Jewish Thinkers of Otherness ⟩ Derrida — Part II

Derrida: The Philosopher as International Media Phenomenon

Professor Steven Taubeneck will present.

After 1967, when he published three books in one year, Derrida experimented in the 1970s with more creative forms of writing. Glas, which combines a reading of Hegel with pages from Genet’s autobiography, was published in 1974. In 1980, he published The Postcard: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, the disruptions with which he implicitly questioned the understanding of philosophy as based on concepts and arguments.

These two texts, among others, follow from his essay on “White Mythology,” in which he showed how philosophy and metaphor are deeply intertwined.

By 1980, he had become world famous, but also widely considered scandalous, “postmodern,” and thus problematic. The controversy led to the rejection of his honorary doctorate from Cambridge University in 1992.

For our meeting on Derrida, “Part 2,” I would like to consider two texts from the later part of his career. Both texts are available on the THORR site. Please have a look at them before our meeting.

The first, “Of an apocalyptic tone recently raised in philosophy,” was a paper given in 1980 in response to Kant’s “Of an overlordly tone recently adopted in philosophy” (“Von einem neuerdings erhobenen vornehmen Ton in der Philosophie,” 1796). Kant had criticized the tone of recent writings in philosophy, and Derrida used the occasion to develop a similar critique of Heidegger and Levinas, on their relation to the apocalypse of St. John.

The second text, Monolingualism of the Other, or the Prosthesis of the Origin, is from 1996. In this, one of his more extended accounts of his own life, he describes what it was like to grow up speaking the language of the colonizer (French) within the context of the colonized (Algeria).

When he died in 2004, the President of the French Republic, Jacques Chirac, announced his passing.

METHOD

• Head on over to the THORR page for this event to download the articles and a handy timeline.
• While you’re there, watch the amazing documentary playing at SADHO Theater.
• Last-Minute Super-Bonus: Prof. Taubeneck has extracted just the choicest quotes from tonight’s readings … and collected them for you here!
• As always, summaries, notes, event chatlogs, episode transcripts, timelines, tables, observations, and downloadable PDFs for all the episodes we cover can be found here: THORR (The High Ontology Reading Room)

ABOUT PROFESSOR TAUBENECK

Professor Taubeneck is professor of German and Philosophy at UBC, first translator of Hegel’s Encyclopedia into English, and SADHO CΦO. Most impressively, he has also been wrestling with the core texts of 20-cent. phenomenology and existentialism for over 30 years, and has worked and collaborated with Gadamer, Derrida, and Rorty.

View all of our coming episodes here.