Introduction: the origins of deconstruction: Derrida's daughters

Authors

Ika Willis, University of BristolFollow

RIS ID

77071

Publication Details

Willis, I. (2010). Introduction: the origins of deconstruction: Derrida's daughters. In M. Mcquillan and V. Willis (Eds.), The Origins of Deconstruction (pp. 1-6). Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

Additional Publication Information

In these essays, a range of leading scholars seek both to investigate the historical, institutional and philosophical origins of deconstruction and to think through the problem of the idea of origin itself.

Abstract

Why, then, start at the beginning? The choice of a starting place can never be justified ('at most one can give a strategic justification for the procedure'), but neither can we not choose, pretend to be starting 'just anywhere' already presupposes a map of the terrain into which we jab the blind pin: and the origin is that which will have instituted the map on which the origin is located in the first place. Whick is to say that the origin comes both before and after the first place. The origing partakes of the cirularity of the Iogos which deconstruction diagnoses as a time which is out of joint.