Sean Gaston
Biographic Data
| ID | 3584267 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sean Gaston |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sean |
| FAMILY NAME | Gaston |
| SIGNATURE | GASTON S |
| AFFILIATIONS | École Normale Supérieure |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2584-4843 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 18 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 6 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 17 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2022 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
A History of Disinterest: The Death Penalty and the Right to Interest
In January 2001 I received a letter from Jacques Derrida. The letter was a response to an article I had written about the concept of disinterest. What I did not know at the time was that he was in the midst of his seminar on the death penalty, which includes his most sustained interrogation of disinterest and interest. This essay examines the history of disinterest as a death penalty. Derrida challenges the possibility of such a history, arguing …
Condillac and Derrida: Perception, the Human and Empiricism
In June 2020, a new work by Derrida on Condillac was published, Le Calcul des langues . This article re-examines Derrida’s readings of Condillac, focusing on the relation between perception and the language of signs; the relation between human knowledge and the animal; and the idealization and limits of empiricism
And Don't Forget Phenomenology, Etc
After 1967, for some twenty years it appears that Derrida has little to say about Husserl. In the late 1980s he returns to Husserl and reiterates his early critiques of the limitations of phenomenology in relation to European humanism. However, in the 1990s there is more than just a return to Husserl, there is also a re-evaluation, prompted by the publication of Derrida's 1953–1954 thesis on phenomenology. This article focuses on Derrida essay fr…
The Wounds of Rhetoric: Derrida on Condillac and Rousseau
The publication of Derrida's fragment Le Calcul des langues - Distyle offers an insight into Derrida's negotiation with empiricism and his rethinking of rhetoric in the early 1970s. Delineating Condillac's pervasive idealization of empiricism, Derrida gestures to a pain-becoming-pleasure and pleasure-becoming-pain that resists the fixed identity of the proper body. His emphasis on the pains and wounds of rhetoric registers both the limits of Cond…
The Philosopher's Family: Plato and Derrida
It appears that a long, monotonous and patriarchal tradition in the history of philosophy has insisted on the absence of the family. Prompted by Derrida’s Glas, this article suggests that any ethics or moral philosophy must contend with the question of the philosopher’s family. The problem of the quasi-private/quasi-public family is already found within Plato’s Republic. While Socrates calls for what amounts to the end of family in the name of th…
Derrida and the Problem of History 1964-1965
This article examines Jacques Derrida's treatment of history in his recently published 1964-1965 seminar on Heidegger. Derrida argues that Being and Time signals a commendable break with the treatment of nonhistoricity by Hegel and Husserl. At the same time, Derrida addresses Heidegger's association with National Socialism. The seminar shows us that terms used in Of Grammatology, such as trace, différance and repetition, had been elaborated in 19…
Concept of World from Kant to Derrida
In the mid-eighteenth century metaphysics was broadly understood as the study of three areas of philosophical thought: theology, psychology and cosmology. This book examines the fortunes of the third of these formidable metaphysical concepts, the world. Sean Gaston provides a clear and concise account of the concept of world from the mid-eighteenth century to the end of the twentieth century, exploring its possibilities and limitations and engagi…
Isaac D'Israeli and the invention of the literary character
Isaac D'Israeli's work on the literary character offers a distinctive analysis of the relation between the literary and history in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Britain. He argues that character can be constructed and shaped by literary activity. The literary character also has common traits across the ages and can be seen as a trans-historical ideal that has tangible, empirical effects. Isolated and part of a solitary community, t…
Derrida and the Eco-Polemicists
This article argues that the recent critical readings of Derrida's work in relation to climate change, the anthropocene and the post-human limit the possibilities of the concept of world and repeat a Heideggerian idealization of the concept of earth. I describe this as a geo-logocentrism
Reading Derrida’s Of Grammatology
Derrida and the End of the World
Derrida was very attentive to the fictions that arise from claiming to open or to close a world, most notably in his readings of Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, and Nancy. At the same time, he retained a concept-or a difference-of world. From his earliest work on Husserl, Derrida relies on a framework that takes its vantage point from what is not only in the world but also of the world, or as Fink puts, at the origin of the world. Derrida uses the differ…
Conrad and the Asymmetrical Duel: Thoughts for the Times on War and Death
War and the Chances of Literature
The Chances Of Literature Responding to the revolutionary wars that dominated his times, in his trilogy Wallenstein (1799) Schiller turned back to the Thirty Years War. Schiller writes of one war without end in the midst of what seems to be another war without end. He suggests that in times of war literature might be able to address more than just the present war, the war of our times. In the literary work, there is the possibility of taking on m…
Starting with Derrida: Plato, Aristotle and Hegel
In this rigorous historical analysis, Lauer challenges traditional readings that have reduced two of German idealism's most important thinkers to opposing caricatures: Hegel the uncompromising systematist blind to the novelty and contingency of human life and Schelling the protean thinker drawn to all manner of pseudoscientific charlatanry. Bringing together recent scholarship that is just beginning to realise Schelling's centrality in the overth…
Exile and Tradition: Zweig, Momigliano and Berlin
This article examines the relation between exile and Jewish and European tradition through the different experiences of Stefan Zweig, Arnaldo Momigliano and Isaiah Berlin. Zweig illustrates a productive rebellion against tradition that was entirely incapacitated by the loss of tradition in exile. Like many of the exiled academics of the 1930s, it is only on the margins of Momigliano's work that his profound dislocation and loss becomes apparent. …
The Impossible Mourning of Jacques Derrida
At the time of his death in 2004, Jacques Derrida was arguably the most influential and the most controversial thinker in contemporary philosophy. But how does one respond to the death of Jacques Derrida? How does one mourn for Derrida, who spent thirty years warning of the dangers of mourning, while insisting that mourning is both unavoidable and impossible? In this original and engaging response to Derrida's death, Sean Gaston re-examines his o…
Une accélération affolante
Derrida and the Ruins of Disinterest
Derrida and the Ruins of Disinterest I. Disinterest on the Margins?Can the question of disinterest be addressed to Derrida's work?Can it be addressed to a work that has sought to challenge the traditional determinations, boundaries, "internal" economies and "necessary" marginalisations that define Western philosophy?As Derrida has pointed out, the question of disinterest has a significant place in the institutional history of philosophy as an aca…
Derrida and the End of the World
Derrida was very attentive to the fictions that arise from claiming to open or to close a world, most notably in his readings of Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, and Nancy. At the same time, he retained a concept-or a difference-of world. From his earliest work on Husserl, Derrida relies on a framework that takes its vantage point from what is not only in the world but also of the world, or as Fink puts, at the origin of the world. Derrida uses the differ…
Derrida and the Problem of History 1964-1965
This article examines Jacques Derrida's treatment of history in his recently published 1964-1965 seminar on Heidegger. Derrida argues that Being and Time signals a commendable break with the treatment of nonhistoricity by Hegel and Husserl. At the same time, Derrida addresses Heidegger's association with National Socialism. The seminar shows us that terms used in Of Grammatology, such as trace, différance and repetition, had been elaborated in 19…
Derrida and the Eco-Polemicists
This article argues that the recent critical readings of Derrida's work in relation to climate change, the anthropocene and the post-human limit the possibilities of the concept of world and repeat a Heideggerian idealization of the concept of earth. I describe this as a geo-logocentrism
The Impossible Mourning of Jacques Derrida
At the time of his death in 2004, Jacques Derrida was arguably the most influential and the most controversial thinker in contemporary philosophy. But how does one respond to the death of Jacques Derrida? How does one mourn for Derrida, who spent thirty years warning of the dangers of mourning, while insisting that mourning is both unavoidable and impossible? In this original and engaging response to Derrida's death, Sean Gaston re-examines his o…
Derrida and the Ruins of Disinterest
Derrida and the Ruins of Disinterest I. Disinterest on the Margins?Can the question of disinterest be addressed to Derrida's work?Can it be addressed to a work that has sought to challenge the traditional determinations, boundaries, "internal" economies and "necessary" marginalisations that define Western philosophy?As Derrida has pointed out, the question of disinterest has a significant place in the institutional history of philosophy as an aca…
Une accélération affolante
Exile and Tradition: Zweig, Momigliano and Berlin
This article examines the relation between exile and Jewish and European tradition through the different experiences of Stefan Zweig, Arnaldo Momigliano and Isaiah Berlin. Zweig illustrates a productive rebellion against tradition that was entirely incapacitated by the loss of tradition in exile. Like many of the exiled academics of the 1930s, it is only on the margins of Momigliano's work that his profound dislocation and loss becomes apparent. …
The Impossible Mourning of Jacques Derrida
At the time of his death in 2004, Jacques Derrida was arguably the most influential and the most controversial thinker in contemporary philosophy. But how does one respond to the death of Jacques Derrida? How does one mourn for Derrida, who spent thirty years warning of the dangers of mourning, while insisting that mourning is both unavoidable and impossible? In this original and engaging response to Derrida's death, Sean Gaston re-examines his o…
Starting with Derrida: Plato, Aristotle and Hegel
In this rigorous historical analysis, Lauer challenges traditional readings that have reduced two of German idealism's most important thinkers to opposing caricatures: Hegel the uncompromising systematist blind to the novelty and contingency of human life and Schelling the protean thinker drawn to all manner of pseudoscientific charlatanry. Bringing together recent scholarship that is just beginning to realise Schelling's centrality in the overth…
War and the Chances of Literature
The Chances Of Literature Responding to the revolutionary wars that dominated his times, in his trilogy Wallenstein (1799) Schiller turned back to the Thirty Years War. Schiller writes of one war without end in the midst of what seems to be another war without end. He suggests that in times of war literature might be able to address more than just the present war, the war of our times. In the literary work, there is the possibility of taking on m…
Conrad and the Asymmetrical Duel: Thoughts for the Times on War and Death
Reading Derrida’s Of Grammatology
Derrida and the End of the World
Derrida was very attentive to the fictions that arise from claiming to open or to close a world, most notably in his readings of Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, and Nancy. At the same time, he retained a concept-or a difference-of world. From his earliest work on Husserl, Derrida relies on a framework that takes its vantage point from what is not only in the world but also of the world, or as Fink puts, at the origin of the world. Derrida uses the differ…
Concept of World from Kant to Derrida
In the mid-eighteenth century metaphysics was broadly understood as the study of three areas of philosophical thought: theology, psychology and cosmology. This book examines the fortunes of the third of these formidable metaphysical concepts, the world. Sean Gaston provides a clear and concise account of the concept of world from the mid-eighteenth century to the end of the twentieth century, exploring its possibilities and limitations and engagi…
Isaac D'Israeli and the invention of the literary character
Isaac D'Israeli's work on the literary character offers a distinctive analysis of the relation between the literary and history in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Britain. He argues that character can be constructed and shaped by literary activity. The literary character also has common traits across the ages and can be seen as a trans-historical ideal that has tangible, empirical effects. Isolated and part of a solitary community, t…
Derrida and the Eco-Polemicists
This article argues that the recent critical readings of Derrida's work in relation to climate change, the anthropocene and the post-human limit the possibilities of the concept of world and repeat a Heideggerian idealization of the concept of earth. I describe this as a geo-logocentrism
Derrida and the Problem of History 1964-1965
This article examines Jacques Derrida's treatment of history in his recently published 1964-1965 seminar on Heidegger. Derrida argues that Being and Time signals a commendable break with the treatment of nonhistoricity by Hegel and Husserl. At the same time, Derrida addresses Heidegger's association with National Socialism. The seminar shows us that terms used in Of Grammatology, such as trace, différance and repetition, had been elaborated in 19…
And Don't Forget Phenomenology, Etc
After 1967, for some twenty years it appears that Derrida has little to say about Husserl. In the late 1980s he returns to Husserl and reiterates his early critiques of the limitations of phenomenology in relation to European humanism. However, in the 1990s there is more than just a return to Husserl, there is also a re-evaluation, prompted by the publication of Derrida's 1953–1954 thesis on phenomenology. This article focuses on Derrida essay fr…
The Wounds of Rhetoric: Derrida on Condillac and Rousseau
The publication of Derrida's fragment Le Calcul des langues - Distyle offers an insight into Derrida's negotiation with empiricism and his rethinking of rhetoric in the early 1970s. Delineating Condillac's pervasive idealization of empiricism, Derrida gestures to a pain-becoming-pleasure and pleasure-becoming-pain that resists the fixed identity of the proper body. His emphasis on the pains and wounds of rhetoric registers both the limits of Cond…
The Philosopher's Family: Plato and Derrida
It appears that a long, monotonous and patriarchal tradition in the history of philosophy has insisted on the absence of the family. Prompted by Derrida’s Glas, this article suggests that any ethics or moral philosophy must contend with the question of the philosopher’s family. The problem of the quasi-private/quasi-public family is already found within Plato’s Republic. While Socrates calls for what amounts to the end of family in the name of th…
A History of Disinterest: The Death Penalty and the Right to Interest
In January 2001 I received a letter from Jacques Derrida. The letter was a response to an article I had written about the concept of disinterest. What I did not know at the time was that he was in the midst of his seminar on the death penalty, which includes his most sustained interrogation of disinterest and interest. This essay examines the history of disinterest as a death penalty. Derrida challenges the possibility of such a history, arguing …
Condillac and Derrida: Perception, the Human and Empiricism
In June 2020, a new work by Derrida on Condillac was published, Le Calcul des langues . This article re-examines Derrida’s readings of Condillac, focusing on the relation between perception and the language of signs; the relation between human knowledge and the animal; and the idealization and limits of empiricism
Philosophy (11 works) · Epistemology (10 works) · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism (8 works) · Art (7 works) · Literature (7 works) · Philosophy (6 works) · Psychology (6 works) · History (4 works) · Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (4 works) · Political science (4 works)