Spectres of a crisis: reading Jacques Derrida after the global financial crisis of 2008

Francis, John James (2020). Spectres of a crisis: reading Jacques Derrida after the global financial crisis of 2008. University of Birmingham. Ph.D.

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Abstract

This thesis investigates a theoretical response to the question of what constitutes the political implications of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. This thesis, working within the tradition of critical and cultural theory, undertakes a sustained engagement with the works of Jacques Derrida to theorise the traditions, norms, and practices that inform a response to an event such as the crisis of 2008. This thesis works with his proposals that: the spectre of its limitations haunts politics; that this has led to the ‘deconstruction’ of the meaning of politics through complex textual frameworks; and that this dynamic leads to a tension between the arrival of new political possibilities on the one hand and new forms of political sovereignty on the other. After examining the significance of Derrida’s approach and secondary literature debating its interpretation, this thesis deconstructs the political implications of the crisis from politics in the traditional sense of the nationstate, the textual politics of scholarship, and finally the politics of the media, the domain, I argue, that incorporates the most discrete and sophisticated forms of sovereign decision-making. Finally, this thesis opens up its findings to secondary literature that suggest contrasting arguments.

Type of Work:

Thesis (Doctorates > Ph.D.)

Award Type:

Doctorates > Ph.D.

Supervisor(s):