Zugl.: Heidelberg, Univ., Diss., 2007. / Best.-Nr. 9698.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Notre Dame, 2003. / Thesis directed by Stephen H. Watson for the Department of Philosophy. "December 2003." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 297-303).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Queensland, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references.

This paper is an attempt to re-read Walter Benjamin’s essay “critique of violence” by separating what we here presume being its three-part core or axis, namely Right (rätt, as in Law), Justice (rättvisa) and Violence (våld), and then make an inquiry into the relationship between them, or, to what extent these three parts relate to each other. The method for doing so is at first a close-up reading of Benjamin’s text, where the core parts are being mentioned. Thereafter we will take a look at some of the most prominent attempts to read Benjamin to see to what extent their interpretation is compatible to ours. At last, in the concluding part of our paper, a suggestion with a shade of psychoanalysis of how to interpret the essay will be presented, together with a clarification of the three notions we did set out to investigate in the beginning. The aim of this paper is both to make Benjamin’s essay clearer, but also to make more stable ground for a new way of looking at Law and Justice and the relationship between them.

The present work explicates the concept of "the messianic" as it figures in the work of Jacques Derrida and Walter Benjamin in order to establish the foundation of a useful (and, one hopes, potentially innovative) critical approach to the works of Mary Shelley, Joseph Conrad, John Fowles, as well as to novelistic fiction generally. This foundation rests on a common quality of the messianic as it figures in Derrida and Benjamin's respective corpora. In their conception the messianic refers not to some individual of divine, semi-divine, or even mortal origin who is charged with functioning as the world-historical agent by whose deeds history itself comes to an end, and a new holy, paradisiacal order is thereby founded, but to the aspirational tenor to humankind's orientation to futurity. The messianic finds expression in the myriad instantiations of human beings' future-oriented activity. As such, it achieves a sort of spectrality--or, to borrow the term Marx applies to the commodity, a phantom-like objectivity--having a somewhat intuitive apprehensibility, if in fact not form or substance.Novelistic fiction, which exploits its own spectrality in a bid for arranging impossible arrangements, realizing impossible realities, ordering impossible orders, attempts to occupy an impossible-to-occupy space between on one hand, the catastrophic present and the messianic future, and on the other hand, the future to come and the future as it is wished to be. Wracked by the tension created by its allegiance to chance, the contingent, and the aleatory on one side, and to the deterministic, the necessary, and the climactic or teleological on the other side, novelistic fiction achieves its particular character precisely through pursuit of its abortive program, just as humanity achieves its character, to the extent that such a notion is legitimate, precisely through its abortive program, which is nothing more no less than survival, than living on.

An analysis of Ernest Buckler's novel The Mountain and the Valley using Jacques Derrida's theoretical perspectives on the nature of writing as supplement. David Canaan is a writer who dreams of writing the perfect novel: his failed dream reveals that writing cannot capture perfection or presence.

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal

No description available.

This project is a critique of the connection between lethal violence and justice within Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Our critique focuses on three specific moments—moments that Derrida touches upon in Glas, but does not address in detail—namely, heroic vengeance, execution and warfare. By subjecting each of these moments to a close reading we will be calling into question the very possibility of an act of violence that can lay claim to being absolutely ‘necessary’ or ‘just’ either within its specific historical moment or from beyond it. The theoretical basis of the project closely parallels Jacques Derrida’s work on Hegel, in that it stems from a deconstruction of the connection between epistemology and ontology. This also has serious implications for the question of ethics. By tracing the play of différance through the semeiological structure of both theoretical and practical cognition Derrida’s work makes it possible to address the ethical implications of speculative dialectics from a non-dialectical angle. Figuratively speaking, the relationship between theoretical and practical cognition can be thought of as the relationship between reading and writing. As such, the title of the project is to be taken as a figurative reference to the connection between theoretical (i.e. reading) and practical (i.e. writing) cognition and by extension to the connection between epistemology, ontology and ethics. Addressed in this manner our project begins by tracing the silence (i.e. the ‘a’ of différance) that is, at one and the same time, a condition of the possibility and impossibility of meaning. This silence has serious ramifications for Hegel’s political philosophy. Hegel’s system sets out to ground the law within the ‘positive’ infinity of the Concept [Begriff] and thus, close the circle of philosophy. This project will attempt to expose the ethical stakes—and the ultimate impossibility—of Hegel’s ‘positive’ infinity by taking up the thread of lethal violence in the Philosophy of Right.

This research project participates in the genre of Performance art. It explores performativity in relation to Emmanuel Levinas' formulation of two interlacing modes of language, the ethical saying and the ontological, political said. The saying is of my originary, ethical relation to the other person that constitutes me, whereas the said is the mode of 'content', knowledge, and ontology. The project suggests that at least two registers of performativity pertain to the saying. One is in Simon Critchley's description of the saying as performative, prior to any decision to perform. In regard to another meaning of performativity, I propose that a political signification of art may be what Levinas calls a "reduction" of the said that 'performs' a showing of the saying. To perform a showing of the saying, would, in a Levinasian engagement, be to make apparent the ultimate interruption by ethics of ontology and politics, thus pointing to a constitutive non-closure of the political like that theorized by Jacques Derrida and by Critchley. Such a non-closure of the political is tentatively linked with critiques of Nicolas Bourriaud's Relational Aesthetics such as Claire Bishop's which draw on Jacques Lacan's notion of the subject. Performances explore the notion of the "reduction" of ontology resourced by Derrida's formulation of Levinas' later writing style as involving a sériature; serial and heterogeneous interruptions of the said1. The project has unfolded in a series of performance pieces, and will conclude with a final performance in March 2007. This exegesis articulates the major provocations for the project, contextualises the project with regard to selected art practices, and documents and discusses the major performance pieces.