Keynotes
Without A Title
In order to keep the memory of Derrida as a thinker, a reflection is warranted on what precisely is the legacy that he has left us. This legacy, I hold, is his implacable critical vigilance, the systematic questioning of all frozen thought. I suggest that this vigilance is based on a radicalization and transformation of Husserl’s bracketing and of Heidegger's rejection of thinking under headings. Faithfulness to Derrida's thought thus demands of us that we no longer relate to his thought under the title "deconstruction," which qua title, is, as Derrida himself has pointed out, a primarily North American invention.
View biography and program entry for Rodolphe Gasché.
Again: “The wounds of the Spirit heal, and leave no scars behind.”
This famous phrase from the Phenomenology of Spirit, which was interpreted in the twentieth century as an expression of Hegel’s logocentrism, could know a new destiny. Because of scientific discoveries concerning the importance of stem cells in particular, the phrase allows one to examine the question of regeneration in regard to scarring. Such reworking leads to a new questioning of the trace. Rereading Jacques Derrida's lecture “La différance,” we will ask to what degree regeneration in its plasticity may be considered a post-deconstructive concept.
View biography and program entry for Catherine Malabou.
Comme si, comme ça: Fictions of Self, State, and a Sovereign God
Sovereignty is essentially a fiction or a phantasm, argues Derrida in several later texts. But this does not make the effects of sovereignty any less real or less dangerous. On the contrary, the power of sovereignty comes precisely from the elision of its fictional origin and its real effects, the elision of a performative fiction (an “as if,” a comme si) and its constative results (an “as such” or a “like that,” a comme ça). From comme si to comme ça: that is the movement of every sovereign fiction and the constitution of every sovereign power. In this paper, I look at three such fictions or phantasms (the sovereignties of the self, the nation-state, and God) in order to understand Derrida’s insistence that we must ultimately relinquish our notion of sovereignty in the name of the very thing that has traditionally been identified with it, that is, in the name of the unconditional. Examining the relationship between sovereignty and unconditionality in several of Derrida’s later works on speech act theory, psychoanalysis, the university, the nation-state, and religion, I ask whether a deconstructive thinking of sovereignty can help determine and change for the better the deconstructive processes already at work in ourselves, our political systems, and our religious institutions.
View biography and program entry for Michael Naas.