Derrida, Europe, today

South Atlantic Quarterly

Volumn 106, Issue 2, 2007, Pages 373-392

  Redfield, Marc ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 60950556511     PISSN: 00382876     EISSN: 15278026     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00382876-2006-028     Document Type: Review

References (37)

1. Jacques Derrida, "L'Europe de l'espoir," Le Monde diplomatique, November 2004: www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2004/11/DERRIDA/11677, my translation. A curtailed and inaccurate English version, "Enlightenment Past and to Come," may be accessed at www.mondediplo.com/2004/11/06derrida.
2. Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Today's Europe, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael B. Naas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 76.
3. That is to say, my essay takes up the peculiar, though in the end I think useful, task of addressing "a paradoxical reader who is supposed not to know anything about Derrida but who is yet imagined able to pick up Derrida's thought in condensed form," as Geoffrey Bennington puts it in Interrupting Derrida (London: Routledge, 2000), 2.
4. 1 cite a few token instances of hostile writing about Derrida in a subsequent note. There is also, of course, an ever-increasing store of very good writing about Derrida; on the specifically political dimension of his thought, see for example (to mention only book-length studies) Richard Beardsworth, Derrida and the Political (London: Routledge, 1996);
5. Geoffrey Bennington, Legislations: The Politics of Deconstruction (London: Verso, 1994);
6. and Alex Thomson, Deconstruction and Democracy: Derrida's Politics of Friendship (London: Continuum, 2005).
7. This is the moment for me to regret that I encountered Michael Naas's fine memorial essay for Derrida, "A Last Call for 'Europe,'" Theory & Event 8:1 (2005), only after my own essay was written; luckily the redundancies do not seem crippling.
8. Jacques Derrida, Paper Machine, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 131.
9. Compare a similar point stressed in Derrida's improvised comments in December 1996, during a demonstration in support of the "sans- papiers": this is "a time when everything is being closed everywhere, when every door is being bolted shut, every port, every airport is tightening its nets, when the nation-states of Europe, especially France, are turning their borders into new iron curtains." Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971-2001, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 134.
10. Jacques Derrida, Of Crammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 4, 6, 9.
11. On sovereignty, see especially Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005).
12. For Derrida's most extensive meditation on democracy and the idea of democracy-to-come, see Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 1997).
13. Edmund Husserl, "Philosophy and the Crisis of European Humanity," in The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 273-75. The "Vienna Lecture" of May 7 and 10, 1935, precedes by six months the lecture series in Prague on which Husserl's Crisis was based.
14. I stress in principle: in practice (and for reasons that outstrip the difference between principle and practice, and have to do with the deep affinities between modern racism and the language of spirit), the mark of racial identity usually intervenes all the more violently in the wake of "Europeanization." The literature on racism in relation to European "culture" is vast: two relevant touchstones here would be Frantz Fanon's classic Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lamm Markmann (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1968);
15. and (fora helpful meditation specifically on racism and spirit) Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Nazi Myth," trans. Brian Holmes, Critical Inquiry 16 (1990).
16. Jacques Derrida, The Problem of Genesis in Husserl's Philosophy, trans. Marian Hobson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 154-55.
17. Jacques Derrida, Edmund Husserl's "Origin of Geometry": An Introduction, trans. John P. Leavey Jr. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 106. Subsequent citations are given parenthetically by page number in the text.
18. Rodolphe Gasché, The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986).
19. Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 54. Subsequent citations are given parenthetically by page number in the text.
20. Derrida, Introduction to Husserl's Origin of Geometry, 149.
21. Husserl, Crisis, 270.
22. Derrida, Rogues, 127. Subsequent citations are given parenthetically by page number in the text.
23. Derrida, The Other Heading, 27.
24. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The Slate of the Debt, The Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge, 1994), 16.
25. On aesthetic humanism and exemplarity, see my Phantom Formations: Aesthetic Ideology and the Bildungsroman (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), esp. 17-27.
26. Derrida, Edmund Husserl's "Origin of Geometry": An Introduction, 115.
27. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 4-5.
28. Derrida, Paper Machine, 129. Subsequent citations are given parenthetically by page number in the text.
29. The first citation is from Richard Bernstein, "An Allegory of Modernity/Postmodernity: Habermas and Derrida," in Working Through Derrida, ed. Gary B. Madison (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 227;
30. the second from Anselm Kyongsuk Min, "The Other without History and Society - A Dialogue with Derrida," in Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century, ed. D. Z. Phillips and Timothy Tessin (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 182.
31. I was led to Bernstein's article by way of Min's. Similar claims are easily found elsewhere: Derrida's writings have been criticized as idealist, ahistorical, apolitical, etc., ever since they first began inspiring debate in the late 1960s. The tone, of course, can vary: Min's, for instance, is a careful essay that only in its final two pages offers what I am arguing are unjustified claims. For an instance of the kind of violent caricature to which Derrida's thought has so often been subjected, see Mark Lilla, "The Politics of Jacques Derrida," New York Review of Books 45.11 (June 1998).
32. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 3.
33. Jacques Derrida, "Faith and Knowledge," in Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2001), 45.
34. See also Derrida's careful critique of Jan Patocka's philosophical meditations on Christian Europe in Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
35. Jacques Derrida responding to Elisabeth Roudinesco, in Jacques Derrida and Elisabeth Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow... A Dialogue, trans. Jeff Fort (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 178.
36. On the ultimate inseparability of questions of language and idiom, see Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, or The Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Patrick Mensah (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 8-9, passim.
37. Jacques Derrida, "Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides - A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida," in Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 118.