https://doi.org/10.53656/phil2025-02-01

Yesterday is a trace of the past that still lives on. A trace not only of what has been, but also of what would have been, what could have been and never was, a reverberating uncertainty keeping in force an obscure promise. Yesterday is also a trace of the irreversible. It is not a name for the better times or for the lost paradise but the name of a scar, and perhaps of a wound that will not heal.

Twenty-one years ago, Jacques Derrida passed away. And still so many of the questions he posed remain and have to be repeated, to echo through the empty halls of the growing refusal to think; for example, the question which opens Glas – “what remains, for us, here, now” (Derrida 2021, p. 7) – a question, perhaps, about yesterday and the time after yesterday. But even before the questions, a certain openness, a promise and a wound, insists and resists the hasty rejection of what happened and keeps happening under the name of deconstruction. ‘After yesterday’ does not mean “after deconstruction” as some want to believe (Tavoillot, Hénin & Salvador 2023).

This openness is most palpable in the conversations: conversations in which Derrida was engaged, conversations engaged with Derrida. In a conversation once he said: “Opening oneself to what comes can be a way of exposing oneself to the future or to the coming of the other, to the coming of what does not depend on me.” (Derrida & Ferraris 2001, p. 60.)

The present issue of the Filosofiya journal turns to what can be seen as ongoing conversations involving Derrida in different manners. These are conversations that deal with the philosophical tradition, with Derrida’s contemporary thinkers, and with specific problems and concepts.

In “Instituting Gestures, Inescapable Ways: Derrida and Zhuangzi Compared” Héctor G. Castaño examines the attempts to compare Derrida with Zhuangzi and analyzes the assumptions underlying such comparisons. Severina Stankeva in her article focuses on Heidegger’s understanding of ‘doctrine’ and his claim that he has no doctrine of his own. Using Derrida’s reading of the German philosopher in “Envoi”, she demonstrates in what sense it could be argued that Heidegger actually did have a doctrine.

Yuji Nishiyama’s text offers a reconstruction of Derrida’s understanding of secret highlighting its relevance for the present-day situation. The author of the present note traces the French thinker’s understanding of phantasm. Johan de Jong in his essay poses anew the question of responsibility arguing against the powerful trend to find comforting ethics in Derrida after the supposed ‘ethical turn’.

In “Blindness and Insight of Reading” Yusuke Miyazaki takes up de Man’s critique of Derrida and Derrida’s late response to that critique, outlining the stakes of reading philosophically and philologically, and shows the importance of the question of reading in light of the current debates on the political and on AI data processing. Finally, Miglena Nikolchina turns to Derrida’s reading of Sollers in “Dissemination” and reads it with Kristeva’s interpretation of Soller’s novel and the novel itself, reconstructing the moves in this exchange often passed in silence by Derrideans, and shedding a new light on all the games entwined in it.

The conversations go on, they traverse different times and different texts, interrupted, interrupting each other, they nevertheless go on, accompanied by “an ageless melancholy” (Derrida 2005, p. 135). And help us, perhaps, see better both what was yesterday and what came after yesterday.

REFERENCES

DERRIDA, J., 2005. “Rams. Uninterrupted Dialogue – Between Two Infinities, the Poem”. Trans. by Thomas Dutoit and Philippe Romanski. Sovereignties in Question. The Poetics of Paul Celan. New York: Fordham University Press, pp. 135 – 163. ISBN 0-8323-2438-4.

DERRIDA, J., 2021. Clang. Trans. by Geoffrey Bennington and David Wills. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. ISBN 978-0816-6915-24.

DERRIDA, J.; FERRARIS, M., 2001. A Taste for the Secret. Translated by G. Donis. Cambridge: Polity Press. ISBN 9780745623344.

TAVOILLOT, P.-H., HÉNIN, E., SALVADOR, X.-L., 2023. Après la deconstruction. Paris: Odile Jacob.