This study is an attempt to develop the discussion about self-injury with the aid of philosophical discussions about understanding. I will present a reading of the discussion between Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida about reason and madness, and also an interpretation of the Derrida and Hans-Georg Gadamer encounter. These readings focus on the concept of understanding, on the possibility to understand the other and on the possibility to reach out from reason toward the irrational. The project to formulate an ethical approach to self-injury by Nancy Nyquist Potter is then used to bring the question about understanding to life. I conclude that the project of Potter, formulated as ?uptake?, is weakened by the fact that she fails to recognize the underlying philosophical problems in stating the possibility to understand the meaning of something that until today has been considered meaningless..

När man inom filosofihistorien diskuterat frågan om djuret, har utgångspunkten ofta varit en negativ kontrast till det mänskliga. Medan människan tillskrivits förmågor som medvetenhet, rationalitet och förmåga till tal och språk, har djuret framställts som något som brister i dessa egenskaper. Dock har det uppkommit nya teorier om djuret som skiljer sig från en sådan metafysisk tradition . Peter Singer lyfter i sin bok, Praktisk Etik, att medvetande och självmedvetandeargument som syftat till att tillskriva människan en särställning gentemot djuret inte längre kan vidmakthållas. Vi har snarare skäl att tro det omvända.

This study departs in a critique issued against the ethics of deconstruction that it does not provide good enough advice for how to turn its ehtics into "real life"-actions. Taking up the concept of moral practices as found in e.g. Alisdain MacIntyre, Stanley Hauerwas, James K.A. Smith, and Roland Spjuth, this study turns to medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas as a potential resource. Combining the teachings in Aquinas' Summa Thologica with a look into his life as a Domninican, a list of moral practices is put forth and analyzed in conjunction with Derrida's ethics.

The essay seeks to clarify some of the decisive but often obscured issues in the famous debate between Jacques Derrida and Jonn F. Searle. The debate commenced in 1977 with the publication in Glyph of Derrida?s lecture Signature Event Context from -71, followed by Searle?s Reiterating the Differences. A Reply to Derrida and subsequently Derrida?s reply Limited Inc a b c ? which encouraged Searle to renew his criticism.

J.O. Mallander?s Extended Play (1968) is a sound recording, a readymade, of the counting of votes in two presidential elections in Finland, during 1962 and 1968. A voice repeats monotonously: ?Kekkonen, Kekkonen, Kekkonen, Kekkonen, Kekkonen?? Although the Finnish president Urho Kekkonen represents, almost personifies, the politics of the post World War II period in Finland, Extended Play does not explicitly address the political. Rather, as this essay argues, it engages in the discourses of power and politics by providing a temporalization of its fixedness, or what Jacques Derrida terms the proper.Extended Play is, in parallel with Derrida?s critique of western metaphysics, a deconstruction in sound that challenges the state ideologies conveyed in the process of the counting of votes, where the presuppositions of the presence of the voice characterizes the ambiguities of power that Kekkonen?s politics of neutrality represent.Mallander?s readymade emerges as a double of the game theory strategies of the Cold War, a mimetic surplus of the administrative control mechanisms of sound recording.

Uppsatsen diskuterar Platons och Derridas textkritik mot bakgrund av Paul Grices meningsteori. Vad innebär författarens död, hans frånvaro, för möjligheten att förstå text? Hur skall kontextens betydelse förstås i förhållande till Grices höga krav på intentionalitet och hur skall Platons rika textproduktion förklars mot bakgrund av Sokrates stränga kritik av det skrivna ordet? Uppsatsen mynnar ut i tanken att förståelsen av en text, signifikanstillskriften, naturligtvis kan peka i vilken riktning som helst, det Derrida kallar textens lösdriveri, men det behöver inte vara så, det är inte nödvändigt att det är så och om man accepterar Grice teori om mening, med dess höga grad av intentionalitet, kan det inte vara så. Det måste finnas ett hägn..

Den allvarsamma leken (1912) by Hjalmar Söderberg has been regarded as one of the greatest love novels of Swedish literature. The story about Arvid Stjärnblom and Lydia Stille and their extramarital love is marked by timeless universality.In this essay, I will examine this notion of love as a prediscursive value, by means pro¬vided by foremost poststructuralist theory. With Derrida?s conception of deconstruction, the analysis will reveal the constructedness of the true love in Söderbergs novel. Examinating typi¬cal logocentric binarisms the essay will show that the notion of true love is constituting a term in an oppositional relation with, in this specific case, the marriage sanctioned by society.

Defining the concept of information has long been the subject of debate within Information Science (IS) and new challenges are constantly presented by new scientific discoveries and new theoretical positions. It is, nevertheless, of key importance for any academic discipline to find definitions on which there is a consensus. The paper therefore aims to clarify the relevance of one of these new theoretical approaches for IS, namely poststructuralism. It does so by describing the theories found in the writings of poststructuralists Mark C. Taylor, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, and discussing their relevance for the three definitions of information suggested by Michael Buckland (Information-as-knowledge, Information-as thing and Information-as-process), thereby answering the following questions: What relevance does Mark C.

Dag Wellander: Meaning ? memory: oblivion. A reading of Birgitta Trotzig?s The mud kings daughter. Master of Arts paper.

The following inquiry begins with one simple question: who is the margin? In other words, what is the referent of the term margin? Is it possible for language to capture connotations of an intended and supposed reality beyond its own limits? My supposition is that margin is a valuable concept to critical studies of the hegemonic order and dominant culture in various contexts. It is therefore necessary to expose the term itself to a critical analysis by attempting to trace its position in different discourses. The intention is to illustrate that the term margin is not merely an abstraction, confined within the framework of intricate theoretical rhetoric.In a deconstructive analysis of Gender Trouble by Judith Butler and Can the Subaltern Speak? by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, based on the work of Jacques Derrida, I study the significance of the term margin and explore how the use or non-use of concrete examples affects the reception of both the term margin and ultimately the text as a whole.The study of these two texts reveals that some of the very same critique raised by Butler and Spivak is itself applicable to the authors? own theory production.

The present essay concerns the Levinasian understanding of responsibility in relation to the two spheres that Levinas introduces in his second major work Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, namely the Saying and the Said. The essay investigates some of the different meanings that the concept responsibility takes on in regard to these two spheres, and thus also in regard to the separation between the ethical and the political that is apparent in the book. Is it possible to find a politically uttered responsibility in Levinas Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence?The essay wants to emphasize the continuous transition between the ethical or the Saying and the political or the Said, and vice versa, with the purpose of showing how the two spheres may be conceived simultaneously. By posing the relationship between the two as a reciprocal rather than a oppositional one, the essay aims to suggest that an understanding of responsibility at once must be ethical and political.

I ett försök att låta psykoanalysen tala med poststrukturalistiskateoribildningar undersöker uppsatsen hur det går att förstå fenomensom kroppslighet, begär och subjektion. Uppsatsen försöker skapaaffiniteter och synteser mellan de inom svensk genusvetenskap oftaignorerade delarna av Judith Butlers psykoanalys och teoretiker sombland annat Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, Sigmund Freud ochJacques Derrida. Genom att låta den freudianska och butlerianskatermen melankoli stå i dialog med Kristevas teori om abjektionenoch Derridas différance-begrepp görs en teoretisk ansats attanalysera ätstörningsproblematikens omedvetna struktur i denmanliga homosexuella subjektspositionen. Uppsatsen argumenterarför behovet av psykoanalysen inom genusvetenskaplig teori för attkunna blottlägga de dolda subjektiverande processer som via enheterosexistisk diskurs skrivs in starkare och mer våldsamt i vissapsyken än andra. Uppsatsen försöker visa på hur den ätstördakroppen hos bögen som subjekt framträder som något förfrämligatoch abjektalt med ursprung i melankoliska heterosexistiskaintrojiceringar i jaget och begäret.

Erik Beckmans roman Inlandsbanan (1967) har, tillsammans med hans hela författarskap, både kritiserats och hyllats som obegriplig, med en berättarstruktur som aktivt bryter mot ett konventionellt, episkt berättande och anammar en försvårande, gestaltande skriv- och läsakt. Derrida diskuterar i Of Grammatology (1967) funktionen hos den skrivna texten som betecknande det betecknande, det vill säga betecknande det talade språket som betecknar den refererade betydelsen, och hur relationerna dessa sinsemellan förskjutits. På ett liknande sätt har Inlandsbanans textfunktion förskjutits från en episk berättartradition till en icke-muntlig, materialistisk struktur. Med hjälp av en inomkompositionell, intermedial begreppsapparat, och en hypotes kring ett musikaliserat berättande, där gestaltande former tar sig runt den muntliga språktraditionen inom litteraturen, ses Inlandsbanan här i ett nytt ljus och en del av dess påstådda obegriplighet redes ut. Allt detta sker integrerat i en diskussion av en intermedial metod för analys, som hela tiden har sitt stöd i Erik Beckmans roman.

This thesis is basically an attempt to discuss the intrinsic intersubjective nature of the so-called ideal sciences, i.e. geometry or arithmetic. Based upon a thorough analysis of Husserls The Origin of Geometry and Derridas Edmund Husserl's Origin of Geometry: an Introduction this thesis takes geometry as an example of an ideal science. The main question of the thesis is how an ideal science or object is constituted. The thesis consist of two main chapters - ?Geometry and Historicity? and ?Language?- and a concluding discussion.

Trough the analyses of three young contemporary Swedish and Norwegian poets, who all in one way or another work with the language as material, I will circulate around the term language materialism. Each poet has his or her specific distinctive feature wich makes them three completely different poets. But they are all challenging the borders of literature and even the grammatical laws of language. Apart from the analyses I sketch an historical line between the predecessors of the experiments with the poetic language in the past, starting with Mallarmé, and the experiments of today. My essay will in conclusion discuss the language poetry in a wider philosophical point of view, connected to Derrida and Wittgenstein.The first analysis introduces the author and artist Johannes Heldén through his debute poetry collection Burner.