Jacques Derrida's deconstruction of the metaphysical priority of the present simultaneously validates presence as the absolute form of meaning. In order to succeed, deconstruction is bound to offer the most robust defence of transcendental phenomenology's systematic articulation of the very constitution of experience in its absolute and irrecusably present form. Edmund Husserl's late philosophy of history accounts for the contradiction of atemporal truth—how it is created in time, and how it is possible for the historical investigation of this truth to determine its meaning with absolute certainty. Through the necessity of an ideal and phenomenologically reduced history—not only for the work of historical investigation in its own right, but as a constituent of the meaning of any truth— Derrida explains why Husserl devotes so much effort to explicating the structure and process of the formation of ideal objects in the course of what is ostensively an explanation of the origination of the geometrical science itself out of subjective experience. The purpose of this is only ever implied in Husserl's own work “The Origin of Geometry”, and the implications are subtle. The purpose of this thesis is to detail how the structures of Husserl's system serve the end clearly elucidated by Derrida. It first explains how objective truth is constituted and an ideal history made possible through Husserl's examination of their appearance in the living present, and following this it examines the problems raised by Derrida's deconstruction itself.

In this thesis, I use a close reading of the silent films of Charlie Chaplin to examine a question of listening posed by Jean-Luc Nancy, “Is listening something of which philosophy is capable” (Nancy 2007:1)? Drawing on the work of Nancy, Jacques Derrida and Gayatri Spivak, I consider a claim that philosophy has failed to address the topic of listening because a logocentric tradition claims speech as primary. In response to Derrida’s deconstruction of logocentrism, Nancy complicates the problem of listening by distinguishing between <em>l’e´coute</em> and <em>l’entente</em>. <em>L’e´coute </em>is an attending to and answering the demand of the other and <em>l’entente</em> is an understanding directed inward toward a subject. Nancy could deconstruct an undervalued position of <em>l’e´coute</em>, making listening essential to speech. I argue, Nancy rather asks what kind of listening philosophy is capable of. To examine this question, I focus on the peculiarly dialogical figure derived from Chaplin that communicates meaning without using speech. This discussion illustrates how Chaplin, in the role of a silent figure, listens to himself (<em>il s’e´coute</em>) as other. Chaplin’s listening is Nancean resonance, a movement in which a subject refers back to itself as another subject, in constant motion of spatial and temporal non-presence. For Nancy, listening is a self’s relationship to itself, but without immediate self-presence. Moving in resonance, Chaplin makes the subject as other as he refers back to himself as other. I argue that Chaplin, through silent dialogue with himself by way of the other, makes his listening listened to. Chaplin refused to make his character speak because he believed speech would change the way in which his work would be listened to. In this way, Chaplin makes people laugh by making himself understood (<em>se fait entendre</em>) as he makes himself listened to (<em>se fait e´couter</em>). In answer to Nancy’s question, I conclude philosophy is capable of meeting the demand of listening as both <em>l’entente</em> and <em>l’e´coute</em> when it listens as Chaplin listens.

O objetivo é analisar as implicações da teorização pós-estruturalista para o pensamento educacional, especialmente no que se refere ao relativismo decorrente desta teorização, assunto que ganhou destaque nas discussões acadêmicas não só apenas de filosofia da educação como também nas relacionadas à filosofia da ciência e do pensamento social. Não se objetivou uma análise extensiva das possibilidades da filosofia pós-moderna para a educação, uma vez que a multiplicidade dos discursos, autores e idéias tornaria esta tarefa irrealizável e inadequada no que se refere ao escopo deste trabalho. Antes, o foco é estabelecido sobre a idéia da deposição das fundamentações realistas, racionalistas e naturalistas do discurso educacional, e sobre as críticas mais representativas que este movimento suscita na comunidade de pensadores da educação.

This paper examines certain theoretical underpinnings of the historical processes by which Shakespeare's history plays became the de facto collective memory of the events they depict, even when those events are misrepresented. The scholarly conversation about this misrepresentation has heretofore centered on Shakespeare's potential political motivations. I argue that this focus on a political, authorial intent has largely ignored the impact these historical distortions have had over the subsequent 400 years. I propose that, due to Shakespeare's unique place in the historical timeline of the development of collective memory, Shakespeare's historical misrepresentation in the history plays is a byproduct of the emerging ability to access historical sources while also shaping the nascent collective memory. Shakespeare became an archon, in the Derridian sense, of English history. As such he exercised the archon's hermeneutic right to interpret English history. Tracing the methods by which the public experienced Shakespeare's plays, this project shows that in the 20th century film became the dominant medium by which audiences experienced Shakespeare for the first time. Using Orson Welles' Chimes at Midnight as the principle example, I show that the hermeneutic right shifted away from Shakespeare and was instead taken on by directors reinterpreting Shakespeare's version of history. Welles' knowing manipulation of the archontic function empowers his film, affecting subsequent interpretation and placing it squarely in the Shakespearean film canon.

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New Zealand's figures for child maltreatment are consistently amongst the highest in the OECD. The purpose of this thesis is to understand what the legal system can do to protect children in New Zealand from maltreatment and why legal responses to child maltreatment often appear to be ineffectual or of limited effect. This thesis uses the theories of Luhman and Teubner to argue that the law's ability to protect children from maltreatment is limited because the legal system creates and responds to its own abstract world. This process arises from the functional requirements of the law and its operation as an autopoietic system of power that produces its own abstract knowledge about the world. The legal system's function within New Zealand society is to stabilise behavioural expectations and maintain society's coherence and it does so by reducing the complexity of subjective human existence into binary alternatives. However, this process of reducing complexity limits the way in which the law produces its knowledge about the world and controls how power is distributed within the law's abstract world to such an extent that the legal system is closed from the world of subjective experience. This closure from the world outside the legal system limits the law's ability to regulate and reform that outside world and protect the children who live within it. By identifying these limits, this thesis will contribute to an understanding of the limits of the law's ability to protect children from maltreatment and thereby improve the effectiveness of New Zealand society's attempts to protect its children.

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.

This thesis examines the relation between two contrasting approaches to justice: the constructive and reconstructive projects of Rawls and Habermas on the one hand, and the deconstructive projects of Levinas and Derrida on the other. First, I identify the central difference between the two projects, reconstructing each account of justice as it develops in relation to Kant??s practical philosophy. I then argue that the two projects are complementary. [New Paragraph] Whilst Rawls and Habermas emphasise the possibility of objectively realising Kant??s idea of an impartial standpoint among autonomous persons, Levinas and Derrida defend the impossibility of determining the content of justice. Rawls and Habermas subscribe to the ??art of the possible??, rendering Kant??s impartial standpoint by means of the ??original position?? (Rawls) or the ??procedures of discourse ethics?? (Habermas). By contrast, Levinas argues for justice??s failure, discovering, in Kant??s moral law, a principle of responsibility for the particular other which conflicts with impartiality. Distinguishing himself from both the reconstructive tradition and Levinas, Derrida affirms, in part through his readings of Kant, the ??undecidability?? of the critical function of justice. Committed to the possibility of justice, Derrida also acknowledges its impossibility: no local determination can reconcile responsibility before the other with impartiality among all. [New Paragraph] Having identified the central difference between the two traditions, I then defend their complementarity. ??Reasonable faith?? in the possibility of justice must be supplemented by the acknowledgment of its impossibility. Conversely, attesting to justice??s failure is unsatisfactory without commitment to the possibility of constructing just social forms. Distancing myself from the liberal critique whereby deconstruction withdraws from the political (Fraser, McCarthy, Benhabib, Gutmann), I instead add my voice to a dissenting group (Young, Cornell, Mouffe, Honig, Honneth, Patton, Thomassen) which affirms that deconstruction can productively engage with the constructive tradition. Deconstruction is at home in Rawls?? view that ??the ideal of a just constitution is always something to be worked toward??.

“其它”是解構主義中的主題之一。它是指一種不可理解的事物，因此“其它”也成了“混渾”，“無限”等字的同義字。正因為“其它”是不可理解的，德瑞達在他的解構理論中必需運用種種技巧來暗示“其它”的存在。德瑞達一方面運用各種技巧以指出各種理論的局限性。另一方面，德瑞達也利用一些有限的模型來呈現無限的混渾。這篇論文討論的是《印度之旅》中的“其它”。但本文並不是以解構主義來解釋這本小說，而是把《印度之旅》當做一本小說版的解構主義來討論。在討論這本小說中所包含的理論的同時，也希望能展現用一些固定理論來解釋作品的不當。 / The Other is a maJor subJect in Derrida's theory of deconstruction. The Other stands for something incomprehensible. It is therefore identical to chaos or infinity. Since the Other is incomprehensible, Derrida in his theory of deconstruction has to employ various tricks to indicate its existence. Derrida uses certain tricks to point out the self-contradictory elements in various theories to demonstrate their limitations. Since those theories are limited, they fail to comprehend the Other. Derrida also uses some tricks to demonstrate the existence of the infinite other with a finite model. 　　This thesis is about the Other in A Passage to India. But this thesis does not intend to apply the theory of deconstruction in order to get an interpretation of it. Instead, this thesis tries to discuss this novel as a narrative version of Derrida's theory of the Other. By pointing out the similarities between the theory implied in this novel and Derrida's theory, this thesis also hopes to demonstrate that a literary work is not always a prey for the predatory critic.