Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Development Under Erasure: Deconstruction In Development Discourse, Micah Gill

Honors Theses

Jacques Derrida’s theory of deconstruction has been historically underappreciated in development. Yet Derrida’s critical theory realizes development as an inherently deconstructive field, one which advocates for the Other when disciplines such as economics and international relations overlook them. By examining the history of development through a Derridean lens, we can see how deconstruction was working within some of the development discourse’s prominent shifts leading up to its “impasse” in the 1980s. Heightened critical attention around this time catalyzed a flurry of deconstructive processes in the following years which have reshaped the landscape of development scholarship and practice. The story of …

The Cave And The Stars: On The People And Democracy Of Non-Philosophy, Jeremy R. Smith

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This monograph dissertation explores the work of François Laruelle and the democratic nature of his non-philosophy. In four separate chapters, this dissertation argues for identifying non-philosophy as the introduction of democracy into thought and seeks to instantiate a necessary theoretical delimitation for its programme, which explores the relationships between people, thought, and power. Chapter One analyzes previous philosophical frameworks from thinkers such as Edmund Husserl, Max Horkheimer, and Louis Althusser on their respective stances toward philosophy’s role for people. Chapter Two investigates the work of François Laruelle for the past fifty years as the development of non-philosophy or “human philosophy.” …

..., Claire Alfonso

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Words are fickle, easily misunderstood, and often put us at a loss... but we all have so much we feel we need to express. This begs the question: Is there any safe way of communication? Can anything ever really be communicated how you mean it? Will you ever see the reflection of what you feel, think, and dream outside of yourself? In response to this existential dilemma, I imagine an alternative language of images, sounds, color, feelings, and non-identification. My thesis is a meditation on the issues with standard language and the idea of alternative language. In my argument I …

Shibboleth: Judges, Derrida, Celan [Toc], Marc Redfield

Philosophy & Theory

In the Book of Judges, the Gileadites use the word shibboleth to target and kill members of a closely related tribe, the Ephraimites, who cannot pronunce the initial shin phoneme. In modern European languages, shibboleth has come to mean a hard-to-falsify sign that winnows identities, and establishes and confirms borders; it has also acquired the ancillary meanings of slogan or cliché. The semantic field of shibboleth thus seems keyed to the waning of the logos in an era of technical reproducibility—to the proliferation of technologies and practices of encryption, decryption, exclusion and inclusion that saturate modern life. In the context …

Infrapolitical Passages: Global Turmoil, Narco-Accumulation, And The Post-Sovereign State [Toc], Gareth Williams

Literature

This book proposes to clear a way through some of the dominant political determinations and violent symptoms of contemporary globalization. It does this in in order to make a case for “infrapolitics” as an enactment of intellectual responsibility in the face of a tumultuous world of war and of technological value extraction on a planetary scale. In Infrapolitical Passages the politics of contemporary global capital is a race to the bottom of reason itself, extended in the wake of the subordination of all forms of living to the economized relation between means and ends. It is this relation which, thanks …

An Archaeology Of Contemporary Speculative Knowledge, Justas Patkauskas

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation investigates contemporary speculative knowledge grounded in the immanence episteme, which is struggling to emerge as a foundation for a new kind of absolute knowledge. Regarding method, I use Michel Foucault’s concept of archaeology, situating archaeology in the context of deconstruction. In general, by delineating the various differences and genealogies within immanence theory, I show that immanence is neither a monolithic homogeneity nor a schizophrenic multiplicity but a coherent, if troubled, ground for speculative thought.

In Chapter 1, I define deconstruction as a broad philosophical project concerned with the order of knowledge and the University and its disciplines. I …

What's Past Is Prologue: Transforming Trauma, Rewriting Identity In Gloria Anzaldua's "Borderlands/La Frontera" And "Light In The Dark/Luz En Lo Oscuro", Richard Edward Riley

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands/La Frontera and Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro are widely acknowldged as groundbreaking texts across Latinx literary canons, invoking selfhood, spirituality, activism, and politics as a queer woman of color writer.

Her language around self-dispersion is still undertheorized in what it owes to traumatic experiences discoverable in the self, body, world, and culture Anzaldua hails from. The extent of colonizing and kyriarchal damage in her work has been recognized; but the exact character of how these breakages and corresponding imperatives to regenerate oneself resemble a traumatic shock remains to be written about.

This thesis sketches frameworks …

Translation Of: Interview With Jacques Derrida: The Western Question Of "Forgiveness" And The Intercultural Relation, Ning Zhang, Steven Burik

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

These two interviews with Jacques Derrida were conducted by Ning Zhang in 1999 and 2000, respectively, in preparation for the publication of his book Writing and Difference in Chinese and his first academic trip to China in 2001. In the first interview, Jacques Derrida tries to clarify the ethical concerns with regard to his deconstructive analysis of Western traditions, through his critical reading of the concept of forgiveness. In this interview he gives us a clearer insight into his ideas about the problem of intercultural exchange, especially concerning questions of translation, translatability, and untranslatability, as central issues of his work. …

Anarchaeologies: Reading As Misreading [Table Of Contents], Erin Graff Zivin

Literature

How do we read after the so-called death of literature? If we are to attend to the proclamations that the representational apparatuses of literature and politics are dead, what aesthetic, ethical, and political possibilities remain for us today? Our critical moment, Graff Zivin argues, demands anarchaeological reading: reading for the blind spots, errors, points of opacity or untranslatability in works of philosophy and art.

Rather than applying concepts from philosophy in order to understand or elucidate cultural works, the book exposes works of philosophy, literary theory, narrative, poetry, film, and performance art and activism to one another. Working specifically …

Aletheia: The Orphic Ouroboros, Glen Mcknight

Theses : Honours

This thesis shows how The Orphic Hymns function as a katábasis, a descent to the underworld, representing a process of becoming and psychological rebirth. I begin with the Greek concept of sparagmόs, a dismemberment or deconstruction, as a necessary precursor in that it emphasises at once both primordial unity and yet also the incipient tensions within the Orphic initiates on this path to katabasis. The argument herein extends beyond literary explication to consider how the Orphics sought to enact this process in Greek society itself.

The thesis then establishes the connections between the Hymns and the thinking of …

A Pre-Structural Center: Deconstructing Classical Social Theory, Darius F. Irani

Honors Undergraduate Theses

For theory and literature to evolve parallel to the subject matter which it associates, it recurrently progresses through admittance of variably incremental, yet critical, entries. This is the nature of modernism. This thesis reflects on one important point in the life of modernism, the advent at which society is first formalized and assimilated into theory: the origin of social theory, a point indisputably influential to twentieth century philosophy, but just eclipsed by one of that century's most noticeable theoretical features. The past century saw the rise and fall of a universalizing framework called structuralism. Informing the disciplines, especially the social …

The Sanctuary Of Acceptance: Love And Identity Through The Letters And Poetry Of John Keats, Amanda Caridad Estevez Ms.

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, I propose to explain how it is that the life and work of John Keats assists us in answering the question of how we create ourselves through the presence of others. I aim to do this through an analysis of the work that his relationship with Fanny Brawne inspired. In doing so, I hope to prove that romantic love creates a sort of metaphysical sanctuary for us to inhabit as we shift through the various incarnations of our identity throughout our lives. By synthesizing the theories of phenomenology and transgression, I hope to demonstrate how Keats’ rapid …

A Deleuzean Poststructural Deconstruction, Adam Nadir Mohamed

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This project seeks to reconceive a poststructural form of deconstructive criticism as a Deleuzean deconstructive commentary. I first explore the way Derrida’s concept of différance is confined to a deconstructive criticism which solely traces it in order to critique metaphysical concepts. As an alternative to the confined use of différance in deconstructive criticism, I develop a deconstructive commentary which deconstructs the primacy of a commentated text. Instead of using différance solely to trace the limitations of philosophical concepts (Hegelian in particular), it can serve as a plane of immanence that track a multitude of differently configured philosophical concepts in their …

Spirals: Spacing, Trauma, Becoming, And Autoimmunity With Caruth, Derrida, Freud, Itō, And Miyazaki., Elizabeth Song

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis studies trauma through the works of Japanese popular culture to propose a spiral model for the form of trauma. I analyse trauma as it is re-presented in the Dark Souls I, III, and Junji Itō’s Uzumaki. Applying contemporary trauma theorists such as Catherine Malabou and Cathy Caruth alongside Gaston Bachelard and Jacques Derrida, I seek here to present a becoming-space of time and becoming-time of space as a new way of approaching trauma. This phrase is briefly mentioned in Derrida’s Rogues and has been reworked here to describe trauma as it behaves in space and time—or, …

An Ecology Not Taking-Place: Analysing Ecocriticism's Move From Place And Space To Spacing And Displacement Through Derrida, Morton, And Haraway, Andrew Case

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Deconstructive readings of place-space dichotomies in ecological thinking reveal not only a repetition of the subject-object divide examined by Derrida and others, but also a spacing in between these categories. Morton and DiCaglio establish the importance of the in-between to ecological thinking and writing, and they demonstrate how literary and physical irony can reveal this spacing to the reader through an experience of displacement. By choosing to reject norms and instead linger in the spacing, individuals can enact a non-lieu-tenance that radically undermines sovereign systems, defers place, and opens up the possibility of new kinds of intimacy and community. By …

Double/Cross: Erasure In Theory And Poetry, John Nyman

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation investigates the implications of overt textual erasure on literary and philosophical meaning, especially with reference to the poststructuralist phenomenological tradition culminating in the work of Jacques Derrida. Responding both to the emergence of “erasure poetry” as a recognizable genre of experimental literature and to the relative paucity of serious scholarship on Derrida’s “writing under erasure,” I focus on twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary and philosophical works in which visible evidence of erasure is an intended component of the finished (i.e., printed and disseminated) document. Erasure, I argue, performs a complex doubling or double/crossing of meaning according to two asymmetrically …

Lost Expectations: On Derrida's Abraham, Mary-Jane V. Rubenstein

Mary-Jane Rubenstein

“To See My Home Before I Die”: The Trip To Bountiful, Memento Mori, And The Experience Of Death, Margaret Sullivan

Journal of Religion & Film

This article analyzes the portrayal of death in Peter Masterson’s 1985 film The Trip to Bountiful. My claim is that the experience of death, in the film, functions as a tool both for the elderly main character’s increased self-understanding and for her conscious, ethical action. I enter this discussion through an examination of late deconstruction’s ethical turn and the argument that aporetic unknowing, if experienced and endured, leads to the chance for real, authentic action. I then demonstrate how the film depicts such an aporetic encounter with death, and do so, in large part, by focusing on the film’s final …

Specters Of Meaning: Deconstructing Wittgenstein And Reconstructing Ethics, Ami H. Naff

Philosophy Honors Projects

Crucial to the debate over the censorship of hate speech is a question of how meaning operates in language, and the political consequences thereof. I respond through an analysis of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s “meaning-as-use,” which situates language as an activity, a form of life. I argue Wittgenstein’s philosophy is a deconstruction of meaning, anticipating that of Jacques Derrida, which implies an ethical openness to the ambivalence of language. This is ostensibly contrary to the efforts of conscientious censorship. However, it is only by being open to the ambivalence of the word that we can work past hate speech and toward empowerment.

Listening/Reading For Disremembered Voices: Additive Archival Representation And The Zong Massacre Of 1781, Jorge E. Cartaya

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis grapples with questions surrounding representation, mourning, and responsibility in relation to two literary representations of the ZONG massacre of 1781. These texts are M. NourbeSe Philip’s ZONG! and Fred D’Aguiar’s FEEDING THE GHOSTS. The only extant archival document—a record of the insurance dispute which ensued as a consequence of the massacre—does not represent the drowned as victims, nor can it represent the magnitude of the atrocity. As such, this thesis posits that the archival gaps or silences from which the captives’ voices are missing become spaces of possibility for additive representation. This thesis also examines the role voice …

When The Canon Backfires: Deconstructing The Centrality Of Hannah Arendt To Human Rights Critical Theory, Nicholas Alexander Lynch

Senior Projects Spring 2017

Hannah Arendt's name and ideas are pervasive in Human Rights critical theory. In fact, Arendt is one of the few scholars we can confidently situate within the Human Rights canon in 2017. Contemporary "re-readings" of The Human Condition and The Origins of Totalitarianism tend to appropriate Arendtian ideas in the attempt to create a theoretical basis for universal rights. Nevertheless, Arendt wrote a defense of racial segregation in the American South, and held personal views that contradict most contemporary notions of social justice. In this paper, I take a deconstructive approach to the reactionary assumptions about humanity and justice that …

Theory At Yale: The Strange Case Of Deconstruction In America [Table Of Contents], Marc Redfield

Literature

This book examines the affinity between “theory” and “deconstruction” that developed in the American academy in the 1970s by way of the “Yale Critics”: Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman, and J. Hillis Miller, sometimes joined by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida.

With this semi-fictional collective, theory became a media event, first in the academy and then in the wider print media, in and through its phantasmatic link with deconstruction and with “Yale.” The important role played by aesthetic humanism in American pedagogical discourse provides a context for understanding theory as an aesthetic scandal, and an examination of the …

Animal Justice: Following Derrida & Other Animals, Andrew Weiss

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

What calls for justice? Are we called to do justice to other animals? How ought we to understand and relate to the other animals around us? The work of Jacques Derrida offers a strong foundation from which to consider these questions, and I build on his work by developing a set of clear conceptual tools to understand justice and animality (or animal alterity) through the demands they make on us. I argue that this interrelation between justice and animality can be addressed in a profound way by considering the figure of "the call"—including the calls of other animals and the …

Auctor In Fabula: Umberto Eco And The Intentio Of Foucault's Pendulum, Douglas Stephens Iv

Senior Honors Theses

Umberto Eco’s 1988 novel Foucault’s Pendulum weaves together a wide range of philosophical and literary threads. Many of these threads find their other ends in Eco’s nonfiction works, which focus primarily on the question of interpretation and the source of meaning. The novel, which follows three distinctly overinterpretive characters as they descend into ruin, has been read by some as a retraction or parody of Eco’s own position. However, if Foucault’s Pendulum is indeed polemical, it must be taken as an argument against the mindset which Eco has termed the “hermetic”. Through an examination of his larger theoretical body, including …

How To Trace An Erased De Kooning, Ian Gonsher

Scholarly Research

This essay describes a series of paintings made in the early 2000s that investigate art history as a process of sous-rature (under erasure); signified by what is both present and absent in the work.

Derrida's Objection To The Metaphysical Tradition, Christopher A. Wheat

CMC Senior Theses

Derrida’s deconstruction of the philosophic tradition shows us not only the importance of pursuit of knowledge, but also the importance of questioning the assumptions on which such a pursuit is based. He argues that the metaphysical tradition is built from the privileging of the logos (speech, thought, and logic,) over it’s opposite, and while Derrida does not object to the societal results of such a privileging, he questions why we allow ourselves to make such an assumption in the investigation of the origin event, and in the nature of reality.

I chose to study deconstruction because through the course of …

On Regret: A Philosophical And Psychological Analysis, Darrell White Ii

Honors Projects

An interdisciplinary explanation of regret research in cognitive psychology by means of the Derridean deconstruction. Particular lines of research regarding regret including rational actor theory, regret forecasting, inaction vs action regret, and regret as autobiographical memory are explained in terms of the Derridean Deconstruction of Mourning.

"The Almost Nothing Of The Unpresentable": The Experience Of "My Death" In The Thought Of Jacques Derrida, Derek Liu

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis argues that the understanding of Derrida’s major concepts of différance, trace, and writing requires the reference to the impossible experience of my death as having always already occurred. The thesis tries to make this experience explicit with reference to the work of Blanchot and Heidegger. Having argued that an experience of “I am dead” is the bedrock of Derrida’s early concepts and the deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence, the last chapter shows the centrality of this experience to the undoing of the animal/human binary. Coterminous with an experience of a disjointed temporality, the radical evil and expropriation …

A Deconstruction Of Elie Wiesel's The Time Of The Uprooted, Cristina T. Carbonell

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the implications of bearing witness as testimony, and the recuperation of community and identity in the wake of exile. Through a close reading of Elie Wiesel’s The Time of the Uprooted, alongside the theories of Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy (among others), I argue that a True Testimony cannot exist, and yet despite this fact, there is a necessity to bear witness in the face of the Other. The realization suggests an imperative of a different order—one that steps back from the very notion of truth, to instead accept the impossibility of truth in any act of …

Khôra, Invention, Deconstruction And The Space Of Complete Surprise, Michael C. Souders

OSSA Conference Archive

Borrowing from Plato, argumentation tends to imagine that invention is at home in the khôra—the space of the ideas—because it is the space for discovering and sorting argument options. In contrast, this paper suggests we re-conceive the idea of inventio as emerging possibility. Inventio is not only the process of sorting the set of possible arguments but is the possibility of the new idea itself; the idiomatic, the absolute surprise.