•  1
    9. Power and the “Drive for Mastery”
    In Samir Haddad, Penelope Deutscher & Olivia Custer (eds.), Foucault/Derrida Fifty Years Later: The Futures of Genealogy, Deconstruction, and Politics, Columbia University Press. pp. 151-165. 2016.
  •  19
    This paper revisits one of the least understood elements of Derrida’s corpus: his sustained critique of Lacan’s conception of the letter operative in the unconscious. Showing where and how this critique has been misconstrued, the paper demonstrates that the ultimate significance of Derrida’s intervention lies in how it brings forward the uncritical conception of heterogeneity found in Lacan. In this way, Derrida’s engagement with Lacan, from ‘Positions’ all the way up to the late seminars on The…Read more
  •  5
    Contemporary continental thought is marked by a move away from the “linguistic turn” in twentieth-century European philosophy, as new materialisms and ontologies seek to leave behind the thinking of language central to poststructuralism as it has been traditionally understood. At the same time, biopolitical philosophy has brought critical attention to the question of life, examining new formations of life and death. Within this broader turn, Derridean deconstruction, with its apparent focus on l…Read more
  •  451
    Freud Beyond Foucault: Thinking Pleasure as a Site of Resistance
    Journal of Speculative Philosophy 32 (3): 522-532. 2018.
    As Derrida showed in a later essay on Foucault’s relationship to psychoanalysis, Foucault displayed a marked ambivalence toward Freud, sometimes putting him on the side of the exclusion of madness and sometimes putting him on the side of those eager to listen to it. Yet, in the final stages of Foucault’s work, this ambivalence hardened into a resistance. By the time of The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, Freud is situated squarely on the side of power. It is precisely in leaving Freud behind, Fo…Read more
  •  2
    The All-Seeing Sovereign
    Symposium 20 (2): 160-179. 2016.
    This article explores an intriguing, yet underdeveloped line of inquiry in Derrida’s late Death Penalty Seminars concerning the inherent visibility or spectacle of the death penalty. Showing how this inquiry surfaces in Derrida’s engagement with Foucault, the article argues that Derrida’s Seminars offer crucial resources for critically analyzing, and thus rethinking, sovereignty and the principle of capital punishment. In particular, it demonstrates how visibility forms a key component of the st…Read more
  •  66
    This essay explores Derrida's work on repetition in psychoanalysis and what Freud, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, called the ‘compulsion to repeat’. Revising the model of the psyche that had to that point dominated his theory, Freud began in 1920 to ascribe greater significance to experiences of trauma and unpleasure, and to their recurrence in the analytic treatment. This type of repeated repetition ultimately suggested to Freud the existence of a ‘death drive’ antithetical to life. I examin…Read more
  •  87
    Derrida and the Death Penalty: The Question of Cruelty
    Philosophy Today 59 (2): 317-336. 2015.
    This paper looks at the recently published text of Derrida’s 1999–2000 Death Penalty Seminars, reading it alongside a key text from the early 2000s, Derrida’s address to the Estates General of Psychoanalysis. Tracking Derrida’s insistent references to psychoanalysis in his writings on the issue of capital punishment, I argue that the deconstruction of the death penalty, in its full scope, can perhaps best be approached in the terms emerging out of Derrida’s engagement with psychoanalysis in thi…Read more