Mosaic, a journal for the interdisciplinary study of literature

Presenters

This page lists the presenters in alphabetical order. Each abstract contains a link that will take to to the corresponding session on the Program page.

Jeremiah Alberg - Session A4 Department of Philosophy, University of West Georgia The Dangerous Supplement . . . is a Sort . . . of Scandal In Derrida’s analysis (Of Grammatology) Rousseau’s logic of the supplement reveals itself as governed by the logic of scandal. As Derrida well knew, scandal is, at root, a biblical concept. For Derrida the supplementarity makes possible speech, society and passion. And yet the supplement is a form of scandal. While no metaphysical or ontological concept can comprehend the supplement, the theological notion of scandal not only can but does. Beneath Derrida’s reading of Rousseau lies a theological moment of origin.

Stephen Barker - Session B21 School of the Arts, University of California at Irvine Derrida’s Subjectile Vision: Drawing On/In Artaud and Nietzsche Derrida’s aesthetic is among the most important aspects of his interdisciplinarity. His exploration of Antonin Artaud, of Kant’s Third Critique commentary on beauty and the sublime, and of Nietzsche’s strategic use of imagery, orchestrates a radically new way of looking at art. In Mémoires d’aveugle: L’autoportrait et autres ruines (1990) and Antonin Artaud: dessins et portraits (1986), Derrida pursues a four-fold inquiry: subjectility and doubling, vision and blindness, tears and traits, and drawing. These central themes can be seen echoing throughout Derrida’s work, for example in his various treatments of painting, photography, and music, and they in fact inform his notions of différance, dissemination, spectrality. To read Derrida’s subjectile vision (a term developed in the Artaud materials) is to read the fundamentals of Derrida’s complex interweavings of theory, philosophy, and aesthetics.

H-Dirksen L. Bauman - Session A12 Department of ASL and Deaf Studies, Gallaudet University Listening to Phonocentrism with Deaf Eyes: Derrida’s Mute Philosophy of (Sign) Language Given the astounding breadth of Derrida’s inquiry, it is curious that he was silent on the topics of deafness and signed languages; this is especially notable as Derrida devoted so much time to his critique of the primacy of the voice in the Western tradition. If non-phonetic writing interrupts the primacy of the voice, as Derrida contends, then deafness and signed languages surely signify a consummate moment of disruption to the hegemony of phonocentrism. The philosophical relevance of deafness is not lost on Derrida, for he often quotes others—Hegel, Leibniz, Rousseau, and Saussure— in an act of philosophical ventriloquism as they speculate on the implications of deafness and signed languages. This paper engages an exchange between Derrida and Deaf Studies: Derrida’s notion of phonocentrism helps to articulate a fundamental critique of Deaf Studies, while Deaf Studies also speaks back to Derrida, inquiring into his silence on signed languages and its implications for reading Derrida.

Andrew Benjamin - Session B21 Faculty of Design, Architecture, and Building, University of Technology, Sydney Drawing/Painting: Derrida and Art Work Derrida’s writings on art usually center on his books, The Truth in Painting or Memoirs of the Blind. While these works are central to his engagement with art, what is overlooked are the more sustained writings on particular artists or works. These writings take at least two forms. The first consists of an actual engagement with specific works by specific artists. In the second instance, there are texts of a more collaborative nature that open up another way for philosophy to engage with art works. Examples of the former are Derrida’s writings on Artaud, Atlan, and Marie-Françoise Plissart. Examples of the second include his work with Micaela Henich and the work with (on?) Colette Deble’s “Pregnances.” The aim of this paper is to investigate these encounters. The argument will be that what is at work in all of this writing is an attempt to engage art without turning it into a mere example on which philosophy can comment. Exemplarity excises particularity. The question is how the particular can be reintroduced such that the encounter is not simply idiosyncratic.

Jean Eudes Biem - Session C31 PhD Candidate, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, Harvard University Derrida’s Legacy, Cosmopolitanism, and the Reinvention of Political Inclusion Close attention to Derrida’s work disproves the idea that deconstruction undermines institutions, either by being a gadfly or by fostering non-progressive politics. In fact, deconstruction is radical and effective only insofar as it bridges the putative gaps between intellectual practice and political practice. Analytical decomposition of purity (the first movement of deconstruction) reveals the internal multiplicity, otherness, and difference through which all institutions and discourses become (de)constructed, prone to inclusion, and potentially hospitable. Central to these configurations, the complex reconceptualization of writing around which Derrida lurked all his life is indispensable to any attempt to reconfigure polity and sociality with coexistence as their foundation. Borrowing from literary, political, and social theory as well as history, this paper examines how the cosmopolitan epistemic shifts that constitute Derrida’s legacy can foster contemporary efforts towards reinventions of political inclusion.

Sarah Blacker - Session A17 MA candidate, Cultural Studies and Critical Theory, McMaster University Renal Generosity: Derrida’s Theory of the Gift in Relation to “Altruistic Stranger” Kidney Donation Derrida has argued that the gift is the impossible ethical gesture because we are obligated to give unconditionally, yet a gift cannot be given freely as it is always-already fraught with the complications of social relationships: guilt, indebtedness, and an inherent demand for compensation. The practice of living donor “altruistic stranger” kidney donation is demonstrative of the gift’s inability to interrupt the cycle of debt and repayment in an economy of exchange. While the language of gift in the arena of organ donation is employed to entice individuals to donate, this language burdens recipients with an impossible obligation to reciprocate for an unrepayable gift. This exploration of the societal reluctance towards, and suspicion surrounding, the idea of organ donation to strangers provides unique insight into Derrida’s thought on the aporia of the gift in a culture of commodification.

Majero Bouman - Session A10 PhD Candidate, Department of English, York University Racism's Specters: Inheriting the Unthought Future Jacques Derrida wrote the article “Racism’s Last Word” in 1983 for "Art Contra Apartheid," an exhibit to be gifted to South Africa once a democratic government had been elected under national suffrage. The unique temporal preoccupations of this article prefigure the anachrony of spectrality unpacked in Derrida's later text, Specters of Marx (1994). The spectralization of “Racism’s Last Word” shows that the article signifies the simultaneity of two poles: the “end of racism,” and the fact that “racism has the last word.” Together, these works suggest that while the past exists as inheritance through imperfect relation, there is a double future, that projected from within the hegemonic structure of the present, and the unthought future, which exists between the present and the foreseeable.

Rowena Braddock - Session C28 PhD Candidate, Department of Gender Studies, University of Sydney Monstrous Hospitality: Balzac’s Panther and “L’animal que donc je suis” This paper risks falling prey to monstrous logic. Proceeding by way of the two-headed logic of the je suis pas qui je suis, where I am at odds with myself and forever falling behind the subject that pursues me, the paper rolls itself into a ball over the question of hospitality. The animalséance I shall address is the product of an altogether improper encounter between soldier and panther in Balzac’s Une passion dans le désert. Addressing Balzac’s particular panther and the faltering step that threatens to disturb the ground between being and following, I seek to discover what it is that runs amok and trembles on the fantastic border between humanity and animality, between guest and host.

Louise Burchill - Session A13 Language Department, Université d’Evry Val d’Essonne Re-aligning “Spacing” and the khôra: Rethinking “Space” following Derrida The term “spacing” (“espacement”), which is absolutely central to Derrida's entire corpus, has been interpreted by many commentators as “another kind of spatiality” by which deconstructive discourse seeks “to disturb the traditional construction of space” or to think “a new sense of place.” In my reading, however, Derrida's insistence on spacing as a com-plication, unfolding or self-affection of time, indicates that “spacing” must, in fact, be understood, no less than "temporizing" itself, as another name for the process of proto-temporalization Derrida elaborates in the wake of Heidegger's “more original” “ecstatical-horizonal” interpretation of time. Yet, Derrida's multifarious interpretations of Plato's khôra reveal that his attempt to trace a primordial space back to proto-temporalization may well deprive spacing of the “productive force” he claims for it. My argument, therefore, seeks to highlight the necessary (if occulted) role that a non-synthetic spatial “ground” plays in the conception of difference itself.

Antonio Calcagno - Session C27 Department of Philosophy, University of Scranton Reconsidering the Here and Now of Political Decisions: Derrida and the Five Foyers of the Democracy-to-come “Concepts” developed to express Derrida’s later political philosophy, “democracy-to-come” and “auto-immunity” articulate the double-bind that lies at the very core of politics. The double-bind, according to Richard Rorty, stymies the possibility of making short-term, pragmatic political decisions. The impossibility of a living present concomitant with the Derridean notions of the past and the future as iterable and open-ended renders impossible decisions that can be effective here and now. I argue that Derrida does indeed give us a way to make concrete political decisions “here and now,” but this entails an understanding of Derridean time as differentiating and spatio-temporising, not as flowing at a hyper-speed or rate. Derridean notions of instantaneity, heritage, and the to-come need not flow at speeds that absolutely transcend human consciousness, thereby resulting in an impossibility of meaning and decision-making.

Gregory Cameron - Session A14 Communication Studies and Cultural Studies, Wilfred Laurier University Politics and Humanism: The Legacy of Husserl's Anti-Nationalism in the Thought of Jacques Derrida Despite an increase of attention to the legacy of Husserl in Derrida’s writings, there appears to be a persistent reluctance to recognize the significance of Husserl’s anti-naturalism in the development of Derrida’s thought. This reluctance is not altogether surprising. Recent readings of Husserl have downplayed the significance of anti-naturalism—perhaps the key to Husserl’s project—emphasizing instead a naturalist and anthropologist reading inspired primarily by Merleau-Ponty. This reading of Husserl makes it difficult to understand Derrida’s anti-humanism most emphatically present in “The Ends of Man” and Of Spirit as belonging to the phenomenological legacy. Recently there have even been attempts to claim that Derrida’s writings compliment those of Merleau-Ponty. In “Politics and Humanism” I will attempt to rectify this by indicating the significance of Husserl’s anti-naturalism in the development of Derrida’s thought and by showing how this anti-naturalism persists even in his more recent political writings.

Adam Carter - Session C31 Department of English, University of Lethbridge Derrida and the Ends of Nation The paper explores concerns with nation and nationalism in Derrida’s writing, particularly in relation to spectrality and the revenant. Can one conclude, as Pheng Cheah has suggested, that for Derrida nationalism “can promise nothing and has no future to-come”? Do “cosmopolitanism” and-or the “international” for which Derrida gave qualified approval constitute viable alternatives to, or a beyond of, the nation? I will suggest on the one hand that one can trace a critique of nationalism in Derrida’s work from such early essays as “The Ends of Man” to later works such as The Other Heading, Spectres of Marx, and On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. On the other hand, most notably in “The Onto-Theology of National Humanism (Prolegomena to a Hypothesis),” Derrida remains acutely aware of the nation as a kind of inexorable spectre and, furthermore, acutely aware that cosmopolitanism is potentially “a fearfully ambiguous value,” fully continuous with the logic and project of nationalism.

Howard Caygill - Session A7 Department of History, University of London Derrida’s Coup Derrida's coup will depart from a reflection upon Derrida’s reading of the coup in Mallarmé's text and then trace it through the problems of legislation and crime. The focus will rest on the appearances of the coup in Glas, showing its crossings between the legislative coup disclosed in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and the coup of the thief in Genet. The reading will pursue the notion of the coup as both a break and a foundation and will close with some reflections on the relationships between the political coup and the coup of writing.

Alan Clinton - Session C27 Interdisciplinary Writing Program, Northeastern University Falling Derrida's Meteoric Writing In this paper I discuss how, in his appropriation of Greek ideas about chance, Derrida restores a sense of "the event" to the reading process, such that every textual event is an intersection, a constellation of other events that is always, like a planet's atmosphere, subject to meteoric bombardment. I will provide a context for understanding the properties of meteoric reading/writing through an analysis of such texts as "Mes Chances: Some Epicurean Stereophonies,” Signsponge, Glas, and “Signature Event Context.” In his use of the signature method of reading various authors' texts, Derrida flirts with the concept that one's name is one's destiny. What is at stake here is not a “body” of knowledge, but falling bodies of possibility. Derrida’s uses of the signature and other chance methods never “fall into place,” but instead are objects thrown at the text in a manner akin to action painting except, rather than filling a blank canvas, Derrida produces unlikely palimpsests.

Joseph Cohen - Session B21 Directeur de Programme, Collège International de Philosophie, Paris Wording Impossible Words: On Specters and Sacrifice in Derrida We shall, in this paper, speak of what Derrida meant by the word sacrifice, suggesting how, from a historical perspective, Derrida’s deconstructive reading of the term differs from Hegel’s, Heidegger’s, and Levinas’s interpretations of it. We shall then, by reading Derrida’s “Foi et savoir” and “Khora,” attempt to understand sacrifice as an “indestructible synonym of deconstruction.” This will lead to an unexpected manner of “seeing” what Derrida calls the “impossible” or “spectral” event of messianicity.

Jehanne Dautrey - Session A13 Directrice de programme, Collège International de Philosophie La musique, entre-deux de la littérature et de l’architecture, de la langue et de l’espace Dans La Dissémination ou dans Psychè, Derrida définit la musique comme dimension transversale traversant la littérature et pointe la tension de la voix et de l’écriture dans la pensée de l’être. La musique est un entre-deux de l’écriture, un rapport du texte à son dehors qui n’est pas le surplomb du métalangage, une expérience de l’espacement du sens qui n’est pas pour autant une transcendance du blanc et du vide. Elle déploie dans la littérature un « labyrinthe hyperbolique », un espace inobjectivable toujours relancé par le geste qui le pointe. Le labyrinthe musical forme ainsi un espace dans lequel les écritures, verbale et architecturale, s’impriment l’une en l’autre. On confrontera la modernité de cette approche derridienne de la musique à celle de Deleuze et de Foucault, en montrant comment il s’agit pour chacun d’analyser la manière dont la musique explore une suture du sens et de l’espace.

Fanie de Beer - Session A8 Department of Information Science, University of Pretoria Archive Fever: A Deconstructive Reading of Archiving and Archives In his text, Archive Fever, Jacques Derrida offers a reading of archives with much wider ramifications than merely the archive as an institution. The implications of his profound reading touch, in truly interdisciplinary fashion (philosophy, psychoanalysis, materialism, religion, technology, and others), on the understanding of history, the theory of interpretation, the politics of power and democratisation processes, a view of the future, our relations to technical developments, and the information era and the informatic culture as well as the impact of these issues on our understanding of what it means to be human and to be involved with the university at this point in time. As a way of honouring Derrida this presentation explores the relevance and dynamics of this Derridean text, and related ones, for these issues for which virtuality and globalisation (worldization) become key contextual notions.

Pleshette DeArmitt - Session C30 Department of Philosophy, University of Memphis Derrida’s Safekeeping Derrida’s rich meditations on mourning, though they may provide comfort, refuse to offer the consolation of philosophy, which, in one guise or another, promises salvation or the “return and restitution of the ‘safe.’” Over the last decade, Derrida demonstrated in many texts that whatever seeks to indemnify itself against harm, to render itself safe and sound [sain et sauf], falls prey to its own “power of rejection.” In light of this suicidal logic of “auto-immunity,” this paper asks if there is any safekeeping to which Derrida would subscribe. The paper thus revisits “Fors,” one of Derrida’s earliest and most complex texts on mourning, in which he articulates another topology—where the dead other is incorporated and borne within the self as in a safe or a crypt—in order to answer: “What safekeeping does mourning entrust us with, even if it does not keep the self or the other safe?”

Ben Dorfman - Session C26 Department of Languages, Culture, and Aesthetics, Aalborg University The Trace of the Trace: Taking the Strong Position on Derrida and History Outlining a “strong position” on Derrida and history, this presentation will dispute that Derrida's position lends itself to refutations of either “classic” historicism or engagements with “New Historicism.” Herein, the presentation will emphasize Derrida’s phenomenological roots and his solutions to Husserl’s Cartesian metaphysics. Derrida’s solutions to Husserl’s metaphysics came not where he intended. Instead of solving problems of the naïve, dehistoricized subject, Derrida's address to Cartesianism fulfills the unfulfilled promise of Husserl’s Lebenswelt concept. Derrida shows us the intended character of the Lebenswelt as a historical domain, debunking Husserl’s notion of its “sedimentation.” Our relation with the historical becomes of prime importance as what might be called the “tracing of the trace” results in a relation with history. Although the trace precedes history – as history represents “the final repression of difference” – responding to history becomes a historical condition of the trace. This impacts modern and postmodern humanistic thought.

Mario Dufour - Session A3 Départment de philosophie, Université du Québec à Montréal Vers une responsabilité affirmative Nous voulons souligner l’importance du problème de la responsabilité dans la pensée de Jacques Derrida et dans la force d’interpellation de son héritage. L’exigence de la responsabilité est ici très proche de l’asymétrie de l’autre dégagée par Emmanuel Levinas dans sa relecture de la philosophie. C'est dans le cadre de cette exigence que circulent les préoccupations de Jacques Derrida pour les questions du don, du secret, de la singularité, du rapport à la mort et à l'autre, de la décision et de la justice au-delà du droit. Il s'agit toujours de se rendre à cette exigence: la responsabilité est un concept inconfortable et aporétique qui ne peut qu’ébranler la présence à soi du sujet. Cette exigence ne conduit pas à un relativisme autoréfutant comme a pu le craindre Habermas mais à un élargissement de la rationalité pratique qui tient compte de sa finitude infinie.

Andrzej Dziedzic - Session A9 Department of Foreign Languages, University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh “To philosophize is to learn to die”: The Notion of Death in Jacques Derrida’s Thought In his interview given to Le Monde in August 1994, Derrida admitted a preoccupation with death that defined his entire life: “No, I have never learned to live. Not at all! To learn to live means to learn to die.” Unlike many other philosophers, he would recall us to a different understanding of finitude, to a thinking of death less as something that comes “after” life, than as an immanent component of life. His more recent works on Marx, Heidegger, and others explored what he called writing spectrality, its haunting of the limit keeping life and death apart. Between the earlier and the later volumes, Derrida’s immense corpus has been shadowed by this thought of death and writing, of death in writing. Taking into account Derrida’s books and interviews, this presentation will explore the discretion, power, and inventiveness that he brought to the thinking of death in his philosophical thought.

Elizabeth Edwards - Session C25 Vice-President, University of King’s College Specters that Cannot not Spook: Derrida’s Haunts Derrida writes about the necessity to endure, suffer, or undergo the aporia his work discovers in the “ordeal of undecideability.” In Specters of Marx, the undergoing of the aporia means forgoing the project of exorcism that Derrida finds in Marx. The “triumphant phase of mourning work,” which attempts to clear off the substanceless specters of history, will always be defeated by the revenants, whose very nature it is to recur. But some aporias are more easily endured than others. The specter-effect is fear, horror, panic: when we are spooked, we react with fear and violence. If the specters keep spooking, can we “welcome” them? This paper suggests two possibilities. One sees certain spectral incarnation effects as potentially reversible; “hauntology” might also propose a disincorporation of lethal political realities. The other takes up the psychoanalytic context, addressing Specters’ concluding quotation from Hamlet (“speak to it, Horatio”) as a reversal of the Lacanian dictum “let it speak.” Instead of ventriloquizing the voice of the specter, the deconstructive ‘scholar’ might speak to it instead.

Diane Enns - Session C32 Department of Philosophy, McMaster University Beyond Derrida: The Autoimmunity of Deconstruction The question of whether philosophy can move beyond Derrida presupposes a historicization of deconstruction that is not always evident in his work. Given Derrida’s preoccupation with the question of limits, it is imperative that we investigate whether deconstruction is itself autoimmune. My paper will address this question to reflect further on the relevance of Derrida’s work for politics and justice. In his claim that deconstruction is justice—and justice is undeconstructible—we find an incongruous appeal to grounds that is problematic for political action. Through an analysis of the notion of “suicidal autoimmunity” as it pertains to the Israeli imprisonment of Palestinians behind a “security” wall that effectively imprisons its own citizens as well, I argue that both justice and deconstruction must remain autoimmune if we are to avoid undermining both the radical nature of Derrida’s work and the potential for historical events to expose the limits of philosophy.

Rebecca Gagan - Session B19 PhD Candidate, Department of English, University of Western Ontario On Being True to Your School: The University after Derrida After Derrida, how can we not speak of the university? My paper argues that while we must continue speaking about the futures of the university after and in the name of Derrida, we cannot continue this important work without first considering Derrida's careful reflection on what it means to be at once faithful and unfaithful to the university. Through the example of his own critical practice, Derrida teaches us that we must not passively accept and follow his legacy of critical thought on the university. Rather, we must be "unfaithful in a spirit of fidelity" by engaging the university as a space of critical resistance where nothing is beyond question. Derrida's body of work on the university is a provocation to guard actively what he calls "the right to deconstruction." Only when we make the university both an object and a source of deconstruction are we faithful to its futures.

Stella Gaon - Session A3 Department of Political Science, Saint Mary’s University Derrida’s desire . . . for justice While Derrida arguably has always written on justice (despite the thesis of an ethical-political turn), it is not clear that his legacy is to have answered the challenge he posed. Specifically, he argues that a deconstructive interrogation of “morality,” of “ethicity,” or of responsibility cannot be said to be “already inspired” by an ethical, moral, or responsible concern (of, for example, a Levinasian kind) because this characterization would have to draw on precisely the kind of legitimacy whose “complacent” self-certainty deconstruction challenges. From this insight there emerges the problematic of a socially-constituted desire, a critical “wanting-itself” of reason itself, that cannot account for its own demand. In this paper I argue that this challenge pushes us beyond the margins of Derrida’s texts into the realm of psychoanalytical theory, but that it does so precisely by assuming a responsibility for justice, for its desire, that Derrida himself insists we assume.

Peter Gratton - Session C32 Department of History, Philosophy, and Political Studies, DePaul University The Legacies of the Future: Derrida and the Thinking of Democracy In this paper, I analyze Derrida's reconceptualization of the democracy-to-come in his later work as a lasting legacy of a profound thinker of freedom. Without this freedom and its autoimmunity, the trembling of the democratic would find no place in Derrida's work. I analyze this trembling of the democratic in two ways: 1) As a political invention that leaves us to think the surprise of the political, and 2) as a philosophical rethinking of a democracy and freedom of concepts, including the concepts of freedom and democracy.

Jody Greene - Session C26 Departments of Literature and Feminist Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz Hostis Humani Generis: Rogue States and Piratopias The most common epithet for pirates in eighteenth-century law, history, and literature was Hostis Humani Generis, enemy of human kind, or, literally, stranger to the human genre or species. This paper takes up Derrida's discussion in Voyous (2004) of the figure of the terrorist and the phenomenon of rogue states, emphasizing the ways these phenomena have troubled and even rendered obsolete the classificatory concepts through which both national and international law make themselves understood. Yet, Derrida notes, the vilification of terrorists and the designation of rogue states have served to obscure the fundamental similarities among rogue states and global superpowers, which themselves supervene the rule of law and unilaterally “use force to confront [rogue states] in the name of a presumed right and the reason of the strongest.” What might contemporary commentators on rogue states and perpetual war learn from the history of piracy, given the renewed appearance of a category of persons deemed to be hostis humani generis?

Martin Hägglund - Session C27 PhD Candidate, Department of Comparative Literature, Cornell University Derrida’s Notion of Desire Derrida’s notion of desire remains unexplored by his commentators, but I argue that it is crucial for understanding the radicality of his thinking. Derrida relies on a very different conception of desire to that presupposed by traditional thinking. For Derrida, mortality is the condition for both the desirable and the undesirable, since it opens the chance of life and the threat of death in the same stroke. Conversely, the immortality that is generally posited as the most desirable (“the best”) is for Derrida the most undesirable (“the worst”), since immortality would annihilate the time of mortal life.

Takao Hagiwara - Session A2 Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, Case Western Reserve University Derrida and Zen: Desert and Swamp By comparing what might be called the “Japanese swamp/womb sensibility” underlying D. T. Suzuki’s soku-hi logic (A is A, because A is not-A) with the desert and nomadic sensibility of Derrida’s deconstruction, this paper argues that, contrary to the views of critics like Robert Magliola, Suzuki’s soku-hi logic accords with Derrida’s thinking. Although the swamp/womb image may initially seem incompatible with Derridean desert nomadism, this sensibility actually corresponds with the latter, as shown by Derrida’s handling of chora, as well as by Kobo Abe’s The Woman in the Dunes and Basho’s The Narrow Road into the Deep North. Just as Derrida’s differential nomadism deconstructs the phallocentric stasis of the desert-oriented Judeo-Christian sensibility, Suzuki’s soku-hi logic deconstructs the entitative stasis of the swamp/womb sensibility. Thus, from opposite directions, Derrida and Suzuki deconstruct the binary opposites within their very different worlds.

Sarah Hammerschlag - Session C29 Department of Religion, Williams College “Another, other Abraham”: Responsibility, Identity and the figure of the Jew in “Abraham, l’autre” Through a comparison of Derrida’s 2003 essay “Abraham, l’autre” with Gift of Death and Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas this paper aims is to illustrate how Derrida in “Abraham, l’autre” extends his efforts to derive a political thinking from Levinas’s ethics. At the heart of this political thinking, I argue, is the mode of “being-Jewish” which Derrida describes as “the experience of deconstruction itself, its chance, its menace, its destiny, its earthquake.” Derrida develops a self-deconstructing model of identity by way of the mode of “being Jewish,” and in so doing simultaneously critiques Levinas for his use of Judaism as an exemplary model of ethical thinking and capitalizes off the tensions arising out of this model, such that the figure of the Jew becomes ironically exemplary for Derrida of a political identity that would call into question the possibility that one could ever claim it as one’s own.

Katrina Harack - Session A16 PhD Candidate, Department of English, University of California at Irvine Tracing Literature and Its Secret: Derrida and the Gift of Art This paper will link Derrida’s concept of the impossible gift to the “wholly other” or “secret” in literature, and explore the possibility of “art acting as gift.” The pure gift occurs in an atemporal moment, and it is impossible because it requires the absence of return, of recompense; the pure gift must cause an infinite and necessarily unrecognized debt, for as soon as the gift is recognized as gift, it is theoretically negated. However, Derrida’s openness to the possibility of the gift allows us to explore literary texts in terms of art acting as gift. Texts may not arrive as gifts, for such an arrival would negate the purpose of the gift. If a linguistic space were not created, if all answers were given, if the work were entirely available to us as gift, there would be no impetus for (re)contextualization or reconsideration.

Gabriela García Hubard, PhD candidate, Université Paris VII Denis Diderot Javier Bassas Vila, PhD candidate, Université la Sorbonne Paris IV Joana Masó, Université Paris VIII-Vincennes-Saint Denis Santiago Borja, Visual artist Echo-Graphic Images - Session A12 Less than a word, less than a voice, echo / Echo multiplies the chance to name Derrida’s legacy concerning writing and visuality. Just as the e(E)cho performs the deconstruction of the voice in Derrida’s thought, the “echographic images” that he identifies in Colette Deblé’s paintings Prégnances suppose a deconstruction of the visual representation; thus we do not hear but read Echo’s voice; likewise we do not see but read Colette Deblé’s échographies. Nevertheless, given that the word échographie was first used to designate a certain kind of aphasia that dissociates writing from meaning, the confusion that surrounds the translation from the word “sonography” to “échographie” produces unexpected effects unexplored by Derrida. Through a dialogue in echo with a contemporary artist, we intend to question Derrida’s inclusion of the visual experience into writing, while exploring the possibilities not only of reading but also seeing the “echographic images” and the aporetic dependency that arises from visuality to writing. How do we experience seeing if the visual is toujours déjà writing?

Antony Hudek - Session A4 Department of Theory, Jan van Eyck Academy On the defusion of differences: Between Jacques Derrida and Jean-François Lyotard Derrida’s reflections on the singular nature of his relationship with Jean-François Lyotard repeatedly put it on the line, that is to say: to the test, into practice. Specifically, the différend between the two philosophers lies in their shared respect for the impossible act of naming the other. Where Lyotard mobilises various mechanisms of translation to show the irresolvable differences between heterogeneous orders of phrases, Derrida defers (to) the law of judgment, whose verdict always falls “later.” I argue that only such différance can summon Lyotard’s différend without betraying it. Yet neither term constitutes a call for, or an answer to, the other. Rather Derrida’s paradoxical refusal to identify Lyotard by name brings the irresolution of their mutual différend into sight. And the same différance that assures Derrida’s and Lyotard’s stances before the Law holds promise, I conclude, for some of the most urgent political and ethical challenges facing “us” today.

Stephan Jaeger - Session C26 Department of German & Slavic Studies, University of Manitoba Postmodern Historiography, War, and Derrida My paper is based on Derrida’s discussion of the paradoxical “impossible possibility” to speak about the event in relation to the historical event. “The Making” of the event creates itself in the secrecy of its speech act. Besides this idea of a performative mode of representing history, Derrida’s consequent delimitation of totalization contradicts the traditional notion of historiographical synthesis. By example of historiographical representations of the last days of World War II, especially Walter Kempowski’s Swan Song ’45, I will bring Derrida’s ideas into dialogue with multi-perspective representations of history that try to give up synthesis. They create open historical performances that depend on the reader’s decision, instead of merely informing on or narrating the past. Finally, the paper will re-evaluate the aesthetic effects of performative and multi-perspective historiography in the lights of Derrida’s figures of the “between” for dealing with the past, particularly his use of “spectres.”

Elsebet Jegstrup - Session A17 Department of Philosophy, Elon University Derrida's Gift: the way . . . of the justice-to-come How can Derrida's justice-to-come be understood from the perspective of infinite responsibility? I shall argue that this justice binds me to the other, but its undeconstructible mystical origin is precisely the source of its authority in much the same way as Plato's city-in-speech is understood “perhaps [as] a pattern laid up for the man who wants to see and found a city within himself on the basis of what he sees.” It is a way of life that at all times thinks the justice-to-come, the injunction before us for which we must be prepared – because of what we see. In Rogues, Derrida develops this understanding of the to-come, this impossibility that is undeniably real but has the effect of an aporia, an enjoining that surprises because its arrival is unexpected. This justice-to-come has “the inheritance [or structure] of a promise, and is therefore the secret” that singularity cannot explain, cannot let go without its self-destruction.

Othmar Kastner - Session A6 PhD Candidate, Faculty of Philosophy and Educational Studies, University of Vienna Kant and Derrida on Acting out of Duty In this paper I draw attention to Derrida's renegotiation of Kant’s differentiation between acting out of duty and acting according to duty. Kant’s understanding of duty draws its strength from his attempt at founding the freedom and autonomy of the will of the subject independent of any heteronomical legitimation. Derrida, however, attempts to show that, because of the very alterity of otherness, acting out of duty towards the other means acting in excess of duty. My presentation examines these two concepts, not strictly opposed to each other as it is widely thought, but rather as completing each other.

Eleanor Kaufman - Session C30 Department of Comparative Literature and French and Francophone Studies, University of California, Los Angeles The Jewry of the Plain: Archives and Cemeteries This paper uses psychoanalysis to explore the relation between the cemetery and the archive in the context of turn-of-the-century Jewish settlement in the American West and Great Plains. It uses the work of Jacques Derrida to examine the archive, the museum, and the cemetery as sites of documentation of a fleeting diasporic community: the Jewish homesteaders, small town settlers, and cowboys who settled in the American West between the 1880s and 1930s. Whereas the museum gives a wholeness and exactitude to the artifacts it displays, the archive and the cemetery provide glimpses into those stories that have been irretrievably lost. In discussing the way the archive embodies a story of absence, of loss, of traces and symptoms and mishaps, I draw extensively on Derrida’s Archive Fever.

Adam Kelly - Session B22 PhD Candidate, Modern English and American Literature, University College, Dublin Derridean Decision and the Singularity of Literature I argue in this paper that Jacques Derrida’s analysis of the moment of decision in his late work can enhance our reading of narrative fiction. In many recent American novels, for example (Morrison’s Beloved, Roth’s The Human Stain, Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides), a decision seems to lie at the structural core of the narrative. How the decision is read is key to how other elements in the text are understood; yet critical work to date has shied away from direct confrontation with the moment of decision. Derrida’s own interest in literature has focused on the relation it stages between singularity and generality. This relation is also central to his thinking on decision. I wish to link these two strands of his work, and argue that Derrida’s decision is not a speech act, but a moment of complex agency with no verbal equivalent, a moment central to the singularity of many literary texts.

Colm J. Kelly - Session C28 Department of Sociology, Saint Thomas University The Trace, the Animal, the Social Part of a larger project attempting to ‘countersign’ an infrastructural (following Gasché’s formulation) “arché-sociality” in Derrida’s work, this paper first examines the themes or threads of the trace and the arché-trace, suggesting that a re-thinking of biological concepts of inheritance, mutation, and selection can be discovered there. This opens out to “man’s” constitution of what is proper to “man” through the conceptualization of animality, and through relations to “the animal” [for example, in domestication, breeding, and training]. The arché-trace would make possible, and mark and work over the limits of, this distinction between human and animal, leading, in turn, tentatively, to the notion of arché-sociality: that is an originary sociality without origin, which, in Derrida’s puzzling formulation, “appears as soon as a society begins to live as a society, that is to say from the origin of life in general” (Of Grammatology 130-131.)

S.K. Keltner - Session A9 Department of History and Philosophy, Kennesaw State University The Being-up-until-death of Sexual Difference: Derrida and the Meaning of Finitude In the context of an examination of philosophical accounts of death as the individuating principle of identity in The Gift of Death, Derrida raises the question of sexual difference: “Let us note in passing that in none of these discourses we are analyzing here does the moment of death give room for one to take into account sexual difference; as if, as it would be tempting to imagine, sexual difference does not count in the face of death. Sexual difference would be a being-up-until-death.” Though The Gift of Death does not follow out this suggestion, it raises a host of questions indispensable to evaluating the relationships among philosophy, feminist theory, and other discursive evaluations of finitude, such as psychoanalysis and art. This essay explores Derrida’s suggestion and asks whether there is a singular structure and meaning of finitude or whether finitude should be conceived as multiple and polymorphous.

Gray Kochhar-Lindgren - Session B19 Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences, University of Washington-Bothell Following Derrida’s Teaching: Transformative Hauntology and the Twenty-first-Century University Working primarily out of Who’s Afraid of Philosophy and Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy 2, I will pass through Derrida’s readings, and let his readings pass through us, in order to elucidate the idea of the university in the 21st century. In particular, I will focus on how Derrida’s writing, which has always been political, can help us transform ourselves into a “new” university through relationships of difference to knowledge formation, communities of learners, and ghosts.

Rauna Kuokkanen - Session A16 Post-Doctoral Scholar, Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition, McMaster University The Logic of the Gift: Does it remain impossible? Of all theorists, Derrida has most rigorously argued the impossibility of the gift. In my paper, I argue that the gift is impossible when it is located within the exchange economy informed by colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy. Conversely, the gift is possible only in specific circumstances outside the logic of exchange. The gift is possible only when the circle of exchange – in which the gift returns back to the original giver in the form of a counter-gift – is disrupted (Given Time 9). I suggest that the circle of exchange is disrupted by indigenous gift philosophies that do not limit the gift to mere exchange, countergift, and debt. Interactions and relationships are perceived and thus discussed in a different manner by this disruptive logic of the gift. In my paper, I examine the relationship between Derrida’s theory of the gift and the logic of the gift in indigenous peoples’ philosophies.

Kir Kuiken - Session C27 Department of English and Comparative Literature, University of California at Irvine Between Two Futures: The Question of Techne in Derrida’s reading of Marx If the notion of even multiple “Legacies” of Derrida’s work implies a certain kind of temporality, a before and an after, then at least one of Derrida’s legacies is to call this temporality itself into question. What my paper proposes is a reconsideration of the temporality or logic of the “future anterior” that Derrida inherits from Heidegger as a way of re-thinking techne and technology away from its delimitation as a “prior” disclosure of Being. I read this uncertain or contested legacy as emerging out of two different relations to Marx. Derrida, on the one hand, positions Marx as “one of the rare thinkers of the past to have taken seriously…the originary indissociability of technics and language.” Heidegger firmly places Marx within the history of the forgetting of Being, while nevertheless asserting that “the essence of materialism is concealed in the essence of technology.” The difference between these two readings marks an undecidable legacy of Derrida that makes itself felt in the unfolding of two irreducible logics or temporalities of the future anterior.

Mourad Laabdi - Session A2 MA Candidate, Department of Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam Islam and Derrida: Islam as the Undecided in Derrida’s Thought? Among the three Abrahamic monotheisms, Islam remains the most absent/present religion in Derrida's writings on “Religion.” Islam has also been rarely approached when applying Derrida to a polemic religious issue like the “renewal of Islam.” This paper focuses on Derrida’s work in relation to the issue of “religious difference and violence,” and investigates its complex involvement with contemporary Islam. On the one hand, this paper tries to decipher why and how Islam is, at the same time, visible/invisible and decided/undecided in Derrida’s work. On the other hand, it reconsiders Derrida’s logic of the “religious difference” in an attempt to draw attention to the cognitive split between Islam as both “the religious” (a-ddin) and a “religion” (a-ddiyana). Derrida’s deconstructive reading of the religious/religion aporia is very important to better understand this question of “renewing Islam” and thus to relocate the emergence of violence in the name of the “religious.”

Michael Lang - Session C31 Department of History, University of Maine Intelligibility and Globalization This paper focuses on Derrida’s understanding of globalization. It argues that his rethinking of this concept informs a broader change in his treatment of intelligibility and the other. In Derrida’s critique of Lévi-Strauss, he describes decolonization as a geopolitical implosion destabilizing the West’s presumption of presence and intelligibility. Anthropology attempts to interiorize the irruption of difference, but the project is already being undermined by the dislocation itself. Derrida thus insists that the differencing of the West can only be regarded as “mute,” without intelligibility. By the 1980s, however, the polemic of decolonization appears to be dissipating under global Western hegemony. Decolonization remains a political fact, but of limited explanatory power. Derrida no longer regards the differencing as mute and turns instead to the transforming spaces of the globalizing process that now offer limited intelligibility.

Leonard Lawlor - Session B18 Department of Philosophy, University of Memphis The Animal and Rogues: Concerning the Concept of Life in Derrida This essay will take up the concept of life in Derrida. As we can see in Of Grammatology (1967) the Derridean concept of life is not biological or natural; it cannot be defined by the Greek idea of zoõn. What indeed defines life for Derrida is the possibility of repetition and therefore language in the most minimal sense. Iterability (like a machine) deprives life of force - life in Derrida is always defined by this weakness - but iterability is the potential for force or the virtuality of more life (sur-vivre). Iterability both destroys and saves the singularity of a life, a singularity to come. But insofar as life in Derrida (as in Deleuze and Foucault) is defined by singularity, life (not lived-experience) is capable of erring and wandering (errer). Therefore life is never defined by sovereignty. Rather, life (and language, the very characteristic that defines the human) consists of rogues that carry sovereign power away ("emporter" would be the French verb needed here).

Adam Lawrence - Session C29 PhD Candidate, Department of English Language and Literature, Memorial University of Newfoundland Human-Fairy Hybrids: A Folkloric Reading of Derrida’s “Hostipitality” In this paper I argue that the changeling motif of Irish folklore, which involves the substitution of a withered fairy child for a healthy human one, finds a compliment in Derrida's exploration of “hospitality,” which he describes as the ordeal of housing, looking after, and being overtaken by my potential enemies. In “Hostipitality” (2002), Derrida examines this sense of detainment and finds that “child substitution” is the “substitution par excellence,” since the child, the successor and link in the chain of filiation, is irreplaceable. Derrida posits hostipitality as a kind of abduction where the home is possessed and transformed by the entrance of the stranger. As I argue, the presence of a changeling in the “home” threatens to overturn all natural ties in place of supernatural or unnatural ones, so that being “hospitable” means inviting into one's own environment elements that may harm, pollute, and even hybridize the familiar location of identity.

Miriam Leonard - Session C29 Department of Classics and Ancient History, University of Bristol Oedipus in the Accusative: Derrida and Levinas In his well known opposition between Odysseus and Abraham, Emmanuel Levinas contrasted the illusive search for the other in Greek thought with the radical commitment to absolute otherness in the Hebraic texts. This paper investigates Derrida’s dialogue with Levinas in the terms of this opposition between the Greek and the Jew. It explores how the discussion of the Greek limits of philosophy is played out against the background of a debate about ethics and hospitality. Its main focus is Derrida’s exploration of the role of the host as hostage to the demands of his guest in his reading of Sophocles’s Oedipus at Colonus. By analyzing Derrida’s investment in a specifically Greek tradition of asylum, this paper also calls into question the much publicized Hebraic underpinnings of Derrida’s ethical programme.

Melanie Lewis - Session C25 PhD Candidate, Department of Religion, University of Manitoba Reading Heidegger’s Poetics through Derrida’s Spectrum: Rhythm, Haunting, and Mourning in “Language in the Poem” In Of Spirit Derrida describes “Language in the Poem” as one of Heidegger’s richest and most problematic texts, to whose collocutionary gesture, mode, and relation to poetics he hopes to do justice elsewhere. My paper builds upon Derrida’s analysis of the spectral modality of Heidegger’s Gespräch with Trakl. I approach the question of rhythm in the essay through an interpretation of its spectral structuration, and I propose that the sister who haunts Heidegger’s text haunts its poetics as well, figuring a rhythmicity contrapuntal to its grammar. Relating the sister to Heidegger’s reading of Antigone in Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister,” I demonstrate the way in which she haunts by providing espacement; by signaling a connection between temporality and pain; and through a collocutionary mode of interpretation I read as structurally analogous to melancholic mourning.

Victor Li - Session C31 Department of English, University of Toronto Why Derrida Prefers Mondialisation to Globalization Jacques Derrida has asked provocatively: “Why do the English, the Americans, and the Germans speak of globalization and not (as the French do) mondialisation?” Rather than reflecting a francophone bias, Derrida’s preference calls attention to a distinction between mondialisation, with its reference to a world “charged with a great deal of semantic history,” and “globalization,” with its air of objective inevitability. Derrida’s careful distinction accomplishes two critical tasks. First, the term mondialisation specifies a history for the seemingly objective processes of globalization, thus allowing a deconstructive analysis of globalization’s European, Abrahamic-Christian, and Roman filiation. Second, the genealogical deconstruction enabled by the historicity of mondialisation opens the world to the unforeseeable and the incalculable. Mondialisation thus permits us to think of a world that is still before us, not a world already globalized or totalized in advance by teleological schemes.

Alphonso Lingis - Session C29 Department of Philosophy, Pennsylvania State University Tact and Caress Derrida uncovers in Levinas’s text two different relationships with the other irreducible to intentionality. There is the ethical relationship with the face of the other—touching as tact—and the carnal relationship enacted in caressing, which is profaning, disrespecting, murderous. The ethical relationship opens upon a future of responses and responses to the other’s responses, without end. The caress is a form of insatiable craving that seeks without knowing what it seeks. The femininity that is caressed is anonymous, infantile, animal, irresponsible and calling for irresponsibility. Levinas’s language betrays the irreducibly antiethical nature of eroticism. We “once again see in this. . . a religious ascendancy, a filiation of virile, paternal, fraternal, always phallocentric fantasies.” But the section of Levinas’s Totality and Infinity devoted to eroticism proves to be a pivot of Levinas’s work, for it engenders the new understanding of the ethical relationship with the other in Otherwise than Being.

Clark Lunberry - Session A7 Department of English, University of North Florida The Theater and its Derridean Double: Derrida’s Theater of Thought The words theory and theater derive from the Greek theoria, signifying the act of beholding or witnessing. Derrida was to take this etymological coupling to heart, enacting within the witnessing of his writings a theatricalized theory, a theorized theater. Such work is presented in Derrida’s analysis of Artaud where he engages Artaud’s efforts to understand something of his own thinking, its relationship to representation, to theater. For Artaud’s fear was that he had “forgotten how to think,” that his thought was “crumbling,” that he hadn’t yet “begun to think,” while his desired theater was to offer the cruel space within which thinking itself might finally start. How is this space to be imagined and, as Derrida asks, “Under what conditions can a theater today legitimately invoke Artaud’s name?” Might Derrida’s own “scene of writing” and the espacement engendered there offer a kind of theatrical response to Artaud’s investigations into thought?

Nick Mansfield - Session C26 Department of Critical and Cultural Studies, Macquarie University “Under the Black Light”: War, Spectrality and Deconstruction In Adieu, Derrida outlines Levinas’s inversion of the Kantian argument that peace is an act of culture instituted in and against a natural field defined by ferocious violence. Instead, for Levinas, peace considered in terms of hospitality as the definitive enactment of ethnicity always precedes war, and war always contains an irrepressible trace of the peace it denies and dissimulates, and that continues to haunt it. In The Politics of Friendship, Derrida deconstructs Schmitt’s concept of the political, defined in relation to “the real possibility of war,” as unable to repress the spectrality inherent in its imagination of what is to-come. Peace emerging through war: the aim of this paper is to bring these two readings together to show the ambiguity of spectrality in Derrida—simultaneously promise and danger, promise in danger—and in order to illuminate Derrida’s later discussions of war and terrorism.

Mustapha Marrouchi - Session A11 Department of English, Louisiana State University Derision Never Comes in Tears This paper pays tribute to a mind so fine, a mind that read the word contrapuntally and from below. Derrida was so perversely myopic a reader, doggedly pursuing the finest flickers of meaning across a page, that he exasperated some of his opponents with his originality and subtlety, not airy generality. As an exegete, Derrida was superb: his commentary on Plato, for example, is hugely enlightening. My intention is to read him as a man who contained multitudes—the outsider who managed to break through in a closed-in society, the émigré avec papiers, and philosopher-critic to boot.

Pamela McCallum - Session A10 Department of English, University of Calgary Questions of Haunting: Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx and Raymond Williams’s Modern Tragedy Both Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx (1993) and Raymond Williams’s Modern Tragedy (1963) address the question of how the present is haunted by the persistence of past revolutions. Although separated by more than a generation, the two writers both reflect on moments of crisis for the left and the work of mourning that ensues: in Specters of Marx, it is the collapse of the former Soviet Union and the disappearance of cold war superpower oppositions; in Modern Tragedy, it is the revelations of Stalinism in 1956 that prompts an exploration of reversals of revolutionary aspirations. This paper focuses on Derrida’s analysis of the Communist Manifesto (chapter 4) and on Williams’s analysis of tragedy and revolution (chapter 1). My purpose is not so much to work through a comparison of the texts under consideration, but to construct a dialogue between Derrida and Williams that will foreground crucial questions for critical reflection.

Matthew R. McLennan - Session A8 PhD Candidate, Department of Philosophy, University of Ottawa Archiving “the Native”: A Derridean Impression Derrida’s reading of the archive, in conjunction with his critique of structural anthropology, may serve as a fruitful starting point for a meditation on the scope, value, and future of ethnography. The Greek roots of the word “archive” denote commencement and commandment, remembrance and authority. On this reading, contemporary projects carried out with the aim of transcribing and archiving the traditional oral story-telling of indigenous peoples offer a revealing glimpse of an ambiguity at the heart of ethnography. The archiving of transcribed field recordings renders an invaluable service to cultural memory, especially where the looming disappearance of oral traditions is concerned. However, in capturing and archiving frozen snapshots of these dynamic traditions, the ethnographer thereby produces “authoritative” versions of folktales—and this “commencement and commandment” is arguably out of step with the nature of the traditions with which she is concerned. This ambiguity lends itself to analysis in a Derridean spirit.

Martin McQuillan - Session A4 Centre for Cultural Studies, University of Leeds Hölderlin in America What is the legacy of Yale? More specifically, what is the legacy of the Derrida-de Man nexus, still cited with horror by cultural conservatives and blamed for the ruination of American academic life? This paper will read the Derrida essay “Le Parjure” and the Henri Thomas novel of the same name, which offers a fictional account of de Man's early years in America. The essay explicitly treats the topic of legacy, indeed an unwelcome legacy in which Derrida discovers the bigamous past of his friend and colleague through a chance encounter with the Thomas novel. My reading will concern reading itself, and by implication, the effects produced in America by the Derrida-de Man academic axis. I will be concerned with infidelity: infidelity to reading, infidelity as reading, infidelity to the academy, to philosophy, and to an idea of America, and to a certain idea of Europe.

William D. Melaney - Session A15 Department of English and Comparative Literature, American University in Cairo Derrida’s Religious Difference: Autobiography and Postcolonial Reason Derrida’s brief autobiography, Circumfession, can be read as an engaged response to the two-fold dilemma of a besieged colonial outsider. This literary text demonstrates how Derrida’s use of the French language is culturally overdetermined on the basis of his uneasy relationship to “metaphysics” (i.e. Plato, Augustine, and patristic commentary). Hence, the first part of the paper emphasizes how Derrida dismantles the traditional appropriation of Augustine to monological discourse. However, Derrida’s work not only unfolds on the margins of “Europe” but also highlights the marginal religious status of its (historical) subject. For this reason, the second part of the paper takes up Derrida’s childhood memories of French anti-Semitism in colonial Algeria during the Vichy period. The conclusion of the paper will discuss how Derrida’s autobiography employs the notion of religious difference in contributing to the critique, rather than the mere affirmation, of postcolonial reason.

Maureen Melnyk - Session C32 PhD Candidate, Department of Philosophy, DePaul University Plotting an Ellipse: Derrida on Sovereignty and the Event Derrida’s final texts traverse an elliptical orbit around two foci. One is the concept of sovereignty and its entanglements with, and production of, three fictional or phantasmatic figures—self, state, and God—as it asserts and maintains its authoritative force and sovereign power. The other is the notion of the event as an unforeseeable and unknowable happening entailing an openness to the arrival of who or what comes, and therefore also an openness to an ethics detached from the mastery and foresight associated with the sovereign rule of reason. I contend that Derrida employs the notion of the event in the deconstruction of this concept of sovereignty and the phantasmatic fictions it produces, such that his theorizations of the event challenge these three manifestations of sovereignty. In addition, following the elliptical path traced by this deconstructive move illustrates the interconnectedness of the event and sovereignty in Derrida’s later works.

Peter Milne - Session A6 PhD Candidate, Department of Philosophy, Emory University The Infinite “Without”: Rereading Derrida Reading Kant In his later work, Derrida explicitly takes up the notion of “event” and its relation to the “powerful teleology” that he argues has guided the tradition of Western philosophical thought. “Event” here is described as that which happens or arrives only once, which is always singular, unforeseeable, incalculable, and which thus comes to disrupt the teleological horizon of Western thinking. In fact, this notion is present throughout Derrida’s writings and structures his notion of the “to come,” at some level the starting point of the political aspect of his work. This paper will “reread” Derrida’s analysis of Kant’s aesthetics in light of this figure of event, arguing that through this rereading new light can be shed on the relationship between teleology, event, and thought’s “infinite task” that not only works to elucidate Derrida’s “later” concerns with politics, but aids us in conceiving of a politically empowered aesthetics.

Eddis Miller - Session A2 PhD Candidate, Religious Studies, University of Pennsylvania Toward a New “Reflecting Faith”: Derrida’s Religious Legacy The latter part of Jacques Derrida’s life was marked by an increasingly intense engagement with questions and themes pertaining to religion. How are we to read these contributions? What is their legacy? Does Derrida have a “religion,” and should he be read as a “theologian”? In this paper, I will argue that an understanding of Derrida’s contributions to the study of religion, whether philosophical or theological, is still to come, and that the difficulty and profundity of these texts lie in the complex relationship between religious and philosophical discourses. I will show that, contrary to the claims of certain commentators, Derrida maintains that there is an irreducible oscillation between revelation (Offenbarung) and revealability (Offenbarkeit), an oscillation that opens the space for a new “reflecting faith” in the spirit of Kant’s Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft, but simultaneously exposes any theological appropriation to insurmountable risk.

Annie Moore - Session C25 PhD Candidate, Department of Comparative Literature, University of California at Irvine Derrida and Celan: Reading after Ghosts This paper attempts to transpose Derrida’s “being-with specters” as a work of mourning into a parallel “reading-after specters” as a work of hospitality. In order to do so, it considers Derrida’s work in relation to poet and Shoah survivor Paul Celan. Both Derrida and Celan labour at mourning by allowing ghosts to hold them hostage, and by granting them the hospitality of coming again, of arriving as guests rather than returning as ghosts. Such an arrival requires us to learn how to talk with ghosts, how to let them speak or how to give them back speech by listening. Celan’s poems are able to offer his ghosts their own speech in a mode of (im)possible, absolute hospitality; similarly, for Derrida this hospitality requires precisely an abstention of breath and language. Indeed, all that remains of the ghost is its breath (or its speech) and perhaps its text, to which we must return so that it can come again and always.

Marie-Eve Morin - Session A14 Department of Philosophy, University of Winnipeg The Community of Witnesses: Derrida Inheriting Husserl and Blanchot The thesis of this paper is that the community of witnesses represents for Jacques Derrida the essential structure of the social bond. To achieve a better understanding of this community of witnesses, I want to show first how the necessity of testimony for Derrida is the result of the radicalization of the crucial insight of Husserl in his Cartesian Meditations, namely the fact that the alter ego can never be given to me in an original way. Furthermore, I want to show how this radicalization is best understood when one turns to Maurice Blanchot, who emphasizes speech instead of perception as the fundamental way of reaching the other. We will then be in a better position to understand how the witness is always singular and can yet, by promising to tell the truth, share her singular experience of the world with other singularities without losing her otherness.

Lee Morrissey - Session A9 Department of English, Clemson University Is Adieu A Word of Welcome? Derrida’s Legacies for the Condition of Reading With this memorial conference, we are now doing for Derrida what Derrida so often did for his friends: thinking about our memory of the other, after the other’s death. This means that Derrida’s late work can guide us in how to respond to his death. Derrida contends that “mourning provides the first chance and the terrible condition of all reading” (Work of Mourning 220). Reading occurs between the mortal and the immortal. The resistance to reading turns out to be a resistance to death, which is also a resistance to part of living. This ambi-valence is what is so important about the tension in the title and the action of this conference: legacies, from the Latin, “lego, legere” (“to read” and “to choose”) and “lego, legare” (“to ordain,” “to appoint”).

John Mowitt - Session A14 Departments of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities “Reason thus Unveils Itself” This paper offers a reading of the figure of the veil in the texts of Fanon and Derrida that seeks to pose the following questions: how does anti-colonialism figure pivotally in the encounter between phenomenology and Marxism that we call deconstruction? What does sexual difference—indeed feminism—between Judeo-Christianity and Islam have to do with this encounter? What is the relation between writing—the textile and texture of communication—and a distinctly post-colonial intellectual? Answers to such questions will prompt consideration of what is fast becoming a received opinion, namely, that theory, once bereft of its nourishing link to political movements, lapses into reaction. Or, from a different angle, theory's power derives precisely from the degree to which it appropriates and thereby defuses insights worked out first in the colonial world. Derrida's figure of the veil pressures us to think differently about these accounts of theory and its power.

Miriam Nichols - Session A16 Department of English, University College of the Fraser Valley Derrida’s Gift: The Turn to Love in The Gift of Death Derrida’s attention to religion in The Gift of Death brings deconstruction directly to bear on lived experience. The persistence of religious feelings (love and mourning, for instance) and the significance of these for ethical thinking suggests that experience, despite Nietzschean demystification and an epistemological bad name, cannot be easily reasoned away. Can Derrida help us to re-think our relationship to Otherness without intellectual embarrassment? In this paper, I will argue that his “gift” to ethical thinking is a hesitation between belief and make-believe, the effect of which is to retain a turn toward the Other (as in a turn to face) while suspending dogmatic content. Such a turn recalls Walter Benjamin’s messianic “waiting” time and it suggests the possibility of measuring social acts from the projected perspective of a redeemed humanity.

Rebecca L. Nicholson - Session A3 PhD Candidate, Theory and Cultural Studies, Purdue University Jacques Derrida “On Forgiveness”: Repentance, Coercion, and Reconciliation in the Public Apology I explore how Derrida conceptualizes “true” forgiveness, specifically in his essay “On Forgiveness,” where he takes the broad idea of forgiveness and examines it in light of its inseparability from other concepts that become attached to it, specifically repentance and reconciliation, related themes that along with others, are “confounded, sometimes in a calculated fashion” with forgiveness (27). I also address the potential for forgiveness in the political dimension, specifically where Derrida questions forgiveness as an ethico-political possibility. By differentiating between reconciliation, political bids for forgiveness, and “true” forgiveness, I argue that Derrida problematizes the politicization of repentance and reconciliation while at the same time imagining a forgiveness that can function beyond these categories.

Ida Nursoo - Session A17 PhD Candidate, Political Science Program, Australian National University “En attendant Démocratie”: Derrida, Cosmopolitics, and Temporality This paper engages the debate on the implications of Derrida’s work for “thinking of the political.” Taking his intervention on the subject of rights for asylum seekers as its point of departure, it explores Derrida’s ideas on the “foreigner question,” hospitality, cosmopolitanism, and “democracy to come,” suggesting that, unlike many political theorists of cosmopolitanism, Derrida locates the political in the timing of cosmopolitanism rather than in its constitution or implementation. It is with reference to, and in the performance and play of, temporality, this paper contends, that Derrida asserts his “political moment.” Like Beckett’s Godot, his “democracy to come” appears as the hesitation of an event, which, present by virtue of its absence, oscillates undecidably between the two possibilities: “to come? Or not to come?” It is the ghost of the undecidable. Yet Derrida’s cosmopolitics assumes that the politics of the future must lie in an establishment of the past, the metropolis, and it celebrates, decidedly, the legacy of the city of refuge in its Judaeo-Christian-European past. This invocation of a given past seems to be at tension with the undecidability upon which the political moment is predicated. The paper explores this tension by examining “temporality” as a tool for “thinking of the political.” It suggests that the Derridean political moment is challenged when the aporia of undecidable politics turns upon itself.

Patrick O’Connor - Session A1 Department of Philosophy, National University of Ireland, Galway Derrida’s Legacy: A World of Responsibility This paper theorizes how Derrida’s deconstruction signifies a fundamental existential alterity. We will examine the use of both the “sacred” and “faith” as tropes to express this possibility. Our hypothesis will articulate how deconstruction, as a development of phenomenology, provides a theoretical nexus where the alterity of things and persons may be thought. We will thus arrive at the paradoxical formulation of “ontological alterity” as a key moment in deconstructive thinking, arguing that deconstruction offers the resources to think the relation between other persons and things in the world motivated by both Heideggerean worldliness and Levinasian alterity.

Michael O’Driscoll - Session B18 Department of English, University of Alberta “The great scene of the legacy”: Derrida, Freud, and the Future of Repetition This paper examines the relationship between the operation of the legacy as Derrida configures that term and the role of the Freudian repetition compulsion in what we might call the “archival technologies” of theory. Derrida’s correlation of the legacy and repetition automatism makes possible an ethical engagement with deconstruction by virtue of the archive’s openness to the future. This paper will juxtapose Derrida’s treatment, in The Post Card, of little Ernst's game of fort/da, which Derrida calls “the great scene of the legacy,” with what Derrida calls, in Archive Fever, the “fatal performative” in his critique of Yerushalmi's reading of Freud's Moses and Monotheism. For Derrida, it is this great scene and the resulting impossibility of textual foreclosure that opens up “l’avenir,” or the future-to-come that gives theoretical ground for promise and hope, for “the attempt to make a difference” in the words of this conference’s organizers.

Kim Olynyk - Session C30 PhD Candidate, Department of English, University of Manitoba Derrida’s “Inconsolable Nostalgia:” The Impossible Work toward Unifying a Concept of Resistance In his book Resistances of Psychoanalysis, Derrida, compelled by a personal “inconsolable nostalgia” and love for the word “resistance,” proceeds to write on its performative functions in Freud. My paper examines Derrida’s desire to repose the question of sense and analysis itself by incorporating and rereading Freud’s own resistances. Derrida reveals Freud’s desire to unify a concept of resistance and stabilize meaning through the work of interpretation; and through his own playful deconstruction of Freud, Derrida traces the deferred and differential character of language and expression, in the process destabilizing any unified, original or totalizing sense of resistance. Although Freud does not incorporate an analysis of his own hidden resistances within a hermeneutics and epistemological understanding of the role of an analyst in the interpretive process, Derrida suggests ways of recognizing resistances as belonging to a different register, one that remains hidden and secretive from the logic of sense, yet always unfolds alongside that which resists it.

Patricia Palulis - Session A1 Faculty of Education, University of Ottawa In the hospes of the text: mourning [with] Derrida . . . un/e pleurant/e . . . Provoking un droit de visite, a reader wrenches the “reads” from Derridean texts and from those who write nearby. Reading Wolfreys reading Germain’s La Pleurante des Rues de Prague, mourning begins in the spaces in-between authors. Un/e pleurant/e. Accustomed to seeking refuge in the hospes of Derridean texts, a reader is drawn to the (im)possibility of hospitality. In Paper Machine, Derrida welcomes the reader into the text as guest. Sans-papier, a reader arrives without identity papers. And Derrida must answer to his own performative contradictions comme un hôte: “Paper is me . . .Paper: my home.” Wolfreys re-articulates traces of Derridean discourse: “Il y a là écriture: There is writing. Writing is there … awaiting reading. Memory of the other before the event. We've not yet begun to read.” Perhaps we’ve not yet begun to mourn [with] Derrida. Mourning is yet to come.

Brett Parker - Session A10 PhD Candidate, Department of English, University of Calgary “In the future, remember to remember the future”: Jacques Derrida and the Legacy of Critical Resistance At last year’s MLA conference in Washington, D.C., Nagugi wa Thiong’o characterized our present with a phrase, once common, now almost repressed: we are living under the shadow of certain death. With the urgency and force of this phrase in mind, I turn to Derrida’s Specters of Marx in an attempt to conceive of a critical intervention that can mount a resistance to the injustice of our present. I argue that, for Derrida, the responsibility of the present, which arises out of a call for justice, must do without the security or certitude of a performative armory—without a politics or an ethics. Derrida’s conception of critical resistance opens up a space in which the recognition of an unjust political, material, cultural reality can develop into a multifaceted, diverse, and active offensive on the complex network of power relations that work to maintain the status quo.

Raja Sekhar Patteti - Session A2 Department of English, Acharya Nagarjuna University The Comparative Dialectics of Deconstruction and Ambedkarism Ambedkarism has evolved into Derridean deconstruction, which is the study of rock bottom reality. Derrida, with his polemical writings, subverted the hierarchy of western thought and philosophy. Long before that, Ambedkar initiated the process of subverting Indian philosophical hierarchy. Ambedkar subverted the philosophy of Hinduism by dismantling the graded hierarchical caste structure of India, lucidly exposing the Hindu scheme of Divine Governance laid bare in the Manusmrithi. The purpose of the paper is to explore crucial comparative issues that relate these two intellectual giants: Derrida and Ambedkar.

Claire Potter - Session B18 Doctoral de Recherches en Psychoanalytique, Université de Paris VII “And every fair from fair some-time declines”: Line 7, Sonnet 18 under the shadow of a Derridean umbrella, or spectres of Shakespeare revisited This paper considers Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 under a Derridean lens. Positing the line: And every fair from fair some-time declines as the sonnet’s axis, the paper investigates how repetition and rhyme can be understood as poetic “folding points,” or what Derrida might have called un lieu d’insistance, where the work redoubles upon itself. Arguing that “specters” in Derrida are synonymous with “time,” just as “writing” in Shakespeare is synonymous with “immortality,” I take the central question for the paper to be how a rapport between shadow and writing in Sonnet 18 permits an understanding of spectres and écriture in Derrida. I argue that the answer lies in Derrida’s writing on enklisis. The inclination of the hand towards the page is an example of a spectre whose shadow is writing: Every fair from fair some-time declines may therein be read as a “falling” towards the scene of writing that in fact permits its “coming- to-stand” (In-sich-stehen).

Adam Rosen - Session C30 PhD Candidate, Department of Philosophy, The New School Impossible Mourning: Before the Legacy of Jacques Derrida We bear the weight of the dead, and so we cannot simply live. Living is survival - and mutilation. Implacably, we bear death, are death-bearing, even, or especially, toward the dead, toward the dead to, for, and before whom we are responsible (for the future). This paper asks how endless grievance and thus endless responsibility could not provoke a certain death-bearing relation toward the dead, even as we bear their desires and projects toward fruition? That is, how could a certain anger, anxiety, or loneliness fail to be provoked by loss, a loss all too easily felt as an abdication consequent upon a prior idealization? Such questions are posed through the texts of Jacques Derrida in order to begin a reflection on his loss, a reflection that must precede, yet is already suffused with, the question of legacy, of what has been or should be passed on, of what is due and what is to be done.

Arina Rotaru - Session A12 PhD Candidate, Department of German, Cornell University Derrida’s Hermeneutics of Recognition My paper unfolds various meanings of recognition in Derridean thought, along two main coordinates, the ethical and the spectral. The ethical is encoded in the non-intentional phenomenology of Levinasian inspiration, and in such recurrent motifs as the gift, the recognition of the stranger, the promise, or the act of inheritance, caught in the subtle movement of filiation and genealogy. The greeting as well as the listening to would be further moments of recognition as acknowledgment. The spectral side of recognition is the arrival of the déjà-vu, the power of anamnesis, the mise en abyme and chiasmus, the recognition that comes before cognition, the memory of the immemorial, of writing about the entirely other in crossing the path of the same. The paper will raise the question of the relation of recognition to language and survival, while exploring the limits of the transition from the ethical to the esthetical of spectrality.

Alan Roughley - Session B22 Department of Arts and Humanities, Liverpool Hope University The “Literary” Jacques Derrida and Deconstructive Anthony Burgess: From “Punctual Positions” to “Grouped Textual Fields” This paper explores the influence of Joyce’s writings upon Derrida’s solicitation of the ideological form of the book and his identification of the mechanical, textual operations that he articulates in texts such as Writing and Difference, Dissemination and Glas. It uses Derrida’s “undecidables” to remark the deconstructive strategies of Anthony Burgess’s The End of the World News. In that novel, Burgess resurrects his birth name of John Wilson to write a Foreword to the posthumous novel of Anthony Burgess, temporarily killing off Anthony Burgess in order to write something about his “literary” self from the position of his other, pre-literary self. He reinvents himself as a distant relative of the American Burgess who invented the term “blurb” in order to write a dust-jacket blurb about The End of the World News by the deceased author, Anthony Burgess. His subversion of the traditional ideological form of the book begins in the “outside” of the blurb and continues in the triptych of narratives about Freud, Trotsky, and the reincarnation of Falstaff as a bawdy New York poet. This triptych repeats the function and operations of Joyce’s and Derrida’s “grouped textual fields.”

Kas Saghafi - Session C33 Department of Philosophy, University of Memphis To Follow Him How do we follow Derrida? One of the many questions posed by the multivalent title of the conference, “Following Derrida: Legacies” is “Who gets to inherit Derrida?” Not simply, who gets to inherit from him, but also who are the rightful inheritors of Derrida? In other words, who gets to speak for and about him? Unlike many great thinkers, Derrida neither favored a core of faithful disciples nor encouraged the development of a school or movement to carry on his thought. Further, there seem to have been no signs in his writings or demeanor that he ever wanted to assume the role of the master (Lehrer, magister), whom Kant dubbed “the legislator of reason.” What, then, would it mean to follow him? What better way to investigate this question than to turn to what Derrida had to say not only about mastery (and discipleship) but also about “following” in his writings?

Russell Samolsky - Session C28 Department of English, University of California, Santa Barbara Specular Capture: Derrida, Dogs, and the Scene of Torture The question my paper poses is this: what happens when the animal enters the human scene of torture? I begin with Derrida’s analysis of what is at stake when his cat subjects his naked body to its unsettling gaze. My paper then shifts from the occasion of Derrida’s unsettlement and his deconstruction of the human/animal dichotomy that has structured Western philosophy to the terror of dogs snarling at naked Arab bodies in the torture chambers of Abu Ghraib. Here I analyze the role of the dogs and dog handlers in the reduction of the detainees to “bare life.” If the tortured detainee is placed in the traditional position of the dog, the dog seems to be elevated to a position that demonstrates a closer kinship with Western humans. The significance of this paper lies not only in its relating of Derrida on sacrificial structure to Agamben’s recent work on the question of the animal, but also as my counter-signing response to Derrida’s provocative question “and say the animal responded?”

Steven D. Scott - Session A15 Department of English Language and Literature, Brock University Reading/Derrida/Reading/Spielberg: Derrida’s Acts of Religion and/in/on Spielberg’s Munich I wish to use Derrida’s Acts of Religion, including, but not exclusively, its notion of the “Abrahamic” religions, to unpack and complexify readings of Spielberg’s Munich, and to use Spielberg’s film, in turn, to unpack Derrida. The “Abrahamic,” in brief, refers to Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, assigning theological weight to Judaism, political weight to Islam, and a kind of wavering indecisive movement between those two poles to Christianity. Munich brings that schema to life, only to hopelessly entangle it: the traditional “theological” group becomes, in fact, a political force; the political group begins to resemble a fanatical religious sect; and the wavering group moves to the center, as the action examines sexual stereotypes, clichéd notions of the nuclear family, and utter American misunderstanding and misreading of a complex, nuanced, profoundly historical situation.

Marta Segarra - Session A4 Department of French and Francophone Literature and Cinema, University of Barcelona Politiques de l’amitié et de la traduction: Derrida et Cixous Nous lirons L’amour du loup d’Hélène Cixous, corps à corps avec Politiques de l’amitié de Jacques Derrida, surtout pas dans le but d’y déceler des influences ou même des connivences, ou encore des différences, mais comme événement de cette « amitié poétique » (JD) ou affinité électrice qui lie les textes de Cixous et Derrida, même ceux qui ne s’adressent pas directement l’un à l’autre. Notre analyse – qui se veut à son tour une lecture amicale, dans le sens du respect sans éloignement et de la dissymétrie caractérisant l’amitié, selon Derrida – part de la phrase « Ma conscience me mord la langue avec tes dents », titre du texte liminaire de L’amour du loup. La métaphore de la dévoration nous conduira aussi à la traduction « relevante », en rapport avec l’amour et en tant que « acte cannibale » (de Campos).

Garry Sherbert - Session C32 Department of English, University of Regina Canadian Cultural Autoimmunity: Derrida and the Essence of Culture Although he has written about religious and political autoimmunity, Derrida has not explicitly written about an autoimmunity specific to culture. If we define culture as social identity, as Derrida has in The Other Heading, then the danger is that a culture may become a closed community based on some characteristic of shared sameness which leads to the exclusion of some individual or group possessing different characteristics. Derrida points implicitly to a structural feature of culture that suggests the need for immunity against its own immunity, or defences, a structural non-identity that I call “cultural autoimmunity.” Cultural autoimmunity discovers an aporia in culture as a concept of social totality, or “whole way of life.” I will explore this aporia in the Canadian cultural preoccupation with its lack of identity; the paradoxical notion of “citizens plus” applied to Canada’s First Nations; and Hubert Aquin’s description of French Canada’s contradictory desire for “both existential intensity and suicide.”

Hugh Silverman - Session C33 Department of Philosophy and Comparative Literature, SUNY Stony Brook Respons-abilities for Legacies: Jacques - on vous suit à travers vos textes Questions of responsibility and legacy pervade much of Jacques Derrida's later work. How can there be a response when someone is no longer living? How can one respond to the loss of someone whose importance cannot be measured by the response? What ability does one have to respond when there cannot be a response "in return?" Can there be communication across texts? In what sense do texts perform the event of communication, response, legacy? Legacy is what is left. In what way are left texts—texts that are left—places of the event of respons-ability: the capacity to respond, to write again, to write in another hand, to reply without any expectation of a response, and yet to write nevertheless?

Jonathan Singer - Session B22 School of English and Liberal Studies, Seneca College A Post Script: Derrida's Post Card and the Crisis of Divisibility in the Epistolary Novel This paper argues that Derrida’s epistolary theory in La carte postale is particularly germane to an analysis of meaning and performance in eighteenth-century epistolary novels, whose plots in turn illustrate and affirm the “divisibility” that Derrida posits at the heart of the letter, and uphold his debated claims about the letter’s identity and destiny. Specifically, the threatened heroines and ardent lovers of the classical epistolary novel strive to transcend epistolary mediation by producing letters that manifestly prove the truth of the sentiments they describe. Derrida identifies, however, an intrinsic, genetic duality of the letter—simultaneously medium and object, referential and rhetorical—that prevents any exorcism of the possibility of calculated performance. The crises motivating classic epistolary novels become, therefore, effects of and responses to the deconstructive law and legacy of the letter form, as the genre’s plots explicitly confront the very crisis of self-evidence that the letter’s divisibility makes inevitable.

Anais N. Spitzer - Session A11 PhD Candidate, Philosophy in Religion and Myth, Pacifica Graduate Institute Soliciting Derrida’s Tears: To Think Sa Otherwise In Glas Derrida demonstrates that absolute knowledge [savoir absolu] is always already faulted and incomplete. This incompleteness occurs not on account of the insufficiency of knowledge, but by virtue of its very nature. Through an exploration of Derrida’s use of the myth of Saturn (in which he makes an association between Saturn [Sa] and savoir absolu [Sa]), this paper proposes to think Sa otherwise. His text reveals that the myth functions as a tear in the logical operations of Sa. From this ruptured seam, myth—the other of logos—is secreted. In writing logos otherwise, Derrida inscribes philosophy’s secret(ion). This secret is the tear of myth that returns to disrupt structures designed to exclude it, including the structuring of knowledge. Such a tear—that Derrida bids be saved in order to “play seam against seam”—solicits a re-examination of the task of thinking and the goal of knowledge.

Elina Staikou - Session A1 Research Fellow, University of London Re-markable Singularities: Translation, Testimony and the Question of the Idiom In Derrida’s Monolingualism of the Other, a “monolingual” addresses a plea and an injunction to his (or her) future readers, the “translator-poets,” to invent in their language if they can or want to hear his (or hers). A double injunction and a double bind: to listen with a keen ear and to affirm and disrupt, to touch and keep intact, to incise and seal, to attest and keep secret, to translate and not to translate. For Derrida, a translation and a testimony worthy of its name (but what does “worthy of its name” mean?) is the event of invention upon the summons of a singular and idiomatic other, the marking of the literal body of a unique re-markability, that is, of a heterological law a priori open to its own transgression, to the coming of an unpredictable and each time singular arrivant.

H. Peter Steeves - Session C33 Department of Philosophy, DePaul University Department of Philosophy, California State University, Fresno There Shall Be No Name Language, like all carnivores, lives by means of the corpse—the carcass of the sign, the mourning that lingers in the sounding of the depths of words. Writing, especially, participates in the risks of mourning—a hazard, Derrida reminds us, marked by the lure of “closure.” Once written down, the word exists without its author. Lyotard’s discussion of the two deaths (Socrates and Auschwitz) for which there shall be no mourning is always with Derrida, ringing, even, in his eulogy for Levinas. As we recall this eulogy, Shakespeare’s sonnet LXXI provides our counterbalance. Names, we know, not only are a making-present, but an invocation. In the intimacy of name-saying, we see the death of the name as the impossibility of mourning. And in the secret lamentation of name-writing, we see the inevitable grief of language as the necessity for mourning. And, yet, if there shall be no name…?

Michael Thomas - Session B22 Department of English, Nagoya University of Commerce and Business Being Hospitable to Derrida: Intolerance and the Literary Reception of Deconstruction This paper discusses the frequently hostile literary reception of deconstruction against the background of Derrida’s concern with tolerance, sovereignty and hospitality. Derrida’s “reception” (or non-reception) in literary studies confirms his own critique of tolerance as protective of its, in this sense, intellectual sovereignty. Opposed to this limited notion of tolerance is Derrida's idea of a “pure and unconditional hospitality,” that is open to someone who is neither expected nor invited, to whomever arrives as an absolutely foreign visitor; in this case, Derrida himself. Divided into three parts, the first section of this paper examines Frank Lentricchia’s (1980) distinction between Derrida and the Yale School critics. The second section focuses on Paul de Man’s use of deconstruction as a form of aesthetic ideology critique. Finally, I examine Barbara Johnson’s reading of deconstruction as a political strategy based on hospitality to the foreign visitor in her essay, “Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion.”

Josh Toth - Session A1 PhD Candidate, Department of English, University of Western Ontario A Certain Perhaps: The Decisiveness of Derrida’s Indecision Seemingly, to “follow” Derrida is to embrace the ironic promise of the perhaps, the spectral promise of a truly ethical (because truly paradoxical) mode of thought, a mode of thought always yet to come. The problem, though, is that Derrida articulates this promise as a philosopher of the perhaps. In doing so, Derrida suggests that the future of the perhaps is not, itself, a condition of the perhaps. This cannot be dismissed as a simple accident. Derrida’s endorsement of the perhaps cannot avoid becoming an imperative, an ethical appeal that is, itself, anterior to the ordeal of the perhaps. What Derrida’s mode of endorsement suggests, then, is that ethical decision making can never endure the ironic doubt of the perhaps. The ordeal of indecision, the ordeal of the perhaps, must be endured. About this need for doubt, we can be (if we follow Derrida) certain.

Joanne Valin - Session A6 PhD Candidate, Department of English, University of Manitoba Tulips, Anemones, and Other Rootless Blooms: Gathering Breath and the Sans of the Pure Cut in Derrida’s Posy This paper considers Derrida’s readings of Kant’s sublime tulip and Plato’s narrative of Socrates’ pharmakon, particularly with reference to the gardens of Adonis. My feminist/deconstructionist questioning will focus on Derrida’s narrative gathering of rootless blooms: the tulip—cut—(which is of air, so to speak. It is not rooted, nor is its representation) and the anemone, which is literally “of breath” (trans. from Greek) and which Adonis becomes after his death. It will follow the ways these terms of air and conceptacle are bloomings of an/Other—the “O” signifying the sans, literally “the without”—as sexuate expression, and as an expression of encounter with the sublime, one which seeks to disrupt the Western patrilineal notion of ground, of semination and logos.

Joris van Gorkom - Session A6 Faculty of Philosophy, Tilburg University What If…? Derrida on Secret, Respect and Specter Kant’s attempt to legitimize the moral law let him into a domain that remains more or less a secret. The only relation between the moral law and the law of nature is an analogy based on the formal structure of the laws formulated as an “as if”: “act as if...” This analogy allows the moral subject to universalize the maxim that guides the action as long as this universalisation does not lead into a contradiction that annuls the moral law. However, Kant was unable to preclude all intuitive aspects, for he introduced the feeling of respect in his ethics. Both the secrecy of the law and the notion of respect fascinated Derrida. In order to reformulate Kant’s “as if” Derrida referred to the spectrality of respect, which enabled him to understand the “as if” in relation to…a future event that cannot be expected: “What if…?”

Amy Villarejo - Session A8 Department of Theatre, Film & Dance, Cornell University Tuning In: Television and the Virtual Archive Moving from Archive Fever to Paper Machine, with Echographies in between, this paper opens a set of questions about television as a (raced, gendered, and sexualized) archival machine. The paper is part of a larger project on television's queer history that argues for the centrality of recognition to the televisual field. This project tries to work against the closed circuit of identity politics while retaining the conviction that recognition, if (to borrow Derrida's formulation) of the "wholly other," nonetheless sustains coherence and is as necessary to the operations of virtual machines as it is to their precursors. This reading of Derrida, then, links televisual recognition to those themes that preoccupied him in the writings before his death (blood, animals, sovereignty, hospitality, capital punishment and so on), with the goal of understanding what Derrida might have called the architectonics of the televisual.

Rea Wallden - Session A13 PhD Candidate, Department of Philosophy, Cardiff University From Semiotics to Metaphysics: the spatio-temporal epistemology of deconstruction In this paper, I argue that Derrida’s view of human communication and his critique of Western metaphysics are inseparable and depend on spatio-temporal infra-structures. I think that deconstruction derives from and extends the structuralist project, while showing its epistemological limitations. I am investigating why what appears as a theory of language ends by questioning the entire system of Western metaphysics and I attempt to show that a kind of spatiality and temporality are its epistemological conditions of possibility. The leap from semiotics to metaphysics is construed through the questioning of the stability of the difference between epistemological orders, which is simultaneously the product and the pre-supposition of the deconstructive endeavour. Derrida is unique in proposing the most radical and consistent epistemological critique of Western metaphysics. He has provided us with a shock of self-recognition. It is my belief that we can use it as a tool for change.

Badea Warwar - Session A15 PhD Candidate, Department of English, York University The Specter of Beginnings: Derrida and Frankenstein Where do we go after the last sky? Is it a question of destiny or destination? The last dot of the last word of the last sentence has been written; can we write? There are no more tears left to shed; what is mourning in the absence of tears? The specter is here haunting us. But what/who haunts the specter of all haunting? If the cruelty of the end is what opens the possibility of spectrality, it is the monstrosity of the beginning, of beginning (giving birth) that constitutes every apparition and all departures. To conjure up the specter, we must therefore speak from the beginning (Of Grammatology) about beginnings (birth) and the monstrosity of that experience (Frankenstein). This textual detour (from the present to Of Grammatology and from Of Grammatology to Frankenstein) is not to retrace or read Of Grammatology via Frankenstein but to read Of Grammatology as Frankenstein. The obsession of both texts, Of Grammatology and Frankenstein, with the question of birth—as the former systematically represses and displaces it while the latter freely indulges in it—renders them, and in spite of their differences, the same text. Frankenstein is Of Grammatology’s unofficial and absented autobiography; the specter text and the text that today haunts our/the specter.

Simon Morgan Wortham - Session B19 School of Social, Historical, and Literary Studies, University of Portsmouth Counter-institutions and the “Double Keeping” of Jacques Derrida This paper follows Derrida according to a double gesture found in his writings on the university. Guardianship of knowledge, tradition, and the institution entails keeping what one “does not have” and “what is not yet”—a singular responsibility (in a nearly “unsituatable” situation) to what is neither in one’s keeping nor purview. Precisely when the highest degree of fidelity is observed, the professor’s bearing witness to the profession includes the irreducible supplement of the false or fictive. The promises one makes while in the university are therefore necessarily kept and broken in a single gesture (witness the Bodleian oath recited in “Envois”). Such ways of thinking about following, legacy, and the university raise questions of the counterinstitution as much as the countersignature. Counter-institutional possibility arises not on condition of a purely alternative model: instead, the ‘counterinstitutional’ is to be found at the always impure and divisible origin of the institution.

Robert L. Zacharias - Session A3 PhD Candidate, Joint PhD in Literary Studies/Theatre Studies in English, Guelph University “And yet”: Derrida on Benjamin’s Divine Violence In “Force of Law,” Jacques Derrida spends some thirty pages offering a sympathetic reading of Walter Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence,” re-inscribing its process and extending many of its conclusions. In a six-page “Post-Scriptum” added to the essay a year after its first presentation, however, Derrida places many of the conclusions of his essay into doubt through a sudden questioning of Benjamin’s work. Referring to “Critique of Violence” as “this strange text,” Derrida’s post-script reads Benjamin’s essay though the lens of the Holocaust, expressing fears that Benjamin’s theory of “divine violence” is all too close to the logic of the final solution. Tracing the source of Derrida’s concerns, I want to read the hesitation of his post-script as an example of Derridean ethics.

Fereshteh Zangenehpour - Session A11 Department of English, Göteborg University A Burst of Laughter: A Derridean Reading of Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, or The Royal Slave For Oroonoko, to be both royal and slave is to dwell within the split of self, a division that mirrors the Hegelian dichotomy of the master/slave relationship, which, according to Derrida, is a restricted economy that reproduces meaning. However, by an undeducible act of liberty, Oroonoko finally succeeds in exceeding the limits of his inner struggle, and thereby in dying as a sovereign. The difference between lordship and sovereignty, Derrida explains, is a burst of laughter, which expresses a non-discursive existence. In his essay “From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve,” Derrida discusses the question of laughter or excess by referring to Bataille’s reinterpretation of Hegel’s discourse on the question of the dialectic of the master and the slave, where Bataille considers laughter as “the unique interval which separates meaning from a certain non-meaning.” Derrida’s reading of Bataille’s concept of laughter is the focus of my paper, in which I examine Oroonoko as a sovereign, as a totally other.

Peter Zeillinger - Session A7 Institute for Fundamental (Foundational) Theology, University of Vienna Derrida’s More-than-performative Speaking (of) the Event Jacques Derrida’s unfolding of discourses of the event forms a heritage that has not been fully acknowledged. In the 1997 Montréal seminar “Dire l’événement, est-ce possible?” he summarizes these discourses of the gift, of forgiveness, confession, testimony, hospitality, invention, promise, and even religion and belief. As these topics are linked by certain performative gestures of speaking (the “perhaps” or the “future anterior,” which marks a confession that can be proved only retroactively) the presentation will focus on how these gestures affect our understanding of reading a text or thinking the political. In his late texts, Derrida criticizes the notion of the performative as it might still refer to a strong subject (actor, agent), and tries to think the event as “symptom.” The paper will conclude with a thesis on the “dire l’événement” of deconstruction as a symptom of the ethical and political event to-come.

Panels

Panel: After Derrida: Histories of the Present - Session A5

1) David L. Clark - Session A5 Department of English and Cultural Studies, McMaster University “The Palestinians, living among us”: Kant’s Neighborhoods In Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), Kant describes the European Jews as “the Palestinians, living among us.” What then is Jewish “life” for Kant, at once proximate and foreign, extraneous to rational humanity and an irreducible part of the history of Europe? Informed by what Levinas calls “the ethics of the neighbor,” Derrida’s late work on the question of “vivre ensemble” points out that being with others is both anticipatory (living together is always to come) and unavoidable (how could one live otherwise?). “Living together” thus names the relationship between absolute intimacy and infinite distance, whose aporetic nature accounts for Kant’s contorted reflections on who constitutes the “neighbor.” Kant’s remark recalls the Levitical injunction to “love” the “stranger that resides with you ”as if he were a “neighbor,” but he over-writes this other categorical imperative because it emanates from a Rabbinical tradition that is foreign to the body of a certain Enlightenment philosophy. Kant treats those who had been commanded by God to welcome foreigners as both foreigners and unwelcome, but I argue that this disavowal registers a more profound dispossession.

2) Dennis Desroches - Session A5 Department of English Language and Literature, Saint Thomas University The Archiviolithic Text(Book): Derrida and Scientific Knowledge Dissemination This paper interrogates something of both the politics and the philosophical presuppositions of textbook knowledge production and dissemination–what I am calling “textbook thinking.” The phrase is meant to recall the centrality of a certain ethos regarding knowledge transmission which, without question, not only dominates how knowledge is transmitted to students in the academy, but just as importantly, if less frequently acknowledged, determines the very task of the intellectual. My paper questions, specifically, the nearly unquestioned efficacy of the textbook model of knowledge and challenges the very competence of the textbook for the task it is universally assigned as placeholder of, and archive for, truth. In this regard, Derrida’s thought on the archive is indispensable for reconceiving how it is that the academy–and more specifically for the purposes of this paper, the “exact sciences”–represents to and for itself the dissemination of scientific knowledge. My paper demonstrates what Derrida means by the “archiviolithic” by comparing the manner in which scientific textbooks represent the Newtonian notion of colour with Newton’s own ruminations on the subject from the Opticks.

3) Dana Hollander - Session A5 Department of Religious Studies, McMaster University Derrida on “Philosophical Nationality” In the writings that came out of the seminar cycle on "philosophical nationality and nationalism" (1984–1988) (the best known of which are the essays on Europe published as The Other Heading), Derrida explored the idea that philosophy is challenged in a special way by discourses of national affirmation, and that philosophy must therefore approach the question of nationality in a way that departs from the way it has been conceived by social science and political philosophy. This paper will look at some aspects of this project as it took shape in the seminar and in published writings, particularly Derrida’s reflections on the conceptions of language that are involved or invoked in discourses of national affirmation. I will also suggest that this material sheds an interesting light on earlier texts by Derrida on Heidegger’s privileging of the Greek, and on his remarks, in “Violence and Metaphysics,” on Levinas’s negotiation between the Jewish and the Greek.

4) Tilottama Rajan - Session A5 Canada Research Chair in English and Theory, University of Western Ontario The University Outside the Nation: Derrida After Foucault In his recent work Derrida has taken up explicitly the question of the university implicit in his earlier concern with “writing,” “(intellectual) history” and “science.” This paper reads Derrida’s analysis of “university reason” alongside Foucault’s reflection on the human and countersciences in The Order of Things, which outlines a “deconstructive university.” It thus frames deconstruction within a history of organizations of knowledge, approaching it as fundamentally a project pertaining to the university. Although Derrida rarely engaged with Foucault on the archive/archeology of knowledge, their epistemo-critical projects during the period of the university crisis have much in common. Derrida’s early work can thus be approached through Foucault’s more explicit articulation of deconstructive reason as part of a history of rationalities. On the other hand, as Foucault after 1968 abandoned the idea(l) of a university to come, turning instead to power and governmentality, it was Derrida who brought the question of the university back into the public sphere, so as to deal precisely with the relation between the university outside the nation and the realities of discursive power.

Panel : Five Faces of Derrida - Session B24 Convener and Session Chair: Bent Sørensen This panel focuses on aspects of Kirby Dick and Amy K. Ziering’s 2002 film Derrida, and its implications for our posthumous reading and following of Derrida. The panel will feature three short presentations, each accompanied by a clip from the film. The three papers in the first part of the panel offer different takes on the relationship between bios and graphein in the case of Derrida and his oeuvre. These papers represent three faces of Derrida; the film constitutes a fourth, in itself many-facetted Derridean face. As the fifth element of this presentation, we aim to create another text to represent the final face, in the form of a round table, where the conversation is initiated by five sets of questions posed by the convener and answered by the five of us: the presenters, the convener himself, and a spectral Derridean presence.

1) Steen L. Christiansen - Session B24 PhD Candidate, Department of Languages, Culture, and Aesthetics, Aalborg University Why I Have Never Seen Derrida It seems peculiar that a film about the one person who has been so emphatically opposed to the metaphysics of presence is so dependent on this very thing. The film wavers awkwardly between the desire to celebrate the myth of Derrida, following him when a new Derrida archive is inaugurated, and yet also wanting to deflate the same myth. In the end, what we see on the screen is not really Derrida, either as academic outlaw or as family person. This paper will focus on the peculiar impossibility of showing Derrida, using the tools of film studies to situate the film as documentary and biography, and indicating how the film never succeeds, nor possibly could succeed, in capturing the signifier behind the many representations it delivers of “Derrida.”

2) Søren H. Balle - Session B24 MA Candidate, Department of Languages, Culture, and Aesthetics, Aalborg University On Derrida’s Difficulty, or, How to Appreciate Derrida as a Late Romantic Derrida’s writings are notorious for their difficulty. Philosophers as well as literary critics have, for instance, found it hard to determine which genre Derrida’s texts belong to. Does Derrida write philosophy or literature? And Derrida is also difficult in the sense that reading him is often considered to be almost impossible. Yet, if his readers have difficulties with his writings, it seems that Derrida has his own difficulties as well. The film Derrida is a good example of that. A number of times during the film Derrida is asked to discuss crucial events in his life such as how he and his wife first fell in love, personal traumas, and the death of his mother. Without exception he refuses to answer and wards off the questions by remarking that these things are “too difficult,” “too complex” or “impossible” to talk about. This short paper deals with Derrida’s ambivalence towards biographical narrative in Derrida, suggesting that this represents perhaps one of his least recognized personae – that of the late, maybe even the last, Romantic in Europe.

3) Camelia Elias - Session B24 Department of Languages, Culture, and Aesthetics, Aalborg University Transmitting (to) Derrida Derrida is preoccupied with transmission. Inspired by the transmitting philosopher persona we witness in the film Derrida, this paper picks up the phone and attempts to transmit back to Derrida what this preoccupation is all about. My starting point is the particular framing of acts of communication performed by/in the film. What media such as the telephone or the fax machine point to, at least as we have them represented in the Derrida film, is that they act as framing devices. I would suggest that one of the messages being transmitted even while transmission is cut is that Derrida’s thought becomes a matter of existential close-ups that dictate between interruptions: “I frame therefore I am.”

4) Bent Sørensen - Session B24 Department of Languages, Culture and Aesthetics, Aalborg University A Dialogue on Derrida/Derrida The cluster of five dialogue themes consists of “Framing” (What are the repercussions of the insistent meta-dimension to the film and to much of Derrida’s writing?), “Transmission” (What is the role of the signature in transmission, and what does the signature sign?), “Faces” (Have we confused faces with masks, have we seen any of Derrida’s faces in the movie, have we touched (upon) any of them in our papers?), “L’amour ou La mort?” (Is love worthy of the philosopher’s attention, and if not, why should the literary critic bother to do the philosopher’s dirty work?) and “Archives” (Must we write differently about Derrida now that his archive has found its final resting place, or should we focus even more upon the belated supplemental portions of Derrida’s bios and graphein? How do we do so without undue reverence and sentimentality?).

Panel: The Legacy of Derrida's Early Writings and Kates's Essential History - Session B23 Moderator: Bernard Rhie Department of English, Williams College

1) Joshua Kates - Session B23 Department of English, Indiana University Response and Responsibility: The Legacy of Derrida’s Early Writings In Essential History: Jacques Derrida and the Development of Deconstruction, I present a reading of Derrida that sees him as much more committed to positions in Husserlian phenomenology than other commentators have suggested to date. Derrida, I claim, used these positions as a springboard to outstrip the finally less radical questioning of a Merleau-Ponty, or even a Heidegger. Without siding with Husserl in the first place, however, in matters like intersubjectivity, the status of essential knowledge, and even the character of historicity, Derrida’s radically novel brand of thought would neither be possible nor persuasive. This panel explores various aspects of my argument: the notion of development, Derrida’s early engagement with Levinas, Rorty’s reading of Derrida and its political valence. I will respond to these responses—all in the name of furthering a novel evaluation of Derrida’s legacy.

2) Jay Lampert - Session B23 Department of Philosophy, University of Guelph What Is An Early Work? Joshua Kates’s brilliant book shows that Derrida in his early works only gradually developed a critical stance towards Husserl, and that this history explains the “quasi-transcendental” Husserlianism that Derrida retained throughout his career. But what does it mean to speak of “early works” in a Derridian context? For Husserl, the concepts of early and late, i.e. of anticipations and fulfillments, are central to a phenomenology of time. But these are aspects of Husserl that Derrida problematizes. Should Kates not apply Derrida’s critique of teleological development to Derrida’s “development”? Derrida himself, in the (“early”) essay “Force and Signification,” criticizes developmental readings of authors. But if we replace concepts of early and late with a new relation between simultaneity and delay, what can still be said about the relation between Derrida’s early and late writings, and therefore between phenomenology and deconstruction?

3) Andrew Payne - Session B23 Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, University of Toronto Derrida Today: Thinking between Language and Life The difference between the current intellectual climate and the one in which Derrida’s writings first found a North American audience is perhaps most apparent in the displacement of the privilege that deconstructive thought awarded to language (as figure or type of the self-differentiation of Being) onto the concept of life, albeit a life conceived in putatively post-vitalist terms. As Giorgio Agamben observes, this shift from language to life implies a related shift from the quasi-transcendental perspective that Derrida establishes in his early engagements with the problem of genesis in Husserl’s phenomenology to an immanentist perspective, one whose most convincing apologist is perhaps Derrida’s friend and contemporary, Gilles Deleuze. In this paper I will undertake to discuss Derrida’s own engagement with the question of life in his middle and late writings, showing how it both extends the thematics of trace, absolute past, and arche-writing developed in the early work on Husserl, and offers critical leverage on the life philosophy advocated by Deleuze and his various epigones.

4) Richard Wellen - Session B23 Division of Social Science, York University Politics and the Limits of Philosophy: Kates on Rorty on Derrida In his recent work, Essential History: Jacques Derrida and the Development of Deconstruction, Joshua Kates points out an important common ground between the work of Derrida and Richard Rorty, both of whom acknowledge the limits of philosophy. After examining Kates’s lingering reservations about Rorty, I argue that there may be something valuable to be won from Rorty’s strange and perhaps self-contradictory project of “compartmentalizing” and drawing limits around theory and philosophy. In particular, Rorty praises deconstruction for its indirect political utility, largely by helping to establish a distinction between private irony and social hope. He argues that by helping to foster a post-philosophical culture, deconstruction will help clear the way for the development of more responsible political stances on the part of “theorists.” This issue is explored by looking at the political implications of deconstruction and comparing Derrida’s and Rorty’s views on political responsibility.

Panel: La Puissance et la vitesse - Session B20

1) Laurent Milesi - Session B20 Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory, Cardiff University La puissance et la vitesse: Reading H.C. pour la vie, c'est-à-dire . . . This paper explores how, in Derrida's study of Cixous, speed (vitesse) and a new linguistic modality of might (puissance) connect to life (vie) in Cixous's work. At stake is the conceptual revitalization of phrases like en puissance, beyond the opposition between act(uality) and potentiality, “for life,” and vivement as a replenished substantive. The potential of the subjunctive, crossing into the actual and the indicative, will be discussed as a key mechanism in Derrida's reading, and such an empowerment allows the play on the affirmative power of si in comme si, turning a virtuality into potency and a felicitous homophony into a chance necessity. The following question will provide a wider horizon of analysis throughout: how does this puissance square with Derrida's previous attempt to redefine the (im)possible, for example in Aporias, concerned with death? It is Derrida's fascination for this other "side" of life that ultimately separates him from Cixous, against which this alliance of puissance and vitesse "for life" will be tested.

2) Ginette Michaud - Session B20 Département d’études françaises, Université de Montréal H.C. pour la vie, c'est à dire . . . ou le « vivier du vivement » pris à la lettre Derrida a toujours accordé une grande importance à la question de la sur-vie dans la pensée de la trace dès ses commencements : « Tous les concepts qui m’ont aidé à travailler, notamment celui de la trace ou du spectral, étaient liés au ‘survivre’ comme dimension structurale et rigoureusement originaire », dit-il dans Apprendre à vivre enfin (p. 26). La crypte littéraire joue à cet égard un rôle crucial. La « littérature », ou plutôt quelque chose qui déborde en elle cet « espace de la littérature » même, semble en effet garder, à ses yeux, une capacité d’ouverture, une hospitalité infinie à l’endroit de cette question. Nous souhaitons interroger quelques-unes des lignes les plus « puissantes » ouvertes par Derrida dans H. C. pour la vie, c'est à dire . . . au sujet du « comme si » de la fiction littéraire, de la « vitesse » et de ce qui arrive ici même, dans le « vivier du vivement » à la lettre entre Cixous et Derrida, comme survie.

3) Mahité Breton - Session B20 PhD Candidate, Littérature Comparée, Université de Montréal Rêve qui peut : la pensée du rêve dans Fichus Dans son discours de réception du prix Theodor W. Adorno à Francfort en septembre 2001, Jacques Derrida laisse venir une pensée du rêve, dans les deux sens de cette expression : une pensée qui pense le rêve et une pensée qui serait sécrétée par le rêve. Le rêve survient d’ailleurs à plusieurs reprises dans les écrits du philosophe, lorsque ce dernier ouvre la réflexion à quelque chose d’autre, de différent, d’impossible, même, qu’il ne saurait faire tenir dans son discours autrement que grâce à cette formule : « je rêve ». Qu’est-ce qui se joue dans ce syntagme ? Comment Derrida le fait-il jouer dans la langue, et au sein d’une institution comme celle qui lui décernait le prix Adorno ? L’exploration de ces questions, en dialogue avec des textes d’Hélène Cixous, se veut une façon de répondre à, de poursuivre et de transmettre, l’interpellation urgente qui perce dans le discours de Francfort.

4) Marie-Joëlle St. Louis Savoie - Session B20 PhD Candidate, Département d’études françaises, Université de Montréal Poétique testamentaire de l’hommage : l’usage de la citation selon Jacques Derrida Dans H. C. pour la vie, c'est à dire . . ., Derrida témoigne de l’amitié partagée avec Hélène Cixous qui, dit-il, aura sans cesse pris parti pour la vie alors qu’il se sera toujours inquiété de la mort, tourment conférant à l’hommage une portée manifestement testamentaire. S’inclinant devant la vie et l’œuvre de l’amie, le philosophe recourt souvent—fort lentement et amplement—à la citation afin de rendre compte de la pensée de celle qu’il considère comme l’un des plus grands écrivains français. Dans ce livre où se renouent après Voiles des fiançailles poétiques, le philosophe se refuse à simplement citer la parole de Cixous, s’engageant plutôt sur la voie de « la décision la plus responsable et la plus inventive, la plus irruptive, la seule qui compte : la lecture contre-signante » (p. 85). Nous nous proposons d’étudier certains des aspects et des effets toujours déjà posthumes de cette « offrande oblique », en privilégiant ici cette question de la citation.