These interviews with Helene Cixous offer invaluable insight into her philosophy and criticism. Culled from newspapers, journals, and books, White Ink collects the best of these conversations, which address the major concerns of Cixous’s critical work and features two dialogues with twentieth-century intellectuals Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. The interviews in White Ink span more than three decades and include a new conversation with Susan Sellers, the book’s editor and a leading Cixous scholar and translator. Cixous discusses her work and writing process. She shares her views on literature, feminism, theater, autobiography, philosophy, politics, aesthetics, religion, ethics, and human relations, and she reflects on her roles as poet, playwright, professor, woman, Jew, and, her most famous, “French feminist theorist.” Sellers organizes White Ink in such a way that readers can grasp the development of Cixous’s commentary on a series of vital questions.Taken together, the revealing performances in White Ink provide an excellent introduction this thinker’s brave and vital work-each one an event in language and thought that epitomizes Cixous’s intellectual and poetic force.

Volume 13 Issue Number 2 Fall 2009
Volume 13 Numéro 2 Automne 2009

Table of Contents/Table des matières

Articles

Foucault et Taylor sur la vérité, la liberté et l’identité subjective. Le vouloir-dire-vrai dans la parrêsia, VALÉRIE DAOUST

Deleuze’s Post-Critical Metaphysics, ALISTAIR WELCHMAN

Nietzsche as a Reader of Wilhelm Roux, or the Physiology of History, LUKAS SODERSTROM

Hume et Bergson, une pratique de la méthode chez Deleuze. Réflexions pour une éthique de la lecture, RENÉ LEMIEUX

The Threat of Givenness in Jean-Luc Marion: Toward a New Phenomenology of Psychosis, JOSEPH CAREW

Book Panel/Table-ronde

Bernhard Radloff’s Heidegger and the Question of National Socialism: Disclosure and Gestalt, GRAEME NICHOLSON, TOM ROCKMORE AND BERNHARD RADLOFF
Étude critique/Review Essay

Michel Foucault : Le Gouvernement de soi et des autres et Le Courage de la vérité, ALAIN BEAULIEU

Derrida and Democracy
Jonathan Culler

Part One
“The Most Interesting Thing in the World”
Jonathan Culler

Passionate Secrets and Democratic Dissidence
David Wills

Signed Paine, or Panic in Literature
Peggy Kamuf

Pulsations of Respect, or Winged Impossibility: Literature with Deconstruction
Henry Sussman

Spectral Gatherings: Derrida, Celan, and the Covenant of the Word
Michael G. Levine

Part Two
For Better and for Worse (There Again . . .)
Geoffrey Bennington

Rogue Democracy
Samuel Weber

A Genealogy of Violence, from Light to the Autoimmune
Samir Haddad

Nondialectical Materialism
Pheng Cheah

Untread and Untried: Nietzsche Reads Derridemocracy
Avital Ronell

Knowledge of the Future: Future Fables
Richard Klein

Part Three
Is Radical Atheism a Good Name for Deconstruction?
Ernesto Laclau

Time, Desire, Politics: A Reply to Ernesto Laclau
Martin Hägglund

Description
Phenomenology or Deconstruction? challenges traditional understandings of the relationship between phenomenology and deconstruction through new readings of the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Paul Ricoeur and Jean-Luc Nancy. A constant dialogue with Jacques Derrida’s engagement with phenomenological themes provides the impetus to establishing a new understanding of ‘being’ and ‘presence’ that exposes significant blindspots inherent in traditional readings of both phenomenology and deconstruction. In reproducing neither a stock phenomenological reaction to deconstruction nor the routine deconstructive reading of phenomenology, Christopher Watkin provides a fresh assessment of the possibilities for the future of phenomenology, along with a new reading of the deconstructive legacy. Through detailed studies of the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, Ricoeur and Nancy, he shows how a phenomenological tradition much wider and richer than Husserlian or Heideggerean thought alone can take account of Derrida’s critique of ontology and yet still hold a commitment to the ontological.This new reading of being and presence fundamentally re-draws our understanding of the relation of deconstruction and phenomenology, and provides the first sustained discussion of the possibilities and problems for any future ‘deconstructive phenomenology’.

Christopher Watkin is a Junior Research Fellow at Magdalene College, Cambridge. He is currently working on atheism and the death of God in Nancy, Badiou, Zizek and Meillassoux.

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Volume 19: Sense and Nonsense
ISBN 1 897646 15 1

This volume is currently available. For ways to buy this issue click here

Sense and Nonsense

The Expression of Meaning in Deleuze’s Ontological Proposition: RAY BRASSIER
Expression and Immanence: MIGUEL DE BEISTEGUI
Nonsense and Mysticism in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: ANGELA BREITENBACH
Epistemology and the Civil Union of Sense and Self-Contradiction: A Co-ordinated Solution to the Shared Problems of Political and Mainstream Epistemology: JEREMY BARRIS
Presuppositionless Scepticism: IOANNIS TRISOKKAS

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Essay on Transcendental Philosophy: A Short Overview of the Whole Work; On the Categories; Antinomies. Ideas.: SALOMON MAIMON
Conflicted Matter: Jacques Lacan and the Challenge of Secularising Materialism: ADRIAN O. JOHNSON
Alain Badiou: Truth, Mathematics, and the Claim of Reason: CHRISTOPHER NORRIS
On the Horrors of Realism: An Interview with Graham Harman: TOM SPARROW

It was in sometime in the ’80s when I heard someone on the radio talking about Clint Eastwood’s 1980 movie “Bronco Billy.” It is, he said, a “nice little film in which Eastwood deconstructs his ‘Dirty Harry’ image.”

That was probably not the first time the verb “deconstruct” was used casually to describe a piece of pop culture, but it was the first time I had encountered it, and I remember thinking that the age of theory was surely over now that one of its key terms had been appropriated, domesticated and commodified. It had also been used with some precision. What the radio critic meant was that the flinty masculine realism of the “Dirty Harry” movies — it’s a hard world and it takes a hard man to deal with its evils — is affectionately parodied in the story of a former New Jersey shoe salesman who dresses and talks like a tough cowboy, but is the good-hearted proprietor of a traveling Wild West show aimed at little children. It’s all an act , a confected fable, but so is Dirty Harry; so is everything. If deconstruction was something that an American male icon performed, there was no reason to fear it; truth, reason and the American way were safe.

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(One might even say that the gods retreated because one no longer gives a present to their presence: no more sacrifice, no more oblation, except by way of custom or imitation. One has other things to do: write, for example, calculate, do business, legislate. Deprived of presents, presence has retreated.)

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This is a brief review of Simon Critchley’s recent book, Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance. In it, he argues that the overriding political-philosophical problem of late modernity is the problem of political motivation. Critchley’s book is both an analysis and critique of how that problem has been resolved by ethical and political philosophers since Kant and a defense of his own solution, which he derives primarily from the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas and which issues in a call for a form of ethical anarchism. In this review I summarize his arguments and raise some critical questions about his solution, while agreeing with him about the essential nature of the problem of motivation that his book highlights.

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If there is no such thing as literature — i.e., self-identity of the literary thing — if what is announced or promised as literature never gives itself as such, that means, among other things, that a literature that talked only about literature or a work that was purely self-referential would immediately be annulled. You'll say that that's maybe what's happening. In which case it is this experience of the nothing-ing of nothing that interests our desire under the name of literature. Experience of Being, nothing less, nothing more, on the edge of metaphysics, literature perhaps stands on the edge of everything, almost beyond everything, including itself. It's the most interesting thing in the world, maybe more interesting than the world, and this is why, if it has no definition, what is heralded and refused under the name of literature cannot be identified with any other discourse. It will never be scientific, philosophical, conversational.

 

– Jacques Derrida, "'This Strange Institution Called Literature': An Interview with Jacques Derrida"[1]

 

Over the years there have been various efforts to engage Jacques Derrida's conception of literature.[2] I think it is widely acknowledged now that there is (or was) no concept or theory of any sort but instead an ongoing attraction to forms of language that make certain works of writing peculiar enough to trouble the ways in which we make sense of things. Anyhow here is what I think we think we know about Derrida's thinking with respect to literature:

 the rest of the review