Encounters possible and impossible: Derrida and Butler on mourning

Philosophy Today

Volumn 50, Issue SUPPLEMENT, 2006, Pages 144-155

  Ziarek, Ewa Plonowska ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY AT BUFFALO   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60949659905     PISSN: 00318256     EISSN: 00318256     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5840/philtoday200650supplement17     Document Type: Article

References (29)

1. Jacques Derrida, Memories for Paul de Man, rev. ed., trans. Cecile Lindsay et al. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 32
2. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 135
3. For Derrida's deconstruction of the distinction between mourning and melancholia, see for instance, Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 1977)
4. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 194-204
5. Derrida, Memories for Paul de Man, 6
6. Sigmund Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia," trans. Joan Riviere, in General Psychological Theory, ed. Philip Rieff (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991), 166
7. Sigmund Freud, "Negation," in General Psychological Theory, 216
8. Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia," 177
9. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 229-30
10. Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, 142
11. Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, trans. Joan Riviere (New York: Norton, 1960), 23
12. Freud, The Ego and the Id, 35
13. Such self-criticism is offered in Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Forham University Press, 2005), 14-16. As she writes, "in The Psychic Life of Power, I perhaps too quickly accepted this punitive scene of inauguration for the subject" (15). One of the ways this "punitive scene of inauguration" is complicated is through the account of the address and exposure to the other - that is, through the account of that which "I cannot give an account of" (35)
14. For a critique of the phallogocentrism of the three main traditions of friendship - the Greek, Christian, and the secular one of the Enlightenment - see, for example Derrida, Politics of Friendship, 263-94. As Derrida argues, it is the authority of the brother that dominates the history and the philosophy of friendship (293)
15. For the account of Klein's depressive position as the separation from the mother and the entry into language, see Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 31-69
16. The structure of haunting and its relation to temporality "out of joint," to the non-contemporaneity of the present time with itself, is more fully elaborated in Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 3-48
17. Judith Butler, Antigone's Claim: Kinship between Life and Death (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 66-67
18. Derrida, The Work of Mourning, trans. and ed. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 234-41.48
19. For an excellent discussion of Derrida's critique of "beautiful death" in the context of the state regulation of mourning and the contemporary political consequences of this critique see Michael Naas, "History's Remains, Of Memory, Mourning, and the Event, Research in Phenomenology 33 (2003): 76-84. Naas points out how already in Plato's philosophy mourning is a political issue, regulated by the state for the purpose of "consolidating the body politic" (83)
20. Butler, Antigone's Claim, 80
21. The limitations of this essay make it impossible to do justice to the richness of this debate on post-Hegelian politics of recognition in feminist, political, and poststructuralist philosophies. For the application of the politics of recognition (recognition understood in the second sense, as recognition and respect for cultural distinctiveness) to multiculturalism, see Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism and "The Politics of Recognition," (Princeton: Princeton Univeristy Press, 2001)
22. For the socialist revision of the politics of recognition, see Nancy Fraser, who argues for combining "cultural politics of difference" with "the social politics of equality," or politics of recognition with the politics of redistribution. Justice Interruptus: Critical reflections on the "Post Socialist Condition," (New York: Routledge, 1997), 12
23. And finally for the ethical critique of recognition, see Kelly Oliver, Witnessing Beyond Recognition (Mineapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), who argues for the replacement of the primacy of recognition by the politics of witnessing
24. For the useful distinction between two main forms of recognition, the democratic recognition of equality and equal rights of other people, on the one hand, and the recognition of cultural dinstinctivness ("difference") and equal worth, see Lawrence Blum, "Recognition, Value, Equality," in Cynthia Willett, ed., Theorizing Multiculturalism: A Guide to the Current Debate (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 75-79
25. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, (London: Verso, 2004), 29-30
26. As Derrida argues, Paul de Man "sees in Hegelianism a specific allegory; not, as is often believed, the allegory of synthesizing and reconciliatory power, but that of disjunction, dissociation, and discontinuity" (ibid., 74)
27. G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford University Press, 1975), 1:399-400
28. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1977), 233
29. Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 37. The spectrality of discourse is implied in Butler's discussion of the function of life and death in the discourse purporting to give an account of onself: "the account of myself that I give in discourse never fully expresses or carries this living self (ibid., 36)