John W P Phillips
Biographic Data
| ID | 252942 |
|---|---|
| NAME | John W P Phillips |
| GIVEN NAMES | John W P |
| FAMILY NAME | Phillips |
| SIGNATURE | PHILLIPS J W P |
| AFFILIATIONS | National University of Singapore |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 33 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 174 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 33 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1983 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
The fuzzy logics of parasitism
10.1080/09639489.2023.2285385
Commemorations
This essay attempts to answer the question of how one commemorates the event of thinking by raising it in relation to some commemorative texts. Derrida’s Demeure, Athènes provides an exemplary point of departure, but the seminars concerned with the death penalty raise the stakes in readings that deeply trouble an inheritance fixated on the determination of death, with Socrates and Oedipus as ancient figures of an enduring culture. The essay touch…
The Accident in Being
Michel Serres’s work traces a historical transition where technologies of mediation replace a framework of life formerly managed by an economics of production. Readings of Serres tend to affirm in this transition the opening to an ecology (econarratology or media-ecology) or towards a replacement of the human in trans- or post-humanism. In this article I analyse the terms of the transition in Serres’s affirmation of a philosophy grounded in the p…
The Half-Life of the Avant-Garde
This introduction to the special section 'The Half-Life of the Avant-Garde: 50 Years On from 50 Years On' explains why the section is conceived to look back at the century since the First World War. It is designed to offer ways of rethinking the concept and the role of the anniversary, where the First World War constitutes the memorialized event. The organization of the section follows the movement between often hidden or submerged forms of conti…
Becoming Female with Derrida and Nietzsche
10.1080/13534645.2014.865322
The Urban Problematic II
This article provides a framework by way of introduction to the special section, 'The Urban Problematic II'. It introduces a new selection of papers contributing to the continuing project of interrogating concepts, processes and practices associated with contemporary forms of urban life. The article focuses in particular on the problem of infrastructure in relation to questions of urban politics and especially remarks on the emergence of a kind o…
The Urban Problematic
This article, which introduces the special section on The Urban Problematic, takes as its starting point the ways in which categories associated with the 'urban' have broken down, such that the once singular and coherent concept 'city' has disintegrated in certain ways: the notion has been demythologized, so that representations of the city must now be regarded as partial and invested; and cities themselves have become opaque and unpredictable bo…
On Topology
Recent arguments asserting a topological turn in culture also identify a range of topologically informed interventions in social and cultural theory. Talk of a topological turn evokes both the enduring interest that the field of mathematics presents and the business of analysis in the cultural sphere. This article questions the novelty of this 'becoming topological of culture' and digs into a deeper historicity in order to identify the trends tha…
Bios, Polis and the Autoimmune
Discourses about immunological structure have been historically productive in both the biological sciences and in political theory. In this article I argue that a deeper historical structure underlies both kinds of discourse and I attempt to draw some implications from this in relation to the current state of biomedical research in Singapore. Taking the establishment of Singapore’s dedicated biomedical research institution, Biopolis, as a startin…
The Poetic Thing (On Poetry and Deconstruction)
Deconstruction has sometimes been championed as if it was a kind of poetic (as opposed to say analytic) writing. The identification has encouraged some to relegate deconstruction to the shadows or sidelines, the sideshows, of serious philosophy. Both tendencies are foolish. There nonetheless remains the question of the relation between two enigmatic discourses: poetry and deconstruction; some deep complicity is surely implied. Reading in the text…
The Dear (le tout cher)
Sub-Stance
The 20-Kilometer University
This piece presents the work of academics and architects in a collaborative venture. It provides an architectural design and a series of statements towards the hypothetical creation of an unconventional city centre in the Chinese city of Shenzhen. The idea is to create a linear university that would run the 20-kilometer length of the Shenzhen Strip: the 20K university. The contributors outline, in the diversity of their idioms, a complex spatial …
Secrecy and Transparency
In this interview Samuel Weber proposes a rethinking of the relation of secrecy to transparency and outlines some of the forms it takes, while considering certain of its implications for current social, political and epistemological contexts. He begins by questioning the opposition itself, suggesting that we will have to learn to be more at home with the secret and that the demand for transparency must be radically rethought and complicated. He a…
Art, Politics and Philosophy
Taking the publication in English of several works by Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière as its point of departure, this review article attempts to outline what may be at stake in reading these two authors together. Looking especially at the works on politics and on aesthetics (particularly Badiou's Handbook of Inaesthetics and Rancière's Politics of Aesthetics ), the article also draws on other major texts by these authors as a way of clarifying …
The Magic Center
The Magic CenterMatrix and Conception in Derrida's La structure, le signe et le jeu John W P Phillips (bio) Le centre n’est pas le centre (Jacques Derrida)1 “Structure, Sign and Play” plays a transitional role in Jacques Derrida’s career, not only introducing him to the notoriety of an ambivalent Anglo-American reception, but also mobilizing the role of transition in the philosophical oeuvre, alerting an academic community to powerful resources f…
Years of Structure, Sign and Play
40 Years of Structure, Sign and Play Ryan Bishop (bio) and John W P Phillips (bio) Introduction During the week of October 18–21, 1966, an international symposium on “The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man” was held under the auspices of the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Initiated by René Girard, Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato, the symposium celebrated structuralist theory for the first time in the United States as an int…
Physics and Formal Adventure
10.1080/13534640902792978
Loving love or ethics as natural philosophy in jacques derrida's politiques de l'amitié
virtual friendship ἀρετά, πολύμοχθε γένει βροτείῳ, θήραμα κάλλιστον βίῳ, σα ς πέρι, παρθένε, μορφα ς καὶ θανει ν ζαλωτoς ἐν ՙEλλάδι πoτμος καὶ πoνους τλη ναι μαλεροὺς ἀκάμαντας· (Aristotle, fro
A Liar in the Language of the Other or a Time for Telling the Truth
This article sets out to establish the extent to which Jacques Derrida's Monolingualism of the Other: Or the Prosthesis of Origin can be regarded as satisfying the logical and pre-existential conditions it claims for any experience of the relation to the other. Matters are considerably complicated by the fact that these conditions are worked out in a faux-autobiographical reading that deliberately constructs a personal fable in order to reconstit…
Media Art at Umat
This article considers the Media Art Exhibition held at the University of Tokyo's Hongo Campus as part of the conference 'Ubiquitous Media: Asian Transformation' 13-16 July 2007), and reflects on the questions raised by the exhibits concerning the connections between science and art, which are revealed lo be mediated through aesthetic technologies. Exhibits that emphasize tactility and revel in synaesthetic effects demonstrate a peculiar and hist…
Technics, Media, Teleology
Of Method
Baudrillard and the Evil Genius
This article commemorates Jean Baudrillard's career with an account of the consistency of his interventionist logic, the subtlety of his styles of argument and the prescience of his observations. It provides an account of Baudrillard's sustained engagement with the intensification of simulation that has increasingly codified trends in communications, technology politics, the social, the psychological and economics in the name of functionality. Th…
Undercover Surrealism
This article considers the Undercover Surrealism exhibition curated at London’s Hayward Gallery (from May to July 2006) and reflects on the practices of documentation, archiving and exhibition when the topic of the exhibition, as in this case, is a journal that in its most radical intention was set up to critique the practices of exhibition and documentation. The short and controversial life of Georges Bataille’s Documents unfolds as an often del…
Violence
Violence is spoken of in several senses but its most basic definition, as a force exerted by one thing on another, harbors serious problems, especially when it comes to a consideration of its source or cause. We begin this article by identifying some of the aporias of violence with reference to philosophical and religious discourses and then we go on to analyze how violence problematizes concepts of law and justice in world historical contexts. W…
Agencement/Assemblage
10.1177/026327640602300219
Technics, Media, Teleology
The Urban Problematic
This article, which introduces the special section on The Urban Problematic, takes as its starting point the ways in which categories associated with the 'urban' have broken down, such that the once singular and coherent concept 'city' has disintegrated in certain ways: the notion has been demythologized, so that representations of the city must now be regarded as partial and invested; and cities themselves have become opaque and unpredictable bo…
Secrecy and Transparency
In this interview Samuel Weber proposes a rethinking of the relation of secrecy to transparency and outlines some of the forms it takes, while considering certain of its implications for current social, political and epistemological contexts. He begins by questioning the opposition itself, suggesting that we will have to learn to be more at home with the secret and that the demand for transparency must be radically rethought and complicated. He a…
On Topology
Recent arguments asserting a topological turn in culture also identify a range of topologically informed interventions in social and cultural theory. Talk of a topological turn evokes both the enduring interest that the field of mathematics presents and the business of analysis in the cultural sphere. This article questions the novelty of this 'becoming topological of culture' and digs into a deeper historicity in order to identify the trends tha…
The Urban Problematic II
This article provides a framework by way of introduction to the special section, 'The Urban Problematic II'. It introduces a new selection of papers contributing to the continuing project of interrogating concepts, processes and practices associated with contemporary forms of urban life. The article focuses in particular on the problem of infrastructure in relation to questions of urban politics and especially remarks on the emergence of a kind o…
Logic of Knowledge
Art, Politics and Philosophy
Taking the publication in English of several works by Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière as its point of departure, this review article attempts to outline what may be at stake in reading these two authors together. Looking especially at the works on politics and on aesthetics (particularly Badiou's Handbook of Inaesthetics and Rancière's Politics of Aesthetics ), the article also draws on other major texts by these authors as a way of clarifying …
Of Method
Language
In this article we outline the ways in which questions of language have both revealed problems with conceptions of knowledge and suggested constructive ways of addressing those problems. Having examined the limitations of instrumental notions of language, we outline some alternatives, especially those developed from the middle of the 19th and throughout the 20th century. We locate forceful and influential philosophical interventions in the writin…
The Knowledge Apparatus
Ignorance
Manufacturing Emergencies
The article examines the distinction between the state of emergency and the normal state and an inherent undecidability at the base of the distinction. We argue that states of emergency arise from strategic sovereign decisions to divide visible from invisible, enemy from ally, underground economy from above-ground, illegitimate war from legitimate war. The capacity to so divide is manifested, for instance, in the technology of air raid sirens in …
The fuzzy logics of parasitism
10.1080/09639489.2023.2285385
The 20-Kilometer University
This piece presents the work of academics and architects in a collaborative venture. It provides an architectural design and a series of statements towards the hypothetical creation of an unconventional city centre in the Chinese city of Shenzhen. The idea is to create a linear university that would run the 20-kilometer length of the Shenzhen Strip: the 20K university. The contributors outline, in the diversity of their idioms, a complex spatial …
Loving love or ethics as natural philosophy in jacques derrida's politiques de l'amitié
virtual friendship ἀρετά, πολύμοχθε γένει βροτείῳ, θήραμα κάλλιστον βίῳ, σα ς πέρι, παρθένε, μορφα ς καὶ θανει ν ζαλωτoς ἐν ՙEλλάδι πoτμος καὶ πoνους τλη ναι μαλεροὺς ἀκάμαντας· (Aristotle, fro
A Liar in the Language of the Other or a Time for Telling the Truth
This article sets out to establish the extent to which Jacques Derrida's Monolingualism of the Other: Or the Prosthesis of Origin can be regarded as satisfying the logical and pre-existential conditions it claims for any experience of the relation to the other. Matters are considerably complicated by the fact that these conditions are worked out in a faux-autobiographical reading that deliberately constructs a personal fable in order to reconstit…
Baudrillard and the Evil Genius
This article commemorates Jean Baudrillard's career with an account of the consistency of his interventionist logic, the subtlety of his styles of argument and the prescience of his observations. It provides an account of Baudrillard's sustained engagement with the intensification of simulation that has increasingly codified trends in communications, technology politics, the social, the psychological and economics in the name of functionality. Th…
Violence
Violence is spoken of in several senses but its most basic definition, as a force exerted by one thing on another, harbors serious problems, especially when it comes to a consideration of its source or cause. We begin this article by identifying some of the aporias of violence with reference to philosophical and religious discourses and then we go on to analyze how violence problematizes concepts of law and justice in world historical contexts. W…
Goffman's Linguistic Turn
Goffman's Linguistic Turn
Manufacturing Emergencies
The article examines the distinction between the state of emergency and the normal state and an inherent undecidability at the base of the distinction. We argue that states of emergency arise from strategic sovereign decisions to divide visible from invisible, enemy from ally, underground economy from above-ground, illegitimate war from legitimate war. The capacity to so divide is manifested, for instance, in the technology of air raid sirens in …
Undercover Surrealism
This article considers the Undercover Surrealism exhibition curated at London’s Hayward Gallery (from May to July 2006) and reflects on the practices of documentation, archiving and exhibition when the topic of the exhibition, as in this case, is a journal that in its most radical intention was set up to critique the practices of exhibition and documentation. The short and controversial life of Georges Bataille’s Documents unfolds as an often del…
Violence
Violence is spoken of in several senses but its most basic definition, as a force exerted by one thing on another, harbors serious problems, especially when it comes to a consideration of its source or cause. We begin this article by identifying some of the aporias of violence with reference to philosophical and religious discourses and then we go on to analyze how violence problematizes concepts of law and justice in world historical contexts. W…
Language
In this article we outline the ways in which questions of language have both revealed problems with conceptions of knowledge and suggested constructive ways of addressing those problems. Having examined the limitations of instrumental notions of language, we outline some alternatives, especially those developed from the middle of the 19th and throughout the 20th century. We locate forceful and influential philosophical interventions in the writin…
Deconstruction
The Knowledge Apparatus
Ignorance
Agencement/Assemblage
10.1177/026327640602300219
Logic of Knowledge
Loving love or ethics as natural philosophy in jacques derrida's politiques de l'amitié
virtual friendship ἀρετά, πολύμοχθε γένει βροτείῳ, θήραμα κάλλιστον βίῳ, σα ς πέρι, παρθένε, μορφα ς καὶ θανει ν ζαλωτoς ἐν ՙEλλάδι πoτμος καὶ πoνους τλη ναι μαλεροὺς ἀκάμαντας· (Aristotle, fro
A Liar in the Language of the Other or a Time for Telling the Truth
This article sets out to establish the extent to which Jacques Derrida's Monolingualism of the Other: Or the Prosthesis of Origin can be regarded as satisfying the logical and pre-existential conditions it claims for any experience of the relation to the other. Matters are considerably complicated by the fact that these conditions are worked out in a faux-autobiographical reading that deliberately constructs a personal fable in order to reconstit…
Media Art at Umat
This article considers the Media Art Exhibition held at the University of Tokyo's Hongo Campus as part of the conference 'Ubiquitous Media: Asian Transformation' 13-16 July 2007), and reflects on the questions raised by the exhibits concerning the connections between science and art, which are revealed lo be mediated through aesthetic technologies. Exhibits that emphasize tactility and revel in synaesthetic effects demonstrate a peculiar and hist…
Technics, Media, Teleology
Of Method
Baudrillard and the Evil Genius
This article commemorates Jean Baudrillard's career with an account of the consistency of his interventionist logic, the subtlety of his styles of argument and the prescience of his observations. It provides an account of Baudrillard's sustained engagement with the intensification of simulation that has increasingly codified trends in communications, technology politics, the social, the psychological and economics in the name of functionality. Th…
The Magic Center
The Magic CenterMatrix and Conception in Derrida's La structure, le signe et le jeu John W P Phillips (bio) Le centre n’est pas le centre (Jacques Derrida)1 “Structure, Sign and Play” plays a transitional role in Jacques Derrida’s career, not only introducing him to the notoriety of an ambivalent Anglo-American reception, but also mobilizing the role of transition in the philosophical oeuvre, alerting an academic community to powerful resources f…
Years of Structure, Sign and Play
40 Years of Structure, Sign and Play Ryan Bishop (bio) and John W P Phillips (bio) Introduction During the week of October 18–21, 1966, an international symposium on “The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man” was held under the auspices of the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Initiated by René Girard, Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato, the symposium celebrated structuralist theory for the first time in the United States as an int…
Physics and Formal Adventure
10.1080/13534640902792978
Art, Politics and Philosophy
Taking the publication in English of several works by Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière as its point of departure, this review article attempts to outline what may be at stake in reading these two authors together. Looking especially at the works on politics and on aesthetics (particularly Badiou's Handbook of Inaesthetics and Rancière's Politics of Aesthetics ), the article also draws on other major texts by these authors as a way of clarifying …
The Poetic Thing (On Poetry and Deconstruction)
Deconstruction has sometimes been championed as if it was a kind of poetic (as opposed to say analytic) writing. The identification has encouraged some to relegate deconstruction to the shadows or sidelines, the sideshows, of serious philosophy. Both tendencies are foolish. There nonetheless remains the question of the relation between two enigmatic discourses: poetry and deconstruction; some deep complicity is surely implied. Reading in the text…
The Dear (le tout cher)
Sub-Stance
The 20-Kilometer University
This piece presents the work of academics and architects in a collaborative venture. It provides an architectural design and a series of statements towards the hypothetical creation of an unconventional city centre in the Chinese city of Shenzhen. The idea is to create a linear university that would run the 20-kilometer length of the Shenzhen Strip: the 20K university. The contributors outline, in the diversity of their idioms, a complex spatial …
Secrecy and Transparency
In this interview Samuel Weber proposes a rethinking of the relation of secrecy to transparency and outlines some of the forms it takes, while considering certain of its implications for current social, political and epistemological contexts. He begins by questioning the opposition itself, suggesting that we will have to learn to be more at home with the secret and that the demand for transparency must be radically rethought and complicated. He a…
Bios, Polis and the Autoimmune
Discourses about immunological structure have been historically productive in both the biological sciences and in political theory. In this article I argue that a deeper historical structure underlies both kinds of discourse and I attempt to draw some implications from this in relation to the current state of biomedical research in Singapore. Taking the establishment of Singapore’s dedicated biomedical research institution, Biopolis, as a startin…
Philosophy (22 works) · Sociology (22 works) · Philosophy (18 works) · Computer Science (17 works) · Epistemology (16 works) · Political science (13 works) · Law (11 works) · Law (9 works) · Linguistics (9 works) · Art (8 works)