Unclearing the Air: The Pneumatological Dalliances of Jacques Derrida

Author:

McCormack Ryan1

Affiliation:

1. University of Tennessee , Knoxville , TN 37996 , United States

Abstract

Abstract In the 1980s, Luce Irigaray accused Western philosophy of “forgetting” about the role that the materiality of air and the act of breathing played in pre-Socratic metaphysics. This essay explores how Jacques Derrida maintained a complicated but insightful relationship to the air throughout his career through the mediating influence of pneuma, a word with long and complicated connections to the air. I highlight two relevant sites of engagement. The first was found in Of Grammatology (1968), where he connected the breathy logocentrism of “natural writing” to a concept of pneumatology (a “science of spirit” with some interesting connections to Leibniz) that served as grammatology’s Janus face. The second stemmed from Of Spirit (1991), in which Derrida emphasized the combustible, fiery face of pneuma to lambast Heidegger’s use of translation to mediate away the historical presence of the word pneuma for ideological purposes. This body of work, en toto, presents a subtle and oblique critique of Irigaray’s position. For Derrida, the air cannot function as the medium for an alternative metaphysics of presence because, historically, its space has already been infused with a pneumatic specter that cannot be ignored.

Publisher

Walter de Gruyter GmbH

Subject

Philosophy

Reference38 articles.

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2. Arthur, Richard. “Andreas Blank, Leibniz: Metaphilosophy and Metaphysics 1666-1686.” Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, May 6, 2006. https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/leibniz-metaphilosophy-and-metaphysics-1666-1686/.

3. Bataille, George. Inner Experience, translated by Stuart Kendall. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014.

4. Berndston, Petri. “The Inspiration and the Expiration of Being: The Immense Lung and the Cosmic Breathing as the Sources of Dreams, Poetry and Philosophy.” In Thinking In Dialogue With Humanities: Paths into the Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, edited by Karel Novotný, Taylor S. Hammer, Anne Gléonec, and Petr Špecián, 281–93. Bucharest: Zeta Books, 2010.

5. Clark, William. “The Death of Metaphysics in Enlightened Prussia.” In The Sciences in Enlightened Europe, edited by William Clark, Jan Golinski, and Simon Schaffer, 423–74. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.

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