This thesis explores the question of technicity in relation to deconstruction. This question of `technics' is first explored in relation to Marx's analysis of the commodity. I examine Jean-Joseph Goux's attempt in Economie et Symbolique to extend the four-stage development of the commodity fetish to all forms of symbolic value including that of the linguistic sign. Here what I demonstrate is that Derrida's understanding of arche-writing, far from representing a `material restitution' of the sign as Goux hopes, in fact represents a process of exteriorisation that is irreducibly as ideal as it is material. This `originary technicity' of the sign then helps to explicate the `technical life' of the commodity as outlined by Derrida in Specters of Marx. Secondly, I examine Bernard Stiegler's influential recent work Technics and Time which attempts to generalise a technicity understood as the `prosthesis of the human' to a general theory of `inorganic organised matter', or an evolutionary technics which Stiegler calls epiphylogenesis. Here I analyse in some detail the logic of Stiegler's argument before moving on to query some of the basic assumptions in his reading of Derrida and Heidegger. Finally, I investigate the question of technicity in relation to the politics of deconstruction. Here I explore critically Richard Beardsworth's recent claims that there are two political legacies of Derrida's work, the one building on Derrida's thoughts around original technicity (Stiegler's route), the other concerned with a more religious or literary thinking of the `promise
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:288842 |
| Date | January 2003 |
| Creators | Roberts, B. L. |
| Publisher | University of Sussex |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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