Deconstructive vs Pragmatic: A Critique of the Derrida–Searle Debate

ABSTRACT

This article presents a critical account of the debate between Derrida and Searle in which I defend Austin’s and Searle’s pragmatic analysis of speech against Derrida’s complex deconstructionist approach. I first formalize Derrida’s argument, reducing it to its main tenets that can be positively identified and critically reviewed. On the basis of this formalization I argue that the apparent incompatibility between Derrida’s and Searle’s approach to language becomes clear once we formalize, according to their type and content, the three concepts of “intention” that are confusedly referred to under one and the same label in the debate. This formalization reduces and clarifies the obscurity associated with the Derrida–Searle debate, and helps demonstrating the shortcomings of Derrida’s position.     

Derrida’s Paralogism of Writing: A Critique of Deconstructive Reasoning

This article is a critique of the flawed logic Derrida employed in articulating his program of a Grammatology for “deconstructing” Western philosophy. I argue that Derrida in several instances built his arguments around what Kant called the “paralogism.” I look at an often cited case in order to substantiate my claim: Derrida’s reading of Saussure, where his argument is based on a paralogism. Derrida misinterprets Saussure by seeing his alleged rejection of graphical writing as a rejection of his own idiosyncratic notion of “writing” (alias différance, trace, generalized writing, etc.), which only corresponds to Saussure’s own notion of “linguistic value,” produced in a system of differences without positive terms.     

Cougar figures,gender, and the performances of predation

This article considers how nonhuman animals are enrolled in the construction of gendered identities. Specifically, I interrogate two gendered figures with which I was repeatedly confronted over the course of researching cougar–human relationships on Vancouver Island, home to what is estimated to be North America's densest population of cougars. The first figure, Cougar Annie, was a woman ‘settler’ on western Vancouver Island, reputed to have killed over 100 cougars in her lifetime and now celebrated as a strong, independent female. The second figure is a contemporary trope, an older woman who expresses interest in younger men, known in slang speech as a ‘cougar’. Both figures are intimately bound to a third figure, the animal cougar, Puma concolor, whose material–semiotic relationship to humans both performs and is performed by ‘cougars’ and Cougar Annie. Haraway's conception of figures as embodied and performative mappings of power is central to this article's discussion, which lies at the intersection of animal studies, more-than-human geographies, posthumanism, and feminist science studies. Methodologically, I draw on interviews and archival research to trace the historical and contemporary specificities of these two figures – Cougar Annie and ‘cougars’ – revealing how they are informed by, and simultaneously produce, uphold, and perform, gendered understandings of the relationship between humans and cougars, predator and prey, humans and animals, and culture and nature.     

Political Involvement and Religious Compromises

Abstract

The risks of modern politics are significant enough that religious believers ought to be making greater efforts than many of them are currently doing to think soberly about the effects of their political participation. In this article I argue that Stanley Hauerwas’s most recent approach to political participation is a promising one but that there are further measures that are equally profitable as ways of facilitating the public witness of the faithful. I develop out of my discussion of Hauerwas some participatory guidelines for religious believers. First I suggest that they ought to be abiding by a worldview integrity condition, and then I argue that they ought also to be subjecting themselves to the assessments of a critical community.     

Renovating the Landscape and Packaging the Penguin: Culture and Nature on Summerland Peninsula,Phillip Island,Victoria, Australia

Changes in settler impacts on Summerland Peninsula, Phillip Island are examined, with an emphasis on the recent program of environmental restoration associated with the Penguin Parade, one of Victoria’s largest tourist attractions. Management strategies construct nature around an ideal of human absence, expressed in, for example, removal of residents and residential buildings; representations of the Aboriginal presence as both prehistoric and part of nature; and formalised rather than experiential environmental education. Paradoxically this encourages intensified tourism and its associated impacts, such that the economics of environmental preservation are dependent on its commodification. This paper draws on two traditions of cultural geography, with components undertaken more than 20 years apart. I argue that a combination of Sauerian and deconstructive approaches can be productively applied to many current environmental issues.     

Derrida’s Tense Bow

This essay explores both the appeal and the difficulties of Derrida’s “democratic Romanticism.” Derrida’s broader philosophical project seeks to make explicit the paradoxes or aporias that are embedded in practical experience. In unveiling these aporias, Derrida pleads, particularly in his later writings, for a transformation of democracy and religion so as to make them hospitable to difference. However, I will argue that Derrida’s reduction of the great variety of moral-political and religious situations to one aporetic logic runs into conceptual problems and risks undoing the moral tissue that makes hospitality possible in the first place.     

Universal,acid: Houellebecq’s clones and the evolution of humanity

ABSTRACT

This article examines Houellebecq’s two genomics novels, Les Particules élémentaires and La Possibilité d’une île and elaborates their relationship with Neo-Darwinian evolutionary naturalism and neoliberal capitalism. In these works, the mutual interdependence of these two regimes of thought both necessitates and makes possible the technology of human cloning, which promises humanity an escape from the misery of its own biological, political predicament. Houellebecq’s work, I show, problematises this dialectic, and in doing so offers an incisive critique of utopian posthumanism, providing instead only an aporetic—but rigorously materialist—form of hope.     

Productive Paradoxes: Exploring Prefigurative Practices with Derrida through a Spanish Food Sovereignty Collective

There has been a proliferation in the use of the concept of prefiguration to describe and understand many of the protest and social change movements of the past decade. However, there are key aspects of the concept that remain unexplored. In this paper I consider telos and justice, and unveil a temporal paradox arising from the thinking behind prefiguration. Rather than this temporal paradox of prefiguration being the undoing of the concept, it does in fact have the potential to be its strength. The purpose of this paper is to assert, by drawing on Derrida’s notion of the impossibility of justice, that the temporal paradox of prefiguration is not something to be resolved but instead is to be foregrounded and navigated. I use research from a food sovereignty collective in the north of Spain to offer an illustration of a prefigurative economic politics that embraces Derrida’s justice-as-an-impossibility.     

China and the emerging regional order in the South Pacific

As China rises, it has become increasingly aggressive in applying its soft power in the Pacific. What does China's arrival mean for the emerging regional order in the Pacific? What is it up to in the strategic backwater of the Pacific, which has traditionally been regarded as an ‘American lake’ and Australia's ‘special patch’? Setting my analysis in the broad context of China's new global diplomacy, I argue that the pattern of China's assertive behaviour in the Pacific is no different from its approach to other regions in the global South. I further argue that with only limited strategic, diplomatic and economic investment in the Pacific, China has become a regional power by default. The arrival of China, therefore, is unlikely to provoke any new round of great power competition. Rather, it offers opportunities for the world's second most formidable development challenge.     

John Banville’s “monstrous child”: freedom and inheritance in Shroud

ABSTRACT

John Banville has described his novel Shroud (2002) – a fictionalised re-imagining of the 1988 scandal of Paul de Man, whose war-time publications for a collaborationist journal were discovered after his death – as his “monstrous child” that only he could love. This essay turns to Derrida’s thoughts on monstrosity, and in particular his framing of the future-to-come as an unforeseeable reckoning between Nietzsche and Rousseau, whose approaches to human freedom and authenticity remain philosophically irreconcilable. Shroud engages with these two inheritances on a thematic level, bringing them into conversation through the characters of Vander and Cass. The interruption of intergenerational love and the prospect of a child between them, however, makes Derridean monstrosity – that more properly deconstructive trope that opens to the future by unearthing traumatic inheritances from the past – into a structuring principle, and the means by which we might best understand the novel itself as a “monstrous child”.     

Notes from County Correspondents.

In 1503, the canons of Ripon Minster initiated a building campaign to replace the church’s nave. Through a careful study of the documentary evidence, including sources that have not previously been considered, this article investigates how Ripon’s clergy organised and funded the project. It offers a more precise chronology of the works and an assessment of their impact on the use of the church by its parishioners. The article also considers the clergy’s motives for rebuilding, proving that the renovation was not a reaction to the old nave’s deterioration so much as an initiative to create a grander architectural setting for processions and more space for burial within the church.     

Warlords and Holymen. Scotland AD80-1000

This article compares and contrasts the work of Quentin Skinner and Jacques Derrida on power and the State. It argues that despite Skinner's explicit repudiation of Derrida's method of philosophising, he has come to advocate an approach to the history of ideas that bears important and striking similarities to Derrida's thought. I attribute this intellectual gravitation toward Derrida as the logical outcome of a shared understanding on the nature of the cosmos and man's place within it—an understanding profoundly indebted to the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche and the genealogical history of Michel Foucault. As a means to illustrate the narrowing intellectual gulf between Skinner and Derrida, I compare their respective thoughts on the nature of the modern and contemporary State, a State that both intellectuals see as emerging from a dominant western philosophical tradition that, at its core, is marked by the idea of fear. For both Skinner and Derrida this has profound consequences for the possibilities open to individuals and societies for free thought and political action.     

Said,Auerbach, and the Return to Philological Hermeneutics

ABSTRACT

This essay explores the relationship between Edward Said’s well-known contrapuntal reading of history and Erich Auerbach’s Ansatzpunkt, or point of departure, as a means of entering a given hermeneutic circle. Although Auerbach occupied an increasingly prominent place in Said’s critical thought, his engagement with the work of the German philologist has been largely ignored or downplayed. In this essay I take the figure of exile, which is so central to Said’s scholarship and which he explicitly links with the intellectual mission of critique, as a point of departure for a deepened exploration of Said’s critical method—a method developed in critical dialogue with Auerbach’s work. Building on the existing literature, I argue that Auerbach offers more than simply a way for Said to problematize identity politics and to challenge the dogmatism of received notions of home and political belonging. More than this, I argue that the German philologist provides Said with a way to reconfigure the dialectic between history and literature; to develop his contrapuntal approach to reading history; and to rethink the parameters of a historicist humanism that, in turn, enables him to reactivate the critical potential of philological hermeneutics.     

Bradley Holt,Thirsty for God: A Brief History of Christian Spirituality

Abstract

In this essay, I consider the relationship between more radically open conceptions of democracy and the recent "return of religion" as the return of distinct, particular religions. The radical democracy of figures such as Derrida, Badiou, and Hardt and Negri is found to be not radical enough to be open to the particular religious other. Derrida's "religion without religion" does violence to the particularity of concrete religious traditions, Badiou appropriates Paul's universalism while abandoning the particularity and difference in his conception of collective identity, and Hardt and Negri advocate a "politics of love" while severing that love from its ground— namely, God. I then show a way of rethinking both society and Christianity so that Christianity finds a place in society and society makes room for Christianity. A radical Christianity devoid of self-privilege and triumphalism provides a model for an intersubjectivity of love in which the other really comes first. Paul's radical conception of membership in the body of Christ accomplishes precisely what radical democracy fails to do: it allows for heterophony as well as polyphony, and incoherence as well as commonality. It is only when church and society allow the possibility of incoherence and heterophony that they are truly open to the other, and it is only when they are truly open to the other that they satisfy the demands of a truly radical democracy and radical Christianity.     

Time and the spectral other: Demonstrating against ‘Unite the Right 2’

Recent public protests against right-wing politics in the United States have often demonstrated a sense of surprise at the recurrence of racist, anti-Semitic and fascist ideologies and movements which ought to belong to the past. Using insights from Walter Benjamin, Johannes Fabian and Jacques Derrida, the authors analyze the recent gathering of thousands of counter-demonstrators at the ‘Unite the Right 2’ rally in Washington, DC and discuss how political and moral enemies are rhetorically consigned to another time. The temporality on display at this demonstration was more complex than linear, progressive time. Instead, it consolidated events from the past, present and future into a sense of eternal and recurrent victory. They argue that this temporality is an expression both of Derrida’s ideas about spectrality and Tanya Luhrmann’s analysis of the moral psychology of faith.     

Dancing around Development: Crisis in Christian Country in Western Province,Papua New Guinea

This article explores the conjuncture of Christianity and development in light of the establishment of a new Gogodala church in Western Province, Papua New Guinea. In the paper, I examine the ways in which members of this new church, the Congregation of Evangelical Fellowship (CEF), are utilising the concept of dance to comment on the failure of both expatriate missionaries and the dominant Evangelical Church of Papua New Guinea (ECPNG) to prepare the Gogodala community for development. I trace how mission-instigated abstention from dance became emblematic of a Christian lifestyle, and remains central to the constitution and articulation of ‘Christian country’ in this part of PNG. The incorporation of dance into CEF services and conferences, then, posits a challenge to the expatriate mission and ECPNG. In the process, dance has become a metaphor for a communal search for development as well as a reinterpretation of the Christian and pre-contact past.     

Creating the cultures of the future: cultural strategy,policy and institutions in Gramsci

Gramsci’s writings have rarely been discussed and used systematically by scholars in cultural policy studies, despite the fact that in cultural studies, from which the field emerged, Gramsci had been a major source of theoretical concepts. Cultural policy studies were, in fact, theorised as an anti-Gramscian project between the late 1980s and the early 1990s, when a group of scholars based in Australia advocated a major political and theoretical reorientation of cultural studies away from hegemony theory and radical politicisation, and towards reformist–technocratic engagement with the policy concerns of contemporary government and business. Their criticism of the ‘Gramscian tradition’ as inadequate for the study of cultural policy and institutions has remained largely unexamined in any detail for almost 20 years and seems to have had a significant role in the subsequent neglect of Gramsci’s contribution in this area of study. This essay, consisting of three parts, is an attempt to challenge such criticism and provide an analysis of Gramsci’s writings, with the aim of proposing a more systematic contribution of Gramsci’s work to the theoretical development of cultural policy studies. In Part I, I question the use of the notion of ‘Gramscian tradition’ made by its critics, and challenge the claim that it was inadequate for the study of cultural policy and institutions. In Parts II and III, I consider Gramsci’s specific writings on questions of cultural strategy, policy and institutions, which have so far been overlooked by scholars, arguing that they provide further analytical insights to those offered by his more general concepts. More specifically, in Part II, I consider Gramsci’s pre-prison writings and political practice in relation to questions of cultural strategy and institutions. I argue that the analysis of these early texts, which were written in the years in which Gramsci was active in party organisation and leadership, is fundamental not only for understanding the nature of Gramsci’s early and continued involvement with questions of cultural strategy and institutions, but also as a key for deciphering and interpreting cultural policy themes that he later developed in the prison notebooks, and which originated in earlier debates. Finally, in Part III, I carry out a detailed analysis of Gramsci’s prison notes on questions of cultural strategy, policy and institutions, which enrich the theoretical underpinnings for critical frameworks of analysis as well as for radical practices of cultural strategy, cultural policy-making and cultural organisation. I then answer the question of whether Gramsci’s insights amount to a theory of cultural policy.     

Miles Hollingworth,The Pilgrim City: St Augustine of Hippo and his Innovation in Political Thought

Abstract

This paper examines the changing pattern of the relationship between religious communities and the state. It argues that the church, in the light of what is actually being offered to it by the state in terms of partnership, should, on the basis of its own frame of reference, refuse the terms and conditions of cooperation. The first section charts the developments which shape this emerging relationship since the early 1990s, most notably, the strengthening of the public voice of minority faith communities. The second section analyses the debates about the role of religious communities in generating social cohesion and social capital in the context of debates about the importance of civil society to liberal democracy. The third section assesses whether the emergent shape of relations between the state and faith communities conforms to or contradicts a liberal account of the role of religious discourse in the public square. In contrast, the last two sections focus on the place of the church in this emergent relationship and analyse the opportunities and pitfalls confronting the church in the light of contemporary political theology. The primary theologies drawn on are represented by the work of Stanley Hauerwas, John Paul II and Joan Lockwood and Oliver O'Donovan.     

THINKING HISTORICALLY WHEN THE MARGINS BECOME THE CENTER: INTELLECTUAL HISTORY AS HISTORICAL CRITIQUE IN MARTIN JAY'S ESSAYS FROM THE EDGE

This review of Martin Jay's recent published collection of essays examines his ongoing rethinking, supplementation, and revision of central themes—the negative and positive dialectics of historical totalization, the varieties and uses of conceptions of experience, the nature of visual cultures and scopic regimes, and the ambiguities of truth‐construction in the public realm—that have been the focus of his major works since the 1970s. It argues that his more recent work indicates a gradual shift toward an affirmation of the kinds of paratactic and deconstructive thinking of Adorno and Derrida as models for producing appropriate forms of historical consciousness and historical critique in the present, and it raises the question of how the issues of historical truth‐telling, consensual collective identity, ethical action, and the cultural role of the critical intellectual are reformulated in this process.     

‘An Angel Directs the Storm’: The Religious Politics of American Neoconservatism

Abstract

In his inaugural speech, President George W. Bush suggested that the mission of America to spread freedom and democracy in the world is a divinely authored mission. The intention first announced in Bush's inaugural to globalize an American Christian vision of freedom and democracy, and of free market capitalism, reflects the theological underpinnings of the neo-conservativism of the Bush administration. In this article I trace the remarkable continuities between the neo-conservative political theology of Bush and his acolytes and more mainstream Niebuhrian approaches to democracy and the ‘manifest destiny’ of America. I then subject the emergence of an American imperium, and the political theology associated with it, to a critique in dialogue with early Christian critics of Roman Empire, and with the Christian pacifist tradition as recently retrieved by North American theological ethicists John Howard Yoder and Stanley Hauerwas.