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.

Zugl.: Köln, Univ., Diss.

This thesis argues that all literature is subject to ‘afterlife,’ a continual process of translation. From this starting point, this thesis seeks to answer two questions. Firstly, how texts demonstrate this continual translation; secondly, how texts should be read if they are understood as constantly within translation. To answer these questions, this thesis seeks to develop a model of textuality that holds afterlife as central, and a model of reading based on this concept of textuality. Chapter One explores how following through the implications of Walter Benjamin’s and Jacques Derrida’s usages of the term ‘afterlife’ in their writings on translation, language and history necessarily implies a model of textuality. The model of reading that this thesis seeks to develop focuses on language and history, as Benjamin and Derrida define these as the parameters within which translation takes place. This study emphasises textuality itself as a third parameter. Chapter One also describes how, following Benjamin and Derrida, language and history are conceived as inescapable, repressive systems. This, paradoxically, allows for the concept of ‘messianicity’ – the idea that all language, and every historical event, has the potential to herald an escape from language or history. By definition, because language and history are all-encompassing, this potential cannot be enacted, and remains potential. An innovation of this thesis is to understand textuality itself as having ‘messianic potential’; all texts have the potential to escape textuality and afterlife, by reaching a point where they could no longer be translated. Understanding texts as having messianic potential, but always being subject to afterlife, is the basis of the model of reading described at the end of this chapter. Due to the ways Benjamin and Derrida suggest we recognise messianic potential, texts are read with a dual focus on their singularity and their connections to other texts. This is achieved through the ‘text-in-afterlife,’ a concept this thesis develops that understands texts as inextricable from the texts they translate and the texts that translate them. Chapters Two, Three and Four test and complicate this model of reading in response to texts by James Joyce, Aimé Césaire and Jorge Luis Borges. Concepts of textuality and reading are therefore developed throughout the thesis. The three key texts are read with focus on their individual relationships with language, history and textuality, and their connections to the texts they translate. Critics have linked Joyce’s Ulysses to multiple other texts, making it seem exceptional. However, the concept of messianicity shows that Ulysses is important precisely because it is not exceptional. Césaire’s Une Tempête demonstrates how a text can interact with several translations of ‘the same’ text simultaneously, and also that, although language and history are structured by colonialism and are inescapable, there is a huge potential for translation within these terms. Borges’ ‘Pierre Menard, Autor del Quijote’ demonstrates the form of texts’ continual translation in afterlife by describing a text that is verbally identical to the text it ‘translates,’ yet is nevertheless different in ‘meaning’ from its original. Borges’ fiction also highlights the endless potential for translation that is inherent to all texts. Through four chapters, this thesis develops a model of textuality that understands literature as defined by an almost endless potential for translation. The value of reading texts in the terms of ‘afterlife’ is to emphasise literature’s immense potential: all texts are continually translated in relation to language, history and textuality, and continually reveal further texts.

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Este trabalho consiste em investigar as marcas do pensamento da desconstrução, em especial da filosofia de Jacques Derrida, nos ensaios críticos de Silviano Santiago. No entanto, o objetivo não se esgota em uma visada meramente expositiva, ou seja, apenas colocar em relevo as noções propostas pelo filósofo argelino em suas obras que por ventura apareçam nos ensaios selecionados crítico literário. Mais do que isso, pretende-se mostrar como a articulação desconstrutora é útil ao crítico na discussão de seus próprios temas, principalmente a questão da dependência cultural. Foram selecionados ensaios de suas coletâneas publicadas no fim do século XX e início do XXI, de modo a evidenciar um eixo temático que perpassa a sua obra, voltada a pensar os esquemas cristalizados de trocas culturais, a partir de questionamentos amplos que visam a subverter as hierarquias estabelecidas, abrindo espaço para a alteridade do outro como diferença, mediante o aporte da noção derridiana de différance. No que concerne especificamente aos estudos literários, serão apresentadas as leituras que Santiago faz das estratégias estéticas que reiteram, deslocam ou reiteram para deslocar os paradigmas de globalização, considerando a literatura como uma modalidade discursiva inserida no campo mais amplo da cultura, afinando sua discussão com as estratégias desconstrutoras de Derrida / This work consists in investigate the marks of the thought of deconstruction, in particular the philosophy of Jacques Derrida, on the critical essays of Silviano Santiago. However, the aim does not end in a purely exposition, that is to highlight the notions proposed by the Algerian philosopher in his works that may eventually appear in the selected essays of the critic. More than that, we intend to show how the deconstructive joint is useful for the critical discussion of Santiagos own subjects, especially the theme of cultural dependency. Published collections in the late twentieth century and early twenty-first of his essays were selected, in order to show the main theme that runs through his work, dedicated to think the crystallized schemes of cultural exchanges, making extensive considerations which aims for subvert established hierarchies, opening space for the others alterity, for the others as difference, through the contribution of Derrida's notion of différance. Regarding specifically to literary studies, Santiagos readings of the aesthetic strategies which reiterates, dislocates or reaffirm to shift the paradigms of globalization will be presented, considering the literature as a discursive modality inserted in the larger field of culture, tuning his discussion with the deconstructive strategies of Derrida

Este trabalho consiste em investigar as marcas do pensamento da desconstrução, em especial da filosofia de Jacques Derrida, nos ensaios críticos de Silviano Santiago. No entanto, o objetivo não se esgota em uma visada meramente expositiva, ou seja, apenas colocar em relevo as noções propostas pelo filósofo argelino em suas obras que por ventura apareçam nos ensaios selecionados crítico literário. Mais do que isso, pretende-se mostrar como a articulação desconstrutora é útil ao crítico na discussão de seus próprios temas, principalmente a questão da dependência cultural. Foram selecionados ensaios de suas coletâneas publicadas no fim do século XX e início do XXI, de modo a evidenciar um eixo temático que perpassa a sua obra, voltada a pensar os esquemas cristalizados de trocas culturais, a partir de questionamentos amplos que visam a subverter as hierarquias estabelecidas, abrindo espaço para a alteridade do outro como diferença, mediante o aporte da noção derridiana de différance. No que concerne especificamente aos estudos literários, serão apresentadas as leituras que Santiago faz das estratégias estéticas que reiteram, deslocam ou reiteram para deslocar os paradigmas de globalização, considerando a literatura como uma modalidade discursiva inserida no campo mais amplo da cultura, afinando sua discussão com as estratégias desconstrutoras de Derrida / This work consists in investigate the marks of the thought of deconstruction, in particular the philosophy of Jacques Derrida, on the critical essays of Silviano Santiago. However, the aim does not end in a purely exposition, that is to highlight the notions proposed by the Algerian philosopher in his works that may eventually appear in the selected essays of the critic. More than that, we intend to show how the deconstructive joint is useful for the critical discussion of Santiagos own subjects, especially the theme of cultural dependency. Published collections in the late twentieth century and early twenty-first of his essays were selected, in order to show the main theme that runs through his work, dedicated to think the crystallized schemes of cultural exchanges, making extensive considerations which aims for subvert established hierarchies, opening space for the others alterity, for the others as difference, through the contribution of Derrida's notion of différance. Regarding specifically to literary studies, Santiagos readings of the aesthetic strategies which reiterates, dislocates or reaffirm to shift the paradigms of globalization will be presented, considering the literature as a discursive modality inserted in the larger field of culture, tuning his discussion with the deconstructive strategies of Derrida

By framing his deconstruction of Plato’s Phaedrus and Timaeus as a response to Platonism, Jacques Derrida overlooks the possibility of a Platonic philosophy beyond dogma and doctrine. This thesis argues that Derrida’s deconstructions target a particularly Platonist abstraction of the dialogues, and thus, his critique relies on the underlying assumption that Plato defends the metaphysics of presence. Derrida attempts to show how the thesis that Being is presence undermines itself in both dialogues through hints of différance like pharmakon and khôra. To answer the Derridean critique, I analyze the hermeneutics of Derrida’s deconstruction of Plato and identify what in the dialogues lies beyond the limits Derrida’s reading, for example Derrida’s notable exclusion of ἔρως.

L'enseignement de la philosophie, dans les lycées chiliens et français a su défendre sa place au sein de l'enseignement secondaire malgré l'intervention des politiques libérales et néolibérales qui ont envahi l'éducation. Cela a été un succès, mais la question devient: quelle philosophie a-t-on voulu défendre? Pourquoi faire? Ce sont aussi ces questions que s'est posé Jacques Derrida dans les années soixante-dix aux fin de mettre en pratique et systématiser le travail théorique qu'il avait fait à partir de la publication de: De la Grammatologie en 1967. Dans cette recherche nous essayerons de répondre à ces questions à partir du travail réalisé par Derrida dans les années 1967 et 1978. Nous considérons que cette période  propédeutique  nous permet de démontrer que la déconstruction aurait comme base stratégique l'enseignement philosophique. C'est à partir de cette prémisse que nous espérons pouvoir établir quelques idées régulatrices déconstructives qui justifient la présence de la philosophie dans le secondaire. Elles seraient nécessaires et fondamentales pour construire un cadre philosophique référentiel et de cette façon, créer des stratégies d'enseignement propres aux conditions historiques, géographiques et culturelles des jeunes. Ces fondements seraient la base principale de la possibilité de déconstruction – la lutte et la résistance – de l'institution de la philosophie. / Although secundary education, both Chilean and French education, has not been unaware to the risk that philosophy has run with the intervention of the liberal and neoliberal policies in education, the multiple edges that build its institutional framework have been able to defend and, therefore, maintain the teaching to adolescents. This has certainly been an achievement, but, what philosofy has defended itself? For what? These interrogatives are also some of which Jaques Derrida contemplated in the seventies, with the idea of putting into practice and systematize the theoretical work that he had been doing since the publication of Of Grammatology in 1967.In this research, we attempt to answer these interrogatives from Derrida’s work, done between 1967 and 1968. We consider that this period – which is institutive– allows us to demonstrate that deconstruction would have the philosophical basis as strategic teaching. From the deconstructive premise, we intend to establish certain guidelines to justify the presence of philosophy in high school, needed to generate a referential philosophical framework and create future strategies of teaching philosophy, distinctive of historical, geographical and cultural conditions of the adolescents and which are the fundamental basis of the possibility of deconstruction -resistance and struggle- of the philosophical institution. / A pesar que la enseñanza secundaria, tanto la chilena como la francesa, no ha estado ajena al riesgo que ha corrido la filosofía con la intervención de políticas liberales y neoliberales en la educación, las múltiples aristas que constituyen su entramado institucional, han sabido defender y, por lo tanto, mantener la enseñanza de la filosofía para los jóvenes. Sin duda que esto ha sido un logro, pero ¿qué filosofía se ha defendido? ¿Para qué? Estas preguntas son también algunas de las cuales se planteó Jacques Derrida en los años setenta con la idea de poner en práctica y de sistematizar el trabajo teórico que venía haciendo desde la publicación de De la gramatología en 1967. En esta investigación intentamos responder estas interrogantes a partir del trabajo realizado por Derrida entre los años 1967 y 1978. Consideramos queeste período −que es instituyente− nos permite demostrar que la deconstrucción tendría como base estratégica la enseñanza filosófica. A partir de esta premisa pretendemos establecer ciertos lineamientos deconstructivos que justifiquen la presencia de la filosofía en secundaria, necesarios para generar un marco filosófico referencial y para crear futuras estrategias de enseñanza de la filosofía que sean propias a las condiciones históricas, geográficas y culturalesde los jóvenes, base fundamental de la posibilidad de deconstrucción −resistencia y lucha− de la institución filosófica.

Dans ce mémoire, nous proposons d’observer la réception de l’ouvrage Force de loi – le « fondement mystique de l’autorité », du philosophe Jacques Derrida, dans la pensée juridique nord-américaine. Dans un premier temps, nous nous attardons au contexte de production de cet ouvrage et en proposons une analyse détaillée. Nous tentons également de définir sommairement les concepts clés de la pensée derridienne mobilisés dans Force de loi, principalement la déconstruction, laquelle a suscité l’intérêt des juristes. Dans un second temps, nous proposons de retracer la trajectoire de Jacques Derrida en Amérique du Nord, sachant que sa pensée y a été reçue selon des termes bien précis, qui ont influencé l’inscription de ses travaux dans la pensée juridique. Dans un troisième temps, nous proposons de poser un regard critique sur la réception de la déconstruction derridienne dans les Critical Legal Studies. Nous soutenons que la pensée derridienne a été mobilisée par les critical legal scholars avant tout comme une technique servant à alimenter leur critique politique du droit. Or cet usage technicien de la déconstruction se serait fait au détriment de sa véritable substance éthico-politique. Nous proposons donc finalement de réfléchir à ce qui pourrait constituer un usage de la déconstruction en droit qui permettrait d’actualiser son plein potentiel critique, en conviant les juristes à élargir le champ épistémologique de leur discipline. / This essay considers the reception and interpretation of Jacques Derrida’s Force de loi – le « fondement mystique de l’autorité » in North American legal theory. In the first chapter, we examine the context in which Force de loi was written and pronounced, provide definitions of the key Derridean concepts mobilized in Force de loi and offer a detailed analysis of the text. In the second chapter, we argue that Jacque Derrida’s work was read and interpreted by American and English-speaking scholars in a very specific way, which shaped its reception in legal thinking. In the third chapter, we look at how Force de loi and “la deconstruction” were mobilized in the Critical Legal Studies. We argue that the critical legal scholars coined a “technical” use of deconstruction that did not fully integrate its ethical and political potential. Finally, we reflect on how deconstruction could be mobilized by legal scholars and jurists to open epistemological and political horizons that Derrida himself had not envisioned.

Thesis advisor: Andrew Prevot / Decisions: Political Theology and the Challenges of Postmodernity, argues that political theologies are both partially responsible for and responsive to the intrinsically related problems of racism, capitalism, and essentialist metaphysical thinking. Relying on dialectical materialist and post-structuralist theories, Decisions critically engages a wide range of classical and contemporary figures such as Karl Marx, Søren Kierkegaard, Carl Schmitt, Jacques Derrida, James Cone, Chantal Mouffe, Cornel West, Martin Hågglund, and Karl ove Knausgaard. These engagements are attentive to not only the particular theoretical and political decisions any one thinker makes, but also to the ways in which “decision” is itself understood as an important theoretical and political category. Although “decisionism” has become a popular motif in contemporary political theology, the concept remains under theorized. This is unfortunate, because contemporary ontological racisms and exploitative market structures aim to prevent political decisions: ontological racism decides in advance the essential “racial” characteristics of a person and market economies ensure that the distribution of goods is “decided” by the so- called invisible hand of the market. Moreover, both racisms and capitalism can imply an underlying modern metaphysics of substance and essence. While the postmodern critique of metaphysics is often read as a challenge to religion, this reading suggests that postmodernity presents an opportunity for the reemergence of an historical and politically engaged form of religion. Such an emancipatory and non-metaphysical approach can be found throughout various religious traditions, but is especially prominent amongst black political theologians working out of the Christian tradition. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2020. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Theology.