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The specimens displayed were often collected during exploring expeditions and trading voyages. In the second half of the 18th century, Belsazar Hacquet c. It included a number of minerals, including specimens of mercury from the Idrija mine , a herbarium vivum with over 4, specimens of Carniolan and foreign plants, a smaller number of animal specimens, a natural history and medical library, and an anatomical theatre.

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Cabinets of curiosities would often serve scientific advancement when images of their contents were published. The catalog of Worm's collection, published as the Museum Wormianum , used the collection of artifacts as a starting point for Worm's speculations on philosophy, science, natural history, and more.

Cabinets of curiosities were limited to those who could afford to create and maintain them. Many monarchs , in particular, developed large collections. The fabulous Habsburg Imperial collection included important Aztec artifacts, including the feather head-dress or crown of Montezuma now in the Museum of Ethnology, Vienna.

These were cabinets in the sense of pieces of furniture, made from all imaginable exotic and expensive materials and filled with contents and ornamental details intended to reflect the entire cosmos on a miniature scale.

The best preserved example is the one given by the city of Augsburg to King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden in , which is kept in the Museum Gustavianum in Uppsala. The curio cabinet , as a modern single piece of furniture, is a version of the grander historical examples. The juxtaposition of such disparate objects, according to Horst Bredekamp's analysis Bredekamp , encouraged comparisons, finding analogies and parallels and favoured the cultural change from a world viewed as static to a dynamic view of endlessly transforming natural history and a historical perspective that led in the seventeenth century to the germs of a scientific view of reality.

The "Enlightenment Gallery" in the British Museum , installed in the former "Kings Library" room in to celebrate the th anniversary of the museum, aims to recreate the abundance and diversity that still characterized museums in the mid-eighteenth century, mixing shells, rock samples and botanical specimens with a great variety of artworks and other man-made objects from all over the world. In , Michael Bernhard Valentini published an early museological work, Museum Museorum , an account of the cabinets known to him with catalogues of their contents.

Some strands of the early universal collections, the bizarre or freakish biological specimens, whether genuine or fake, and the more exotic historical objects, could find a home in commercial freak shows and sideshows.


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He began sporadically collecting plants in England and France while studying medicine. He accepted and spent fifteen months collecting and cataloguing the native plants, animals, and artificial curiosities e. This became the basis for his two volume work, Natural History of Jamaica , published in and Sloane returned to England in with over eight hundred specimens of plants, which were live or mounted on heavy paper in an eight-volume herbarium. He also attempted to bring back live animals e. Sloane meticulously cataloged and created extensive records for most of the specimens and objects in his collection.

He also began to acquire other collections by gift or purchase. Herman Boerhaave gave him four volumes of plants from Boerhaave's gardens at Leiden. William Charleton, in a bequest in , gave Sloane numerous books of birds, fish, flowers, and shells and his miscellaneous museum consisting of curiosities, miniatures, insects, medals, animals, minerals, precious stones and curiosities in amber. Sloane purchased Leonard Plukenet 's collection in It consisted of twenty-three volumes with over 8, plants from Africa, India, Japan and China.

Mary Somerset, Duchess of Beaufort — , left him a twelve-volume herbarium from her gardens at Chelsea and Badminton upon her death in Reverend Adam Buddle gave Sloane thirteen volumes of British plants. Philip Miller gave him twelve volumes of plants grown from the Chelsea Physic Garden. John Tradescant the elder circa s— was a gardener, naturalist, and botanist in the employ of the Duke of Buckingham. He collected plants, bulbs, flowers, vines, berries, and fruit trees from Russia, the Levant, Algiers, France, Bermuda, the Caribbean, and the East Indies.

His son, John Tradescant the younger — traveled to Virginia in and collected flowers, plants, shells, an Indian deerskin mantle believed to have belonged to Powhatan , father of Pocahontas. Father and son, in addition to botanical specimens, collected zoological e. By the s, the Tradescants displayed their eclectic collection at their residence in South Lambeth. Tradescant's Ark, as it came to be known, was the earliest major cabinet of curiosity in England and open to the public for a small entrance fee.

Elias Ashmole — was a lawyer, chemist, antiquarian, Freemason , and a member of the Royal Society with a keen interest in astrology , alchemy , and botany. Ashmole was also a neighbor of the Tradescants in Lambeth. He financed the publication of Musaeum Tradescantianum , a catalogue of the Ark collection in Ashmole, a collector in his own right, acquired the Tradescant Ark in and added it to his collection of astrological, medical, and historical manuscripts. In , he donated his library and collection and the Tradescant collection to the University of Oxford , provided that a suitable building be provided to house the collection.

Ashmole's donation formed the foundation of the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford. Cabinets of curiosities served not only as collections to reflect the particular curiosities of their curators but as social devices to establish and uphold rank in society. There are said to be two main types of cabinets. Evans notes, there could be "the princely cabinet, serving a largely representational function, and dominated by aesthetic concerns and a marked predilection for the exotic," or the less grandiose, "the more modest collection of the humanist scholar or virtuoso, which served more practical and scientific purposes.

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In addition to cabinets of curiosity serving as an establisher of socioeconomic status for its curator, these cabinets served as entertainment, as particularly illustrated by the proceedings of the Royal Society , whose early meetings were often a sort of open floor to any Fellow to exhibit the findings his curiosities led him to. However purely educational or investigative these exhibitions may sound, it is important to note that the Fellows in this period supported the idea of "learned entertainment, [20] " or the alignment of learning with entertainment.

This was not unusual, as the Royal Society had an earlier history of a love of the marvellous. This love was often exploited by eighteenth-century natural philosophers to secure the attention of their audience during their exhibitions. Places of exhibitions of and places of new societies that promoted natural knowledge also seemed to culture the idea of perfect civility. Some scholars propose that this was "a reaction against the dogmatism and enthusiasm of the English Civil War and Interregum [sic]. Exhibitions of curiosities as they were typically odd and foreign marvels attracted a wide, more general audience, which "[rendered] them more suitable subjects of polite discourse at the Society.

Because of this, many displays simply included a concise description of the phenomena and avoided any mention of explanation for the phenomena. Quentin Skinner describes the early Royal Society as "something much more like a gentleman's club, [21] " an idea supported by John Evelyn , who depicts the Royal Society as "an Assembly of many honorable Gentlemen, who meete inoffensively together under his Majesty's Royal Cognizance; and to entertaine themselves ingenously, whilst their other domestique avocations or publique business deprives them of being always in the company of learned men and that they cannot dwell forever in the Universities.

His specialty was repairing congenital anomalies, cleft lip and palates, and club foot. He also collected medical oddities, tumors, anatomical and pathological specimens, wet and dry preparations, wax models, plaster casts, and illustrations of medical deformities. This collection began as a teaching tool for young physicians. A pedagogy which inversely gives to the voice of the masters that infinite sovereignty that allows it indefinitely to re-say the text.

Many of Derrida's translators are esteemed thinkers in their own right. Derrida often worked in a collaborative arrangement, allowing his prolific output to be translated into English in a timely fashion. Having started as a student of de Man, Gayatri Spivak took on the translation of Of Grammatology early in her career and has since revised it into a second edition.

Alan Bass was responsible for several early translations; Bennington and Peggy Kamuf have continued to produce translations of his work for nearly twenty years. In recent years, a number of translations have appeared by Michael Naas also a Derrida scholar and Pascale-Anne Brault.

Bennington, Brault, Kamuf, Naas, Elizabeth Rottenberg, and David Wills are currently engaged in translating Derrida's previously unpublished seminars, which span from to Further volumes currently projected for the series include Heidegger: With Bennington, Derrida undertook the challenge published as Jacques Derrida , an arrangement in which Bennington attempted to provide a systematic explication of Derrida's work called the "Derridabase" using the top two-thirds of every page, while Derrida was given the finished copy of every Bennington chapter and the bottom third of every page in which to show how deconstruction exceeded Bennington's account this was called the "Circumfession".

Derrida seems to have viewed Bennington in particular as a kind of rabbinical explicator, noting at the end of the "Applied Derrida" conference, held at the University of Luton in that: I have the challenge of trying to be unpredictable after him, which is impossible Derrida was familiar with the work of Marshall McLuhan , and since his early writings Of Grammatology , Speech and Phenomena , he speaks of language as a "medium," [] of phonetic writing as "the medium of the great metaphysical, scientific, technical, and economic adventure of the West.

He expressed his disagreement with McLuhan in regard to what Derrida called McLuhan's ideology about the end of writing. I think that there is an ideology in McLuhan's discourse that I don't agree with because he's an optimist as to the possibility of restoring an oral community which would get rid of the writing machines and so on. I think that's a very traditional myth which goes back to And instead of thinking that we are living at the end of writing, I think that in another sense we are living in the extension — the overwhelming extension — of writing.

At least in the new sense I don't mean the alphabetic writing down, but in the new sense of those writing machines that we're using now e. And this is writing too. As writing, communication, if one insists upon maintaining the word, is not the means of transport of sense, the exchange of intentions and meanings, the discourse and "communication of consciousnesses. It is this questioned effect that I have elsewhere called logocentrism. Though Derrida addressed the American Philosophical Association on at least one occasion in , [] and was highly regarded by some contemporary philosophers like Richard Rorty , Alexander Nehamas , [] and Stanley Cavell , his work has been regarded by other analytic philosophers, such as John Searle and Willard Van Orman Quine , [] as pseudophilosophy or sophistry.

Some analytic philosophers have in fact claimed, since at least the s, that Derrida's work is "not philosophy. From Socrates to Freud and Beyond , one section of which is an experiment in fiction purposefully uses words that cannot be defined e. Rorty, however, argues that this intentional obfuscation is philosophically grounded.

Philosopher Sir Roger Scruton wrote in , "He's difficult to summarise because it's nonsense. He argues that the meaning of a sign is never revealed in the sign but deferred indefinitely and that a sign only means something by virtue of its difference from something else. For Derrida, there is no such thing as meaning — it always eludes us and therefore anything goes.

On Derrida's scholarship and writing style, Noam Chomsky wrote "I found the scholarship appalling, based on pathetic misreading; and the argument, such as it was, failed to come close to the kinds of standards I've been familiar with since virtually childhood". Gross and Norman Levitt also criticized his work for misusing scientific terms and concepts in Higher Superstition: Three quarrels or disputes in particular went out of academic circles and received international mass media coverage: In the early s, Searle had a brief exchange with Jacques Derrida regarding speech-act theory.

The exchange was characterized by a degree of mutual hostility between the philosophers, each of whom accused the other of having misunderstood his basic points. Searle did not consider Derrida's approach to be legitimate philosophy or even intelligible writing and argued that he did not want to legitimize the deconstructionist point of view by dedicating any attention to it. Consequently, some critics [] have considered the exchange to be a series of elaborate misunderstandings rather than a debate, while others [] have seen either Derrida or Searle gaining the upper hand.

The level of hostility can be seen from Searle's statement that "It would be a mistake to regard Derrida's discussion of Austin as a confrontation between two prominent philosophical traditions", to which Derrida replied that that sentence was "the only sentence of the "reply" to which I can subscribe".

Austin's theory of the illocutionary act. While sympathetic to Austin's departure from a purely denotational account of language to one that includes "force", Derrida was sceptical of the framework of normativity employed by Austin. He argued that Austin had missed the fact that any speech event is framed by a "structure of absence" the words that are left unsaid due to contextual constraints and by "iterability" the constraints on what can be said, given by what has been said in the past.

Derrida argued that the focus on intentionality in speech-act theory was misguided because intentionality is restricted to that which is already established as a possible intention. He also took issue with the way Austin had excluded the study of fiction, non-serious or "parasitic" speech, wondering whether this exclusion was because Austin had considered these speech genres governed by different structures of meaning, or simply due to a lack of interest.

In his brief reply to Derrida, "Reiterating the Differences: A Reply to Derrida", Searle argued that Derrida's critique was unwarranted because it assumed that Austin's theory attempted to give a full account of language and meaning when its aim was much narrower. Searle considered the omission of parasitic discourse forms to be justified by the narrow scope of Austin's inquiry. Some critics [] have suggested that Searle, by being so grounded in the analytical tradition that he was unable to engage with Derrida's continental phenomenological tradition, was at fault for the unsuccessful nature of the exchange.

The substance of Searle's criticism of Derrida in relation to topics in the philosophy of language —referenced in Derrida's Signature Event Context —was that Derrida had no apparent familiarity with contemporary philosophy of language nor of contemporary linguistics in Anglo-Saxon countries. Searle explains, "When Derrida writes about the philosophy of language he refers typically to Rousseau and Condillac , not to mention Plato.

And his idea of a "modern linguist" is Benveniste or even Saussure.

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Searle also wrote in The New York Review of Books that he was surprised by "the low level of philosophical argumentation, the deliberate obscurantism of the prose, the wildly exaggerated claims, and the constant striving to give the appearance of profundity by making claims that seem paradoxical, but under analysis often turn out to be silly or trivial. Derrida, in his response to Searle "a b c Searle did not reply. Later in , Derrida tried to review his position and his critiques of Austin and Searle, reiterating that he found the constant appeal to "normality" in the analytical tradition to be problematic from which they were only paradigmatic examples.

In the description of the structure called "normal," "normative," "central," "ideal," this possibility must be integrated as an essential possibility. The possibility cannot be treated as though it were a simple accident-marginal or parasitic. It cannot be, and hence ought not to be, and this passage from can to ought reflects the entire difficulty. In the analysis of so-called normal cases, one neither can nor ought, in all theoretical rigor, to exclude the possibility of transgression.

Not even provisionally, or out of allegedly methodological considerations. It would be a poor method, since this possibility of transgression tells us immediately and indispensable about the structure of the act said to be normal as well as about the structure of law in general. He continued arguing how problematic was establishing the relation between "nonfiction or standard discourse" and "fiction," defined as its "parasite", "for part of the most original essence of the latter is to allow fiction, the simulacrum, parasitism, to take place-and in so doing to 'de-essentialize' itself as it were".

This question is all the more indispensable since the rules, and even the statements of the rules governing the relations of "nonfiction standard discourse" and its fictional "parasites," are not things found in nature, but laws, symbolic inventions, or conventions, institutions that, in their very normality as well as in their normativity, entail something of the fictional. In the debate, Derrida praises Austin's work but argues that he is wrong to banish what Austin calls "infelicities" from the "normal" operation of language. One "infelicity," for instance, occurs when it cannot be known whether a given speech act is "sincere" or "merely citational" and therefore possibly ironic, etc.

Derrida argues that every iteration is necessarily "citational," due to the graphematic nature of speech and writing, and that language could not work at all without the ever-present and ineradicable possibility of such alternate readings. Derrida takes Searle to task for his attempt to get around this issue by grounding final authority in the speaker's inaccessible "intention". Derrida argues that intention cannot possibly govern how an iteration signifies, once it becomes hearable or readable. This significance, Derrida argues, cannot be altered or governed by the whims of intention.

In , Searle argued that the ideas upon which deconstruction is founded are essentially a consequence of a series of conceptual confusions made by Derrida as a result of his outdated knowledge or are merely banalities.

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He insisted that Derrida's conception of iterability and its alleged "corrupting" effect on meaning stems from Derrida's ignorance of the type—token distinction that exists in current linguistics and philosophy of language. As Searle explains, "Most importantly, from the fact that different tokens of a sentence type can be uttered on different occasions with different intentions, that is, different speaker meanings, nothing of any significance follows about the original speaker meaning of the original utterance token.

He called Derrida's conclusion "preposterous" and stated that "Derrida, as far as I can tell, does not have an argument. He simply declares that there is nothing outside of texts According to Searle, the consistent pattern of Derrida's rhetoric is: The revised idea—for example—that everything exists in some context is a banality but a charade ensues as if the original claim— nothing exists outside of text [ sic ]—had been established.

In some academics at Cambridge University , mostly not from the philosophy faculty, proposed that Derrida be awarded an honorary doctorate. This was opposed by, among others, the university's Professor of Philosophy, David Mellor. Academic status based on what seems to us to be little more than semi-intelligible attacks upon the values of reason, truth, and scholarship is not, we submit, sufficient grounds for the awarding of an honorary degree in a distinguished university.

In the end the protesters were outnumbered— votes to —when Cambridge put the motion to a vote; [] though almost all of those who proposed Derrida and who voted in favour were not from the philosophy faculty. Richard Wolin has argued since that Derrida's work, as well as that of Derrida's major inspirations e.

In , when Wolin published a Derrida interview on Heidegger in the first edition of The Heidegger Controversy , Derrida argued that the interview was an intentionally malicious mistranslation, which was "demonstrably execrable" and "weak, simplistic, and compulsively aggressive". As French law requires the consent of an author to translations and this consent was not given, Derrida insisted that the interview not appear in any subsequent editions or reprints.

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Columbia University Press subsequently refused to offer reprints or new editions. The matter achieved public exposure owing to a friendly review of Wolin's book by the Heideggerian scholar Thomas Sheehan that appeared in The New York Review of Books , in which Sheehan characterised Derrida's protests as an imposition of censorship.

It was followed by an exchange of letters. Twenty-four academics, belonging to different schools and groups — often in disagreement with each other and with deconstruction — signed a letter addressed to The New York Review of Books , in which they expressed their indignation for the magazine's behaviour as well as that of Sheenan and Wolin. Contrary to what some people believe or have an interest in making believe, I consider myself very much a historian, very historicist [ I take great interest in questions of language and rhetoric, and I think they deserve enormous consideration, but there is a point where the authority of final jurisdiction is neither rhetorical nor linguistic, nor even discursive.

The notion of trace or of text is introduced to mark the limits of the linguistic turn. This is one more reason why I prefer to speak of 'mark' rather than of language. In the first place, the mark is not anthropological; it is prelinguistic; it is the possibility of language, and it is everywhere there is a relation to another thing or relation to another. For such relations, the mark has no need of language.


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In language there are only differences. Whether we take the signified or the signifier, language has neither ideas nor sounds that existed before the linguistic system, but only conceptual and phonic differences that have issued from the system. The idea or phonic substance that a sign contains is of less importance than the other signs that surround it. Successively, and in a regulated fashion, the centre receives different forms or names. The history of metaphysics , like the history of the West, is the history of these metaphors and metonymies.

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All these formulations have been possible thanks to the initial distinction between different irreducible types of genesis and structure: To ask oneself the following historico-semantic question: What does the notion of structure in general , on whose basis Husserl operates and operates distinctions between empirical, eidetic, and transcendental dimensions mean, and what has it always meant throughout its displacements? And what is the historico-semantic relationship between Genesis and structure in general?

It is to ask the question about the unity of the historical ground on whose basis a transcendental reduction is possible and is motivated by itself. It is to ask the question about the unity of the world from which transcendental freedom releases itself, in order to make the origin of this unity appear. Perhaps something has occurred in the history of the concept of structure that could be called an "event," if this loaded word did not entail a meaning which it is precisely the function of structural—or structuralist—thought to reduce or to suspect.

Between these two papers is staked Derrida's philosophical ground, if not indeed his step beyond or outside philosophy. If the alterity of the other is posed , that is, only posed, does it not amount to the same , for example in the form of the "constituted object" or of the "informed product" invested with meaning, etc.? From this point of view, I would even say that the alterity of the other inscribes in this relationship that which in no case can be "posed.

On the phrase "default of origin" as applied to Derrida's work, cf. Bernard Stiegler , "Derrida and Technology: Cambridge University Press, Stiegler understands Derrida's thinking of textuality and inscription in terms of a thinking of originary technicity, and in this context speaks of "the originary default of origin that arche-writing constitutes" p. See also Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus Stanford: Stanford University Press , It is an opening that is structural or the structurality of an opening.

Yet each of these concepts excludes the other. It is thus as little a structure as it is an opening; it is as little static as it is genetic, as little structural as it is historical. It can be understood neither from a genetic nor from a structuralist and taxonomic point of view, nor from a combination of both points of view.

One way in which this question is raised in relation to Husserl is thus the question of the possibility of a phenomenology of history , which Derrida raises in Edmund Husserl's Origin of Geometry: One of the more persistent misunderstandings that have thus far forestalled a productive debate with Derrida's philosophical thought is the assumption, shared by many philosophers as well as literary critics, that within that thought just anything is possible.

Derrida's philosophy is more often than not construed as a license for arbitrary free play in flagrant disregard of all established rules of argumentation, traditional requirements of thought, and ethical standards binding upon the interpretative community. Undoubtedly, some of the works of Derrida may not have been entirely innocent in this respect and may have contributed, however obliquely, to fostering to some extent that very misconception.

But deconstruction which for many has come to designate the content and style of Derrida's thinking, reveals to even a superficial examination, a well-ordered procedure, a step-by-step type of argumentation based on an acute awareness of level-distinctions, a marked thoroughness and regularity.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. For the documentary film, see Derrida film. For the physicist, see Bernard Derrida. El Biar , French Algeria. Continental philosophy Post-structuralism Deconstruction Radical hermeneutics [1]. Hegel Jean Genet Franz Kafka. This section is in a list format that may be better presented using prose.

You can help by converting this section to prose, if appropriate. Editing help is available. Caputo , Radical Hermeneutics: Radical hermeneutics situates itself in the space which is opened up by the exchange between Heidegger and Derrida Jackie was born at daybreak, on 15 July , at El Biar, in the hilly suburbs of Algiers, in a holiday home.

When he was circumcised, he was given a second forename, Elie, which was not entered on his birth certificate, unlike the equivalent names of his brother and sister. The University of Chicago Press. Peter Lang Publishing Inc.