This thesis is centrally concerned with the texts of Jacques Derrida that have addressed directly the theme of sexual difference. Yet to say the thesis is centrally concerned with a philosophy that positions itself clearly as one that deconstructs centrality and its trajectory of return, is to face the crisis or chiasmus of my concern. The thesis is not returned to Derrida. If the question of feminism for Derrida is a question from the margins, from interruptions, of the trace and of la cendre, ashes, the question of sexual difference is primordially and originarily that of the undecidability of the name, signatory, and textual border. She would not have appeared here. Therefore she cannot return. There are two frames to this research that can be recognized in the chapter sequence of the thesis. Initially I develop a preparatory engagement to a questioning of the ontology of sexual difference, with Chapters 2 and 3, with a questioning that broaches the metaphysics of the feminine with respect to the texts of Derrida, Heidegger and Cixous in particular and further engages with Écriture Féminine, Levinas and feminist responses to Heidegger and Levinas. However, this broader questioning is undertaken in order to develop a sharper focus on the writings of Derrida that address Heidegger’s ontological difference, Levinas’s ethics before being, and a more originary questioning of sexual difference. The second frame and predominant focus of the thesis is on Derrida’s approach to the metaphysics of the feminine with four pivotal texts by Derrida from the late 1970s and early 1980s examined in Chapters 4 to 7. Each addresses a questioning of difference and the metaphysical tradition, under difference’s many names: ontological difference, sexual difference, différance, and engages deconstruction’s encounters with Nietzsche & Heidegger (Spurs); the psychoanalysts Abraham & Torok (“Fors”); Levinas (“At This Very Moment in This Work Here I Am”) and Hegel (Glas). In bringing together these four texts, my aim is to emphasize the significance of a double deconstructive movement of transgression and restoration, as this research’s politico-ethical acts of writing and reading for an otherwise discourse on sexual difference. This otherwise discourse has always already been produced with phallogocentrism and remains critical for the inventing of thresholds across philosophy, literature and their others. The ashen Preface enkindles a paradigmatic figure as deconstructive trace of sexual difference in writing and reading practices. A Postscript questions the binding to institutional laws constitutive of disciplinary practice while the fiery trace in Derrida’s writing on Kafka’s law concludes on the ash-laden edges of Blanchot’s unavowable work.

Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This thesis explores theoretical aspects of the affective dimension of literature. Beginning with Aristotle's tying of katharsis to the drama, the pattern of affective relations is completed through the establishing of terms for each of the three broad traditional genres. These relations can be expressed in the ratio: as katharsis is to the genre of the dramatic, so kenosis is to the genre of the lyric, so kairosis is to the genre of the epic. Within each of these affective relations, further relations are determined for the identity structures within each genre. In defining these identity structures, the philosophical, theological, psychological and literary aspects of katharsis, kenosis and kairosis are explored. Of particular use in mapping these identity structures and literary affects were the philosophical theories of Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, Sartre, and Wittgenstein; the theological views of D.G. Dawe, John Macquarrie, Charles Pickstone, and Ernest F. Scott; the psychological theories of C.J. Jung, Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva; the literary theories of Mikel Dufrenne, Stanley Fish, Toshihiko and Toyo Izutsu, Hans Robert Jauss, W.R. Johnson, Frank Kermode, William Elford Rogers, and D.T. Suzuki; and the literary works of Homer, Shakespeare, George Herbert, S.T. Coleridge, Charles Baudelaire, Wallace Stevens, and James K. Baxter. Taking up Aristotle's project to grant cognitive value to the experience of art, this thesis argues for the centrality of identity structures within the dimension of the affective. The thesis further determines that literature's affective dimension is the domain within which aesthetic identity is established. Such imaginative identity structures amount to a cultural catalogue of identity possibilities. As the keepers of this catalogue, the three interpretive genres amount to a body of affective knowledge that is its own dimension.

Thesis--Amsterdam. / Cover title: Lucrèce. Bibliography: p. 341-352.

Thesis (doctoral)--Magadh University, 1981. / Text in English, appendices in Sanskrit. Includes bibliographical references (p. 332-356).

Thesis--Amsterdam. / Cover title: Lucrèce. Bibliography: p. 341-352.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Columbia University, 1935. / Without thesis note.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Columbia University, 1935. / Without thesis note.

Diss.--Munich. / Bibliography: p. 181-188.

Thesis (doctoral)--Uppsala universitet, 1985. / Abstract and summary in English. Errata sheet laid in. Includes bibliographical references (p. 185-196) and index.

No description available.