Cfp: "New Critical Perspectives on the 'Trace,'" University of Malaga, Spain, October 20-22, 2011.

The aim of this Conference is to explore the critical notion of the ‘trace’ and its applicability to contemporary literature written in English. The turn to ethics and trauma studies in contemporary criticism has attracted much critical interest. However, little attention has been given to the concept of the ‘trace’ and the ways in which it engages questions of ethics, memory studies and trauma in contemporary literature.

Visit: http://www.thetraceinliterature.com/presentation.php.

Protevi, John. Review of Catherine Malabou, PLASTICITY AT THE DAWN OF WRITING. NDPR (February 2010).

Malabou, Catherine. Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic, Destruction, Deconstruction. Trans. Carolyn Shread. New York: Columbia UP, 2010. This translation of a 2005 French text will be of great interest to readers of Hegel, Heidegger and Derrida. Catherine Malabou is the author of a number of major works treating this trio, which may come to replace the vaunted "Three H's" (Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger) with their own grouping, "HHD," as it were. If you are in search of a quick label, you could say Malabou presents a "post-deconstructive" reading, but as with all such labels, that would do scant justice to the richness of her work. The book has the form of an intellectual autobiography, though it is not really about Malabou the person, but about the concepts of our era, or more strikingly still, about the "materiality of existence and [the transformations of] its ontological meaning" (81). Malabou uses the figure of the "transformative mask," drawn from Lévi-Strauss, to discuss the relations among the figures and concepts she studies, those that inform our ontology as expressed by HHD (4). A transformative mask is split along the vertical axis, allowing the two halves to fold in to meet along the dividing line, and to fold out to reveal another mask -- which can itself be similarly split and concealing -- underneath. The first masks combine HHD with Freud and Lévi-Strauss in various conjunctions, and the final confrontation is between philosophy and the neurosciences (4). With this relation of philosophy and one of its others, Malabou argues that "plasticity" has come to replace "writing" as the "motor scheme" of our epoch (13, 31, 57). We will return to this claim at the conclusion of the review. Malabou begins by opposing two notions of negation, a dialectical one in which presence is re-formed after a temporal sojourn, and a deconstructive one in which resolution is endlessly deferred in the "spacing of a pure dislocation" (5). This opposition is not fixed but subject to a continuous circulation of mutual transformation. So then a further question must be posed: is the "space of confrontation" between the two forms of negation (dialectical and deconstructive) itself dialectical or merely a juxtaposition? That is, is the relation of temporal resolution and spatial dislocation temporal or spatial? Does it head toward re-formation of presence or are form and presence threatened with "explosion"? (6) A further twist, however: the second option, irresolvable conflict and exploded form, can itself be seen as both temporal differentiation (the final re-formation is endlessly deferred) and as the pure synchronicity of difference (at any one time, at all times, the elements of thought and being are separated). I will not continue, but Malabou is able to produce a few more embeddings along these lines; these are beautiful passages -- as is the entire work -- demonstrating her complete mastery of dialectic and deconstruction, making them both object and method of themselves and each other. . . . Read the whole review here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=19007.

Bruns, Gerald. Review of Leslie White, RADICAL INDECISION. NDPR (March 2010).

Hill, Leslie. Radical Indecision: Barthes, Blanchot, Derrida, and the Future of Criticism. Notre Dame: U. of Notre Dame P, 2010. As a rule literary criticism is not a thing of any philosophical interest, at least not in English-speaking contexts. It is true that occasionally philosophers in the analytic tradition have written about literature, but only under the pretext of doing moral philosophy, meanwhile adhering faithfully to Aristotle's principle that literature means narrative conceived as a form of cognition (mimesis) and rational deliberation (plot). Lexis, sometimes translated as "diction," is not part of the definition of literature. Donald Davidson once broke ranks by writing about James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, arguing that one can learn to read the Wake, despite its Babel-like confusion of tongues, much the way an anthropologist can get the hang of the discursive practices of an alien culture. Davidson's assumption that the language of Finnegans Wake is still chiefly a form of mediation leaves much unsaid, but his pragmatic approach to what is singular and irreducible in linguistic experience could just as well be applied to any refractory modernist artwork (one of Duchamp's Readymades, for example), where the idea is not so much to understand something as it is to respond to the kind of aporia that T. W. Adorno describes in his Aesthetic Theory:

The better an artwork is understood, the more it is unpuzzled on one level, the more obscure its constitutive enigmaticalness [konstitutiv Rätselhaftes] becomes. It [the Rätselcharakter of the work] only emerges demonstratively in the profoundest experience of art. If a work opens itself completely, it reveals itself as a question and demands reflection; then the work vanishes into the distance, only to return to those who thought they understood it, overwhelming them for a second time with the question, "What is it?"

Leslie Hill is a literary critic, not a philosopher, but as a Professor of French Studies at Warwick University in England he is situated at an interesting, if possibly fatal, crossroads: on the one side is a venerable British tradition that thinks of criticism in terms of the elucidation and evaluation -- which is to say the elevation -- of literary monuments (F. R. Leavis); on the other there is recent French intellectual culture, where the boundaries between philosophy and literature are often indeterminate, meaning particularly that the writing of both philosophy and criticism is nothing if not "modernist" in its embrace of nondiscursive forms of language, a practice reflected in Hill's own elliptical prose, with its recurrent play of chiasmus and oxymoron ("the readability of any text is made both possible and impossible only by the impenetrable shadow of the unreadable" [336]). One recalls Jürgen Habermas's objection to the way Derrida and his American followers in literary studies leveled "the genre distinction between philosophy and literature," and his argument that the task of criticism is to translate "the experiential content of the work of art into normal [i.e. communicative] language." Hill will have none of Habermas. His book consists of three extensive monographs on Roland Barthes, Maurice Blanchot, and Jacques Derrida, and, although he nowhere refers to Adorno, his aim is to show how their engagement with literature converts what we think of as criticism into something like the aporetic experience (what Hill calls "radical indecision") that occupies such a definitive place in Adorno's aesthetics. This conversion is not just a break with the past; it opens criticism to a time that, as Derrida would say, is "still to come," a time marked by interruption, reserve, and interminability. One thinks of John Cage's line that defined the impasse that avant-garde or experimental art spent the better part of the last century expanding in multiple directions: "I have nothing to say, and I am saying it." The work of art is no longer an object to be housed in a museum or repertoire; it is an event to be lived through as a kind of limit-experience in which we confront, in Maurice Blanchot's elusive conception, "a meaning for the meaning of words that, while determining that meaning, also surrounds this determination with an ambiguous indeterminacy that wavers between yes and no.". . . Read the whole review here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=19027.

Cfp: "Deconstruction and Science," DERRIDA TODAY (forthcoming).

In this special issue of Derrida Today, the editors wish to address thequestion of the meeting of deconstruction and science, the latter broadly defined. Since the 1960s and ‘70s, poststructuralist thought has garnered a reputation for being at odds with science and the Enlightenment worldview upon which modern science is based. This is understandable if for no other reason than the fact that the last four decades can historically testify to this tension. From the Sokal debate to the general sense within the scientific community that deconstruction is basically just a form of relativism that attacks science’s empirical method and the basic assumption that reason can have access to the world, there has been little attempt to find ways in which a positive dialogue can be had. One of the goals of this special issue is to allow the voices that might contribute to such a dialogue to come to the fore. Although any and all approaches to the topic will be considered, including essays dealing with the ways in which deconstruction calls the general project of science into question, the editors are especially interested in investigating what can be positively said rather than what can be criticized. That is, how might the insights of deconstruction change theway in which science is practiced? How might individual science practices (e.g., chemistry, physics, biology) be affected by an encounter with deconstruction? And, indeed, how is deconstruction altered by its encounter with science? Essays that are of a theoretical as well as a practical nature are thus welcome, and authors from any discipline are encouraged to submit. Deadline for submission of 300-word abstract: 30 June 2009 Deadline for submission of paper (no more than 6000 words): 30 November 2009 Co-edited by:

• Nicole Anderson, Critical and Cultural Studies Department, Macquarie University, Australia, General Editor, Derrida Today
• H. Peter Steeves, Professor of Philosophy, DePaul University, Chicago

All submissions should be prepared for blind review and emailed to DTJEditors@scmp.mq.edu.au with the title “Deconstruction and Science” as the subject title of the email.

Rorty, Richard. "Deconstructionist Theory." FROM FORMALISM TO POSTSTRUCTURALISM. Vol. 8 CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF LITERARY CRITICISM. Cambridge: CUP, 1995.

Most of Derrida’s work continues a line of thought which begins with Friedrich Nietzsche and runs through Martin Heidegger. This line of thought is characterized by an ever more radical repudiation of Platonism of the apparatus of philosophical distinctions which the West inherited from Plato and which has dominated European thought. In a memorable passage in The Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche describes ‘how the “true world” became a fable.’ There he sketches an account of the gradual dissolution of the other-worldy way of thinking common to Plato, to Christianity, and to Kant, the way of thinking which contrasts the True World of Reality with the World of Appearance created by the senses, or matter, or Sin, or the structure of the human understanding. The characteristic expressions of this other-worldliness, this attempt to escape from time and history into eternity, are what deconstructionists often call ‘the traditional binary oppositions’: true–false, original–derivative, unified–diverse, objective–subjective, and so on. . . . Read the rest here: http://themiddleeastinterest.wordpress.com/2008/07/01/deconstructionist-theory/.