jderrida's New Writeups

Jean-Baptiste Say (place)

2003-02-08T22:56:14Z

The great breakthrough that Say's work on political economy achieved was an anticipation of the marginal revolution that would not be accomplished until the simultaneous theorization of marginal utility in the 1870s by Jevons, Walras, and Menger. Although Say's work is certainly not an early instance of the theory of marginal utility, his revision of Adam Smith's theory of value is important as an anticipation of it.

Supply and Demand

Say's great achievement was to combine Condillac's utility theory of demand with Smith's cost theory of supply in order to arrive at a general description of value or wealth for a political economy. That the ideologues (Condillac's school) emphasis on demand as the only factor in value is erroneous is all too obvious. The Condillacian theory of utility would figure key in Say's description of value, but would also be supplemented by a theory of supply, which was itself…

Of Grammatology (place)

2002-09-25T01:55:31Z

Of Technology in Of Grammatology

(You would never again think of your self as you had : you would no longer think, but recite yourself. You would be dazzled and you would be nauseated, you would be profound. You would recognize, in writing, power.
* Derrida, Jacques. De la Grammataologie. Les Editions de Minuit, 1967.
* Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology, translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, The Johns Hopkins Universitiy Press, 1974, corrected edition 1997.)

At the end of the first part of Of Grammatology Jacques Derrida boldly asserts the very extent to which writing, and not yet speech, is constitutive of and distributed over the vast network of human activity. It is not just that writing is part and parcel of human activity in general (for this is almost a truism)—-Derrida…

Différance (place)

2002-09-23T04:05:10Z

"Differance" in Differance

(* Derrida, Jacques. La Différance. Bulletin de la Société française de philosophie 62, 3, September 1968. et Théorie d'ensemble, Éeditions du Seuil, 1968.
* Derrida, Jacques. Differance. In Speech and Phenomena, translated by David B. Allison, Northwestern Universitiy Press, 1973)

"Differance" would be situated somewhere in the middle: it would be situated somewhere between: differ and defer (the two senses of the French verb différer), the e and the a, active and passive, presence and absence. I will here attempt to discuss each of these in turn. Should I be able to give them sufficient treatment, we will have arrived at a reading of "differance" within Derrida's Differance. I will, if you know the text already, be leaving "trace" and certain other substitutions to the side, as well as the reference to the historical figures…

Signature Event Context (place)

2002-09-21T04:07:48Z

Chapter in Limited Inc, prior to that book.

And: a citation such as this will inevitably displace the original text. Such a displacement, however, could not here operate except with the same spirit as the text that is being read, which is, after all, by no means an original, however original its claims may be. It is not that I would want to suggest that we should shy away from this displacement. It is inevitable. Nor does this inevitability license a pernicious reading. The awareness of this displacement, and my prological announcement of it, would seem to characterize the entire text that might follow. I would hope that we could have always engaged in a careful reading that would not reproduce a text in its identity. If that were the case, the sublime concept of the original would be inherent in the very production of any book. A careful reading should not be a repetition of an ideal idol, rather it never could have been this: we might be inclined to name…

Speech and Phenomena (place)

2002-09-16T05:01:24Z

(This will not have been a preface to a critique of Edmund Husserl written under the name Jacques Derrida in a book you called Speech and Phenomena.
* Derrida, Jacques. La Voix et le phénomène: Introduction au problème du signe dans la phénoménologie de Husserl. Epiméthée: Essais philosophiques. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1967. 2d ed. 1972. 3d ed. 1946. 4th ed. 1983.
* Derrida, Jacques. Speech and Phenomena, and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs. David B. Allison, tr. Preface by Newton Garver. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973. Pbk. 1979. Translation of La Voix et le phénomène.
It was a book that already will not have been the book in which the most thorough critique of phenomenology will have been presented, for its form was already, in 1967 deconstructed in the one we would have also named ~~Of Grammatology~~, but to which I can now not refer. There would also have been others, if not

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Luce Irigaray (idea)

2002-06-11T20:53:09Z

European feminist, psycholinguist, and philosopher. Critic of Jacques Lacan and Sigmund Freud.

Irigaray was born in Belgium in 1930. She participated in Jacques Lacan's revisionist psychoanalytic seminars in the 1960s; she trained as and later became a psychoanalyst. She received her doctorate in linguistics in 1968. In 1982, while holding the chair in philosophy at Rotterdam's Erasmus University, she published her celebrated An Ethics of Sexual Difference establishing her priority on the scene of contemporary continental philosophy. Currently, Irigaray is director of research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris.

"Sexual difference is probably the issue in our time which could be our 'salvation' if we thought it through."

Like Cixous and Kristeva, Irigaray is critical of the philosophico-psychological tradition of differentianting men from women, because it is…