•  2
    Tout le monde. Descartes’ World
    Oxford Literary Review 46 (2): 203-228. 2024.
    René Descartes plays a small but pivotal role in Jacques Derrida’s 1961–62 course, ‘The Notion of World’. In contrast, one finds the world everywhere in Descartes’ own texts, from the Discourse on Method to The World. A more extensive discussion of Descartes’ world is found in Derrida’s 1981/82 seminar, Language and the Discourse on Method, which takes up Descartes’ travels throughout the world, a spacing before Cartesian extension, and the tension between universal reason, shared by the whole w…Read more
  •  16
    Derrida and the exemplarity of literature
    Orbis Litterarum 79 (1): 108-128. 2024.
    Jacques Derrida's scattered remarks on the ambiguous role examples play in the passage between the universal and the singular revolve around an often-neglected point: any attempt to theorise exemplarity will itself be subject to the law it seeks to account for. This oversight limits scholarship on the subject, but may be amended by returning to the loci classici on exemplarity in Derrida's Glas, La vérité en peinture, Passions, and elsewhere. Moreover, in three texts published in the 1980s: La l…Read more
  •  34
    Translating Khora
    Derrida Today 17 (1): 82-96. 2024.
    Khora, as it figures in Plato’s Timaeus, as read by Jacques Derrida, poses a singular translation problem, not only for having more than one meaning, but also for having less than one. This might be thought of in terms of Derrida’s distinction between ‘polysemy’ and ‘dissemination’, in so far as any concept of translation will ‘re-mark’ a translation or reception of something like khora, the ‘all-receiving’. This means both that khora is untranslatable and that its translation into every languag…Read more