farewell to the future! For the future to have a future, and because God himself remains still to come, should not his death, if it has ever taken place, be purely accidental? Absolutely unpredictable and never re-appropriable, never re-essentializable, not even by some endless work of mourning, not even, and above all, by God himself? A God who would have, without ever seeing it come, let an infinite bomb explode in his hands, a God dead by some hopeless accident, hopeless of any salvation or redemption, without essentializing sublation, without any work of mourning and without any possible return or refund, would that be the condition of a future, if there must be such a thing called the future? The very condition for something to come, and even that of another God, of an absolute other God?

Jacques Derrida— Preface to Catherine Malabou’s The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic (via autohebung)

[fuckyeahjacques]

Grammatology must deconstruct everything that ties the concept and norms of scientificity to onto-theology, logocentrism, phonologism. This is an im-ense and interminable work that must ceaselessly avoid letting the transgression of the classical project of science fall back into a prescientific empiricism. This supposes a kind of double register in grammatological practice: it must simultaneously go beyond metaphysical positivism and scientism, and accentuate whatever in the effective work of science contributes to freeing it of the metaphysical bonds that have borne on its definition and its movement since its beginnings. Grammatology must pursue and consolidate whatever, in scientific practice, has always already begun to exceed the logocentric closure. This is why there is no simple answer to the question of whether grammatology is a "science." In a word, I would say that it inscribes and delimits science; it must freely and rigorously make the norms of science function in its own writing; once again, it marks and at the same time loosens the limit which closes classical scientificity.

Positions: An interview with Julia Kristeva (1968)

[fuckyeahjacques]

In uselessness (the uselessness of painting giving (itself) to be read (in) that of the shoes, the uselessness of the work (in) that of the product, and vice versa) the truth of the useful appears. It appears in the putting to work of the useless pro­duction. The putting to work of truth, Heidegger will say later. The truth of the useful, in other words the being-product of the product (at first sight) appears in the instance of the out­ of-service, in the unlacing and destricturation. So these are used, in that, for that. This movement of truth passes via the possibility of fetishization but ends up, if one can say that, only confirming the very thing it seems to efface. The truth of presentation, in its appearing, overloads uselessness with value, augments it with surplus value in attaching it symbolically to its belonging. The latter, a capital difference since it concerns the head of the subject, is not that of a proprietor­ subject, the holder or wearer of the shoes. It is not even that of some particular world, for example that of the peasant woman who is, precisely, only an example. It is, for any product and any usefulness, the earth and the world. The earth and the world, even if one must each time think them otherwise and in a singularly determinate way, in an opposition, a conflict or a war (of the earth and the world) . Heidegger will later relate to this his thinking concerning the trait and attraction [l' attrait] . The "truth" of the useful is not useful, the "truth" of the product is not a product. The truth of the product "shoe" is not a shoe- -But one could think the difference between being [l'etre] and the existent [l'etant] like the shoe, through it, in its step. And likewise the ontological difference: shod in painting.

Restitutions of the Truth in Pointing (1978)