This thesis argues that attitudes of inhospitality operate subtly in our politics, in our religious beliefs and practices, and in our understandings of who we are. Consequently, the question of hospitality - what it is and what it signifies - is an urgent one for us to address. In this thesis I examine and outline the hermeneutics-deconstruction debate over the experience of otherness and what it means to respond to others ethically (or hospitably). In the first two chapters I defend the importance of properly understanding the ethics of both Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida. Against the concerns of Paul Ricoeur and Richard Kearney, I maintain that a Levinasian and Derridean insistence on answering to the call of an unconditional hospitality is the best way forward in our attempt to respond with justice to strangers. Next, by engaging Martin Hagglund's objection to an ethical reading of Derridean unconditionality, I give attention to the theme of negotiation in Derrida's later work, a theme which I take to be the central feature of his account of hospitality. I conclude by proposing five theses concerning hospitality. These theses provide an overview of the main themes discussed in this thesis and once more address the various tensions internal to the concept of hospitality.

Magistro darbas analizuoja įžymiųjų Frankfurto atstovų – Foucault ir Habermaso diskusiją, detaliau gilinamasi į komunikacinio veiksmo teorijos ir genealogijos metodų aiškinimą ir jų taikomumą. Nors apie šią diskusiją jau buvo plačiai analizuota ir apsvarstyta viešojoje akademinėje bendruomenėje, tačiau šio darbo išskirtinumas yra tai, kad gilinamasi į transgresijos perspektyvos atveriamus dekonstrukcijos ir rekonstrukcijos motyvų kryptingumų atskleidimus. Svarbu išsiaiškinti, ar socialinių formų destabilizacija įtakoja dekonstrukciją, ar rekonstrukcija nesudaro priežastinių ryšių santykių hierarchijos, vedančios link vienos krypties orientyro (vienpusiškumo)? Remiantis transgresijos sąvokos koncepcija, nurodančia įvykių nesugrįžtamo motyvo prielaidą ir panašių įvykių pakartotinumo galimumo motyvą. Apibendrinant pastaruosius pastebėjimus, galime teigti, kad rekonstrukcija ir dekonstrukcija atlieka svarbų vaidmenį socialiniuose moksluose atsirandantiems emerdžiškumams. Siekiant plačiau analizuoti komunikacinio veiksmo teorijos ir genealogijos metodų pateiktis, kuriamos koreliacijos, išryškinusios emerdžentiškumo motyvo skvarbių pretenzijų pasireiškimą. Magistrinis darbas siekia praturtinti klasikinės socialinės metodologijos keliamų klasifikavimo standartų nugulusius reikalavimus naujomis stiliaus atpažinimo galimybėmis, sutelkiančias lygiavertę lygiavimosi pretenziją į meninio stiliaus paraiškos svarumo pateiktį. / This masterʼs thesis analyses the debate of the famous Frankfurt representatives Foucault and Habermas, while examining in more detail the interpretation of the theory of communicative action and genealogy methods and their applicability. Although this debate has already been widely analyzed and discussed in the public academic community, however, the uniqueness of this paper is the analyzing of the disclosures of the purposefulness of the motifs of the deconstruction and reconstruction, revealed by the transgression perspective. It is important to find out, whether the deconstruction or reconstruction, which are influenced by the destabilization of social forms, do not constitute the hierarchy of causative relations, leading to the one – way target. Based on the notion of the transgression concept, indicating the hypothesis of the motif of the irreversibility of events and the motif of the possibility of the repeatedness of similar events. Summarizing the recent observations, it can be stated about the importance of the reconstruction and deconstruction in social sciences, while originating emergentisms. In order to analyze in more detail the method presentations of the theory of communicative actions and genealogy, the correlations are created, in order to emphasize the penetrating pretensions of the emergentism motif. This master‘s thesis aims to enrich the standard overlying classification requirements, raised by the classical social methodology, with the new... [to full text]

<p>This dissertation contains two related documents: a piece of music entitled <italic>Hallmarks, Sigils & Colophons</italic> for three female singers and chamber orchestra setting excerpts from Christian Bök's <italic>Eunoia</italic>; and an article entitled "Reorganizing the Rock and Roll: U.S. Maple's Musical Deconstructions." These two chapters are linked by an engagement with the phonic materiality of speech and the polyvalent implications that arise from the intense musical study of that materiality. </p><p>Chapter 1, <italic>Hallmarks, Sigils & Colophons</italic>, is a six-movement work for soprano, mezzo-soprano, alto, and chamber ensemble. Each movement sets excerpts from the individual chapters of Christian Bök's <italic>Eunoia</italic>, a collection of prose poems inspired by the avant-garde literary group Oulipo. As such, each chapter only uses single vowels: "Chapter A" uses only words with the letter a, "Chapter E" uses only e, and so on. The piece explores the sound worlds of each individual vowel, attempting to create unified musical ideas from each vowel's unique sonic character. I am particularly interested in the ways in which the limited range of vowel sounds changes the affect of a sonic space. I occasionally attempt to mimic (or at least reference) Bök's use of constraints, though I never allow constraint to override musical concerns. Despite using words, this piece tells no unified story, and each movement exists, on some levels, as self-contained wholes.</p><p>Chapter 2, "Reorganizing the Rock and Roll: U.S. Maple's Musical Deconstructions," discusses the relationship between the music of the rock group U.S. Maple and Derrida's theories of deconstruction. U.S. Maple's music is often described by critics and fans as "deconstructing" rock music, though the band dismisses the term for its pejorative implications. In this article, I argue that the band's music could, in fact, be read as expanding the Derridean concepts of <italic>différance</italic> and the "trace" into the realm of music. I describe how US Maple performs what Marcel Cobussen terms "deconstruction in music" to the case of conventional hard rock tropes. I focus particularly on the way in which singer Al Johnson creates a language out of paralinguistic utterances--singing in yelps, growls, grunts, groans, and garbled words--and thereby cultivates the multiplicity of sounds and significations that are typically relegated to subordinate status by other rock singers. I also use Richard Middleton's ideas about repetition in pop music to analyze how the band deconstructs the syntax of rock by imbuing their songs with the affect of improvisation.</p> / Dissertation

Thèse numérisée par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal.

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

Notre thèse se propose de montrer que la déconstruction peut être pensée comme le résultat de la jonction de l’intentionnalité husserlienne et de la compulsion de répétition freudienne. En repartant des premières lectures derridiennes de certains textes de Husserl, mais surtout de La voix et le phénomène (1967) vraisemblablement rédigée en même temps que « Freud et la scène de l’écriture » (conférence de 1966), nous y étudions comment Derrida unit la temporalité husserlienne et la temporalité freudienne : le Présent Vivant n’est pas essentiellement différent de l’ « après-coup » (Nachträglichkeit), de même que la répétition de l’idéalité n’est pas essentiellement différente d’une compulsion de répétition aveugle et mécanique.Cet étrange accouplement a selon nous donné naissance à toute la philosophie derridienne, même si celle-ci n’a par la suite cessé de s’enrichir et de se complexifier grâce à l’ « ex-appropriation » d’une / The present dissertation aims to show that deconstruction can be conceived of as resulting from the confluence of Husserl’s intentionality and Freud’s repetition compulsion. By going back to Derrida’s first readings of some of Husserl’s texts, but mostly back to Voice and Phenomenon (La voix et le phénomène, 1967), probably written concurrently with ‟Freud and the Scene of Writing” (‟Freud et la scène de l’écriture‟, lecture from 1966), I try to examine how Derrida brings the Husserlian and the Freudian temporalities together : the Living Present is not essentially different from the ‟après-coup” or deferred action (Nachträglichkeit), nor is the repetition of ideality essentially different from a blind mechanical repetition compulsion.Such uncanny coupling is, in my view, what gave birth to the Derridean philosophy as a whole, even if that philosophy did continue to get richer and more complex thanks to the ‟ex-appropriation” from many other authors, whether philosophers, poets, writers and so on.

A kind of poetry that tries to understand contemporary social and philosophical issues as much as behaviors by rewriting in a poetic language the video artwork of some of the main representatives of modernism and postmodernism. Such poetry is deprived of confessional hues, any personal reference has to be ascribed to a mirroring effect by which the single person empathically absorbs and projects what is conveyed, be it stemming directly from the historical time of the artwork's making and inherited, or alive at the time of its actual viewing. By following a restructuring process started at the beginning of the twentieth century, the writing analyzes possible ways to outline developments or to underline breaking points. Poetry is seen as an active medium within the formation of societies characterized as it is by its highly introspective power, not restricted to the individual but open to all beings perceived as members of one entity.

The artist's process in which she examines the built environment through the medium of black and white photography. By tracing the trajectory of her awareness of architecture from her early career as a dancer, to the making of photographic images, the artist illuminates the process of deconstructing architectural and pictorial space into fragmented yet illusionistically convincing photographic montages. Influenced by the urban localities in which she dwells, she tells the story of being captivated by the post-industrial landscape of Williamsburg, Brookyn, NY, followed by landing in New Orleans and her fascination with post-Katrina architecture. Grounded in the analog techniques of traditional black and white photography, Levitsky describes the various means by which she alters her images to create visionary reconstructions of buildings in transitional states.

<p>The Subaltern Clinic explores a certain legacy of unreason that Sigmund Freud identified throughout the course of his writings as the "death drive," or the compulsion to repeat. In Freud's work, the death drive is often thought as the opposite of the pleasure principle, which situates the pleasure-unpleasure binary at the center of psychoanalytical thinking and Freud's conceptualization of the psyche as well as morality, ethics, and civilization. The Subaltern Clinic traces a legacy of the death drive and a series of thematic concerns that emerge from it, specifically the instability of the pleasure-unpleasure binary that ostensibly upholds the "principle of reason," through a colonial-postcolonial archive. In doing so, the dissertation attends to those subaltern figures who are constituted as the "unreason" of society, particularly the mentally ill, women, and homosexuals. </p><p>In particular, the dissertation looks to the intersection of psychoanalysis and deconstruction, specifically to Jacques Derrida's engagements with Freud's "Beyond the Pleasure Principle," to argue that deconstruction needs to be thought of as a marginal and politicized form of psychoanalytic thinking, the stakes of which emerge through Derrida's readings of Freud's death drive. The dissertation follows the thread of these readings to consider the problems of difference, violence, sadism and masochism, and anxiety in the work of colonial and postcolonial practitioners of psychoanalysis as well as postcolonial artists and novelists. The Subaltern Clinic makes the argument that an attention to the legacy of the death drive in the postcolonial archive allows for a more robust critique of postcolonial reason, which would attend to questions of ethics and aesthetics.</p> / Dissertation

How should we understand the relations between human beings and technology? Where does technology end and where does the human being begin? How should we understand the relation between thinking and technology? These and related questions have been increasingly salient during the last decades. The aim of this study is to provide an outline of a philosophy of technology in the work of a major contemporary philosopher: Jacques Derrida.    The study is divided into seven chapters, each dealing thematically with a part of Derrida’s philosophy of technology. The opening chapter begins with an exposé of the way the question of technology has evolved historically. It argues that Derrida’s deconstructive thinking avoids many of the problems associated with earlier as well as contemporary approaches. The next chapter sketches the basic features of a coherent philosophy of technology, a deconstructive phenomenology of technology that enlarges the concept of technology to include the entire phenomenological field: technology is here not opposed to the psychical, it is rather a close relation between the psychical and the non-psychical, between life and death. Life is always already contaminated with technology. Chapter three explores in some detail Derrida’s thesis that contemporary life is contaminated by what he calls a “gigantic tele-technological machine” including the media, the Internet, mobile systems, digital archives, etc. As is discussed in the following chapter, this contamination also has consequences for our experience of time. More than ever before, time is today produced artificially by the tele-technological machine that transforms our temporal experience. Chapter five suggests that also the ethical dimension in Derrida’s thinking is closely linked to technology. The main part of the chapter is devoted to three technological events of historic proportions: the electronic revolution, the hypothesis of a total nuclear war, and global terrorism, all of which require an urgent ethical response beyond current politics. This ethico-political response is further elaborated in the subsequent chapter, dealing especially with Derrida’s radical thesis that the tele-technological machine will transform the concept of the political as we know it. According to this thesis, the ability of the new technologies to facilitate extremely rapid circulation of ideas, voices and images around the world will eventually erase the borders between nation states, a fact that will force us to think the political beyond politics. The final chapter on religion argues that Derrida’s provocative thoughts about the close link between religion and science, religion and technology, and religion and the media provide keys to a more comprehensive understanding of his thinking about the technical, if not of his thinking as a whole.