Tuesday, August 3, 2010

PDF Ebook The Gift of Death (Religion and Postmodernism)

PDF Ebook The Gift of Death (Religion and Postmodernism)

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The Gift of Death (Religion and Postmodernism)

The Gift of Death (Religion and Postmodernism)


The Gift of Death (Religion and Postmodernism)


PDF Ebook The Gift of Death (Religion and Postmodernism)

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The Gift of Death (Religion and Postmodernism)

From Publishers Weekly

French philosopher Derrida stares death in the face in this dense but rewarding inquiry. Beginning with an analysis of an essay on the sacred by Czech philosopher/human rights activist Jan Patocka, Derrida follows the development of moral and ethical responsibility, and the concept of the soul's immortality, in the transition from Platonism to Christianity. He then ponders the self's anticipation of death in sacrifice, war, orgiastic mystery cults, murder and execution, with reference to Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, Nietzsche, Heidegger's thought (a "constant attempt to separate itself from Christianity") and the biblical story of Abraham's contemplated sacrifice of his son, Isaac, at God's behest. In the most provocative section, Derrida links religious injunctions of sacrifice to the "monotonous complacency" of modern society, which allows tens of millions of children to die of hunger and disease. Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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From Library Journal

This is Part 2 of Derrida's exploration of the ambiguity of giving. Part 1 (Given Time: Counterfeit Money, Univ. of Chicago Pr., 1992) weaves in and out of a Baudelaire prose poem on giving a beggar a counterfeit coin. Part 2 is more direct and reality-grounded, probably because its point of departure is an essay on history, religion, and responsibility by Jan Patov cka, Czech philosopher who died of a brain hemorrhage after police interrogation in March 1977. When confronted with the death of a scholar who gave his life because of his commitment to human rights, Derrida's readers will find the paradox of giving one's life-through death-somewhat precious. Derrida moves through texts from Emmanuel Levinas, Kierkegaard, the New Testament, and Nietzsche before ending with a passage from Baudelaire's art criticism, where he finds some of the same possibilities for double-reading a gift. Willis's model translation renders the text in clear English, with sufficient parenthetical French interpellations for readers to see where Derrida is playing on the gaps between the two languages. Recommended primarily for academic libraries.Marilyn Gaddis Rose, Binghamton Univ., N.Y.Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product details

Series: Religion and Postmodernism

Hardcover: 124 pages

Publisher: University Of Chicago Press; 1 edition (May 15, 1995)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0226143058

ISBN-13: 978-0226143057

Product Dimensions:

5.8 x 0.8 x 8.8 inches

Shipping Weight: 10.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)

Average Customer Review:

4.0 out of 5 stars

17 customer reviews

Amazon Best Sellers Rank:

#841,761 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

I've been an eager reader of Derrida since encountering Plato's Pharmacy in grad school. This second edition of Donner la Mort includes the essay Literature in Secret. Derrida is a notoriously difficult read, but rewarding; it may help to realize that he does not lay out a theory of philosophy, but rather performs philosophy. I found his exploration of the Abraham and Isaac story especially notable. In reading him, I always think of the carpenter's maxim: "measure twice, cut once."

Derrida's analysis of 'secret' is excellent, and a wonderful set up for his premise about the significance of death.Others have mentioned that a foundation of Heidegger would be helpful when reading this book, and I would agree. In this sense, I feel like Derrida here clarifies Heidegger's position about how Being Towards Death produces authenticity, but this could be because I read both for fun and didn't have any courses to guide me through.I really liked his analysis on the nature of subjectivity at the end. I'm not one to try to summarize an author's arguments in a review - I think the person can read the book him/herself and discover what is said, but I'm a fan of Derrida, and I believe this is his best work. I read Grammatology (yes, the whole thing, not the excerpts from Between the Blinds and in college courses), and really enjoyed it, and this may have influenced how well I enjoyed this work.

DON'T MISS THE HERMENEUTICAL GUIDE-STATEMENT ON PAGE "9". Derrida is best known as the "father of deconstructionism" for post-modern thought. But approaching this book from that narrow perspective would rob the reader of a great deal of significance in this work. This book truly is about "THE GIFT"; and that point should be honored. But the best key for understanding this manuscript is given to us by Derrida himself on page "9": "Even if that is not the case, nothing prevents us from putting a psychoanalytic reading of these words (Patocka's) to the test, at least on an experimental basis. This is Derrida's "philosophy of psychology", through the interpretive lens of Patocka. He willingly takes up this approach as an experiment because post-modern thinking has almost exclusively taken the subjective/psychological framework as their best model for articulation; usually consisting of an extreme leftist Hegelian framework. Derrida is a difficult thinker to absorb; but not impossible. He just has a style of compressing a great deal of significance in just a few pages. In this instance, I would suggest slowing-down your normal reading pace for scholarly work, in order to stay tuned to the author's evolving thought. This is "post-grad" material so don't expect less. This is one of the most strongly-balanced presentations I've seen in post-modern work; and from a date of 1995, which is a little ahead of the curve when its popularity began to rise. Derrida approaches from the depths of the "dark", the unconscious. Better wear your miner's hat with spotlight. The conversion experience takes place in the unconscious, not consciousness. This is a Christian presentation; but of the post-modern type. In fact the view actually proposes a reciprocal model consisting of: 1. orgiastic-aesthetics; 2. Platonic-rationalism; and 3. Christian-reversal. All three remain present to each other thoughout the workings of the hermeneutical circle, where the stage of "myth-morphic incorporation" continues to re-constitute the pre-linguistic self-consciousness. This myth-morphic stage is where the unconscious takes the "mystery" of conversion experiences and converts them into "secret", one that is internally posted as an objective representation (just not linguistic yet). Articulation of our responsible intentions of differentiation for the "GOOD" take place in consciousness. And ths is an articulation "before": 1. The "other"; 2. The "law"; and 3. The "self". Most of the specificity is before the "law" and consists of our deconstructions of the inauthenticity of technological society; and reconstruction using the three reciprocal "secrets" and their alliance with "responsibility". This great internal work by the self; who speaks from an internal dialogue between the unconsciousness and consciousness, posits the intention as "gift". This means a self-sacrifice that actually goes to the extreme of relinquishing all "possession" of the intention so that it can truly be self-actualized as an "incarnation" in the world. Take your time with this book and the reward will be overwhelming. I'm extremely impressed with Derrida n 1995. Easily a very appreciative "5" stars for boldly presenting such profound content.

You can give someone life--or you can put someone to death. But you cannot "give" someone their own death. Death is a "gift" because it insures our irreplaceableness in God's eyes; it is ours and ours alone. No one can die in my place no more than I can die in theirs. Our willingness to acknowledge this relationship with our own deaths (which above all requires "responsibility," a term Derrida seems to prefer to "faith") in turn unites us with God and the self, with the giver and the receiver.I'll admit I hadn't expected a deconstructionist to use terms like "absolute," "transcendant," "God," "self"--in profusion and in earnest. But perhaps Derrida has sufficiently exposed the instability, metaphoric basis and deceptive play of language to be able to employ it without qualifiers, disclaimers, and tedious textual self-referentiality. As is his custom, he represents his own work as a critique of others' works--Plato's "Phaedo," Nietzsche's "Genealogy of Morals," Kierkegaard's "Fear and Trembling," and the contemporary, politically executed Polish philosopher Jan Potocka. While he establishes his distance from Plato and Nietzsche, his re-visioning of Kierkegaard offers new angles without questioning or challenging the great Dane's existential reading of the Abraham-Isaac story. And his alignment with Potocka is so complete as to suggest more an apologia than a critique of the latter's work. Add to these texts numerous references to Heidegger and to both the Old and New Testaments as well as to stories by Poe and Hawthorne, and you'll have some idea of how richly allusive, not to mention dense, Derrida's discourse can be, even in a brief work such as this.The primary requisite for reading "The Gift of Death" is some knowledge of its precursor, "Fear and Trembling." Like Kierkegaard, Derrida defines religion as access to the responsibility of a free self, which in turn is defined as a relationship consciously and secretly experienced by the individual subject who sees him or herself in the gaze of God. Truth is separated from Socrates' truth by its interiority, by its replacement of reason, ethics, and aesthetics with the sheer horror of the abyss. Compared to Kierkegaard, however, Derrida's account is less romantic, less inspiring, more disturbing. The leap of faith involves not a sacrifice of Isaac but of oneself, a secret and senseless meeting with one's own death. Derrida interprets the absence of woman in the Abraham and Bartleby stories as proof that the "knight of faith's" quest is not the "tragic hero's". Instead, it is beyond all knowledge, a confrontation with the abyss that marks the Absolute singularity of the self. (This latter observation is reminiscent of Marlowe's inability, or unwillingness, in Conrad's "Heart of Darkness," to share the "truth" of Kurtz' final words, "The horror, the horror," with Kurtz' fiance.)In the latter part of his critique, Derrida offers a paradoxical criticism of the technological, modern age. Far from becoming quantified or de-naturalized, we have returned to the demonic and orgiastic from which religion arose. Modern man has fallen into inauthenticity, becoming not a self or person but assuming the mask of a "role." Present-day democracy, in turn, is not about the equality of individuals but of roles. Hence the importance of discovering and accepting the gift of death that determines human uniqueness. Responsibility is the criterion; freedom is the result.This is a work not to be read quickly or only once. Derrida moves slowly, taking two steps backward before moving one step forward, but his method insures the communication of his meanings. If it's any inducement to the reader, I would suggest that the fourth and final chapter, "Tout autre est tout autre," is anticlimactic and unhelpful. By then the attentive reader will already have located the gift.

Derrida impresses again with a magnificent display of his analysis on language, the concept of writing, and the deconstruction in the field of phenomenology.

Great!

Radical thought!

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