THE OTHER PHILOSOPHY-POLITICS OF JACQUES DERRIDA: « L'AMOUR DES RUINES »
The Other Philosophy-Politics of Jacques Derrida: « L'amour des ruines »

Summary/Abstract: The aim is to analyse and interpret Derrida's texts in their aesthetics, ethics and politics as Other philosophy of difference and social space. The issue to be examined is the presence of the non-presence, the non-presence of the presence. As Derrida wrote, "Memory stays with traces, in order to 'preserve' them, but traces of a past that has been never been present, traces which themselves never occupy the form of presence and always remain, as it were, to come." This opens the problematics of experience-expectation, past-present, trace-ecart and Derrida's spectrology in his Denkbild of the spectres. Is this a non-place of the Benjaminian weak messianic power (schwache messianische Kraft), a political utopia or a philosophical, Socratic a-topos? To grapple with the indeterminacy, we enquire in to Derrida's quest between psyche and polis, law and justice, and forgiveness, life and death. Our investigation refers to the writings of Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, Giorgio Agamben, Julia Kristeva and the paintings of a contemporary Belgian artist, Luc Tuymans, whose theme is absence-presence of the memory of the Holocaust and of today's evil. We interpret Derrida's diagnosis of contemporaneity: "never have violence, inequality, exclusion, famine, and thus economic oppression affected as many human beings in the history of the earth and of humanity."

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