Vernon W Cisney

Few thinkers from the twentieth century have had a greater impact on the contemporary continental tradition in philosophy than Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze. While their respective areas of research overlapped greatly in terms of content, and extended into domains political, literary, and artistic, they are still best known for their respective attempts to theoretically formulate a non-dialectical conception of difference (différance in Derrida’s case and difference-in-itself in Deleuze’s). Yet, while a great deal of scholarly work has explored the ethical and political comparisons between the two, none has specifically attempted to compare or contrast their concepts of difference. This book draws such a distinction between Derrida and Deleuze, by examining each with respect to Hegel and Nietzsche, differentiating them on the basis of the criticisms they level against Hegel, as well as their valorizations of Nietzsche, and the ways in which they understand Nietzsche’s thought to surpass that of Hegel.

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Among French intellectuals of the late twentieth century, Jacques Derrida stood apart as one of the most controversial and influential. Published in 1967, Voice and Phenomenon marks a crucial turning point in Derrida’s thinking: it is the culmination of a fifteen-year long engagement with the phenomenological tradition, and it introduces the concepts and themes that would mark the project that would become deconstruction. This Philosophical Guide is designed to introduce the reader to the historical context out of which Derrida is working (including and especially Husserl’s thought), to provide the reader with careful, critical commentary of Derrida’s text, and to demonstrate how the concepts explicated in Voice and Phenomenon would pave the way for Derrida’s future works. It is designed to be clear enough for an undergraduate, but rigorous enough for a graduate student or professor. Derrida’s Voice and Phenomenon: An Edinburgh Philosophical Guide thus provides an essential toolkit for those approaching Derrida for the first time.

Wallace’s characterization of The Broom of the System, as ‘a conversation between Wittgenstein and Derrida,’  is well known. Much of the scholarship surrounding the novel has interpreted Wallace’s remark as an assertion that the novel constitutes a debate between Wittgenstein and Derrida, and has, more often than not, assumed that Wittgenstein ‘wins’ that debate for Wallace. In this paper I argue that this assessment rests on at least a partial misunderstanding of Derrida’s thinking,  and that Derrida, for Wallace, is in fact the thinker who points the way beyond the 'double bind' of the 'postmodern trap' - the either/or of solipsism or linguistic realism - in which Wittgenstein's thought leaves us.

In this paper I employ the notion of the 'thought of the outside' as developed by Michel Foucault, in order to defend the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze against the criticisms of 'elitism,' 'aristocratism,' and 'political indifference'—famously leveled by Alain Badiou and Peter Hallward. First, I argue that their charges of a theophanic conception of Being, which ground the broader political claims, derive from a misunderstanding of Deleuze's notion of univocity, as well as a failure to recognize the significance of the concept of multiplicity in Deleuze's thinking. From here, I go on to discuss Deleuze's articulation of the 'dogmatic image of thought,' which, insofar as it takes 'recognition' as its model, can only ever think what is already solidified and sedimented as true, in light of existing structures and institutions of power. Then, I examine Deleuze's reading of Foucault and the notion of the 'thought of the outside,' showing the 'outside' as the unthought that lies at the heart of thinking itself, as both its condition and its impossibility. Insofar as it is essential to thinking itself, finally, I argue that the passage of thought to the outside is not an absolute flight out of this world, as Hallward claims, but rather, a return of the different that constitutes the Self for Deleuze. Thinking is an ongoing movement of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, or as Foucault says, death and life. Thinking, as Deleuze understands it, is essentially creative; it reconfigures the virtual, thereby literally changing the world. Thinking is therefore, according to Deleuze, thoroughly political.

The questions that my paper shall pursue are: 1) What path leads from Deleuze's early writings to his latter-day conception of a life, and 2) What can such a conception of life mean? Our path will trace a reversal and a return, respectively, through phenomenology to Bergson. For Deleuze, a genuine concept of a life is thinkable, only when the phenomenological subject, which Deleuze considers an illusion, has been jettisoned, reabsorbed into the flux of immanence. This implies a return to a century-old philosophical renewal, namely, the reformulation of the experience of time.

... Law.” Agamben's first mention of this important notion, so far as I can find, is in Homo Sacer in 1995 (in which he also cites, for the first time, “Force of ... 2. To Kill and Not Sacrifice In Homo Sacer, to be sure, Agamben is in many ways operating on a different plane than is Derrida. ...

ABSTRACT Benedict de Spinoza, C.S. Peirce, and Gilles Deleuze delineate a trajectory through the history of ideas in the dialogue about the potentials and limitations of panpsychism, the view that world is fundamentally made up of mind. As a parallel trajectory to the panpsychism debate in contemporary philosophy of mind and cognitive psychology, this approach can inform and enrich the discussion of the role and scope of mind in the natural world. The philosophies of mind developed by Deleuze and Peirce are Spinozistic in their natural monism but move beyond Spinoza to explain mind as a part of the natural world in semiotic terms.