The limits of hauntology

SYMPOSIUM Spectres of Derrida The limits of hauntology G hosts are not renowned for their sense of humour. As Charles Lamb (he of the undeconstructed tales from Shakespeare) put it; ‘Can a ghost laugh, or shake his gaunt sides, when you are pleasant with him?’ But the ghost ofthe theorist of farcical returns might well […]

Marx the uncanny? Ghosts and their relation to the mode of production

Where Marx is closest to the spirit of deconstruction is, arguably, in these formulaic gestures towards a society that had so far transcended existing actuality that its conditions of realization could no longer be conceptualized. Marx is spectral Marx in his refusal to envision communism in his envisaging of it, in his anti-utopian utopianism. Now, […]

Messianic ruminations: Derrida, Stirner and Marx

mind/geist of Europe by its cultural others and inferiors. Derrida’s fascination is with Hamlet-as-geist haunted by the corporeal form of the ghost, as a trope for the irreducible spectral implication of spirit and spook. However, this Vah~ryian reading of Hamlet forecloses his distinctive relation to the premodern, conscripting his melancholic Renaissance proto-modernity into a latterday […]

Drucilla Cornell

INTERVIEW Drucilla Cornell Feminism, deconstruction and the law RP: Perhaps you could begin by saying something about the Critical Legal Studies movement in the USA. What is its relationship to feminism? And where do you see your own work as fitting in? Cornell: Regrettably there’s very little organized presence of either Critical Legal Studies or […]

Jacques Derrida

The Deconstruction of Actuality An Interview with Jacques Derrida This interview was conducted in Paris in August 1993, to mark the publication ofDerrida’ s Spectres de Marx (Paris, Galilee, 1993), and was published in the monthly review Passages in September. This English translation appears in Radical Philosophy with permission. Passages: From Bogota to Santiago, from […]

Democracy and Difference, Yale University, 15-18 April 1993; Derrida: Spectres Of Marx, University of Warwick, 20 May 1993; The First European Congress of Analytic Philosophy, Aix-en-Provence, 23-26 April 1993

Discussing Deliberative Democracy Democracy and Difference Yale University, 15-18 April 1993 It is New Haven in April. The annual meeting of the Conference for the Study of Political Thought has ‘descended upon Yale University to debate ‘Democracy and Difference’. The agenda for this year’s Conference, set by Seyla Benhabib, manifests her desire to bring together […]

The promise of justice

The promise of justice Howard caygill Breaking the promise of justice is an act peculiarly repugnant to reason. It implies a double betrayal: not only of the promised justice but also of the justice of the promise. Nevertheless, how is it possible to do justice to the promise of justice? Especially when this very promise […]