Abstract
Professor McKenna has offered us an attempted conciliation or reconciliation of Girard and Derrida. In his own words his paper sets out “to relate Derrida’ s critique of origins to Girard’ s originary hypothesis” (p. 46).1 Clearly, as the text unfolds, the reader sees that he is not dealing with an essay on the origin of social order and its relationship to violence but with an essay on Girard and Derrida and their relationship, or rather the relationship between their works. True enough, McKenna’ s paper is about violence, but it is not so much about the original violence that founds the social order according to Girard, as it is about another violence, final, terminal, definitive. ‘Apocalypse’ as the title of his paper says, ‘total and remainderless destruction’ as Derrida says (p. 71), nuclear extermination. In short, it is about a violence that founds nothing at all, out of which no social order can emerge. McKenna concludes that this final violence echoes the original violence from which the community was born, and that this resonance transforms, in a sense, the originary hypothesis into “absolute knowledge, being knowledge of the absolute” (p. 74). The absolute being total annihiliation.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Aristotle: Poetics.
Derrida, J.: 1967a, L’ Ecriture et la Différence. Paris: Seuil.
Derrida, J.: 1967b, De la Grammatologie. Paris: Minuit.
Derrida, J.: 1972, La Dissémination. Paris: Seuil.
Derrida, J.: 1984, ‘No Apocalypse, Not Now (Full speed ahead, seven missile, seven minutes’ , Diacritics, XIV, 2.
Dumouchel, P.: 1983, ‘Mimétisme et Autonomie’ in L’ Auto-organisation, de la Physiaue au Politique. Paris: Seuil.
Dumouchel, P.: forthcoming, ‘Chickens, Cyclists and Scientists’ .
Dupuy, J.-P.: 1982, ‘Mimesis et Morphogenèse’ in Ordres et Désordres, Paris: Seuil.
Fodor, J.: 1979, The Language of Thought. Harvard University Press.
Girard, R.: 1988. ThingsHidden Since the Foundation of the World. Athlone.
Husserl, E.: 1962, L’ Origine de la Géométrie. PUF. Introduction et traduction de Jacques Derrida.
Livingston, Paisley: 1988, ‘Durkheim et Girard’ in Violence and Truth. Stanford: Athlone.
Popper, K. R.: 1982, The Open Universe, Rowman and Littlefield.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1992 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Dumouchel, P. (1992). A Morphogenetic Hypothesis on the Closure of Post-Structuralism. In: Varela, F.J., Dupuy, JP. (eds) Understanding Origins. Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, vol 130. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8054-0_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8054-0_4
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-90-481-4090-9
Online ISBN: 978-94-015-8054-0
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive