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

This work deals with the difference between man and animal in the context of the theme of time as treated by Heidegger and Derrida. The starting point of the work is the critique of early Heidegger and his characterization of animal as poor in world. This critique targets his thinking of time and possibility. As first two chapters try to show, despite his basic emphasis on time and on the possibility character of human being, Heidegger still thinks time on the basis of presence and possibility on the basis of reality. Only after taking this step can he think animal privatively as meaningless or poor - in a certain absence of time. This critique results in looking for a more consistent thinking of time and possibility as a way to a more welcoming thinking of animal. The third chapter is concerned with Derrida's objections to searching for other time and it maps the main problems connected with this project of Heidegger. The next three chapters present the main analysis of Heidegger's later thought of time. The differences between his late and early thought are emphasized as the differences between his late speech Time and Being and the early work Being and Time. Heidegger in his later works explores the unity of the three-dimensional time and bewares to think it as presence. The ground of the unity...

This is a study of the relationship between the works of Giorgio Agamben and Jacques Derrida. It explains how the vantage point of Agamben's thought is achieved by rendering Derridean terminology inoperative. It is argued that this enactment of suspension with regards to Derrida is Agamben's way of undoing a theological structure of thought that philosophy has unknowingly appropriated. Agamben claims a position that is decidedly post-Derridean, and it is from this position that his sometimes baffling claims about philosophy and its tradition obtain their justification. The closure of the Derridean era and the inoperativity of Derridean terminology is sealed and traced by a messianic motif. Only Derrida can object to the naivety of Agamben's claims, as he did in his final seminar-series. For anyone else to make such objection would be to take the bait. This is because the apparently dizzying magisterial position that Agamben occupies makes sense only in a philosophical landscape wherein Derrida has become obsolete. However, this thesis will argue how Derrida's thought even in its desuetude continues to exert influence, now as a paradigm of language. As Agamben recalls in his essay “The Messiah and the Sovereign”: “[...] in the Jewish tradition the figure of the Messiah is double. Since the first century B.C.E.., the Messiah has been divided into Messiah ben Joseph and a Messiah ben David. The Messiah of the house of Joseph is a Messiah who dies, vanquished in the battle against the forces of evil; the Messiah of the house of David is the triumphant Messiah, who ultimately vanquishes Armilos and restores the kingdom” (Agamben 1999a, 173). The vanquished messianic force here represents Derrida's work that in its defeat releases its positive messianic twin, the thought of Agamben. In the first chapter of this thesis I will give an introduction to Agamben's thought specifically speaking to the motif of the messianic in its relation to infancy. In the second chapter the outline of the messianic exhaustion of the law of potentiality will be examined closely in the literary figure of Herman Melville's scribe Bartleby. In the third chapter it will be argued that in the philosophical constellation Bartleby's role as the paradigm of the self-capacity and passion of writing is fulfilled by Derrida. This is argument is presented against the background of the theme of life in philosophy. Furthermore, this chapter presents a close reading of Derrida's khōra essay as a counterpart to Agamben's text on Bartleby. Finally, in the fourth chapter, the positive gains of Agamben's thought are explored by looking at two messianic tableaus: life and writing. Life is explored the shape of a contingent “being”, a “creature” in the theological sense – yet one that has vanquished its theological condition of abandonment. In this sense, the modality of contingency is sought in a condition of being theologically disenchanted. Furthermore, passing beyond the Derridean paradigm of pharmacology, a new paradigm of writing is indicated.

Chance, in the sense of the incalculable, the indeterminable, names the limit of every estimation of the truth. Whereas traditional philosophical discourses aspire to transcend this limit, deconstruction affirms on the contrary its necessity; not as a higher principle that relativizes truth and renders all our calculations futile, as is commonly suggested by flippant appropriations of Derrida's work, but as a structural property within every event and every concept, every mark. Rather than a mere impediment to the pursuit of truth then, the incalculable forms a necessary correlative of the pursuit itself. Deconstruction effectively attests to and exemplifies the dependence of every philosophical discourse on its irreducible, inherent limitation. With reference to numerous commentaries on Derrida's work, Chapter 1 shows that the unconditional indeterminability of a deconstructive, methodological identity is indissociable from deconstruction's critical import. And as Chapter 2 verifies in turn, focusing now primarily on Derrida's lecture ‘My Chances/Mes Chances' and the performative aspects of his writing, deconstruction's appeal to the accidental and the idiomatic is not a call to irresponsibility and a turning away from theory; it is what ensures its remarkable theoretical consistency. Through close readings of Aristotle, Freud, Richard Rorty and William James, Chapter 3 demonstrates that any attempt to regulate chance cannot help but put chance to work instead. Not even fiction can arrest its contaminating force. Reading Derrida alongside Edgar Allan Poe, Chapter 4 posits that the commonsensical conception of chance as a deviation from the truth is bound up with an uncritical notion of literary writing as sheer untruthfulness, and hence as the site of pure chance. The constitutive pervasiveness of chance bears out, in the first place and above all, the instability of the limit that separates fiction from non-fiction, truth from non-truth.

<p>This study is an attempt to develop the discussion about self-injury with the aid of philosophical discussions about understanding. I will present a reading of the discussion between Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida about reason and madness, and also an interpretation of the Derrida and Hans-Georg Gadamer encounter. These readings focus on the concept of understanding, on the possibility to understand the other and on the possibility to reach out from reason toward the irrational. The project to formulate an ethical approach to self-injury by Nancy Nyquist Potter is then used to bring the question about understanding to life. I conclude that the project of Potter, formulated as “uptake”, is weakened by the fact that she fails to recognize the underlying philosophical problems in stating the possibility to understand the meaning of something that until today has been considered meaningless.</p>

This study is an attempt to develop the discussion about self-injury with the aid of philosophical discussions about understanding. I will present a reading of the discussion between Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida about reason and madness, and also an interpretation of the Derrida and Hans-Georg Gadamer encounter. These readings focus on the concept of understanding, on the possibility to understand the other and on the possibility to reach out from reason toward the irrational. The project to formulate an ethical approach to self-injury by Nancy Nyquist Potter is then used to bring the question about understanding to life. I conclude that the project of Potter, formulated as “uptake”, is weakened by the fact that she fails to recognize the underlying philosophical problems in stating the possibility to understand the meaning of something that until today has been considered meaningless.

The WM sector in Nairobi is a failure. Collection rates are deplorable, regulations go unenforced and the municipal landfill is desecrating the environment and killing neighbouring slum dwellers. This paper focuses on the exclusion and marginalization of the slums adjacent to Nairobi’s landfill, Korogocho and Dandora, and uses a post-structuralist theoretical framework to conceptualize a just response to these exclusions and theorize an inclusive approach to waste policy in Nairobi. Building on the work of Jacques Derrida, I present a ‘deconstructive ethic’ for development that is dedicated to mitigating and overcoming the production of alterity, and reintegrating excluded communities and knowledges into the sites of knowledge and policy creation. This ethic is used to formulate a five-part response to the conditions of exclusion experienced in Korogocho and Dandora, and to engage these populations in finding participatory solutions to the city’s waste problem.

Based on Derrida's deconstruction and other methodologies, this six-chapter thesis aims at effecting a valid re-reading of self manifested in Wordsworth's The Prelude. What the stop here introductory chapter unfolds is the motivation to pursue this research, a summary of the related scholarship to date, an overview of the poem, and a description of the theoretical approaches. The second chapter is an attempt to identify the internal instability, fluidity, and ambivalence of self that inform The Prelude. Wordsworth's language is what the third chapter concerns. It seeks to work out a way into the following questions: Does Wordsworth know that self is a trick of language and ever-changing? If he does, how profound is his knowledge? Since it is self that Wordsworth does hope to privilege, what we tend to identify as the reconciliation of nature, imagination and that self can hardly be realized and is little more than an illusion. This is the subject to which the fourth chapter is devoted. Because of his inability to get rid of the sense of confinement and insecurity even in the face of what he may call the renovating virtues, a scene that repeats more frequently in The Prelude is Wordsworth's continuous struggle against them. To do Wordsworth justice, however, to argue that he is not the only one whose subject is unstable, a history of self and its inevitable relation to other is provided in the fifth chapter. I suggest here also that if the position of self is precarious, that of autobiography, a genre that purports to articulate subjectivity, cannot be more secure. In conclusion, we have a review of the maintained dialogue between Wordsworth and Derrida. For the sake of de/construction, the thesis ends with an attempt and a hope to put everything back to what it is.

This dissertation studies and applies the signature theory of Jacques Derrida to two American poets, Sharon Olds and John Cage. I begin by looking at the two texts by Derrida that most closely apply signature theory to poetics: Glas and Signsponge. Along the way, I narrow the scope of Derrida's writing somewhat by focusing on psychoanalytic aspects that relate to Jacques Lacan's ideas and to the concept of the superego. From this work I isolate some protocols for reading, which are then used to study Olds and Cage, two poets who have clearly developed their own signature styles. Here are the protocols:1. Treat Olds' and Cage's texts as blazons.2. Read for anthonomasia---Derrida's neologism combining the words anthology and antonomasia (the trope of using proper nouns as common nouns and vice versa).3. Look for (and practice) hypogram and anagram.4. Trace the placement in abyss.5. Post-death-of-the-author, read and write for and as if mourning.6. Eat the proper names, continuing whatever encryption of the letters can already be read. My studies of Olds and Cage alternate between application of these protocols and my attempt to follow the respective laws of their own signatures. In Olds' poetry the most prominent signature effect is the encryption of the Sh-effect. Cage's poetics places his rebus-signature in the abyss of his texts.