Jacques Derrida | Nicholas Royle

Written by atreestump


Here is a copy on Derrida from the Routledge Critical Thinkers Series, I haven’t read it myself, but it’s supposed to be an excellent introduction for those new to Derrida. Who wants to read it with me?

I have opened up a new sub-forum here for reading groups. I am the moderator for now. Please feel free to join, just let us all know if you are joining in and we will bring yu up to speed on page numbers etc.

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0 thoughts on “Jacques Derrida | Nicholas Royle”

  1. I’ve just e-mailed you a better copy with some other PDF’s, for those that have already downloaded it and are keen to join with reading this book, I’d re-download it once admin upload the better version

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  2. Thanks. Will do it when I get to my PC. Can’t figure out how to upload files from iPhone.
    [hr]
    I already read the preface, the bit about undecidability when responding and how decision should be considered a passion makes more sense of the opening of David Woods book, specifically the Aporia of duty/response vs non-response.

    Okay, I’m on chapter 4, going to stop for today and wait until you say where you are.

  7. Each chapter in the book will constitute a preface of sorts: with luck it should be possible for the reader to pick up the book and start from more or less any chapter. This, I hope, will accord with the logic, just mentioned, of a ‘strategy without finality’.

    This made me think of Nietzsche’s style, especially in works like BGE and TSZ and GS.

  8. Nietzsche’s style (which was anti-systematic) heavily influences Derrida’s project, I think Royle is trying to demonstrate Derrida’s thinking by adopting this strategy

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  9. Taking a step back, I recall coming up with a quote in that book I wrote on communication and the new age –

    Urgency delays agency

    Anyway, that aside, I think one of the ways in for me, is to relate Derrida to Nietzsche, I get an inkling of his flow style, lots of flux, like the text is in some sense ‘alive’ and working on me, demanding my input.

    Another part of this chapter that took my interest was the bit about how death is central to life, death is not something after life and that life is other to itself, namely death. This reminds me of Heidegger – Sorge, or Care, is all about the Being-toward-death, that is what constitutes human existence.

  11. Have you any thoughts so far? Anything to guide us with?;)
    [hr]
    I see it opens with the problem of how to respond to a question, ‘Why Derrida?’ and it immediately focuses on the presupposition that we know Derrida is not an energy drink, or a prospective location for the Olympic games. Then ‘Why Derrida?’ is in quotes, but it already was.

    So already there’s deontic demands, presuppostions and the review of time, how a text appears present, but is in the past. Reflecting on Being and Time, which was like reading an experience ‘horizon’, where objects pop up and then we magnify them, zoom in and take a really close look at them. In this text, it is focusing on sentences, the structure of the sentences. The question of deciding comes in, how do we decide what goes in quotes?

    My impression is that there are two processes at work at any moment, but the one we experience is not actually ‘the present’, quotation seems to be used whenever something is not the whole fact, it’s never complete, there’s always something to add on to it. Quotes are always ‘past’.

    I’m trying to bear in mind that Derrida is a process philosopher and that the text is all that is the case.


  13. I’m just at Chapter 4, my only advice at this moment would be to read and digest

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    Oh, ok. I thought we were going to discuss each chapter, so I was holding back on chapter 1.

    I will resume.

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  15. I’m on Chapter 6 of the Derrida Critical Reader….Chapter 4 I found a little difficult if I’m honest, all that talk of the spectre and ‘the experience of the impossible’…hopefully this will make more sense as I progress….Chapter 5 is where I think it gets interesting when he tackles Derrida’s investigation of ‘the supplement’ in Rousseau and how it relates it to the on-going construction of the ‘l’ and formation of identity….as ‘we are (always) (still) to be invented’…..Chapter 6 addresses that often misunderstood comment by Derrida that ‘there is nothing outside of the text’ which has been touched on earlier in your forum…here it looks at Derrida’s criticism of the linguistic turn in Structuralism, and concentrates more on what he calls the ‘other of language’ which is the true focus of deconstruction…this is where he employs the use of ‘the mark’ rather than the text or language…which is prelinguistic, I think this links in with what he is trying to tease out in Chapter 4

  17. Think I will pick this up again this week. I just ploughed through the fascinating Judith Butler book ‘Gender Trouble’. Tried reading some Wittgenstein and Derrida but the writing style is incredibly tame compared to Butlers style!

    @”thetrizzard”

    How are you getting on with this?

  19. Took a break myself, I’m on Chapter 11….there’s an interesting comment in Chapter 10 on page 133…’Deconstruction, Derrida suggests, has to do with ‘the opening of the future itself’

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  22. I think I will have to go back and read about Kristeva’s ‘Monstotous Feminine’ after reading this chapter on Monsters – seems it could be talking about this ‘arrivant’.

  24. So I find the chapter ‘Monsters’ to detail Derrida’s pre-reading process as a new beginning, faced with fear, hes scared of what is to come very interesting. Lots of beginners mind references here, ‘approach the text like you have never read anything before’, completely empty.

    Derrida also brings a whole new reading of Nietzsche’s quote about the abyss here too – rather than it sounding like one becomes what is abysmal in others in a negative sense, Derrida explains it as an arrival we can affirm, the abyss is the future.

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  27. Just finished it. Lots to digest, think i will get on with the Lacan book for now. The last chapter probably has some good starting points we could go over.

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  28. This video has some interesting takes on Shakespeare and mentions ‘the time is out of joint’. Much of what this guy says reminded me of what I had read in this book.

    [video=youtube]https://youtu.be/_P0G0VwQoQo[/video]

  31. In regards to ‘the secret’ – the word ‘secretion’ has many similarities to Derrida’s description of language.

    Secret- means ‘moved apart’. Other meanings are akin to emanation, leakage, ooze, production and leaching – after all, deconstruction is parasitic and like an earth quake.

  32. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1BAMctIPO-w

    I’ve decided not to end it there with the (Routledge Critical Thinkers) book on Derrida, I’m now reading ‘A Companion to Derrida’ edited by Zeynep Direk and Leonard Lawlor (2014), which is the most intellectually up-to-date book on Derrida’s work available….in this book there is an excellent essay by John D. Caputo called ‘Derrida and the Trace of Religion’….I have have been aware of Caputo’s work for a while and I think this may help those members of the forum that want to deepen their introductory understanding of Derrida.


  37. I highly recommend the John D. Caputo lecture on YouTube

     Going to watch it when I get in.

    Although this thread has not (as of yet) revealed anything mindblowing, it has been a great team effort of sharing links and resources, little pointers here and there.

    I think we should keep to this kind of method, reading an assigned book per thread.

    If you want to, you can open up a new thread for the companion book in the reading area section. I will definitely commit to it if I am reading it with someone else.

  38. I agree, nothing mind blowing as yet but to be fair, it takes a while to get a grasp of the terrain and the concepts employed that map out that terrain. However, reading prepares the ground from which insight flourishes, and although there are areas covered in the Routledge book that I am unfamiliar with, the Caputo essay and lecture (together) has for me build on previous knowledge and helped elucidated some of the unfamiliar concepts covered in the routledge book…Caputo (in the lecture) has a knack for putting post-structuralism into its intellectual context and why it disagrees with the claims of the structuralists ….Caputo’s essay inparticular is good for fleshing out Derrida’s importance in a number of fields / disciplines….his repeated reference of ‘the impossible’ is explained and it’s good for understanding Derrida’s reference to Deconstruction’s in relation to that which is ‘to-come’…also excellent for explaining Differance as a transcendental field (from which all forms are conditioned or constructed)…which when understood (if only partially) IS mind blowing….read the essay before listening to the lecture and let me know how you get on.[hr]It seems to me that this idea of Chaosmos from James Joyce referred to by Derrida, has Dialectical Monist overtones

  41. A passion for the impossible – I really like that bit.

    I think I got the secret when I wrote my Plato and Mysticism thread, the secret does and does not have to exist for us to search for it.

    Love the Spinoza summary.

  43. I laughed when Caputo says ‘anything that is un-deconstructable has not yet been constructed’ as Derrida explicity makes it clear that Justice is un-deconstructable. 😀

  44. ‘The still belongs to a process which is generating effects’.

    Form and plasticity are effects of Differance also. Deconstruction is a destabilisation that holds a promise that could be a disaster. It goes on whether we like it or not, it is the very movement of time itself. This is what Derrida terms autodeconstruction – a series of transformations; a series of reinventions going on all the time.

    We can involve ourselves in it however, we can participate. We can prevent the event, or try to anyway. Promotion of the event is also possible. 

    Prevention can be reactionary or conservative. Promoting is proactive, or progressive. 

    Are all the changes that go in these systems rule governed, or are they open?

    If you know the rules you can predict all the events that the system will produce. Post-Structuralists say these systems are open-ended and are capable of producing unforeseen, unprogrammable, events. A deep code is written in our brain according to materialists like Chomsky, but to Post-Structuralists, argued against this and this brings up a discussion of metaphors. I have read about this in the Wittgenstein and Derrida book.

    A metaphor is the attempt to break the rules of language ever so precisely.

    Metaphoricity and history of language indicates it is an open system capable of producing new effects.

  45. The unconditional is what we are dreaming of, praying for, what we desire. What we affirm. We are loyal to it, it’s what we are commanded by and what we are responding to. It’s a complex of callings – what is calling to us.

    Caputo calls this a mostly Jewish religious modality – which is interesting as my thread on Plato when I discuss Kabballah defines it as ‘to recieve’, which means recieving an evocation, to provoke. 

    No finite relative conditional construction is ever adequate to the unconditionals. The undeconstructable is a call that we can never adequately answer. It is a call to which we are already responding. It’s not our doing, it is what is being done to us. It’s not a projection – it a projectile coming at us.


  46. I laughed when Caputo says ‘anything that is un-deconstructable has not yet been constructed’ as Derrida explicity makes it clear that Justice is un-deconstructable. 😀

    This is wrong, Derrida explains that Justice is Deconstruction!


  49. So self presence is say, ‘I’, which we ordinarily take to be ‘there’ as a fixed, coherent construct?

    Any concept / signifier only makes sense in a system of difference and in relation to that which it is not, e.g. ‘I’ only makes sense in relation to it’s opposite or it’s ‘other’, therefore each sign cannot be fully present to itself as there is always a trace (or a play of traces) of that which it is not…that which is absent.

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