Diss. / Bibliogr. p. 209-216.

The thesis is concerned with ideas of 'normality'. What does it mean to be normal, either for the discourses which aim to define this (for example, the human sciences), or for the human subject who is both originator and object of all such attempts? The thesis tries to think the 'normal' as that which is essentially indebted - albeit in an unacknowledged way - to the term which would seem to name the subversion of it, that of the' abnormal'. 'Abnormality' is read throughout as connoting a plurality of 'threats' to what is normal: to error, irrationality, pathology and madness. The first part of the thesis is interested in scientific norms. By elaborating and developing the key terms of French epistemologist Gaston Bachelard's defence of the objectivity of scientific discourse, it is argued that the rationality of scientific norms depends upon their periodic subjection to a deformation (an unnorming) in moments of creative revision. A similar thought emerges through the second chapter, where, following the work of philosopher of medicine Georges Canguilhem, it is argued that what is 'normal' for human beings is precisely to risk one's existing forms of normality through flights into an abnormality of which pathology (including mental illness) is an irreducible risk. The second part of the thesis considers the relationship of literature to normality. Is what is normal for literature that it creatively suspend forms of normality? The third chapter considers this question through Derrida's work on the relation ofliterature to law and aporia. In the final chapter, Bessie Head's novel A Ouestion of Power is read as producing a profound questioning of ideas about what it is to be (mentally, culturally) normal, through the inscription of experiences which refuse simply to be normalised by any scientific, medical or literary expectations

Bochum, Univ., Diss., 2003. / Computerdatei im Fernzugriff.

Bochum, Universiẗat, Diss., 2003.

Oldenburg, Universiẗat, Diss., 2001.

Diss. / Bibliogr. p. 215-220. Index.

Mémoire numérisé par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

In this thesis I will follow the works of Jacques Derrida and Hans-Georg Gadamer, reconciling both thinkers by providing a reflection on the necessary and foundational conditions for the experience of meaning. A reflection on Jacques Derrida's formulations on différance, trace, absence, presence, clôture, and hospitality, alongside Gadamer's critical hermeneutics on the aesthetics of play and interpretation will open up this tension and provide a new relation for the possibility for meaning. By reconciling these two philosophers it will become apparent that the Self-Other relationship, the activ-ity of difference,and the trace, all condition a space for heterogeneity within linguistic, hermeneutic, and narrative meaning. It is my case here that we must submit to the multiplicity of identities of meaning in language and reformulate the idea of meaning as a development that emerges not from a radically subjective consciousness, but constituted by absence, history as trace, and most importantly the 'Other.'

Humboldt-Univ., Diss.--Berlin, 2005.

With a view to Jacques Derrida's rearticulation of Plato's khoral myth I consider the possibility of non-oppositional difference within a relational economy - a notion that Derrida seems quite resistant to. By framing a discussion in terms of Derrida's critical interaction with phenomenology, looking specifically to Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt, I attempt to mark the context from which deconstruction emerges as a philosophical position. In a general sense, I deal with Derrida's conception of the relational space in-between persons, places and things, and the implications of his appropriation of khora for thinking about how we properly relate to one another.