Tropismes, 2007

Hereafter "La langue" plus page number. 2 Philippe Romanski and I translated "La Langue n'appartient pas" and other interviews and essays by Jacques Derrida, published in Jacques Derrida's Sovereignties in Question (Fordham University Press, 2005), edited by myself and another person. After having sent back copy-edited pages with my final corrections, I discovered the book published in a bookstore without my ever having seen the galley proofs. Fordham copy-editor, Helen Tartar and others unbeknownst to me introduced thousands of changes, of the order of taking the impersonal expression in French, "il faut," for a "he must," or changing aberrantly the translation of vif, disfiguring scandalously the book. 3 A key moment in the history of philosophy for this expulsion of ghosts and of literature from philosophy is the movement Kant travels from his Dreams of a Ghostseer (1766) to his Critique of Pure Reason (1781), where "ghosts" are made to be the stuff of fictio or Erdichtung, off realms for philosophy. On this exclusion, see T. Dutoit, "Ghost Stories, the Sublime and Fantastic Thirds in Kant and Kleist," 225-254.

Research In Phenomenology, 2016

This article puts into play the ghostly horizon of “death” as it follows its semblances through Derrida’s reading of Heidegger in the French thinker’s last seminars as published in The Beast and the Sovereign Vol. ii. The moments I underscore are three, always marking the playing out or releasing of death’s ghost, its sovereignty over life, while the readings, drift off driven by other forces: 1. In Session iv, Derrida’s enjambment of Heidegger’s sense of dasein and Welt with Celan’s line from Atemwende, “Die Welt ist fort, Ich muß dich tragen” (“the world has withdrawn, I must carry you”); 2. The mutual displacement of the question of the other and the question of death at the beginning of Session v; and 3, the unfolding of Crusoe’s desire and fear of “living a living death” in Derrida’s discussion of survivance, also in session v. The discussion closes with the interpolation of Latin American thought through the introduction of the temporalizing movement of différance read in ligh...

Phenomenological Reviews, 2019

trace, and différance-that allow for a differential account of all living beings, of all sorts of relationships between the living and the dead. It is to this story, Derrida goes on, that one should retrace his early project of grammatology-the project of replacing the notions of word (parole), sign, and signifier, with the aforementioned figures (see Of Grammatology, 1967). Since then, he had re-elaborated the oppositional account of life, based on the humanist conception of language, into the differential account made possible by the analogical code of grammē. For Derrida, the humanist and oppositional account of life hinges on an axiomatic demarcation. On the one hand, we have animal autorelation (the animal ability to move, feel and affect itself with traces of itself, which is traditionally opposed to inorganic inertia); on the other hand, we have human selfreference or autodeicticity (one's power to refer to oneself in a deictic way, that is, by saying "this is me," 131-2). The logical matrix of Derrida's argument for a critical re-elaboration of the humanist account of life consists in calling into question this axiomatic demarcation of animal autoaffection and human self-reference. Building on his early work (above all, Voice and Phenomenon, 1967), Derrida rethinks autorelation as the minimal condition of life, including human life, and thus self-reference as an effect of autorelation, with all that this implies-to begin with, the departure from phenomenology as a thinking of the self-referent living present.

2001

Introduction to my translation of Jacques Derrida's 1995 "Avances," originally written as a preface to Serge Margel's 'Le Tombeau du dieu artisan.' The latter has also since been published in English translation with a new introduction by Margel. https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/advances https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/the-tomb-of-the-artisan-god

Derrida and Queer Theory, 2017

ATHENA: Journal of Philosophical Studies, 2018

In the given article, I would like to address a few texts of Jacques Derrida, written by him in the 1990s, namely: Back from Moscow, in the USSR (1993), Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International (1994) and Marx & Sons (1999). The close reading of Back from Moscow, in the USSR will allow me to examine the first series of questions, in particular: what the role of the genre of “autobiographical-travel-testimony”, constituted by the texts of European intellectuals who visited USSR in different periods of its history, in the intellectual biography of Derrida, was; how the travel diary can turn into a political diagnosis and what Deconstruction and Perestroika have in common. Two other texts are important for the analysis of more general, yet interrelated questions: how and why the untimely / contretemps thoughts of Derrida on the fate of Marxism, become relevant dans l’ici-maintenant – here (in Eastern Europe) and now (thirty years after the collapse of socialism) and how the studies of “spectralities” contribute to our understanding of the Postsocialist condition.

Philomathes, 2017

Plague literature by Poe and Lucretius remains highly relevant today as we encounter a human future still defined by infectious diseases. This essay analyzes the oscillation of plague metaphor and non-metaphor in De Rerum Natura (Book VI) by Lucretius and “The Masque of the Red Death” by Edgar Allan Poe. These plague texts are literary palimpsests, with Lucretius rewriting Thucydides and his account of the Athenian plague, and Poe rewriting Boccaccio’s Decameron and its portrayal of literary escape from the bubonic plague. The accounts of plague in Lucretius and Poe 1) oscillate between metaphorical representations of disease and non-metaphorical representations of disease and 2) possess abrupt textual disruptions and failures of metaphor. These disruptions allow for an opening of interpretation and new metaphors, but also invite inquiry into the authors’ biographies and literal deaths. The liberatory possibilities via these textual disruptions may allow the reader participation in a more authentic Being-towards-death as understood by Heidegger in Being and Time. Moreover, the contemplation of our actual future deaths, alongside those of plague victims past and present, with the interrelated moral, ethical, and social implications, may inaugurate a more authentic human relationship to both death and time.

Anthropological Quarterly, 2005

Diacritics, 1977

I can read Glas as an ancestral rite. More than half of the Hegel column discusses Hegel's work on the family, even in such early works as The Spirit of Christianity, where he suggests that the true pleroma of love and the family became possible with Christianity, the revealed religion of a Holy Family.' He records Pompey's surprise that the crypt in the Jewish tabernacle was empty, that there was nothing behind the veil. Derrida has often dwelt on the power of the veil as an image in terms of truth as aletheia or unveiling, a notion sustained from Plato through Hegel and Heidegger.2 In Glas that image of Truth is associated with the Father. The words derriere les rideaux (behind the curtain or veil) remind Derrida of the name of his own father, recently deceased at the time of writing [80b]. Hegel is himself a sort of father in this text: "To work in the name of Hegel, [... ] I have chosen to draw on [ ... ] the law of the family" [10a]. And, in the passage from Glas quoted below, Derrida might be instructing the Christian father who wrote in The Spirit of Christianity that filial love does indeed inform the crypt derriere les rideaux (in the name of the Jewish father and behind the veil) in the tabernacle; he describes the whole undertaking of Glas in terms of that love: 1 "The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate," Early Theological Writings, tr. T. M. Knox (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Paperback 1971), pp. 182-301. As he draws many conclusions from these early, often bypassed Hegelian writings, Derrida hints at an approach to an author's whole corpus. First, "what one finds there [in the early work] in fact is presented at once as a seed and as a set of invariant traits of the system" [28a]. But also, "the Hegelian tree thus turns upon itself, the old Hegel is the father of the young Hegel only in order to have been his son, his great-grandson." [97a]. The relationship of part and whole is an independent Derridean concern.