Perennially homeless: deconstruction—a disciplined non-belonging

Date
2008
Authors
O'Connor, M
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Conference Contribution
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AUT University
Abstract

In the context of the academy today, what is it to say that we belong in a perennial condition of translation? That is, a translation process across, and of course internal to, the borders of [its] disciplinary borders? Perhaps, our contemporary notion of inter or trans disciplinarity constitutes and, at the same moment testifies to, a desire for something more primordially akin to Heidegger’s homelessness. A homelessness, I’m cautious to add, that is “inherent” in the forces of deconstruction — here we would want to deconstruct notions of the filial and legacy. This paper desires to traverse a desire for (our) homelessness in relation to a constituted instituted notion of interdisciplinarity to reveal the trace of its (metaphysical) path. Our strategy here, via a deconstruction of sexual difference in relation to (some of) its contemporary disciplinary discourses, is to reveal a more originary question on the question of sexual difference today. Further we hope here to broaden a dialogue on the relevancy of deconstruction in the university today. In what you will here today this paper carries forward a notion of perennial homelessness into a radical questioning of belonging and identity explored via Heidegger located in his text Identity and Difference and furthers this relation to the notion of the proper or restricted economy that is housed within an academy’s disciplinary borders to a more primordial deconstructive question of ecriture in the general economy. [Perhaps, I/we — or Je-Nous — find proximity to what Stephen Barker in his paper yesterday suggested via Steigler’s neologism Default that finds proximity to Différance. For instance, Steigler’s Default, as Barker’s paper suggested, rejects any form of disciplinarity and rather chooses to name what he does as a hyperphilosophy – on the basis of his thinking of technics as the originary default or in Derrida’s terms the originary différance as an arche-writing. My connection here will be to link up grammatology as that technic if you like, as a way of approaching the question of concepts; thinking differences, and their proper place for 2 discoursing constitutive of laws invented in languages housed within disciplinary borders to the question of sexual difference]. That is, this paper now takes up via Derrida’s text Spurs its deferment of the question of woman to style for an opening up of my question of sexual difference to a grammatological one. That is to say, if there is a discipline such as feminism that it would be a category of the system of the Book (in the capital B) as a totalized encounter. In this restricted economy the discipline of Derrida (and here I evoke a question of what might constitute this conference in its titular head) and to continue, the discipline of woman are both totalized and thereby lose the impropriety or contamination of what deconstruction and grammatology can bring as a question.

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The 1st Derrida Today Conference, Sydney, Australia, 2008-07-10 - 2008-07-12
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