Aporias (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics) 1st Edition by Jacques Derrida (PDF)

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My death―is it possible?That is the question asked, explored, and analyzed in Jacques Derrida’s new book. “Is my death possible?” How is this question to be understood? How and by whom can it be asked, can it be quoted, can it be an appropriate question, and can it be asked in the appropriate moment, the moment of “my death”? One of the aporetic experiences touched upon in this seminal essay is the impossible, yet unavoidable experience that “my death” can never subject to an experience that would be properly mine, that I can have, and account for, yet that there is, at the same time, nothing closer to me and more properly mine than “my death.”This book bears a special significance because in it Derrida focuses on an issue that has informed the whole of his work up to the present. For the last thirty years, Derrida has repeatedly, in various contexts and various ways, broached the question of aporia. Making it his central concern here Derrida stakes out a new frontier, at which the debate with his work must take place from now on: the debate about the aporia between singularity and generality, about the national, linguistic, and cultural specificity of experience and the trans-national, trans-cultural law that protects this specificity of experience and of the necessity to continue working in the tradition of critique and of the idea of critique, yet the corresponding necessity to transcend it without compromising it; the aporetical obligation to host the foreigner and the alien and yet to respect him, her, or it as foreign.The foreign or the foreigner has always been considered a figure of death, and death a figure of the foreign. How this figure has been treated in the analytic of death in Heidegger’s Being in Time is explored by Derrida in analytical tour de force that will not fail to set new standards for the discussion of Heidegger and for dealing with philosophical texts, with their limits and their aporias. The detailed discussion of the theoretical presuppositions of recent cultural histories of death (Ariès, for example) and of psychological theorizations of death (including Freud’s) broaden the scope of Derrida’s investigation and indicate the impact of the aporia of “my death” for any possible theory.

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Editorial Reviews: Review “My death–is it possible?” That is the question asked, explored, and analyzed in Jacques Derrida’s new book. Focusing on an issue that has informed his work for the last 30 years, Derrida stakes out a new frontier, at which the debate with his work must take place from now on. From the Back Cover “My death–is it possible?” That is the question asked, explored, and analyzed in Jacques Derrida’s new book. Focusing on an issue that has informed his work for the last 30 years, Derrida stakes out a new frontier, at which the debate with his work must take place from now on. About the Author Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) was director of studies at the école des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris, and professor of humanities at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of many books published by the University of Chicago Press. Read more

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Is “death” a limit? For Derrida “death” is that which `involves a certain step / not … pace’ (il y va d’un certain pas) (p. 6). It is not a telos or a terma, a limit beyond which there is none, but rather a `step’, a peras, a passage one traverses by penetrating. At the same time, it is the moment of a `not’, of an impossibility. What is more, it is certain that one reaches this step as impossibility, as non-path at a certain pace.And in bringing forth Heidegger and the Aristotelian notion of aporia in the sense of being stuck in-between, Derrida is wondering whether “death” can be conceptualized in non-vulgar terms without being stuck in an impasse.To achieve this, he remarks that aporia is the border as limit, as oros, and at the same time as tracing, as gramme. Hence an `aporetology’ (p. 15) as has been his key concern in numerous instances, when, what is at stake, is not the crossing of the border, but rather, the double concept of the border from which aporia comes to be determined. Thus the word “death” whose concept is `unassignable or unassigning’ (p. 22). And to expand on this, Derrida explores two issues.First the idea of aporia as the impossible (in § 1: Finis) along with Heidegger’s definition of “death” as `the possibility of the pure and simple impossibility for Dasein’ (p. 23). In using the Heideggerian distinction between “properly dying” (tod – eigentlich sterben) and “perishing” (verenden), Derrida emphasizes that the problem of “death” concerns Dasein or the mortal, `not man (sic), the human subject, but it is that in terms of which the humanity of man must be rethought’ (p. 35). A possible answer lies in “demise” (ableben) in the sense of walking away from life, thus placing an emphasis on the “arrivant” with no name or identity i.e. Dasein proper – death proper. Such delimitations institute a three-pronged inquiry for Derrida in one single braid: the problematic closure (conceptualisation of limit), anthropological border (discourse on limit), and conceptual demarcation (logical redefinition).Second the idea of aporia as the crossing of borders (in §2: Awaiting (at) the Arrival). To this purpose, to wonder what there is after death makes methodological sense if the ontological essence of death has been elaborated and existential analysis of death has been carried out. More importantly such decisions occur here, over this side (i.e. not after death): they concern Dasein in its essence of `the being-possible’ (p. 63). With an emphasis on the possible, Derrida remarks that `death is the most proper possibility of this possibility’ (i.e. being-possibility of Dasein): with death Dasein awaits itself, standing before the impending anachronism (contretemps) of death.To conclude I want to go to the beginning where Derrida dedicates this text to Koitchi Toyosaki, apparently for two reasons: Toyosaki’s death and his father’s (p. x). It seems to me that in citing `Toyosaki’ and given that `names matter’ (p. 21), Derrida is echoing what Toyosaki says. Namely, `citing is a manner of translating since it is obliged to leave its milieu of origin to find another where it takes more or less a new meaning et more importantly that it enters with the words that surround it in a relation of reciprocal translation’ (Les fins de l’homme p.246). Citing then is about crossing a limit between that which is original and another, this side and the other. And if death for Derrida is this limit, it is an aporia – that which prompts anyone to wonder, to interrogate … death as a figure of difference.A book you must have read – but keep Heidegger close by!

⭐”My death, is it possible?” Derrida has recently become more and more preoccupied with what has come to be termed “possible-impossible aporias” – aporia was originally a Greek term meaning a philosophical puzzle or state of puzzlement and in rhetoric a rhetorically useful expression of doubt, but it has come to mean something more like an impasse or paradox. Very interesting book, an aporia for thought.

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