Deconstruction, Its Force, Its Violence: together with "Have We Done with the Empire of Judgment?"

by Rodolphe Gasché

In this book, Rodolphe Gasche returns to some of the founding texts of deconstruction to propose a new and broader way of understanding it--not as an operation or method to reach an elusive outside, or beyond, of metaphysics, but as something that takes place within it. Rather than unraveling metaphysics, deconstruction loosens its binary and hierarchical conceptual structure. To make this case, Gasche focuses on the concepts of force and violence in the work of Jacques Derrida, looking to his essays "Force and Signification" and "Force of Law," and his reading on Of Grammatology in Claude Levi-Strauss's autobiographical Tristes Tropiques. The concept of force has not drawn extensive scrutiny in Derrida scholarship, but it is crucial to understanding how, by way of spacing and temporizing, philosophical opposition is reinscribed into a differential economy of forces. Gasche concludes with an essay addressing the question of deconstruction and judgment and considers whether deconstruction suspends the possibility of judgment, or whether it is, on the contrary, a hyperbolic demand for judgment.

Genres: Philosophy

144 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 2016

About the author

Rodolphe Gasché is Distinguished Professor and Eugenio Donato Professor of Comparative Literature at the State University of New York at Buffalo.