Thevenet, Charlotte;
(2020)
La rhétorique du commentaire dans les textes doubles de Jacques Derrida / Rhetorics of the commentary in Jacques Derrida’s double texts.
Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).
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Abstract
That Jacques Derrida is an abstruse philosopher has long been a widespread opinion among philosophers and social scientists alike. Surprisingly, none of the researchers actually working on Derrida has ever tried to account for this stylistic obscurity. Focusing on texts putting forward an apparent illegibility through a divided page—“La double séance” (1972), “Tympan” (1972), Glas (1974)—, this thesis takes Derrida’s famous unreadability as its starting point to question the philosopher’s rhetorics. These texts’ difficulty, I argue, is not something to be sorry for not to celebrate, but rather an effect built by the text’s rhetorics itself, and as such, we should try to account for its mechanisms. This thesis both describes how these apparently illegible texts actually function and offers an answer regarding how to read them. Drawing on from poetics, rhetorics and discourse analysis, this thesis addresses the rhetorics of illegibility in Jacques Derrida’s work in three chapters, each examining one specific aspect of the texts. The first chapter tries to answer the question: “who speaks?” and proposes to answer it through the notion of ethos. Through a close reading of Derrida’s commentary of Hegel’s Spirit of Christianity in Glas, this chapter shows how the Derridean enunciator assumes a Jewish ethos in response to Hegel’s antijudaism. The second chapter tackles the question of genre, understood both as genre and as gender as it intends to demonstrate the relationship between the texts’ genre and the function assumed by the “woman”. Finally, the third chapter turns to the reader of these supposedly illegible texts: to whom these texts are written? Leaving aside their ‘real’ readers to examine the readers explicitly invoked in the texts, this chapter shows that under their textualistic looks, these texts actually equally put forward reading and hearing; following this thread, this last chapter tries to elaborate what it could mean to lend an ear to Derrida’s double-columned texts.
| Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Qualification: | Ph.D |
| Title: | La rhétorique du commentaire dans les textes doubles de Jacques Derrida / Rhetorics of the commentary in Jacques Derrida’s double texts |
| Event: | UCL |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| Language: | French |
| Additional information: | Copyright © The Author 2020. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author’s request. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities > SELCS |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10093002 |
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