TWENTIETH CENTURY PHILOSOPHY: Intellectual Heroes and Key Themes

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TWENTIETH CENTURY PHILOSOPHY Intellectual
Heroes and Key Themes

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LECTURES

1. The limits of language.
2. Death and authenticity.
3. The great society.
4. Making differences.
5. Social hope.
6. Communicative rationality.

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MAKING DIFFERENCES
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• 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?

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1. DECONSTRUCTIVISM
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PROPER NAMES AND METAPHORS

• Ludwig Wittgenstein draws the attention on the
  fact that the meaning of a word depends on its
  use in specific language-games.
• Especially if one focuses on the meaning of
  proper names and metaphors it is fruitful to
  study language-games.
• Proper names gt words that seem to refer to a
  clear-cut object (for instance the word
  Auschwitz), but in fact dont pinpoint its
  meaning.
• Metaphors gt literally they are not truth, but
  they have a meaning (for instance if someone says
  René is a turtle!).

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FILTERS AND BRIDGES

• A metaphor fulfills at least two functions
• 1. The function of a filter gt due to a metaphor
  some things come to the fore and others will
  t ake a back seat.
• 2. The function of a bridge gt a metaphor
  connects in a subtle way is and ought, i.e.
  facts and values.
• Dead metaphors gt 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.

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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.

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MAJOR WORKS

• De la grammatologie (1967).
• La Voix et le phénomène (1967).
• Lécriture 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
  lautorité (1994).
• Cosmopolites de tous les pays, encore un effort!
  (1997).
• De lhospitalité (1997).
• Philosophy in a time of terror. Diaglogues with
  Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (2003).
• Rogues (2003).

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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 gt two columns (Hegel and Genet).
• - La Carte postale gt starts with love letters
  with no address.
• Derrida wants to show the equivocality of a text.

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NOTHING OUTSIDE THE TEXT

• One of the most famous sentences of Derrida
  There is nothing outside the text (Il ny 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) gt the process of
  dispersion in the course of which reading a text
  generates new meanings.

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REITERATION AND DECONSTRUCTION

• Reiterate gt putting (old) texts into new
  contexts.
• Deconstructivism gt 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.

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A CRITIQUE OF WESTERN PHILOSOPHY

• Metaphysics is one of the main objects of
  Derridas 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.

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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).

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2. HEARING AND SEEING
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THE WRITTEN AND SPOKEN WORD

• The most famous founding fathers of Christianity
  (Jezus) and philosophy (Socrates) have one thing
  in common gt they have never written a single
  word.
• Western culture gt the denigration of the written
  word and the valorisation of the spoken word.
• The spoken word gt purity and authenticity.
• Whereas the spoken word directly refers to mental
  experiences, the written word does that
  indirectly.
• Presupposition of the Western culture gt the
  spoken word is a symbol of mental experience and
  the written word is a symbol of the already
  existing symbol.

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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 doesnt do
  justice to differences.

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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.

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TRACES

• Traces gt 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 gt
  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.

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THE APORIA OF LOVE
Central question Who do I love? What do I love?
Answer I love you because you are you I love you because of your qualities
Focus The singularity of a person The particular aspects of a person
Language Proper name Predicate
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3. JUSTICE AND FORGIVENESS
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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 gt fixed rules
  versus unfixed morality.
• The general and the particular gt application of
  the law to concrete issues.
• Justice as a deconstruction of law gt show what
  particularly cannot be subsumed under a general
  judicial norm.

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MESSIANISM

• Messianism gt 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.

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THE UNFORGIVABLE

• Truth and reconciliation commissions gt about
  forgiveness.
• Derrida argues that forgiveness isnt and
  shouldnt 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.

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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.

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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 gt the fixation of a collective
  identity trigger people to oversee differences.
• A deconstruction of such a collective identity
  creates space for the non-identical.

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HOSPITALITY

• The fixation of a collective identity frustrates
  the hospitality towards strangers.
• Derrida gt 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.