The ‘archaic structures of our desire’

Abstract

What I am interested in and what I want to argue for in this piece is what Drucilla
Cornell, following Jacques Derrida, calls ‘an alternative ethic of love’. The failure of love or ‘love’s failure’2 will be taken as a reason for the persistence of violations, exclusions, inequality, discrimination and injustice in private and public lives, and in a more abstract sense also for the failure of politics, friendship and the law. The philosophy of deconstruction and specifically the work of Jacques Derrida do much to expose the persistence of phallogocentrism – the centrality of maleness – in the philosophy of ideas and in ordinary life, in what we tend to regard as natural in our deepest desire. For Derrida, phallogocentrism must be challenged not only through writing and thinking, but also by how we live, and how we are influenced by the unconscious.