This thesis focuses on the figure of an abyss residing at the heart of metaphysics, and argues that thinking in light of its destabilising connotations opens up the possibility of attempting to take responsibility for the violence immanent to any and all politico-philosophical p…
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In recent years, human rights discourse has become increasingly intertwined in the justifications presented for Western wars and interventions. The aim of this thesis is to illustrate the problems implicated in human rights based justifications of war and violence. To achieve th…
Multiplicity is a key challenge and opportunity of world politics, yet scholars continue to struggle to do it justice. One way of reducing the challenge multiple times and spaces present us with has been to organise them allochronically, to align spatial difference in temporal s…
The thesis explores the political dispositions lurking within the practices of vision, construed here in terms of the visible and invisible. It locates this investigation firstly, in the representational culture of colonial Singapore and secondly, in postcolonial Singaporean per…
This thesis looks at the function of signatures in visual art using the theory of Jacques Derrida and a series of paradigmatic historical examples. Specifically, it departs from ‘Signature Event Context’ (SEC) to establish signature outside the idiom of visual art as a social pr…
There is a close relationship between art and philosophy. From time to time, philosophy attempts to make art its theme. Invariably it has to acknowledge the very qualities of art that it seeks to explain - art’s elusiveness and its indeterminateness. On the other hand, it is the…
This thesis uses the photographic portrait as an example of contemporary art practice to examine developments in aesthetic sensibility and constructions of meaning with particular address to ineffable qualities in both the subject and in the photograph. It examines the contribut…
The settler imaginary creates Hawaii as a distinct space from Hawaiʻi. Drawing on the work of Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, Martin Heidegger, and Eve Tuck I seek to explore the overlapping of two distinct epistemological territories sharing the same physical location. This …
This dissertation develops the practical and political dimensions of Jacques Derrida’s post-humanist approach to animal ethics. It does this by creatively theorizing the post-human and the post-secular together. After providing a novel outline of Derrida’s unique theoretical app…
Text Machines explores the rhetorical and technological resonances of Martin Heidegger’s “event of appropriation” and Paul de Man’s “material event”. The crucial questions here are what it would mean to approach the “text machine” of which de Man writes as a “question concerning…
American Hospitality rereads the canon of American literature by focusing attention on the centrality of hospitality to the twentieth-century American literary imagination. It argues that twentieth-century U.S. authors employ scenes of hospitality (scenes of welcoming and withho…
Canines and children cohabit common worlds, both personal and political subjects of their own lives and from a metaphysical perspective, active “agents.” Their encounters may be characterized by mutual curiosity, indifference, or fear and can lead to multiple outcomes. Some chil…