Centre for European and International Studies Research (CEISR)

Profile

My main area of interest is in all aspects of postmodern theory – but with specific reference to deconstruction.  Although this term can be applied to many thinkers, it is mostly associated with the French-Algerian philosopher Jacques Derrida (whom I am currently studying).  Although impossible to define (indeed it is the argument that absolute definition is impossible), I would say that deconstruction ‘is’ the following.  For Derrida, it is the disruption – not destruction – of metaphysical values (of presence, purity, proximity and the proper) insofar as they operate within the tradition of metaphysical philosophy, in resistances to this tradition, and in everyday social, political and cultural life.  

Qualifications

• University of Nottingham, 2003, Masters Degree in Critical Theory and Cultural Studies (Distinction).
• University of Dundee, 2002, Honours Degree in Philosophy (2:1).

Current Research Projects

My research project is entitled, The Politics of Autobiography: On Deconstruction and Identity.   My aim is to draw out, through a reading of Derrida, a paradox between the ‘autobiographical’ and ‘political’ elements of identity.  For, it is argued, neither the autobiographical nor the political can institute their own identity: rather, in a strange way, the one is the condition on which the other can be thought.  My thesis thus intermingles the way in which we characterise ‘identity’ as simultaneously specific and ‘personal’ on the one hand, and generic and ‘political’ on the other.  Indeed, I will also argue that the relation between specific and general also works on the level of (inter)nationality.  I argue that we must go beyond traditional nationalism and work instead with the difficult paradox between the way in which the specific ‘identity’ of our own nation is called into question in its relation to the ‘identity’ – which, in its affirmation of national difference, is more of an ‘alterity’ – of the international.