Is logos a proper noun?: Or, is Aristotelian Logic translatable into Chinese?

During Jacques Derrida’s visit to China in 2001, he held a meeting with the Chinese philosopher Wang Yuanhua. 1 Derrida opened their dialogue with a sentence that had the effect, no doubt involuntary, of aggravating his interlocutor and all of those Chinese listeners present: ‘China doesn’t have philosophy, but/only thought [中国没有哲学, 但/只有思想, Zhongguo meiyou zhexue […]

‘For all that gives rise to an inscription in general’

‘For all that gives rise to an inscription in general’ hans-Jörg Rheinberger * This is a translation of ‘Al es, was überhaupt zu einer Inskription führen kann’, the first chapter of Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Iterationen [Iterations], Merve Verlag, Berlin, 2005, pp. 9–29. It is published here with the kind permission of Merve Verlag. Its title cites Liechtensteiner […]

Generative grafting: Reproductive technology and the dilemmas of surrogacy

COMMENT Generative grafting Reproductive technology and the dilemmas of surrogacy Elina staikou In 2013, at the advanced age of 101, Howard W. Jones, a medical pioneer in reproductive technology, published Personhood Revisited: Reproductive Technology, Bioethics, Religion and the Law. Looking back at the development of what came to be called the ARTs (assisted reproductive technologies), Jones […]

Conditions of the university

Reviews Conditions of the universityAndrew McGettigan, The Great University Gamble: Money, Markets and the Future of Education, Pluto Press, London, 2013. 232 pp., £54.00 hb., £15.00 pb., 978 0 74533 294 9 hb., 978 0 74533 293 2 pb. In an interview with Giovanna Borradori given after 9/11, Jacques Derrida said: ‘I am incapable of […]

Grande biog

Benoît Peeters, Derrida: A Biography, trans. Andrew Brown, Polity Press, Cambridge and Malden MA, 2012. 603 pp., £25.00 hb., 978 0 74565 615 1. ‘What matter who’s speaking, someone said, what matter who’s speaking?’ Despite post-structuralist philosophies’ association with Beckettian questions such as these, they remain surprisingly bound to what Foucault called that ‘singular relationship […]

Fabrication defect: Fabrication defect: François Laruelle’s philosophical materials

Fabrication defect François Laruelle’s philosophical materials Andrew mcgettigan François Laruelle, professor of philosophy at Paris X, Nanterre, has been publishing since the early 1970s and now has around twenty book-length titles to his name. English-language reception of his work owes most to the efforts of Ray Brassier, who published an account of Laruelle’s ‘non-philosophy’ in […]

Subjectivity as medium of the media

Dossier: What is German Media Philosophy?

Contemporary, let us say ‘post-modern’, discourses on media, communication, information and so on are functioning in our society in at least two different – if interconnected – ways.* First, they describe scientifically the functioning of contemporary media and their growing role in our society. But the development of media theory during recent decades was, in […]

Euphemism, the university and disobedience

Euphemism, the university and disobedience Alexander garcía düttmann Euphemism is the linguistic condition of contemporary society and spreads through the university as much as through any other institution. But what, exactly, is a euphemism? After having turned his attention to the different meanings of the Greek word from which ‘euphemism’ is derived, and having considered […]

Marx the uncanny? Ghosts and their relation to the mode of production: Spectres of Derrida Symposium

Where Marx is closest to the spirit of deconstruction is, arguably, in these formulaic gestures towards a society that had so far transcended existing actuality that its conditions of realization could no longer be conceptualized. Marx is spectral Marx in his refusal to envision communism in his envisaging of it, in his anti-utopian utopianism. Now, […]

Messianic ruminations: Derrida, Stirner and Marx: Spectres of Derrida Symposium

mind/geist of Europe by its cultural others and inferiors. Derrida’s fascination is with Hamlet-as-geist haunted by the corporeal form of the ghost, as a trope for the irreducible spectral implication of spirit and spook. However, this Vah~ryian reading of Hamlet forecloses his distinctive relation to the premodern, conscripting his melancholic Renaissance proto-modernity into a latterday […]

73 Reviews

REVIEWS Marxism without Marxism Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, translated by Peggy Kamuf, New York and London, Routledge, 1994. xx + 198 pp., £11.99 pb., 0415910455. There is no doubt that Derridean deconstruction was a political project from the outset, or that […]

Deconstruction and the Political, University of Essex, 27-28 October 1994

NEWS Deconstruction and the Political (or how not to speak, while still speaking, of deconstruction and politics) More than two decades ago, in one of Jacques Derrida’s first Derrida’s concepts of hegemony. Aletta Norval investigated interviews, Jean-Louis Houdebine advanced the ‘first sketch the ‘hybridity’ of subjective identity in relation to post- of a question: what […]

Jacques Derrida: The Deconstruction of Actuality

The Deconstruction of Actuality An Interview with Jacques Derrida This interview was conducted in Paris in August 1993, to mark the publication ofDerrida’ s Spectres de Marx (Paris, Galilee, 1993), and was published in the monthly review Passages in September. This English translation appears in Radical Philosophy with permission. Passages: From Bogota to Santiago, from […]

66 Reviews

REVIEWS RULING PASSION STRONG IN DEATH Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault, London, Faber, 1993. 363pp, £9.99 pb, 0 571 169732. David Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault, London, Hutchinson, 1993. 583pp, £20 hb, 0 09 1753449. James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault, London, Harper Collins, 1993. 491pp, £18 hb, 0 00 255267 1. ‘Alive,’ claims […]

Democracy and Difference, Yale University, 15-18 April 1993; Derrida: Spectres Of Marx, University of Warwick, 20 May 1993; The First European Congress of Analytic Philosophy, Aix-en-Provence, 23-26 April 1993

Discussing Deliberative Democracy Democracy and Difference Yale University, 15-18 April 1993 It is New Haven in April. The annual meeting of the Conference for the Study of Political Thought has ‘descended upon Yale University to debate ‘Democracy and Difference’. The agenda for this year’s Conference, set by Seyla Benhabib, manifests her desire to bring together […]

Hell’s Angels: Derrida and the Heidegger Controversy

Hell’s Angels Derrida and the Heidegger Controversy Richard Wolin’s anthology The Heidegger Controversy – reviewed in RP 63 under the heading’ Righteous Indignation’ – has run into trouble with its original publisher, Columbia University Press. This useful selection of texts dealing with Heidegger’s Nazism appeared in November 1991 and sold well. No doubt part of […]

Massacre of the Innocents: Derrida and the Cambridge Dons;Waiter Benjamin Centenary; Women and the History of Philosophy; Singer Silenced; Philosophy for Children

NEWS Massacre of the Innocents: Derrida and the Cambridge Dons On 21 March, at a lofty conclave of dons at Cambridge University, something happened. The matter for discussion was a list of academic aristos to be invited to receive an honorary doctoral degree from the Duke of Edinburgh. (Honorary degrees are solemn rewards for those […]