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  Was the U.S. government’s mass deportation on March 15, 2025, legal despite the judge’s ruling? Introduction : The Grammatological Power of the Law On March 15, 2025, a plane carrying alleged members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua departed U.S. soil despite a federal judge’s order to halt their deportation. Chief Judge James Boasberg had ruled that the removal violated due process, yet by the time the written injunction arrived, the flight had already left. The administration defended its actions, arguing that the order was issued too late to be legally binding. However, reports suggest Boasberg verbally communicated his decision before the written document was finalized, raising a critical legal and philosophical question: does a spoken order hold the same weight as a written one? This dilemma is not just a procedural dispute—it echoes a fundamental tension in Western thought. As Jacques Derrida argued in Of Grammatology , Western tradition has long privileged spee...

Introduction The pursuit of truth has long been a central concern in philosophy and education. John Milton, in Areopagitica , warns against uncritical acceptance of ideas: “A man may be a heretic in the truth; and if he believe things only because his pastor says so... the very truth he holds becomes his heresy.” This statement finds an intellectual counterpart in Socrates’ dictum, “The unexamined life is not worth living,” and his call to “know yourself.” Both thinkers suggest that truth is not a possession to be inherited but a process to be actively pursued. This article explores the dangers of intellectual conformity, the psychology of passive learning, and the importance of critical inquiry in academia and beyond. Intellectual Conformity and the Danger of Rote Learning One of the greatest threats to genuine understanding is rote learning and intellectual conformity. Psychological studies on authority bias and the psychology of conformity, such as Stanley Milgram’s Obedien...

Introduction Philosophical writing often appears as the product of deliberate, structured reasoning—a thinker consciously shaping arguments to construct a coherent system. Yet, there are moments when a philosopher’s own work seems to outgrow its creator, developing beyond their control and forcing them to abandon their original intentions. Two striking cases of this phenomenon can be found in Ludwig Wittgenstein and Friedrich Nietzsche. Wittgenstein, in the preface to Philosophical Investigations , acknowledges that he initially attempted to present his later work alongside Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus , only to realize that the gap between the two was insurmountable. Likewise, Nietzsche began Beyond Good and Evil as a continuation of The Dawn , but as he transcribed the manuscript, he became convinced that it had taken on a radically different tone and depth. In both cases, the authors were led by the momentum of their own evolving thought, eventually forced to recognize that t...

Note : This article is intended as an introduction to “When Thought Escapes the Thinker: Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, and the Autonomy of Language” (see link below ). Introduction Language has often been viewed as a tool wielded by a conscious, autonomous subject. However, poststructuralist thought, along with psychoanalysis and even theological traditions, challenges this assumption. The idea that language precedes and structures human thought suggests that individuals do not simply use language; rather, they are spoken by it. As Lacan famously put it, "It is the world of words that creates the world of things"—an assertion that resonates with Derrida’s concept of arche-writing , Barthes’ death of the author , and even the biblical phrase, "In the beginning was the Word." But if language is the true agent, does this imply a form of determinism, or is there still space for creativity and agency? This article explores the tension between linguistic determinis...

  “Like seeing roasted meat and other dishes in front of you and suddenly realizing: This is a dead fish. A dead bird. A dead pig. Or that this noble vintage is grape juice, and the purple robes are sheep wool dyed with shellfish blood […] That’s what we need to do all the time […] to strip away the legend that encrusts them”. Marcus Aurelius. Meditations, Book 6.13 Introduction: Why Trace the Genealogy of Derrida’s Concepts? Understanding Derrida’s work can be challenging due to the density of his terminology. Concepts such as arche-writing , différance , transcendental signified , and text often appear fully formed in later works, making them difficult to grasp without context. This article proposes an approach similar to The Little Prince’s method of uprooting baobabs early—tracing these concepts to their origins before they become overwhelming theoretical constructs. A careful reading of Of Grammatology , particularly the section “The Signifier and Truth,” reveals how...

  Introduction The aim of this article is to provide a structured analysis of Derrida’s critique of structuralism, with a particular focus on his reading of Saussure through the lens of Roman Jakobson’s linguistic theory. The discussion will unfold in three main sections. In the first part, the content of the section The Signifier and Truth from Derrida’s Of Grammatology will be presented as objectively as possible. This section is crucial to understanding Derrida’s deconstruction of the metaphysical presuppositions underlying Western linguistic and philosophical traditions, particularly the logocentric privileging of speech over writing. The second part will explore the role of Roman Jakobson in shaping Derrida’s assessment of structuralism. Jakobson, as one of the leading figures of structural linguistics, provided an interpretation of Saussure’s linguistic model that played a significant role in Derrida’s critique. By analyzing Jakobson’s influence, this section will hig...

“As modern structural thought has clearly realized, language is a system of signs and linguistics is part and parcel of the science of signs, or semiotics (Saussure's semiologie). The mediaeval definition of sign-"aliquid stat pro aliquo" has been resurrected and put forward as still valid and productive. Thus the con stitutive mark of any sign in general and of any linguistic sign in particular is its twofold character: every linguistic unit is bipartite and involves both aspects -one sensible and the other intelligible, or in other words, both the signans "signifier" (Saussure's signifiant) and the signatum "signified" (signifie) . These two constituents of a linguistic sign (and of sign in general) necessarily suppose and require each other”. (Jakobson 1963: 162) (This passage was cited by Derrida in Of Grammatology — Part One, section The Signifier and Truth — in the context of his criticism of Saussurean linguistics, where he argues that ...