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Example research essay topic: Death Of His Mother Piece Of Writing - 1,302 words

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... described as the fiction of an origin Metaphysics the white mythology which resembles and reflects the culture of the West (Derrida 1982: 213). Derrida offers the term archive, which combines the notion of founding principles with, broadly speaking, the ideological values of a governing force (1997: xvi). Deconstruction uncovers the excess (ibid. ) or the concealed and repressed elements that philosophy must hide in order to distinguish and perpetuate itself as philosophy (ibid. : x). Derrida deconstruction therefore destabilizes foundation alist beliefs in systems of thought such as Authority, Order and Free-Will, by revealing that in order for culturally valued systems of meaning to be attached to these signifier's, other signs must already have been in place in order to make them possible. Deconstruction of the sign runs the risk of becoming a pointless nihilistic endeavour.

Attempting to get out of a philosophical system of thought is inherently problematic because Western thought has proceeded from a teleological position. This position posits origins and goals as coterminous in their significance for organising meaning hierarchically. Derrida's idea of sous rate (under erasure) exemplifies the difficulty here; looking up a word in a dictionary can never fix the meaning of that word. There will always be another sign (signifier that refers to a signified) that can be substituted.

Each word that is sought is being continuously erased by the next word but remains as a trace to the original referent (entity that begins this process). Sous rate exemplifies the inadequacy of the signifier / signified binary but it also highlights the necessity for this system that attempts to distinguish the sensible / intelligible (Bennington 1993: 39). The logic of presence presumes that speech is closer to thinking and presence, than writing. Derrida shows how deconstruction can subvert this logic by highlighting the connection between phono centrism, logo centrism and centrism that reveals the longing in Western thought for a centre (1997: 279, 292). Writing destabilizes the notion of a centre; it is unable to convey intonation or guarantee meaning because it does not function in the same way as a face to face dialogue with an interlocutor, who might question the speaker in order to clarify the understanding of a communication. If the logo centric text seeks to privilege an author with certain intentions that are communicated to the reader, then deconstruction as a methodology problematises metaphysical truths that have historically governed Western epistemology.

Lets return to the discussion of hypertext and continue to explore its relevance to Derrida and critical theory. The reader of a bound text is a relatively passive consumer in Lands schema, who is unable to argue with the author, question or change the text, without engaging in a lengthy exchange and response. Arguably, The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie (republished in 1992) refutes notions of a passive consumer. The controversy following its publication constrained the author whilst the fatwa (issued on 14 February 1989 by the Ayatollah Khomeini) that threatened his life, temporarily removed the book from display and distribution. However, the book remained unchanged and is still in distribution, which tends to support Walter Ong's position regarding the authority of a printed text: The author may be challenged if only he could be reached, but the author cannot be reached in any book. There is no way to refute a text.

After absolutely total refutation, it says exactly the same thing as before. This is one reason why the book says is popularly tantamount to it is true. It is also one reason why books have been burnt (cited in Delaney and London 1994: 8). The Satanic Verses was burnt in protest at the contents of Rushdie's text. The Rushdie incident exemplifies the power of the written text that can mobilise a succession of political, religious and theoretical issues. These issues collide in their desire to ground truth within two very different systems of belief.

Another but less extreme example that contests the book as truth, relates to our primary text and concerns the bible and Derrida's references to Catholic doctrine in Circumfession. Derrida invokes a sixteenth-century translation of Saint Augustine's Confessions and uses the figure of Saint Augustine's mother, Saint Monica, to frame the death of his mother and to provide what I will refer to as a foundation for his work on the Mother in Circumfession (1993: 8). Derrida's preoccupation here, it could be argued, is with beginnings and endings. I have chosen to focus on Circumfession for several reasons.

This text exemplifies the illogic nature of the logo centric text, which Derrida critiques and deconstructs into literary and philosophical history throughout his career as an academic, as a writer, as a philosopher and as a man in feminism. Derrida looks up to Geoffrey Bennington's exposition of Derrida's corpus, which forms the main body of the book. Circumfession is constituted in the lower margin of each page and Day attempts to surprise Djef (ibid. : 13) in line with the contract that they have negotiated from the outset (ibid. : 1). Like Saint Augustine who turns his eyes heavenward in order to confess his life to God following the death of his mother, Derrida engages in an impossible act of confession. He attempts to confess what is always in excess of a text; his confession, as we will see, ultimately fails because it is in excess of language or any symbolic system. Derrida's challenge is to return what cannot be returned to the text the warm blood of his body, shed during his ritual circumcision.

He fails to present an uncircumcised piece of writing because his circumcision marks the moment in Judaism where the boy recieves his proper name. He fails, therefore, to produce an unnamed text that can surprise Djef, of everything G. can be expecting of me, a supposedly idiomatic, unreachable, unreadable uncircumcised piece of writing (1993: 194). My reasons for imagining Derrida with feminist tendencies (against the charge of anti-feminism that circulate in discourses about him and alluded to in Bennington 1993: 225) are based mainly on his autobiography (ibid. : 20). I was at first reluctant to write anything about this piece of autobiographical because for Derrida the sign is always under erasure. The sign can never be a stable homogenous unit that bridges a referent (origin) and an end (meaning), as semiology might dictate it.

What sort of autobiography proceeds after Derrida's deconstruction of the very metaphysics of presence? To quote Derrida: [I]n the absence of a centre or origin, everything became discourse [] that is to say, a system in which the central signified, the original or transcendental signified, is never absolutely present outside a system of differences (1997: 280). The illogical logo centric text strives to secure a stable transcendental signified that relates to some underlying truth (God, essence, matter, the author) but Derrida argues that transcendental meanings are fictions does this make his autobiography fictional? Hypertext radically alters the notion of an author as the individual creator of an isolated and unique piece of work. Derridabase (Bennington 1993) and Circumfession (1993) offer a hyper textual reading experience. The multiplicity of hypertext questions historical and cultural assumptions of hierarchy and status in the printed text.

For example, copyright laws protect the printed text and author and ensure that the text remains unchanged and therefore the intellectual property of the writer thus regulating the market of print technology. It could be argued that copyright laws did not protect Salman Rushdie from a fundamentalist regime (note the provisional status that I am awarding this comment because it is a comment that presumes a centre) situated several thousand miles away. In line with what I observe as Derrida's frequent / repeated theorising on de centring, the Rushdie case exemplifies Western metaphysics and attitudes towards cultures outside this Eurocentric vision. This vision image...


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Research essay sample on Death Of His Mother Piece Of Writing

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