This Ph.D. thesis is, in large part, a deepening of my M. A. dissertation, entitled: "Différance Beyond Phenomenological Reduction (Epoché)?" - an edited version of which was published in The Warwick Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 2, Issue 2, 1989. The M. A. dissertation explores the development of the various phases of the movement of epoché in Edmund Husserl's phenomenology and its relevance for Jacques Derrida's project of deconstruction. The analyses not only attend to the need for an effective propaedeutic to an understanding of phenomenology as method, they also serve to demystify the logics of Derridean non-teleological strategy by explaining the sense of such a manoeuvre - as a kind of maieutic response to the Husserlian project - which operates within the horizon of a radical epoché. According to this orientation, Derrida's deconstruction of phenomenology is permitted to open itself up to a phenomenology of deconstruction. This doctoral thesis develops these analyses and utilizes a form of critique that points the way to the possibility of a phenomenological-deconstruction of the limits of Derrida's project of deconstruction through the themes of epoché, play, dialogue, spacing, and temporalization. In order to trace the resources from which he draws throughout the early development of deconstruction, this study confines itself to a discussion on the texts published between 1962 and 1968. This subjection of deconstruction to a historical de-sedimentation of its motivational, methodological, theoretical, and strategic moments, involves a certain kind of transformational return to the spacing between phenomenology and deconstruction that urgently puts into question the alleged supercession of phenomenology by deconstruction. The expression of such a 'beyond' is already deeply sedimented in contemporary deconstructive writing to the point at which it is now rarely even noticed, let alone thematized and brought into question. This conviction (regarding the transgression of phenomenology by deconstruction) traces itself out in the form of an attitude to reading which is, in fact and in principle, counter to D6rrida's own call for care. The meaning and limits of the very terms, transgression, beyond, supercession, etc., must be continually subjected to deconstruction. The notions of play, dissemination and supplementarity - with the concomitant sense of transformational repetition that defines them - do not function as a mere excuse for lack of scholarly rigour. Deconstruction is a movement of critical return, which must insert itself (with a sense of irony) within the margins and intersections of that which gives itself up to this practice of textual unbuilding. The strategy of play encourages the structural matrix of that with which it is engaged to turn in upon itself, exposing its limits and fissures in a kind of textual analogue to a psychoanalysis. To be sure, this does involve a certain kind of violence -a violation of the ( system's' own sense of propriety (what is proper [propre] and closest to itself) -but in no sense is this an anarchical celebration of pure destruction. We speak rather of irony, parody, satire, metaphor, double-reading and other tactical devices, which permit a reorganization of the deconstructed's (textual analysand's) self-relation and the possibility of playful speculation. Such play demands care and vigilance in regard to the appropriation of the logics of the system with which it is in a relation of negotiation. In order to play well, one must learn the game-rules.

This thesis begins from an analysis of Derrida's specific readings of Plato and Platonism, identifying there a modernist bias, which interprets these metaphysical systems as if they were coextensive with Cartesian rationalism. Against Derrida, I argue for a repositioning of Plato and Platonism in the context of an ancient-modern quarrel. In replacing Descartes's "clarity and distinctness" with a pre-modern emphasis on "faith" (pistis), I am seeking to challenge Derrida's diagnosis of a perplexity or impasse (aporia) which cannot be overcome by philosophy. With specific reference to the Meno and the Phaedrus, one can locate a three-tiered Platonic dialectic beginning with an assertion of knowledge, followed by a necessary deconstruction of this knowledge with, thirdly, a tentative reconstruction of philosophy based on faith rather than knowing. In later chapters, I examine this dialectic as it is developed in the Neo- and Christian- Platonist traditions, particularly through the work of Plotinus, Boethius and Augustine. On my interpretation, deconstruction remains at the second level of the Platonic dialectic, that of impasse and perplexity (one of Derrida's most recent texts is in fact entitled Aporias). Again with reference to an ancient-modern quarrel, it is my contention that Derrida's unstinting stress on the "aporetic" is due to an overemphasis of the Cartesian paradigm. Derrida identifies the exhaustion of what Deeley calls "the classical modern paradigm" with the exhaustion of philosophy per se. But this identification of philosophy with Cartesianism can be seriously challenged through a renewed foregrounding of the premodern philosophical resources which Descartes (and now Derrida) have sought to obscure.

Contrary to the idea that there are fundamental differences between the work of Martin Heidegger and Walter Benjamin, the thesis shows that there exists a profound similarity in the direction of their projects, by exploring how they took up Kant's critical legacy concerning the temporality of language: the belonging together of language and time. The ground of Kant's system and of the necessity of systematicity - the three-fold synthesis which 'generates' time under the direction of conceptuality - is elucidated via the Second Analogy and the Critique of Teleological Judgment. It is argued that Kant's understanding of language and time remains fixed within a circular justification of Newtonian Science, which prevented him from taking up the critical resources of his treatment of teleological concepts and applying it to his idea of the critical system itself. Heidegger's and Benjamin's work may be understood as taking up the hermeneutic circularity of Kant's philosophical system, though freeing it from its appeal to a limited time determination. They both develop notions of a more originary temporality in conjunction with a linguistic phenomenology. They further allow this more critical thinking of language and time to reflexively fall back on the writing of philosophy itself. Their understanding of the temporality of language is explored through the way 'translation' focuses, in each case, a thinking of tradition and of linguistic works. The thesis rejects attempts to separate Heidegger's early work from his later approach, and further rejects a tendency to focus on Benjamin's style of writing in isolation from its theoretical basis. The thesis concludes by arguing that the work of both Heidegger and Benjamin points to a rethinking of Kant's legacy of the necessity of system, in terms of system as the inescapable belonging together of language and time.

For the most part, philosophical discussion of the senses has been concerned with what distinguishes them from one another, following Grice’s treatment of this issue in his ‘Remarks on the senses’ (1962). But this is one of two questions which Grice raises in this influential paper. The other, the question of what distinguishes senses from faculties that are not senses, is the question I address in this thesis. Though there are good reasons to think that the awareness we have of our bodies is perceptual, we do not usually think of bodily awareness as a sense. So in particular, I try to give an account of what it is that is distinctive about the five familiar modalities that they do not share with bodily awareness. I argue that what is distinctive about vision, touch, hearing, taste and smell, is that perception in all these modalities has enabling and disabling conditions of a certain kind. These enabling and disabling conditions are manifest in the conscious character of experience in these modalities, and exploited in active perceptual attention— in looking, listening, and so on. Bodily awareness has no such enabling conditions. The five familiar senses having this distinctive feature, and bodily awareness lacking it is not a merely incidental difference between them. Nevertheless, I do not claim that having these enabling conditions is necessary and sufficient for counting some faculty as a sense, or, correlatively, for something being an instance of sense-perception. Rather, we can see why it would serve certain (contingent) human interests for us to think of the faculties that involve these enabling conditions as instances of a single kind of thing, of which bodily awareness is not an instance.

The following thesis explores the notion of truth as developed in the work of Martin Heidegger and Walter Benjamin. Contrary to the position adopted by many commentators, who seek to drive a wedge between Heidegger's unorthodox phenomenology and the resolutely non -phenomenological Benjamin, I shall want to show how both begin with a rigorously Husserlian conception of truth as an intuition of essence in order, finally, to deviate from it. I argue that, for neither one, can truth be merely one problem or issue taken up by a thinking secure in itself. Rather, from its most classical determination in, for example, the Metaphysics as έπιστήμη της άληθείας, the way in which truth has been determined has itself determined the very project of philosophy. Yet whilst the trajectory of both Heidegger and Benjamin's work can thus be determined in large measure by the question of truth, both are also concerned to re-orient that question in a direction that renders problematic Aristotle's implicit connection of truth to knowledge and knowledge to intuition and presence. I argue that their respective challenges to the location of truth in the act of knowing -a challenge made each time by way of an analytical regression from a propositional understanding of truth (Satzwahrheit) to intuitive truth (Anschauungs-wahrheit) to, finally, its more original character as disclosedness (Erschlossenheit) - remain thoroughly phenomenological before showing how it is in the work of art, and in tragedy in particular, that each one finds the resources for a still more radical understanding of truth. Not in the cognitivist sense that art makes truth claims about the world, but in the sense that it is with the work of art that the historical act of disclosure and world -constitution that Benjamin and Heidegger call truth is most emphatically made.

This study investigates Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe's claim in "The Caesura of the Speculative" that Hölderlin is a "modern" writer. Its aim is to establish what is at stake in this claim and to evaluate whether it can be substantiated. In Chapter One I discuss the relationship between tragedy and philosophy. I show that the uneasy relationship between philosophy and the arts is premised upon Plato's understanding and judgement of mimesis. I contrast Plato and Aristotle's treatment of poetry by examining how they understand the mimetic process. In Chapter Two I focus on Hölderlin's understanding of the relationship between Ancient Greece and 18th Century Germany. After discussing the background to Hölderlin's work I provide detailed readings of two texts, The Perspective from which We Have to Look at Antiquity, (1799) and the first letter to Böhlendorff, dating from 1801. I argue that in these texts Hölderlin, through his acknowledgement of the divided nature of Greek culture, offers a unique understanding of the relationship between Greece and Germany which isolates him from his contemporaries. In Chapters Three and Four, I examine Hölderlin's understanding of tragedy. After establishing the centrality of the aesthetic presentation for Hölderlin's project I examine the "poetological" writings which date from 1798-1800. I give a close analysis of the implications of Hölderlin's statement that the tragic "is the metaphor of an intellectual intuition" which occurs in the text On the Difference of the Poetic Modes, (1800), showing why the tragic form is central to Hölderlin's poetological project. To illustrate the problems inherent in this project, in Chapter Four I examine Hölderlin's attempts to write a tragic drama which corresponds to his theoretical beliefs. I discuss the two theoretical texts - The Ground to Empedocles and Becoming in Dissolution - which accompany Hölderlin's drama Empedocles. In analysing these texts I argue that there is an inherent tension between the presuppositions of the theory and the way they can be realised in the drama. In Chapter Five, I turn to Hölderlin's final work, his project to translate Sophocles' tragedies. Through close analysis of the theoretical Remarks which accompany the translations, I show how Hölderlin's theoretical and poetological interests in Greece and Tragedy are brought together through this project. I argue that these texts give an insight into the problems which confront Hölderlin's poetological project. However, simultaneously, these texts provide an alternative way of understanding the function of the tragic form. In this discussion I show how the questions concerning the status of dramatic mimesis and the "mimetic" relation between Greece and Germany coincide in the analysis of Sophocles' dramas. In conclusion I return briefly to the questions that I raised in the introduction concerning the status of tragedy in the present time, and assess the accuracy of the claim that Hölderlin is a "modern" thinker.

This study argues that a theory of the distinctively human Individual lies latent within Deleuze's readings of Hume and Bergson and his two major metaphysical treatises. This evolving theory derives from efforts to re-think the concept of 'the subject' In terms of 'difference', 'becoming', 'repetition' and 'event'. Using critical exegesis, the study shows that Deleuze's model is precise and workable, capable of supplanting discredited accounts of the subject and nullifying charges that Deleuze is an 'anti-humanist'. Deleuze's subject is neither pre-existent nor stable, but always in the process of becoming-other, Individuated by Inherent differences. Chapter 1 argues that Deleuze's account (and several theoretical resources) can be traced to an early engagement with empiricism, where he uses Humean atomism to define a field of difference 'within which' associationist psychological tendencies define the subject as a 'fiction'. As Chapter 2 shows, weaknesses in this model lead Deleuze to Bergson. Having adopted Bergsonlan Intuition as his method, Deleuze seeks after the preconditions of the flow and temporality of consciousness. He determines that the subjects constitutive moment is the virtual point of intersection between the physicality of material objects and the 'inner life' of consciousness. Chapter 3 turns to questions of ontology and ethics, arguing that Deleuze's theory of internal difference accounts for the role of contingent circumstances In subject-formation whilst his theory of the event establishes each lived moment as unique. Deleuze Interprets Nietzsche's eternal return as an ontological device entailing the recurrence of difference in the lived time of the subject's 'becoming', and as the means for coherence between the moments of a life. This theory leads Deleuze to an 'ethics of the event' with the goal of transforming human thinking from a concentration on unity and identity towards a more creative and fulfilling life of becoming.

One of the main influences on Judith Butler‘s thinking has been the work of Michel Foucault. Although this relationship is often commented on, it is rarely discussed in any detail. My thesis makes a contribution in this area. It presents an analysis of Foucault‘s work with the aim of countering Butler‘s representation of his thinking. In the first part of the thesis, I show how Butler initially interprets Foucault‘s project through Nietzschean genealogy, psychoanalysis and Derridean discourse, and how she later develops this interpretation in line with the progress of her own project. In the main part of the thesis, I present an analysis of Foucault‘s thinking in the period from The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969) to The History of Sexuality volume 1 (1976). This analysis focuses on the aspect of his work which has most influenced Butler‘s thinking: namely the notion of a relationship between knowledge, discourse and power. The other issues in his work which Butler addresses—genealogy, the subject, the body, abnormality, and sexuality—are discussed within this framework. I show how, in the early 1970s, Foucault develops the notion of power-knowledge, and sets out a relationship between power-knowledge and discourse which is overlooked by Butler. I argue that Butler interprets Foucaultian power through the notions of repression and social norms, and ignores the concepts of technology and strategy which form a key part of Foucault‘s thinking. I show how, from The Archaeology of Knowledge on, Foucault develops a socio-historical ontology and a genealogy of the subject, both of which are at variance with Butler‘s interpretation of his thinking.

This thesis is a study of the two major texts of Derrida on Husserl's phenomenology. Engaging in a close reading of Introduction to the Origin of Geometry (1962) and Speech and Phenomena (1967), this thesis tries to bring together, and reconstruct, under the title of speech and writing, those Husserlian questions which never stop occuping, motivating and intriguing Derrida's thought, from his student studies and the Introduction to Rogues (2003) These were the questions or themes of origin and of historicity, of scientific objectivity and truth, of reason and responsibility, as well as of the living present, of living speech, of egological subjectivity and the alter ego. The question that this thesis raises is the following: why are these Husserlian themes of historicity, of the idea of the infinite task, of the living speech, etc., not simply the first objects or targets, subsequently to be abandoned, of Derridean deconstruction? Why is deconstruction, the event, the advent or invention of deconstruction, irreducible to some methodical or theoretical procedure, or to an operation of problematization or delegitimation of transcendental questioning? As we show in the first part of the thesis, these questions were investigated and developed by Husserl as a "responsible" response to the Crisis of the European sciences and humanity. Our investigation into Husserl's teleological discourse of history and responsibility shows that this crisis, which is anything but an empirical accident, threatens the very thing that Husserl wants to keep safe and sound (or to immunize, as Derrida writes in Rogues): the transcendental freedom of an egological subjectivity. For Husserl the possibility of crisis (of the subject) remains linked with the moment of truth, i.e., with the production and tradition of scientific objectitivities, and in fact has an essential link to writing. Husserl's teleological determination of writing as phonetic writing is an attempt to limit, tame and economize the essential ambiguity of writing: it threatens with passivity, forgetfulness and irresponsibility the very thing that makes possible, i.e., the transcendental and ideal community of a we-human-subjects- investigators-responsible-for-the-history-of-truth/reason. In the second part of the thesis, following Derrida's reading of Husserl in Speech and Phenomena, in Form and Meaning, Signature Event Context, and Eating Well, we show that Husserl's phenomenology of language and of phone is also a great philosophy of the transcendental subject. The essential and phenomenological distinctions between nonlinguistic and linguistic signs, sense and meaning, expression and indication, which are at the centre of Husserl's doctrine of signification, have also a teleological character: they are destined to define the limit, the arche and telos of language, as human language or human (i.e., phonetic) writing. In our reading we give great emphasis to Derrida's phenomenological analysis and deconstruction of this unique experience of auto-affection, the experience of hearing oneself speak. This is the experience of the human subject, the experience of a free, voluntary, auto-affecting egological subjectivity conscious of its voice, its speech and its humanity. Denying the possibility of phonic auto-affection of the human subject, in favour of the hetero-affection of writing was never the point of Derridean deconstruction. Deconstruction, the concept of writing or arche-writing, the graphics of differance, of iterability, are not imposed from the outside on Husserl's discourse on the human subject, the zoon logon echon. Rather, phenomenology itself interrupts or deconstructs itself, according to Derrida, as soon as it addresses the question of time and of the other, of the alter ego. Deconstruction was never only a thcoretico-philosophical, or academic affair. In our conclusion, we argue for the right of deconstruction, i.e., the right or demand to deconstruction. This right or demand to deconstruction, to ask questions about truth, consciousness, language, responsibility and so forth - so many powers, capacities or possibilities of which the animal is said to be deprived and poor - and the right or demand to do so performatively, by writing, by transforming and producing new analyses, new events and texts, new events of thought in the history of the concepts of man, of truth, of the subject and of human rights, is according to Derrida, an ethical and political demand.

This thesis examines the question of living nature and its bearing on ecological thought in the light or the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. The difficulty of adequately thinking about living nature in the terms developed in Being and Time (1927) is taken as the starting point for the investigation. The thesis concentrates on Heidegger's thought in the period beginning with the 1929/30 lectures The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude and ending with the courses on Heraclitus in 1943 and 1944. In this 'middle period' Heidegger' attempts to fonnulate a phenomenology of animal life and then a thinking of the place of living nature in the 'history of being' which does not return to the vitalist principles with which he had previously broken. The thesis considers the extent to which these attempts to find another way to think about living nature are successful. To this end a variety of lecture and seminar courses together with manuscripts from this period are discussed, some of which have only recently become available, including the seminars on Nietzsche's second Untimely Meditation and Herder's Treatise on the Origin ofLanguage and the manuscripts Besinnung and Die Geschichte des Seyns. Contemporary responses to Heidegger's thinking of living nature and its relevance for philosophical ecology, including those of Jacques Derrida, Michel Haar, Giorgio Agamben and Michael Zimmennan are re-evaluated on this basis. -. :'. j,- Abstract - The guiding concept of the investigation is the notion of poverty, which plays a variety of roles in the context under discussion. In particular, the thesis presented in The Fundamental Concept of Metaphysics that the animal is 'poor in world', has been seriously misunderstood by many commentators. If the poverty in question is properly understood as a thesiS concerning the fundamental attunement of the encounter between Dasein and living nature, then we can see how this concept of poverty develops in various directions in the following years, informing Heidegger's understanding of the capabilities of living beings, of the 'earth', the silence of language and finally allows for the development of a thinking of freedom that is proper to the earth itself, rather than a development beyond the earthly. It is argued that the notion of poverty is an essential counter to a prevalent Spinozist and Nietzschean strain in ecological thought that thinks living nature on the basis of plenum or overflow and concedes no space for a true freedom of the earth.