Derrida on the Mend

Forsideomslag
Purdue University Press, 1984 - 238 sider

The pun built into its title, Derrida on the Mend, suggests the thesis of this book. Derrida is indeed astride the "mend" whereby logocentrists (theorists who believe in "organic unity") think to repair the "rents" in organicism. Derrida is indeed devouring the mend, but his quandary is that he must use logic (a logocentric operation) to do so. For Derrida to be "on the mend" in the other sense activating the pun, a means must be found to heal the quandary while preserving deconstruction. This book argues for such a means: the author finds in Nagarjuna, a Buddhist rationalist of the first century A.D, the same three deconstructive techniques used by Derrida. Nagarjuna, however, is able to reinstate logic and organicism while continuing the deconstructive process. He does so through his specialized versions of the Buddhist "two truths," a solution which our author adopts, adapts, and universalizes.

The book has four parts. The first provides a lengthy explication and critique of Derrida, a service still much needed by today's philosophers and literary theorists. The second part locates a recension of Heideggerian thought at a site the author calls centric mysticism. Throughout this section, there are original applications to literature. The third part presents the full-scale analysis of Nagarjunist technique, and then goes on to develop a differential Zen contrasting very much with the centric Zen of Suzuki. Replete with treatments of Buddhist poetry, it is bound to be of great interest to Buddhologists. The fourth part applies differentialism to monotheism and Christian theology and develops a nonentitative trinitarianism, which will revise, it is hoped, contemporary theology significantly. Two appendices, in a concrete way, apply to literary theory and criticism what the author has worked out in the body of the book.

Fra bogen

Indhold

III
3
IV
57
V
87
VI
133
VII
165
VIII
176
IX
189
X
233
XI
235
Copyright

Almindelige termer og sætninger

Populære passager

Side 220 - And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the powers of death shall not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.
Side 134 - There is no longer a simple origin. For what is reflected is split in itself and not only as an addition to itself of its image. The reflection, the image, the double, splits what it doubles. The origin of the speculation becomes a difference.
Side 137 - His state was divine, yet he did not cling to his equality with God but emptied himself to assume the condition of a slave and became as men are; and being as all men are, he was humbler yet, even to accepting death, death on a cross.
Side 45 - language" is the inflation of the sign itself, absolute inflation, inflation itself. Yet, by one of its aspects or shadows, it is itself still a sign: this crisis is also a symptom. It indicates, as if in spite of itself, that a historico-metaphysical epoch must finally determine as language the totality of its problematic horizon. It must do so not only because all that desire had wished to wrest from the play of language finds itself recaptured within that play but also because, for the same reason,...
Side 49 - Within the closure, by an oblique and always perilous movement, constantly risking falling back within what is being deconstructed, it is necessary to surround the critical concepts with a careful and thorough discourse— to mark the conditions, the medium, and the limits of their effectiveness...
Side 3 - All the metaphysical determinations of truth, and even the one beyond metaphysical ontotheology that Heidegger reminds us of, are more or less immediately inseparable from the instance of the logos, or of a reason thought within the lineage of the logos, in whatever sense it is understood: in the pre-Socratic or...
Side 233 - So the servants of the householder came and said unto him, Sir, didst not thou sow good seed in thy field ? from whence then hath it tares ? He said unto them, An enemy hath done this.
Side 184 - The cease of majesty Dies not alone ; but, like a gulf, doth draw What's near it, with it : it is a massy wheel, Fix'd on the summit of the highest mount, To whose huge spokes ten thousand lesser things Are mortised and adjoined ; which, when it falls, Each small annexment, petty consequence, Attends the boist'rous ruin. Never alone Did the king sigh, but with a general groan.
Side 66 - But if we see this circle as a vicious one and look out for ways of avoiding it, even if we just "sense" it as an inevitable imperfection, then the act of understanding has been misunderstood from the ground up.

Om forfatteren (1984)

Robert Magliola is a professor of comparative literature and English at Purdue University. He earned his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University with a specialization in philosophical and literary hermeneutics.

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