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29. 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.
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27Revisiting Derrida’s Critique of Lacan, Beyond the MisunderstandingsDerrida Today 15 (2): 225-250. 2022.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
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194“Power and the ‘Drive for Mastery’: Derrida’s Freud and the Debate with Foucault.”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.
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8From Life to Survival: Derrida, Freud, and the Future of DeconstructionFordham University Press. 2022.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
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491Freud Beyond Foucault: Thinking Pleasure as a Site of ResistanceJournal 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
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2The All-Seeing SovereignSymposium 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
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90Derrida and the Death Penalty: The Question of CrueltyPhilosophy 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
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76Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis: 'A Problematic Proximity'Derrida Today 5 (1): 69-91. 2012.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
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Seattle UniversityRegular Faculty (Part-time)
Seattle, Washington, United States of America
Areas of Interest
Continental Philosophy |
European Philosophy |