Deconstruction as a method

The course consists of six sessions across two days. It is aimed at research students, who wish to learn more about deconstruction and how to use it for research in the humanities and social sciences. The aim of the workshop is to examine deconstruction as a method for political analysis broadly conceived. We read examples of deconstructive analyses by Jacques Derrida and others, and we discuss the methodological implications of deconstruction as well as the philosophical assumptions behind it. Deconstruction is often used in literature and cultural studies, but is less used as a method in social and political theory, let alone political science. Having said that, and although deconstruction is usually associated with Derrida’s work, it has been put to use by political theorists such as Judith Butler, Lisa Disch, Bonnie Honig, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. The course examines the usefulness of deconstruction for the study of politics not only by reading about deconstruction, but also by seeing how it can be put to use in the analysis of texts. Each session is organised around set texts and will focus on methodological issues as well as substantial political concepts.

At the end of the course, the participants will have knowledge of the philosophical assumptions behind deconstruction, the implications of deconstruction for questions surrounding the use of methods in the social sciences and humanities, the politics of deconstruction, and the use deconstruction for concrete socila and political analysis.

Session 1: Deconstruction as method: events, performatives and iterability

Is it possible to teach deconstruction? Is it possible to learn deconstruction? What does the deconstruction as/of method mean for the way one researches and writes, for instance, a PhD-thesis? What is a good (or bad) deconstructive reading? We examine these questions, using the example of the (concept of the) event (what happens when commentators, politicians, etc. name something as an event?).

Session 2: Europe and exemplarity

What role do examples play in our research? How does one choose good examples/cases/texts? What is the relationship between particularity and universality? We examine these questions, using the example of Europe as a starting point, asking questions such as: Is it possible to invoke the name of Europe in a non-Eurocentric way? Is there a Europe worth hoping for after deconstruction? How can one think deconstructively about identity?

Session 3: Film

What would a Derridean film about Derrida look like? What would a deconstructive biography be like? What does Derrida have for breakfast? And lunch? Does it matter? Do the sex lives of philosophers matter? Who is the author of a biography? If Derrida’s family do not understand him, who does? What is deconstruction? Is deconstruction like Seinfeld? Why all this talk about Derrida? In this session we watch and discuss the movie Derrida.

Session 4: Hospitality: conditional and unconditional

What is the difference between conditional and unconditional hospitality? Is unconditional hospitality possible? What about tolerance? Starting from Derrida on hospitality, we discuss these questions. The session also serves as a first introduction to conditionality/unconditionality, which is important for thinking deconstructively about a number of political concepts (democracy, sovereignty, among others).

Session 5: Deconstructing sovereignty

What does sovereignty ‘do’? What is the relationship between sovereignty and performativity? What role does images of sovereignty play? What are the implications of the deconstruction of sovereignty for how we think about democracy and the state? And the university? What role does the pair conditionality/unconditionality play in the context of sovereignty?

Session 6: (Post-)Truth

In debates about post-truth, deconstruction is often referred to as a postmodernist precursor for post-truth, for instance by Michiko Kakutani and Lee McIntyre. This session examines the relationship between deconstruction, truth and post-truth. Derrida was adamant that deconstruction requires an unconditional defense of truth and reason, and that this requires us to ask, “what is truth?” Therefore, truth is inherently provisional, open-ended. What is more, there will always be a performative aspect to truth discourse, so truth is always also about truth-effect or force. What, then, is the status of deconstruction as a discourse of truth? And, if truth discourse is also performative, how can we defend truth against lies and demagogy?

Reading List:

Each session is organised around set readings, which participants are required to read in advance. Included below are a number of additional readings for those who wish to dig further into a particular topic. Good introductions to deconstruction include Rodolphe Gasché, The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), Part II; Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction, 25th Anniversay Ed. (London: Routledge, 2008); and Susanne Lüdemann, Politics of Deconstruction: A New Introduction to Jacques Derrida (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014). Nicholas Royle (ed.), Deconstructions: A User’s Guide (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000) has short useful introductions to a number of topics. For deconstruction and politics, the following introductions are useful: Alex Thomson, Deconstruction and Democracy (London: Bloomsbury, 2005); and Geoffrey Bennington, ‘Derrida and politics’, in Tom Cohen (ed.), Jacques Derrida and the Humanities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 193-212. Good places to start reading Derrida are Jacques Derrida, Positions, 2nd ed., trans. Alan Bass (London: Continuum, 2002); and Jacques Derrida, Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews 1971-2001 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002). The ‘Introduction’ in Jason Glynos and David Howarth, Logics of Critical Explanation Social and Political Theory (London: Routledge, 2007) has a good discussion of the question of method in the context of post-structuralist theory more generally.

Session 1: Deconstruction as method: events, performatives and iterability

Essential preparatory readings

Derrida, Jacques, ‘Letter to a Japanese Friend’, in Psyche: Inventions of the Other, Volume II, eds. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), pp. 1-6. Also in David Wood and Robert Bernasconi (eds), Derrida and Différance (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988), pp. 1-5.

Derrida, Jacques, ‘Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides – A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida,’ in Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy In a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003), pp. 85-136, at pp. 85-92.

Additional readings

Butler, Judith, ‘For a Careful Reading’, in Seyla Benhabib et al., Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 127-143.

Butler, Judith, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (London: Routledge, 1997), chapter 2.

Derrida, Jacques, Limited Inc, edited by Samuel Weber (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988).

Derrida, Jacques, Of Grammatology, 40th Anniversary Ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), pp. 171-8 (‘The Exorbitant. Question of Method’).

Fritsch, Mathias, ‘The Performative and the Normative’, in Mauro Senatore (ed.), Performatives after Deconstruction (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).

Gasché, Rodolphe, The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), especially pp. 212-17.

Thomassen, Lasse. ‘Deconstruction as method in political theory.’ Österreichische Zeitschrift für Politikwissenschaft 39:1 (2010), 41-53.

Session 2: Europe and exemplarity

Essential preparatory readings

Jacques Derrida, ‘The Other Heading,’ in The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), pp. 1-83, at pp. 4-20 and 75-83.

Jacques Derrida and Jürgen Habermas, ‘February 15, or What Binds Europeans Together: A plea for a Common Foreign Policy, Beginning in the Heart of Europe’, Constellations vol. 10, no. 3 (September 2003). Also in The Derrida-Habermas Reader. Edited by Lasse Thomassen, 270-7. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006; and in Jürgen Habermas, The Divided West (Cambridge: Polity, 2006), pp. 39-48.

Additional readings

Caraus, Tamara, ‘Jacques Derrida and the “Europe of Hope”’, openDemocracy 23 June 2014, available at https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/can-europe-make-it/jacques-derrida-and-europe-of-hope/.

Derrida, Jacques, ‘Enlightenment past and to come’, Le Monde Diplomatique, November 2004 (http://mondediplo.com/2004/11/06derrida).

Gasché, Rodolphe, ‘“In the Name of Reason”: The Deconstruction of Sovereignty’, Research in Phenomenology 34 (2004), 289-303.

Levy, Daniel, Max Pensky and John Torpey (eds), Old Europe, New Europe, Core Europe: Transatlantic Relations After the Iraq War (London: Verso, 2005).

Naas, Michael B., ‘Introduction: For Example’, in Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), pp. vii-lix.

Naas, Michael, Derrida from Now On (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), chapter 4.

Session 3: Film

We will watch Dick Kirby and Amy Ziering Kofman, Derrida (Zeitgeist Film, 2002), 86 min.

Additional materials

Benoît, Peeters, Derrida: A Biography (Cambridge: Polity, 2014).

Dick, Kirby and Amy Ziering Kofman, Derrida: Screenplay and Essays on the Film (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005).

Salmon, Peter, An Event, Perhaps: A Biography of Jacques Derrida (London: Verso, 2020).

Session 4: Hospitality: conditional and unconditional

Essential preparatory readings

Derrida, Jacques, ‘Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides – A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida’, in Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy In a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), pp. 124-30.

Jacques Derrida, ‘Hostipitality’, trans. Barry Stocker and Forbes Morlock, Angelaki vol.5, no. 3 (2000): 3-18. Reprinted in Lasse Thomassen (ed.), The Derrida-Habermas Reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), pp. 208-30.

Additional readings

Derrida, Jacques, Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).

Derrida, Jacques, Hospitality. Volume I and II (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023 and 2024).

Naas, Michael, ‘Hospitality as an Open Question: Deconstruction’s Welcome Politics’, in Taking on the Tradition: Jacques Derrida and the Legacies of Deconstruction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), pp. 154-69.

Thomassen, Lasse, British Multiculturalism and the Politics of Representation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), chapter 5.

Session 5: Deconstructing sovereignty

Essential preparatory readings

Derrida, Jacques, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), Preface (xi-xv), introduction to Part 1 (1-5), §6 (63-70), §8 (78-94), §9 (95-107).

Additional readings

Bartelson, Jens, A Genealogy of Sovereignty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 1-21, 49-52.

Brown, Wendy, ’Sovereign Hesitations’, in Pheng Cheah and Suzanne Guerlac (eds), Derrida and the Time of the Political (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), pp. 114-32.

Derrida, Jacques, “The University without Condition,” in Without Alibi, ed. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002).

Derrida, Jacques, “Unconditionality or Sovereignty: The University at the Frontiers of Europe,” Oxford Literary Review 31, no. 2 (2009).

Derrida, Jacques, The Beast & the Sovereign: Volume I and II (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009 and 2010).

Leitch, Vincent B., ‘Late Derrida: The Politics of Sovereignty’, Critical Inquiry 33 (Winter 2007): 229-47.

Patton, Paul, ‘Deconstruction and the Problem of Sovereignty’, Derrida Today 10:1 (2017): 1-20.

Session 6: (Post-)Truth

Essential preparatory readings

Donald Trump and Michael Scherer, “Trump’s Interview with TIME on Truth and Falsehoods,” Time, March 22, 2017, https://time.com/4710456/donald-trump-time-interview-truth-falsehood

Additional readings

Derrida, Jacques, The Truth in Painting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 1–8.

Derrida, Jacques, “History of the Lie: Prolegomena,” in Without Alibi, ed. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002).

Rodolphe Gasché, The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986); and Samuel C. Wheeler III, Deconstruction as Analytical Philosophy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).

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