Rearticulating the Concept of Experience, Rethinking the Demands of Deconstruction
In: Research in PhenomenologySearch for other papers by Steven Gormley in
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Abstract
A principle aim of this paper is to convince friends and critics of deconstruction that they have overlooked two crucial aspects of Derrida’s work, namely, his rearticulation of the concept of experience and his account of the experience of undecidability as an ordeal. This is important because sensitivity to Derrida’s emphasis on the ordeal of undecidability and his rearticulation of the concept of experience—a rearticulation that is already under way in his early engagement with Husserl and continued in later work—necessitates a rethinking of what the ‘experience of undecidability’ entails. Rather than signaling a withdrawal from politics or a normatively impotent ethics of ‘mere openness to the other,’ Derrida’s account of the experience of undecidability not only points to a fundamental aspect of our basic ethical experience but also leads to a number of ethico-political demands, which I summarize as the demand to maintain an ethos of interruption.
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3)
Martin Jay, Songs of Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 5.
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4)
A helpful work here is David Wood, “The Experience of the Ethical,” in Questioning Ethics, ed. Richard Kearney and Mark Dooley (London: Routledge, 1999), 105–19. Hereafter cited as QE.
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5)
Geoffrey Bennington, Interrupting Derrida (London: Routledge, 2000), 198n4. See also John Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell (New York: Fordam University Press, 1997), 175n19.
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13)
Jacques Derrida, Points . . . Interviews 1974–1999 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 363; hereafter cited as Ps. This is far from being an off-the-cuff remark; see, AP, 15; N, 192, 352, 362; PF, 105; Ps, 207; SM, 35, 65, 90.
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23)
David Velleman, “Love as a Moral Emotion,” Ethics (1999): 338–74, at 361.
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27)
Iris Murdoch, Fire and the Sun (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977), 36.
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28)
Jacques Derrida, “On Responsibility,” in Warwick Journal of Philosophy 6 (1997), 19–36, at 25.
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30)
Jacques Derrida, Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971–2001 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 200 hereafter cited as N.
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31)
Jacques Derrida, “Perhaps or Maybe,” Warwick Journal of Philosophy 6 (1997): 1–18, at 20; hereafter cited as PM.
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32)
Richard Rorty, “Response to Simon Critchley,” in Deconstruction and Pragmatism, ed. Chantal Mouffe (London: Routledge, 1996), 41–46, at 42.
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35)
Jacques Derrida, “Afterword: Toward an Ethic of Discussion,” in Limited, Inc. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1997), 11–160, at 148; cited in text as LI.
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38)
Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man (London: Penguin, 1985), 197.
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39)
Jacques Derrida, “The Villanova Roundtable,” in Deconstruction in a Nutshell, ed. John Caputo (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997), 17; hereafter cited as VR.
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42)
J. Wilson, ‘That sweet sound sleep that is the lot o’ a gude conscience,’ in Blackwood Magazine, Apr. 1827, 476. See Apperson, Dictionary of Proverbs, 110.
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44)
Richard Wolin, The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism; From Nietzsche to Postmodernism (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2004), 223–24.
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45)
Martin Hägglund, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time Of Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 187.
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Rearticulating the Concept of Experience, Rethinking the Demands of Deconstruction
In: Research in PhenomenologySearch for other papers by Steven Gormley in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
Abstract
A principle aim of this paper is to convince friends and critics of deconstruction that they have overlooked two crucial aspects of Derrida’s work, namely, his rearticulation of the concept of experience and his account of the experience of undecidability as an ordeal. This is important because sensitivity to Derrida’s emphasis on the ordeal of undecidability and his rearticulation of the concept of experience—a rearticulation that is already under way in his early engagement with Husserl and continued in later work—necessitates a rethinking of what the ‘experience of undecidability’ entails. Rather than signaling a withdrawal from politics or a normatively impotent ethics of ‘mere openness to the other,’ Derrida’s account of the experience of undecidability not only points to a fundamental aspect of our basic ethical experience but also leads to a number of ethico-political demands, which I summarize as the demand to maintain an ethos of interruption.
| All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 429 | 58 | 3 |
| Full Text Views | 91 | 7 | 0 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 69 | 16 | 0 |
