In this book, Rodolphe Gasché returns to some of the founding texts of deconstruction to propose a new and broader way of understanding it—not as an operation or method to reach an elusive outside, or beyond, of metaphysics, but as something that takes place within it. Rather than unraveling metaphysics, deconstruction loosens its binary and hierarchical conceptual structure. To make this case, Gasché focuses on the concepts of force and violence in the work of Jacques Derrida, looking to his essays ‘Force and Signification’ and ‘Force of Law, ‘ and his reading on
Of Grammatology in Claude Lévi-Strauss’s autobiographical
Tristes Tropiques. The concept of force has not drawn extensive scrutiny in Derrida scholarship, but it is crucial to understanding how, by way of spacing and temporizing, philosophical opposition is reinscribed into a differential economy of forces. Gasché concludes with an essay addressing the question of deconstruction and judgment and considers whether deconstruction suspends the possibility of judgment, or whether it is, on the contrary, a hyperbolic demand for judgment.
Tabella dei contenuti
Acknowledgments
Pre/postface
1. The Force
of Deconstruction
2. The Possibility
of Deconstruction
3. The ‘Violence’
of Deconstruction
Appendix
Have We Done with the Empire of Judgment?
Notes
Index
Circa l’autore
Rodolphe Gasché is SUNY Distinguished Professor and Eugenio Donato Professor of Comparative Literature at University at Buffalo, State University of New York. His many books include
Views and Interviews: On ‘Deconstruction’ in America and
Europe, or the Infinite Task: A Study of a Philosophical Concept.