Thesis (M.A.)--Western Washington University, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 44-45). Also available in electronic format.

En del av doktrinforskningen berör att doktriner som redskap för det militära har en rad disparata betydelser som är motsägelsefulla. Detta orsakar doktrindilemmat. Exempelvis är det svårt för doktrin att både kunna ge tydlig inriktning till landets försvarsmakt samtidigt som doktrinen ska vara anpassningsbar till en värld i förändring. Argument för doktrinens olika syften och nyttofunktion framförs ofta i relation till hur robust doktrinen kan och bör vara mot en föränderlig värld. Svensk militärstrategisk doktrins syften är ambitiös i omfång och omfattar exempelvis funktioner som inriktande, utbildande, signalerande och vägledande. I föreliggande arbete formuleras frågeställningar som besvarar huruvida och på vilket sätt det är möjligt att kommunicera samtliga syften deklarerade i MSD. Analysen sker genom diskursanalys där olika meningsbetydelserna i doktrintexten undersöks. Metoden är poststrukturalistisk dekonstruktion vilket innebär att motsatsförhållanden i texten påvisas och framförs vilket skapar andra diskurser än de som normalt framträder som självklara. Utifrån detta diskuteras huruvida diskurserna bidrager till att stärka argument för doktrinsyftenas funktion. Resultatet påvisar att dekonstruktionen frambringar motsägelsefull kommunikation av samtliga analyserade doktrinsyften vilket innebär att doktrindilemmat är aktuellt för MSD.

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.

L’objectif poursuivi dans cette thèse est de rendre compte de l’émergence, dans la réflexion philosophique de l’après-guerre, d’une préoccupation pour les questions de l’affect et de la corporéité. Nous abordons cette orientation affective et sensible de la pensée avec les œuvres des philosophes français Emmanuel Levinas et Jacques Derrida, qui l’ont infléchie dans le sens d’une prise en compte de la fragilité et de la précarité de l’existence. Cela donne lieu à deux pensées incarnées. Le corps est chez Levinas à la fois ce qui pose dans l’être et permet de se vouer à autrui. Chez Derrida, c’est l’écriture qui fait sortir hors de soi, venant espacer et différer l’identité. Le défi sera de montrer que l’écriture relève, elle aussi, du registre de la corporéité. Les deux pensées reconnaissent ainsi au corps une place importante dans l’élaboration d’une nouvelle conceptualité qui se produit aux interstices de la vie et de l’œuvre. On a affaire dans les deux cas à des écritures vivantes, poétiques, métaphoriques, qui affectent le lecteur et ouvrent ainsi des avenues nouvelles pour penser les questions éthiques et politiques. Les deux philosophes engagent de la sorte la métaphysique et l’ontologie dans un mouvement, allant du même vers l’autre, et faisant du sentir et du pâtir le lieu même d’une nouvelle expérience philosophique. Nous en rendons compte en termes d’une orientation matérialiste de la pensée ainsi que d’une notion de subjectivité conçue, à travers le prisme de l’hospitalité, comme ouverture à l’autre.

Modern understandings of nostalgia sharply distinguish it from memory and often construe its relationship to the past as reactionary, fanciful, or retrograde. This dissertation reconsiders that valuation by engaging the formative sources that contribute to philosophical understandings of nostalgia and provide resources for thinking it otherwise. It reexamines time and memory in continental philosophy and U.S. cinema to argue that nostalgia does important work often overlooked in present conceptions, work that repositions relations with the past to generative, animating effect. The project analyzes the temporal issues nostalgia elicits, highlights its affective contours, and repositions its power to mediate and rework memory. It maintains that the role nostalgia plays in human experience is more propulsive than regressive, making it more attuned to time’s tensions and demands than previously thought. Chapter one narrates the history of nostalgia, beginning with the work of Johannes Hofer. Origins in medical nosology establish a diagnostic frame of reference that grounds nostalgia’s reception as pathology while also revealing its persistent instabilities. Martin Heidegger and, especially, Jacques Derrida bring the temporal vectors of those instabilities into sharper focus. Chapter two shows how Heidegger’s work provides a useful understanding of time and moods, but ultimately remains tethered to a nostalgia for presence (nostos). Chapter three brings Derrida’s thinking on time and the trace into conversation with psychoanalysis to isolate a more capacious approach, one that indulges nostalgic desire but also frustrates it (algos). The remaining chapters turn to film and develop an understanding of the moving image based on its ability to capture passing time, the eminent object of modern nostalgic experience. Chapter four engages critical literature on the uses of nostalgia in film and reconsiders George Lucas’s American Graffiti (1973), a pivotal work often reproached by critics and scholars. Chapter five advances a close reading of Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life (2011) and his estranged relationship with philosophy. That relationship informs his work and often takes nostalgic recollection as an orienting concern. The film in question situates nostalgia as a propulsive screen affect that facilitates the work of mourning in the wake of loss and discontinuity. The dissertation concludes by sketching out horizons for future research and turning to insights contained in Augustine’s Confessions that further illustrate the form of nostalgia explored throughout.

<p>This dissertation interrogates the ways in which the ethical rhetoric following September 11th, 2001 (particularly that of the administration of U.S. President George Bush) and contemporary globalization (which Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have called "Empire") implicate one other, as well as the ways in which these interlinked discourses are currently shaping the post-9/11 global "ethical climate" and its universalized human subject. Drawing upon Jacques Derrida's concept of "hauntology" which he introduces in Specters of Marx (1994), the main argument of the thesis is that the dominant post-9/11 ethical rhetoric is a specter of Empire, such that it is both a symptom of and a particularly influential force-of-law shaping the "Spirit" of contemporary globalization/Empire. The thesis claims that in their shared universalism, neo-Hegelian remainders of idealism, and theocratic impulses to contain and ethicopolitically manage the entire world, globalization/Empire and its most serious recent symptoms-Bush's post-9/11 ethical rhetoric and the global war on terror--contain suicidal auto-deconstructive tendencies that threaten to destroy themselves from within in spite of their utopic visions of themselves. Finally, the dissertation investigates some of the key spectral remainders of "9/11" and contemporary ethical thought which contradict and/or corroborate the dominant post-9/11 discourse of Empire and its universalized ethico-political human subject.</p> / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This dissertation answers three questions relating to Jacques Derrida’s writings: why is Derrida concerned with human/animal difference? How should his deconstruction of this distinction be understood in the context of his broader philosophical project? Finally, do the answers to these questions complicate the belief that Derrida’s thought promotes a post-human ethics? Whereas Derrida’s sensitivity to the suffering of non-human creatures partially explains his interest in “the animal,” there are complex reasons for why he frequently returns to interrogate this theme–reasons that can only be understood by first clarifying core features of his philosophy. I maintain that what obsesses Derrida in virtually all of his writings is how a longstanding, “metaphysical” view of human consciousness proves deconstructable. Following Derrida, I term this view “living presence”–the belief that experience happens presently to beings who are present to themselves. In undermining this view, Derrida reimagines experience as what I term “survival,” where the very things traditionally thought to be foreign to human subjective life are required for experience to carry on happening. Importantly, the fact that philosophers repeatedly describe human consciousness in terms of presence is not simply an error. It is rather an effort to preserve the living present against the threat that everything opposed to presence plays in its very possibility. This explains why human/animal difference is so strenuously affirmed throughout the history of Western thought on Derrida’s view. Animals are not simply inferior kinds of beings compared to humans; there is rather thought to be an essential difference between the two. Whereas humans encounter themselves and their world presently, animal are utterly instinctual, reactional, and non-present to themselves. However, by deconstructing the human/animal distinction, Derrida reveals that those features traditionally associated with animals are necessary for any life, human or otherwise, to exist. For this reason, “the animal” is a “pharmakon”: it both sustains and upsets a long-held understanding of what we uniquely are. In my final analysis, I examine whether my reading of Derrida’s thought is compatible with a non-human ethics. I do so in two steps: first, I examine a prominent reading of Derrida’s thought that contends that it is. For a large number of thinkers in “animal studies,” Derrida’s thought is aligned with the philosophy Emmanuel Levinas in important respects: whereas Derrida rejects Levinas’ anthropocentrism, he retains the core of Levinas’ ethics. However, I argue that the conditions that Derrida believes make life possible undermine this reading of his work. In the end, I argue that if deconstruction is an ethics, it is so only because it promotes “life” understood in the sense developed in this dissertation. Yet we must be mindful of what deconstruction does not provide in the way of an ethics: on the one hand, any standard of ethical belief is deconstructible. On the other hand, deconstruction does not necessarily promote a more inclusive and compassionate future. Whereas it can do so, it might also inaugurate a future that is less inclusive and more savage. This is, I argue, precisely what cannot be known. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Jacques Derrida a ouvert un nouvel horizon pour concevoir l’écriture, en insistant notamment sur la dynamique de la différence qu’elle met en œuvre. Pour penser cette différence et pour libérer le texte d’un sens présupposé univoque, il sollicite Friedrich Nietzsche, mais sans étudier, pour autant, le lien qui rattache l’écriture de ce dernier à la question du corps. Quant à sa propre conception de l’écriture, il est frappant qu’elle ait été abondamment étudiée, sans que le lien qui l’unit à la question du corps reçoive toute l’attention méritée. Ce présent travail vise donc à penser l’écriture du corps chez Nietzsche et chez Derrida, ou plus exactement entre eux, en étudiant la « corporalisation » de l’écriture et la « textualisation » du corps. Nous montrons que, chacun à sa façon, Nietzsche et Derrida puisent dans l’ambiguïté corporelle pour élaborer de nouvelles dynamiques d’écriture, tout en donnant à penser le corps lui-même en termes d’écriture. Pour étudier ce double geste, nous lisons différents textes de Derrida, à partir desquels nous proposons une réflexion sur l’écriture du corps chez Nietzsche, sans que ce dernier y soit nécessairement mentionné. En effet, c’est l’hospitalité de l’écriture de Derrida elle-même qui invite à une telle démarche, que nous abordons en termes d’intrusion. / Jacques Derrida has opened a new horizon to conceive writing by insisting on the dynamic of “difference” that it implements. To address the question of difference, as well as to liberate the text from a presupposed unambiguous meaning, he solicits Friedrich Nietzsche without examining, however, the link which connects the writing of the latter with the question of the body. As for Derrida’s own conception of writing, what is striking is that while it has been widely studied, its link to the question of the body has not received the attention it deserves. Therefore this present work aims to consider the writing of the body in Nietzsche’s and Derrida’s philosophies, and more precisely between them, by studying the “corporization” of the writing and the “textualization” of the corporeity. We demonstrate that both Nietzsche and Derrida, each in his own way, draw from the body’s ambiguity to develop new dynamics of writing, and think about embodiment, at the same time, in terms of writing. To discuss these two aspects, we read various texts of Derrida, through which we also suggest a reflection on Nietzsche’s writing of the body, without the latter being necessarily mentioned. It is actually the hospitality of Derrida’s writing that allows such a gesture, which could be perceived more in terms of intrusion.

Não é raro nas produções de J. M. Coetzee e de Roberto Bolaño que a prática artística converta-se em exercício de terror e violência. São constantes as situações em que a construção literária e da literatura produz modos específicos de autoritarismo, esquecimento e injustiça. Tais atos provocam um abalo enunciativo nos textos que os narram, gerando um questionamento sobre sua própria legitimidade (estética, ética, política) e a do campo discursivo ao qual estão associados. Para compreender a situação apresentada e enfrentada por essas obras, esta tese recompõe os percursos históricos por elas traçados. A começar por genealogias da literatura e de sistemas literários, que se entrecruzam, sobrepõe-se ou apropriam-se do passado colonial, do nazismo, das ditaduras latino-americanas e do apartheid, tal como indiciam Foe e La literatura nazi en América. Em seguida, nossa rota se detém sobre os períodos de transições que marcaram tanto a África do Sul como o Chile de finais do século XX, nos quais processos de verdade e justiça acabam se revertendo em casos de neutralização da memória e da linguagem, ficcionalizando a violência do passado em troca da legitimação da nova ordem discursiva do presente, na qual o literário teria um lugar próprio, tal como ocorre, por exemplo, em Nocturno de Chile. Por último, abre-se o presente democrático a partir do qual todos esses livros são narrados, em que a literatura se converte no produto mais bem acabado de um regime de oferta da palavra e de administração da multiplicidade, sob a forma do direito e da promessa do direito. Assim se configuram, por exemplo, Elizabeth Costello ou Los detectives salvajes, sem, no entanto, deixarem de esboçar uma fuga desse horizonte, em busca de outros mundos, outras formas possíveis de partilhar a linguagem. Nessa trajetória, iremos rever importantes conceitos e valores que estão intimamente ligados a essa prática simbólica tais como autonomia, liberdade, memória, democracia, entre outros, para que possamos compreender em que condições a literatura pode se tornar indesejável ou mesmo repudiável, tais como conjecturam esses autores / It is not uncommon, in the works of J. M. Coetzee and Roberto Bolaño for artistic practice to convert itself into the exercise of terror and violence. In numerous situations, the literary construction and literature produce particular types of authoritarianism, oblivion and injustice. Such acts provoke an enunciative disturbance in the narrating texts, generating questions about their own (esthetic, ethics, politics) legitimacy and about the discursive field to which they are associated. In order to understand the situation presented and the ones faced by these literary works, this thesis reconstructs the historical paths tery trace. The study begins with literary genealogies and literary systems that intersect, overlap or appropriate Colonial History, Nazism, Latin American dictatorships and the apartheid, such as indicated by Foe and La literatura nazi en América. Then the focus rests on periods of transition that mark both South Africa and Chile at the end of the 20th century. In such periods truth commissions and justice end up reverting to the neutralization of memory and language, fictionalizing the violence of the past in exchange for the legitimization of the new discursive order of the present, in which literature would have a place of its own, such as in Nocturno de Chile. Lastly, the democratic present is the opening from which all of these books are narrated, wherein literature converts itself into the most polished product of a supply scheme of the written word and the administration of multiplicity, in the form and the promise of the right. It thereby constitutes the works, Elizabeth Costello or Los detectives salvajes, for example, while simultaneously sketching an escape of this horizon, in search of other worlds, other possible forms of sharing language. In this trajectory, important concepts will be reconsidered, along with values closely linked to the literary, such as autonomy, freedom, memory, and democracy, among others, so that it may be possible to understand in which conditions, literature can become undesirable or even despicable, as these authors conjecture

[pt] Direito e justiça no rastro de Derrida investiga a aproximação entre direito e justiça no pensamento de Jacques Derrida. O objetivo é verificar como as reflexões desconstrutivas do autor percebem os limites e as possibilidades de um discurso jurídico que pretenda fazer justiça à alteridade absoluta. O trabalho explora temas tradicionais das reflexões jusfilosóficas, como a diferença entre força e violência, o fundamento e a justificação da autoridade, a delimitação e a interpretação do direito, bem como a possibilidade de realização de justiça. A experiência da justiça, afirmada como aporia, exige, na negociação do impossível, responsabilidade política infinita pela decisão que pode transformar a ordem jurídica e renovar a promessa por justiça. / [en] Law and justice on the trace of Jacques Derrida investigates the approach of law and justice in the thought of Jacques Derrida. The objective is to verify how Derrida’s deconstructive thought understands the limits and the possibilities of a legal discourse that intends to do justice to absolute alterity. The paper explores traditional issues for legal thought, such as the difference between force and violence, the foundation and justification of authority, the delimitation and interpretation of law and the possibility of achieving justice. The experience of justice affirmed as aporia requires, in the negotiation of the impossible, infinite political responsibility for the decision that might change the legal system and renew its promise for justice.