Phantasms

2019

This paper investigates the figure of the ‘phantasm’ in Jacques Derrida’s last seminars, explicating this notion in terms of his argument for life’s constitution as originally other-oriented and inflected by a non-present, finite temporality. Since this constitutive differential and finite condition demands the living organism affirm its survival as itself, I contend that the phantasm is generated as the anticipatory projection of life’s re-identification with itself, thus turning away from finitude and relational interdependence. Yet, I argue that it couldn’t be otherwise – that there couldn’t be a life without such a phantasm – since the disappropriative effects of its constitutive conditions only allow for lived identity as re-identification across an innately finite temporality and aleatory relationality. Moreover, the projected, phantasmatic ‘return’ of self-identification is required to establish any relation to the other from the outset: without the living being’s anticipated...

This is the draft for the text presented at the 7th Derrida Today Conference. It deals with the concept of phantasm in the works of Jacques Derrida. Reconstructing it against the background of the conceptualizations of phantasm offered before that by Lacan, Laplanche and Pontalis, and Deleuze, the text focuses on Derrida's last seminar and then goes back to "Glas" before moving to an enigmatic sentence in "The Post Card", stating that "As long as you don’t know what a child is, you won’t know what a fantasm is, nor, of course, by the same token, what knowledge is." The last part of the text is an interpretation of the relation between child, phantasm, and deconstruction.

Literature and Event: Twenty-First Century Reformulations, 2021

Jacques Derrida and Catherine Malabou both attempted to rethink the event by accounting for a certain poetizing essence of philosophy, or for a poetics of the event. Notably, they tried to approach the eventness of the event by highlighting a phantasmatic dimension inseparable from what we call 'the real.' As they both reject the conventional opposition between 'phantasm' and 'real event,' they redefine the role of phantasm and literature in relation to reality by attributing to the phantasm a certain materiality and a privileged access to what we call an 'event.' But they do so with very different implications as to the status and definition of reality. This chapter discusses these two conceptions of the articulation between 'phantasm' and 'the real' — the first predicated on Malabou's readings of Heidegger and Kafka, the second following Derrida's readings of Blanchot and Cixous. While Malabou's 'ontological phantasm' offers an ontology of the event described as Being's plasticity and indexed on a 'new materialism,' Derrida strives to think a phantasm-event that precedes and exceeds its capture by ontological discourse, thus liberating literature and the event's otherness, its 'materiality without matter,' from the authority of philosophical decision on the truth of Being.

Derrida Today, 2010

In this paper I have examined Derrida's reception in the phenomenological field. I examined common miscontruals of Derrida as an empiricist and nihilist, and allegations that his post-phenomenology is a destruction of phenomenology. Contrary to these charges, I have argued that Derrida's post-phenomenology is a meta-phenomenology in its account for the conditions of possibility for transcendental-empirical distinction through his notions of differance and trace, as well as the quasi-transcendental. The quasi-transcendental is the interval between the transcendental and empirical which enables the thinking of both. Iterability and repetition name the conditions of possibility of ideality rather than being any simple destructive negation of it. The transcendental is only enabled by its signature, or difference from the origin in order to be communicated through space and time. It is the written mark, the quasi-transcendental, that which is neither transcendental nor empirical, which makes possible the distinction between the transcendental and empirical at the same time it makes impossible a sphere of purely expressive signs without the distinction. The written mark functions as if it was transcendental, but without it no distinction between the transcendental or empirical would be able to take place, and were the distinction impossible no transcendental or pure expressive realm would take place either. Hence the phenomenological project becomes possible through this paradoxical relation of the quasi-transcendental, relating the transcendental and empirical in simultaneous identity and difference, identity in non-identity. It is thus made more powerful through an acknowledgement of the quasi-transcendental as its condition of possibility. In this paper I review Derrida's reception in the field of phenomenology. This section differs from the review I gave earlier of phenomenologists in that it is a review of contemporary phenomenologists who have, unlike those covered previously, read Derrida, but read him erroneously, as I judge from my understanding of Derrida. I seek to address these misconceptions in this paper. Where contemporary phenomenologists describe Derrida's work as a disruption and interruption of phenomenology in critiquing the metaphysics of presence, I proceed to argue that characterizations of Derrida as a destructive critic of phenomenology are mistaken, and show how Derrida rather accounts for the conditions that make phenomenology possible with his notions of differance, iterability and the quasi-transcendental. Derrida is not to be mistaken for as a nihilist or an empiricist, rather he argues that phenomenology has to account for the conditions that make it possible. These conditions are differance, iterability, and the quasi-transcendental, that which is neither transcendental nor empirical, but the paradoxical space between that determine and enables us to think both transcendental and empirical. Derrida thus performs meta-phenomenology rather than a

In this paper I have examined Derrida's reception in the phenomenological field. I examined common miscontruals of Derrida as an empiricist and nihilist, and allegations that his post-phenomenology is a destruction of phenomenology. Contrary to these charges, I have argued that Derrida's post-phenomenology is a meta-phenomenology in its account for the conditions of possibility for transcendental-empirical distinction through his notions of differance and trace, as well as the quasi-transcendental. The quasi-transcendental is the interval between the transcendental and empirical which enables the thinking of both. Iterability and repetition name the conditions of possibility of ideality rather than being any simple destructive negation of it. The transcendental is only enabled by its signature, or difference from the origin in order to be communicated through space and time. It is the written mark, the quasi-transcendental, that which is neither transcendental nor empirical, which makes possible the distinction between the transcendental and empirical at the same time it makes impossible a sphere of purely expressive signs without the distinction. In this paper I review Derrida's reception in the field of phenomenology. This section differs from the review I gave earlier of phenomenologists in that it is a review of contemporary phenomenologists who have, unlike those covered previously, read Derrida, but read him erroneously, as I judge from my understanding of Derrida. I seek to address these misconceptions in this paper. Where contemporary phenomenologists describe Derrida's work as a disruption and interruption of phenomenology in critiquing the metaphysics of presence, I proceed to argue that characterizations of Derrida as a destructive critic of phenomenology are mistaken, and show how Derrida rather accounts for the conditions that make phenomenology possible with his notions of differance, iterability and the quasi-transcendental. Derrida is not to be mistaken for as a nihilist or an empiricist, rather he argues that phenomenology has to account for the conditions that make it possible. These conditions are differance, iterability, and the quasi-transcendental, that which is neither transcendental nor empirical, but the paradoxical space between that determines and enables us to think both transcendental and empirical. Derrida thus performs meta-phenomenology rather than a destruction of phenomenology as his critics

Phenomenological Reviews, 2019

In this paper, we have examined various aporias that afflict phenomenology-Husserl's phenomenological reduction cannot hold if the transcendental is separate from the empirical, indeed, nothing separates the transcendental and the empirical and thus they are essentially the same. We demonstrated that Heidegger's repeated attempts to inverse to negate metaphysics only reproduced metaphysics as a ghostly double that returned to haunt his anti-metaphysics which remained bound to its ontological structure and vocabulary. We showed through readings of Levinas, Ricoeur, Merleau-Ponty and Blanchot that their radical empiricisms and privilege of Other over the same repeated metaphysics like Heidegger, in negating it and reversing its structure, thus reproducing and affirming it paradoxically. In all these demonstrations we have shown that the impossibility of a text is precisely its site of possibility, deconstruction proceeds by exposing the limit of a text and then delimiting it towards the Other that it had repressed, its method is thus transgression and exceeding of limits imposed by a text towards its blindspots through exposing an aporia, and then proceeding to show the unthought of a text that needs to be thought in order to address this aporia.

Mosaic: an interdisciplinary critical journal , 2015

By way of a double reading of the temporality of guillotine and photography in the anonymous 1939 film of the execution of Eugène Weidmann, this essay examines the putative instantaneity of death, which posits life as that which happens only before death.