Deconstruction

Questo testo lancia provocatoriamente una sfida che nasce da un ribaltamento di prospettiva. Se si vuole andare alla ricerca di un senso possibile del fenomeno della mobilità umana, è troppo poco limitarsi a sapere se coloro che si spostano hanno un futuro nel Paese d'arrivo. Al contrario, si potrebbe provare a chiedersi se queste persone danno un futuro e dischiudono prospettive alle società in cui giungono. Questo capovolgimento è la chiave di volta che il cosiddetto "pensiero generativo" vuole offrire al dibattito sulle migrazioni. Più che all'esaustività, il lavoro punta sulla profondità del rapporto che si genera tra i dati raccolti dalle varie statistiche in circolazione e alcune interpretazioni di autori che si sono sforzati di andare oltre i dati, per cogliere un senso diverso e implicito al migrare. Per questa ragione, una delle direttrici seguite è stato il costante tentativo di dialogo con saperi e discipline diverse: filosofia, sociologia, antropologia e, non ultima, la teologia biblica. L'intento può apparire ambizioso. Forse lo è davvero. Ma consente di contribuire al dibattito più ampio.

Neste artigo, pretendo apresentar algumas reflexões acerca da desconstrução da imagem oficial do Estado Novo português através de dois objetos de estudo: o romance O ano da morte de Ricardo Reis (1984), de José Saramago, e o filme Fantasia Lusitana (2010), de João Canijo. No romance, este expediente ocorre, sobretudo, através do narrador, ao passo que no documentário, o mesmo se dá pela presença de certos estrangeiros que utilizaram Lisboa como rota de fuga dos nazistas durante a Segunda Guerra Mundial.

In the year that marks the 100th anniversary of the
accession of Vojvodina to Serbia, besides the occasion fot the celebra-
tion of the anniversary, it is necessary to make a brief review with the
question „What has it brought us and what has been away taken over
the past 100 years?“. The first part of the paper will bi devoted to defi-
ning basic concepts such as: identity, nation, national identity, in order
to understand the significance of these. Tehn, in second part of the
paper, we will present the methods used in order to break the Serbian
national identity in time continuity from 1918. This way we come to
the third part where, with special reference to the AP Vojvodina, a
series of examples will highlight the present state of national identity
as well as the possible threat of the same struggle for a new identity of
Vojvodina province. We are witnessing the methods used both by in-
ternal and external factors in order to completely devastate the Serbian
national code, regarding this it is necessary to point out that the traces
of Serbian stability are being eroded, falsifying history in favor of
synthetic ideas, identity and nations, censuring the truth about the cri-
mes committed against Serbs, Serbian language and Cyrillic script are
destroyed, Serbian culture, tradition and customs, Serbian Orthodox
Church, as a cohesion factor of Serbian people, the territory of the state
is fragmented, the national conscious intellectual elite is marginalized
and media criminally imprisoned, the guilt which, as a heavy burden,
nonexistent „I“, all in favor of fictitious identities, and at the expense
of the Serbian one.

“Take our differences and make them our strengths”—the poet’s inten- tion recalls the black feminist position as trouble. For it refuses to disappear into the general categories of otherness or objecthood, that is, blackness and womanhood, and refuses to comply with the formulations of racial and gender- sexual emancipatory projects these categories guide.1 At once an experiment and performance, this essay takes up Sojourner Truth’s question(ing) as an invitation to rebel. Heeding a long line of the “unacceptable women,” I stage a confrontation between the female figuring of blackness and the very notions of the subject, “object,” and the “other” that organize feminist and black and other critical discourses on difference. With this return to the problem of difference, I tackle the current circumstance; that is, how, as deconstruction becomes part of the common vocabulary, there seems to be a return to the “good” old themes of modern philosophy, in reaffirmations both of the subject and its ability to produce “objective descriptions” and of its “mathematical” access to “truth,” which explicitly and implicitly disavow critical affirmations of social (race, gender, sexual) difference as grounds for challenging modern architectures, practices, and texts.2 Returning to the theme of difference, I experiment with a black radical procedure designed to counter recent reactionary moves by European philosophers and theorists. More explicitly, I propose that the object (as figured in modern political philosophy and the arsenal of racial knowledge and the practices and discourses these sustained) emerging as subject of a critical address interrupts such refashionings of modern themes disguised as critical departures from deconstruction (as Bruno Latour argues) or from postmodern deviations of proper philosophy (as Alain Badiou argues); for many reasons, but most importantly, because of how such easy returns to “objectivity” (Latour) and “truth” (Badiou) do not even pretend to contemplate the instances in which the human itself emerges as an “object,” as registered by raciality, sexuality, and other modern concepts.

"One of the greatest challenges Giorgio Agamben presents to his readers is the vast and often bewildering range of sources that he draws upon in his work...The present volume aims to guide the reader through the maze of Agamben’s sources, rendering explicit what remains implicit and providing a reliable guide to his reading of the many figures he draws from....‘Submerged Dialogues’, focuses on figures who seem to be lurking in the background of Agamben’s arguments even though he mentions them only fleetingly, if at all."
~ "Introduction" by Kotsko & Salzani

This paper examines Jacques Derrida's deconstruction of Giorgio Agamben's account of the history of bio-politics in the Beast and the Sovereign. According to Agamben, the 'threshold of bio-political modernity' is identified with the collapse of an allegedly immemorial distinction between life and the law. As Derrida argues, however, this in-distinction between life and the law, which supposedly marks the historical emergence of the bio-political, is in fact an originary event. Agamben, therefore, announces a bio-political modernity that has always already existed. In this essay, I argue that Derrida, in the Beast and the Sovereign, fails to grasp the significance of one of the principal figures employed in Agamben's theory of the bio-political, the 'threshold'. This figure, which Agamben opposes, elsewhere in his writings, to the Derridean notion of difference/deferral, does not refer to either an historical beginning or something that has always already existed. Rather, the threshold is defined as a particular moment in which an originary phenomenon becomes a decisive historical norm. In his 'history' of the bio-political, therefore, Agamben identifies the modernity of the latter in terms of the historical normalization of an in-distinction between law and life that has always already occurred.

This book surveys a broad range of contemporary texts to show how representations of human-animal relations challenge the anthropocentric nature of fiction. By looking at the relation between language and suffering in twenty-first-century fiction and drawing on a wide range of theoretical approaches, Baker suggests new opportunities for exploring the centrality of nonhuman animals in recent fiction: writing animal lives leads to new narrative structures and forms of expression. These novels destabilise assumptions about the nature of pain and vulnerability, the burden of literary inheritance, the challenge of writing the Anthropocene, and the relation between text and image. Including both well-known authors and emerging talents, from J.M. Coetzee and Karen Joy Fowler to Sarah Hall, Alexis Wright, and Max Porter, and texts from experimental fiction to work for children, Writing Animals offers an original perspective on both contemporary fiction and the field of literary animal studies.

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-vii
Introduction: Literary Animals (Timothy C. Baker)....Pages 1-37
The Ape Speaks: Rereading Red Peter in the Twenty-First Century (Timothy C. Baker)....Pages 39-74
Ladies into Foxes: Narratives of Transformation (Timothy C. Baker)....Pages 75-108
The Dying Animal (Timothy C. Baker)....Pages 109-143
The Dying Animals: Anthropocene Stories (Timothy C. Baker)....Pages 145-184
Look! A Squirrel!: Animals Writing (Timothy C. Baker)....Pages 185-209
Back Matter ....Pages 211-239

Animal Visions considers how literature responds to the harms of anthropocentricism, working with Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) and various adaptations of this canonistic novel to show how posthumanist dream writing unsettles the privileging of the human species over other species. Two feminist and post-Freudian responses, Kathy Acker’s poem “Obsession” (1992) and Anne Carson’s “The Glass Essay” (1997) most strongly extend Brontë’s dream writing in this direction. Building on the trope of a ludic Cathy ghost who refuses the containment of logic and reason, these and other adaptations offer the gift of a radical peri-hysteria. This emotional excess is most clearly seen in Kate Bush’s music video “Wuthering Heights” (1978) and Peter Kosminsky’s film Wuthering Heights (1992). Such disturbances make space for a moor love that is particularly evident in Jane Urquhart’s novel Changing Heaven (1989) and, to a lesser extent Sylvia Plath’s poem, “Wuthering Heights” (1961). Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and its most productive afterings make space for co-affective relations between humans and other animal beings. Andrea Arnold’s film Wuthering Heights (2011) and Luis Buñuel’s Abismos de Pasión (1954) also highlight the rupturing split gaze of non-acting animals in their films. In all of these works depictions of intra-active and entangled responses between animals show the potential for dynamic and generative multispecies relations, where the human is one animal amongst the kin of the world.

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-viii
Introduction: Emplaced Readerly Devotions  ....Pages 1-103
Artful Dream Writing into the Roots  ....Pages 105-160
Ghosts: Of Writing, at Windows, in Mirrors, on Moors  ....Pages 161-194
Moor Loving  ....Pages 195-234
Respecting and Trusting the Beast  ....Pages 235-266
Animal Grace  ....Pages 267-285
Back Matter ....Pages 287-314

Se intenta desarrollar una reconstrucción conceptual de los orígenes del término fenomenología y de la filosofía fenomenológica anterior a Husserl. Se pone en evidencia las razones que motivan la aparición de la metodología fenomenológica como respuesta al fortalecimiento del racionalismo de la tradición alemana del siglo XVIII. Se enfatiza el carácter epistemológico en el que nace y se desarrolla la fenomenología, que asume como tema principal la objetividad del conocimiento humano. Finalmente, se concibe que la clave para comprender este tipo de fenomenología es su intento por establecer una correcta relación entre apariencia, fenómeno y realidad. Los primeros fenomenólogos pre-husserlianos abordados en este trabajo son Friedrich Christoph Ötinger (teólogo-teósofo) y Johann Heinrich Lambert (científico-filósofo).

Legal recognition constitutes one of the most topical questions for LGBTQI+ movements and the relative theory. Addressing the Greek context, this article explores the aporetic tensions between the political demand of recognition and its radical potential , on the one hand, and the context (historical, political and social) of the institution of marriage on the other. Is there any justice in inclusion and how should we understand it? Are all the stories of recognition, hence of inclusion and subjec-tion to law, the same? What does law sustain when its idiom expands, for instance in the case of the new Greek civil partnership agreement? Where is the place – if any – of justice and can it be inhabited by law? Is law something that we ‘cannot not want’, as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak puts it? Finally, does the position from which these questions are posed matter? The article does not attempt to respond to the dilemmatic question ‘for or against’ legal recognition, but complicates it with analytical tools borrowed from critical theory, feminist and queer theory and Derridean deconstruction.

Es verdad que hoy, aquí, ahora, yo sería menos insensible que nunca a la llamada del contra-tiempo o del contra-pie, como al estilo de una intempestividad más manifiesta y más urgente que nunca. '¡Ha llegado el momento de dar la bienvenida a Marx!', oigo ya decir. O también: '¡Ya era hora!', '¡Por qué tan tarde?'. Creo en la virtud política del contra-tiempo. Y si un contratiempo no tiene la suerte, más o menos calculada, de venir justo a tiempo, entonces lo inoportuno de una estrategia (política o de otro tipo) todavía puede testimonia, justamente, la justicia, dar testimonio, al menos, de la justicia exigida, de la que decíamos más arriba que debe estar/ser desajustada, irreductible a la justeza y al derecho 4 1. Antes de los Espectros: Contratiempos del archivo Llegamos tarde, demasiado tarde; es la ley de una justicia que no se confundirá con la ley (law o right): la justicia nunca llega a tiempo, nunca llega 1 Traducción Ramiro Parodi. Cuando se trate de textos inéditos, las citas respetarán el francés original con una traducción hecha para esta edición a pie de página junto a la referencia. Las citas en francés aparecerán en cursiva, salvo aquellas que contengan partes subrayadas explíctamente por el autor. 2 Una primera versión de este ensayo se presentó en julio de 2016 en Salerno, con motivo de la conferencia «The Future of Deconstruction. On Derrida's Archives» organizado por Francesco Vitale. Me gustaría darle las gracias por su invitación, por sus consejos y su amistad y por haber hecho posible las siguientes discusiones: con