The Text and the Living. Derrida between Biology and Deconstruction, in The Oxford Literary Review, 36.1 (2014): 95-114. (original) (raw)
Related papers
Introduction Learning to Live Finally, Jacques Derrida's last interview, released when death was imminent, suggests that we take a step back and reread his oeuvre on the track of life: As I recalled earlier, already from the beginning, and well before the experiences of surviving [survivance] that are at the moment mine, I maintained that survival is an originary concept that constitutes the very structure of what we call existence, Dasein, if you will. We are structurally survivors, marked by this structure of the trace and of the testament. But, having said that, I would not want to encourage an interpretation that situates surviving on the side of death and the past rather than life and the future. No, deconstruction is always on the side of the yes, on the side of the affirmation of life. Everything I say—at least from Pas (in Parages) on—about survival as a complication of the opposition life/death proceeds in me from an unconditional affirmation of life. 1 Along this reverse path, we encounter autoimmunity and the religious, the community and the political; the animal and the bestial associated with sovereignty; survival and testimony, Blanchot and literature. However, to grasp the sense of these apparently recent traces, we shall go further back and shed light on a more or less explicit engagement with life sciences (paleontology, ethology, and, above all, biology and the theory of evolution) since the very first steps of deconstruction. We shall consider the investigation of life not only an issue of deconstruction but the latter's very matrix; we shall think différance as the irreducible and structural condition of the
The Text and the Living: Jacques Derrida between Biology and Deconstruction
Oxford Literary Review, 2014
This paper gives an account of work in progress on ‘Derrida and Biology’ that takes its point of departure from Derrida's unpublished seminar La vie la mort (1975), the first six sessions of which are devoted to biology and, in particular, to the work of François Jacob, a genetic biologist known for his research on the DNA structure and the laws of heredity in the organization and evolution of the living. This seminar shows that Derrida's engagement with biology is already at work in his earliest texts, and in particular in Of Grammatology, where biology functions as the horizon in which notions like ‘differance,’ ‘archi-writing,’ ‘trace,’ and ‘text’ find their genetic-structural foundation and articulation. The goal is to demonstrate that only within this horizon one can understand the statement ‘there is nothing outside the text’ as well as the notion of the ‘general text’, widely misunderstood as the thesis of a hyperbolic hermeneutics.
Reading the Programme: Jacques Derrida's Deconstruction of Biology
Postmodern Culture, 2019
In the unpublished seminar La vie la mort (Life-Death) (1975-76), Derrida reads The Logic of Life by the biologist François Jacob. The seminar is oriented to answer a question already advanced in Of Grammatology: what are the deconstructive effects-if any-provoked by grafting the theory of information onto biological research, and in particular by the use of notions such as "programme" and "writing"? This essay shows how Derrida deconstructs the biological notion of "programme," reading its definition in light of the dynamics of différance. In the seminar La vie la mort, Derrida's reading of François Jacob's The Logic of Life is explicitly oriented to verify the following hypothesis, advanced in Of Grammatology (1967): It is also in this sense that the contemporary biologist speaks of writing and program in relation to the most elementary processes of information within the living cell. And, finally, whether it has essential limits or not, the entire field covered by the cybernetic programme will be the field of writing. If the theory of cybernetics is by itself to oust all metaphysical concepts-including the concepts of soul, of life, of value, of choice, of memory-which until recently served to separate the machine from man, it must conserve the notion of writing, trace, gramme, or grapheme, until its own historico-metaphysical character is also exposed. (9) Throughout La vie la mort Derrida explicitly recalls this hypothesis, as well as the reasons for critical vigilance about it, and thus he also offers a verification:
Research in Phenomenology, v. 40, 2010
In a move that has puzzled commentators, Derrida’s The Animal that Therefore I Am rejects claims for continuity between the human and the animal, aligning such claims with the ideology of “biologistic continuism.” This problematization of the logic of the human-animal limit holds implications for how we are to understand life in relation to auto-affection, immanence in relation to transcendence, and naturalism in relation to phenomenology. Derrida’s abyssal logic parallels the “strange kinship” described by Merleau-Ponty, though only if this strangeness is intensified as “hetero-affection” by incorporating death into life. Following Merleau-Ponty and Elizabeth Grosz, we locate the creative moment of this abyssal intimacy in the transformative productions of sexual difference. This positive account of the excess of hetero-affection reconciles phenomenology with evolution and offers a figure for thinking the thickening and multiplying of the differences between human and non-human, living and nonliving, corporeal and cosmic.
Futures of Life Death on Earth: Derrida's General Ecology (Introduction)
Published December 2018 with Rowman & Littlefield International in series 'Future Perfect: Images of the Time to Come in Philosophy, Politics and Cultural Studies.' Uncorrected Proofs of Table of Contents and Introduction. Life on Earth is currently undergoing its sixth mass extinction, also known as the Holocene or Anthropocene extinction. Along with innumerable organic species and individuals, the majority of the planet’s indigenous languages and cultures – the planet’s ‘biocultural diversity’ – is now threatened with its irrecoverable loss. This book simply asks what kind of future we want for the Earth, one of sustainability or one of extinction, and what thoughts of temporality, alterity, materiality, mortality and survival might underlie such a choice. Departing from Jacques Derrida’s unpublished 1975-6 seminar Life Death, the author elaborates a notion of ‘general ecology’ as one way to respond to this loss, in conversation with Bataille, Blanchot, Deleuze, Esposito, Foucault, Heidegger, Husserl and others. This work will prove essential to those working at the intersections of continental philosophy and the environmental humanities, as well as those interested in biopolitics, new materialism and speculative realism.