TWENTIETH CENTURY
PHILOSOPHY:
Intellectual Heroes and Key Themes
LECTURES
I.
II.
III.
IV.
V.
VI.
The limits of language.
Death and authenticity.
The great society.
Making differences.
Social hope.
Communicative rationality.
MAKING DIFFERENCES
1.DECONSTRUCTIVISM
How to read this world?
2.HEARING AND SEEING
Why should one make a difference?
3. JUSTICE AND FORGIVENESS
Is there a match between the conditional and
the unconditional?
1. DECONSTRUCTIVISM
PROPER NAMES AND
METAPHORS
 Ludwig Wittgenstein draws the attention on the fact that the
meaning of a word depends on its use in specific languagegames.
 Especially if one focuses on the meaning of proper names
and metaphors it is fruitful to study language-games.
 Proper names > words that seem to refer to a clear-cut
object (for instance the word Auschwitz), but in fact don’t
pinpoint its meaning.
 Metaphors > literally they are not truth, but they have a
meaning (for instance if someone says
“René is a turtle!”).
FILTERS AND BRIDGES
A metaphor fulfills at least two functions:
1. The function of a filter > due to a metaphor
some things come to the fore and others will t
ake a back seat.
2. The function of a bridge > a metaphor connects
in a subtle way ‘is’ and ‘ought’, i.e. facts and
values.
Dead metaphors > words wit a literal meaning.
Is it possible to reanimate them?
Or is it ridiculous to suppose that they can die?
Jacques Derrida raises these kind of questions.
JACQUES DERRIDA
BIOGRAPHICAL DATA:
 1930: Born July 15, in El-Bia (Algeria).
 1942: As Jew expelled from school.
 1952-1954: École Normale Superiéure.
 1967: An ‘annus mirabilis’ because of the
publication of three influential books.
 1965-1984: Professor of the history of philosophy at
the École Normale Superiéure.
 1982: One of the founders of the Collège
Internationale de Philosophie.
 1983: Director of Studies at the École des Hautes
Études et Sciences Sociales.
 2001: Theodor W. Adorno Award.
 2002: A documentary on Derrida.
 2004: Died October 8, in Paris.
MAJOR WORKS
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De la grammatologie (1967).
La Voix et le phénomène (1967).
L’écriture et la différence (1967).
Marges – de la philosophie (1972).
Glas (1974).
La Carte postale. De Socrate à Freud et au-delà (1980).
Limited Inc (1990).
Sauf le nom (1993).
Les spectres de Marx (1993).
Force de loi. Le ‘Fondement mystique de l’autorité (1994).
Cosmopolites de tous les pays, encore un effort! (1997).
De l’hospitalité (1997).
Philosophy in a time of terror. Diaglogues with Jürgen Habermas and
Jacques Derrida (2003).
 Rogues (2003).
PHILOSOPHICAL STYLE
Derrida discusses a subject often indirectly and
mixes genres.
His style is more evocative than argumentative and
more circular than linear.
Examples:
- Glas > two columns (Hegel and Genet).
- La Carte postale > starts with love letters with
no address.
Derrida wants to show the equivocality of a text.
NOTHING OUTSIDE THE TEXT
 One of the most famous sentences of Derrida: “There is
nothing outside the text” (Il n’y pas de hors-texte).
 Texts are in the broadest sense of the word meaningful
units.
 Derrida depicts paintings, buildings and institutions also as
texts, i.e. as meaningful units.
 The meaning is not inherent to the text, but the result of
reading it.
 If one reads a text anew, one puts it into another context.
 By putting a text into new contexts Derrida wants to
generate new meanings.
 Dissemination (dissémination) > the process of dispersion in
the course of which reading a text generates new meanings.
REITERATION AND
DECONSTRUCTION
 Reiterate > putting (old) texts into new contexts.
 Deconstructivism > a way of criticizing texts and
institutions that is neither negative, nor positive.
 Aim: to open texts up to alternative readings, i.e. to
look for neglected elements in texts (especially the
aporias).
 Moral drive: to render justice and to prevent the use of
violence.
 A deconstruction is always an intervention that
changes the one way or the other the object of
research.
 Derrida wants to subvert a text by showing its limits.
A CRITIQUE OF WESTERN
PHILOSOPHY
Metaphysics is one of the main objects of
Derrida’s criticism.
Philosophical activity: to subvert various binary
oppositions that dominate different ways of
thinking.
Binary oppositions reproduce hierarchies and
forms of subordination.
An insistence upon the importance of the other,
the marginal, that what is different.
HEURISTIC VALUE
Literary theory (Paul de Man amongst
others).
Feminism (Judith Butler amongst others).
Architecture (Frank Gehry amongst others).
Cultural studies (Stuart Hall amongst
others).
Philosophy (Christophe Menke amongst
others).
2. HEARING AND SEEING
THE WRITTEN AND SPOKEN
WORD
 The most famous founding fathers of Christianity
(Jezus) and philosophy (Socrates) have one thing in
common > they have never written a single word.
 Western culture > the denigration of the written word
and the valorisation of the spoken word.
 The spoken word > purity and authenticity.
 Whereas the spoken word directly refers to mental
experiences, the written word does that indirectly.
 Presupposition of the Western culture > the spoken word
is a symbol of mental experience and the written word is
a symbol of the already existing symbol.
SIGNS OF SIGNS
 Derrida criticizes the metaphysical idea that
symbols that are part of the written language are
parasitic to the symbols that are part of the spoken
language.
 Logocentrism: metaphysics of the presence to
oneself.
 The written word is not a derivate of the spoken
word.
 “Writing is not a sign of a sign, except if one says it
of all signs, which would be more profoundly true.”
 Metaphysics freezes identities and doesn’t do
justice to differences.
IDENTITY AND DIFFERENCE
The difference between différance and
différence is inaudible.
If one wants distinguish différance and
différence one needs the written world.
In order to do justice to the ambiguity that is
inherent to the spoken word one has to
analyze the written word.
That implies reading texts in different
directions, i.e. looking for their traces.
TRACES
Traces > signs that are present, but refer at the
same time to what is not present.
 Derrida: “The (pure) trace is the différance.”
Deconstructivism traces the relations between signs
that are present and those that are not.
To trace something means showing the aporias >
irresolvable contradictions that cannot be
reconciled.
Example: the aporia of love.
If a person asks why he or she loves someone, he
or she can give two kinds of answers that are not
compatible.
THE APORIA OF LOVE
Central
question
Who do I love?
What do I love?
Answer
I love you
because you are
you
The singularity
of a person
I love you
because of your
qualities
The particular
aspects of a
person
Predicate
Focus
Language
Proper name
3. JUSTICE AND FORGIVENESS
THE DECONSTRUCTION OF
JUSTICE
Justice can not be grasped, i.e. objectified.
One can only speak in an indirect way about
justice.
The aporia of law and justice > fixed rules
versus unfixed morality.
The general and the particular > application of
the law to concrete issues.
Justice as a deconstruction of law > show what
particularly cannot be subsumed under a general
judicial norm.
MESSIANISM
Messianism > stories about the arrival of a hero
(the Messiah) in the future.
The transfiguration of utopia.
There is often no clear description of the hero that
will come.
Central question: does the hero really comes?
Deconstruct various messianisms.
There is no identifiable other.
THE UNFORGIVABLE
 Truth and reconciliation commissions > about forgiveness.
 Derrida argues that forgiveness isn’t and shouldn’t be
normal.
 The impossibility: forgiving something that cannot be
forgiven.
 Derrida: “If one is only prepared to forgive what appears
forgivable, what the church calls ‘venial sin’, then the very
idea of forgiveness would disappear. If there is something to
forgive, it would be what in religious language is called
mortal sin, the worst, the unforgivable crime or harm. From
which comes the aporia, which can be described in its dry
and implacable formality, without mercy: forgiveness
forgives only the unforgivable.”
 The state cannot organize in a proper way the reconciliation.
PLURALITY
Because of globalisation and migration
more people live in a plural world with
different lifestyles and religions.
Two reactions:
1. Intolerance, xenophobia, racism.
2. Tolerance, xenophilia, respectful
integration of the other.
ANTISEMITISM
Derrida was a victim of anti-Semitism.
He lost his citizenship rights during the Second
World War and had to leave the public school.
Relation between anti-Semitism and
deconstructivism > the fixation of a collective
identity trigger people to oversee differences.
A deconstruction of such a collective identity
creates space for the non-identical.
HOSPITALITY
The fixation of a collective identity frustrates the
hospitality towards strangers.
Derrida > hospitality is only possible when
strangers are recognized in their irreducible
difference.
Two forms of hospitality.
1. Pure form of hospitality: unconditional
acceptance of the stranger.
2. Impure form of hospitality: the stranger is only
welcome when he accepts certain conditions.
Hospitality has to be realized.