Mauro Senatore

• Adolfo Ibáñez University

This article focuses on Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive re-elaboration of the tradition of mechanicism, from the Cartesian animal–machine to contemporary scientism. It shows that Derrida does not counter this tradition by resorting to the metaphysical presupposition of Freedom – as sovereign independence from the machine – which secures the tradit...

Jacques Derrida had never written a book on “freedom.” This word occurs very rarely in his writings until the late ’80s; since then, he had increasingly employed it, but with circumspection. In this article, I aim to show that we can trace a thinking of freedom throughout Derrida’s work and that this thinking describes a singular trajectory from th...

In Of Grammatology (1967), Jacques Derrida explains that Western culture undergoes a transformation of knowledge and discourses that unfolds as the gramma­tization of experience. By resorting to the code of writing (grammē), as the elementary code of experience, modern sciences call into question ontological regionalism, that is, their traditional...

On the occasion of the publication of Derrida's unedited seminar Geschlecht III: Sex, Race, Nation, Humanity (1984-5, 2018), which includes significant pages on Heidegger's discourse on animality, this article proposes reopening the dossier that the French philosopher had dedicated to that discourse throughout his work. It aims to elaborate an over...

In his influential essay “Signature, Event, Context” (1972), Derrida puts forward a shocking appraisal of Austin’s ground-breaking doctrine of the performative. He interprets Austin’s treatment of the failures that may affect performative utterances as the repetition of the traditional philosophical treatment of the negative. In this article, I wil...

In this article, I focus on the reading of Heidegger's Kant that Derrida offers in his recently published 1978-9 seminar Donner le temps II (§§12–3). Here Derrida tracks across Heidegger's text the auto-affective or auto-dative structure (namely, the originary synthesis of spontaneity and receptivity) in which the Kantian conceptions of the experie...

In this article, I aim to cast light on the genetic analyses of the apperception of the other that the phenomenologist Marc Richir develops in his late masterwork Phénoménologie en esquisses (2000). My reading hypothesis is that these analyses consist in the original contribution that Richir makes to the standard phenomenological account of empathy...

Where do centaurs come from? In his 1904-05 lectures, Husserl sketches an answer to this question that draws on his original doctrine of phantasy (Hua XXIII, text n.1, §38). Centaurs, he argues, results from the phenomenization of phantasy appearances, namely, from their condensation into the image of a perceptual object that may have never been in...

In his recently published 1975–76 seminar on Life Death (§3), Jacques Derrida offers a severe critique of French epistemologists and philosophers of life. On Derrida’s view, they do not seem to be concerned with the question of the metaphoricity of metaphor but, rather, by taking the epistemological cut between (inadequate) metaphors and (adequate)...

In their recent work in phenomenological psychopathology, Andreas Rosén Rasmussen and Joseph Parnas argue that there is an expressive relationship between the anomalies of imagination reported in schizophrenic spectrum disorders (SSDs) and an underlying generative self- or ipseity disorder. The authors build their argument on an updated review of t...

This article focuses on two indices from Geschlecht III session XIII: (1) an apparently insignificant reference to Stiegler and (2) the recourse to the concept of the engram as a trope of other grammatological figures that are more frequent in Derrida's work. By interweaving these indexes together, the article suggests that Derrida's text can be re...

In his “Foreword” to Politics of Friendship, Derrida draws attention to one of the central tasks of the text: the question of what a decision is and who decides. This chapter offers a close reading of the text focused on the decision and the deciding subject. At stake is precisely how subjectivation and decision are articulated according to the unc...

In this article, I propose an original re-interpretation of the encounter between deconstruction and psychoanalysis as it is described by Jacques Derrida in his early essay "Freud and the scene of writing" (1966). My working hypothesis is that Derrida first reads psychoanalysis as a partially deconstructive human science. To test this hypothesis, I...

This article casts light on Marc Richir’s remarkable and yet poorly known interpretation of the analyses of animality that Martin Heidegger develops in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude and Solitude. It shows that this interpretation unfolds as a two‑step critical revision of Heidegger’s analyses within the framework of Richi...

25 years after the publication of Derrida’s Politics of Friendship (Politiques de l’amitié, 1994), this edited collection gathers 23 critical chapters that revisit this underappreciated text. Emerging out of Derrida’s seminars in the late 1980s and 1990s, Politics of Friendship critiques fraternity as a model of political community and its prominen...

In his recently published seminar Life Death (1975–76), Derrida engages in a close reading of Heidegger's refutation of the biologistic interpretation of Nietzsche. Derrida explains that, building on his interpretation of Nietzsche as the peak of metaphysics, Heidegger wishes to rescue the latter's metaphysical discourse from its biologizing charac...

In an influential essay entitled ‘The End of Writing? Grammatology and Plasticity’ (2007), the philosopher Catherine Malabou announces the double end of: first, writing as the metaphorical code of a biological discourse, that of genetics, which has been historically overcome; and second, grammatology as the theory of a generalized and intraregional...

This article focuses on the project of a mechanistic and posthuman history of life as developed by one of the major figures of contemporary biological thought, the biophysicist and theorist of auto-organization Henri Atlan. In particular, it explores Atlan’s elaboration of this project in relation to the recent history of biological thought and in...

This erudite volume by Charles Alunni is devoted to what the author designates as one of the most significant streams in twentieth-century European thought — namely, the zone of multidisciplinary interferences identified as ‘surrationalisme’. Alunni is the founder and director of the Laboratoire disciplinaire Pensée des sciences at the École normal...

This essay takes as its point of departure the interpretation of the philosophical tradition of the critique and deconstruction of subjectivity that Catherine malabou develops in "Go wonder: Subjectivity and affects in neurobiological times" (2013). It challenges this interpretation by offering an alternative reading of the philosophical projects u...

In the essay ‘To Speculate – On “Freud’”, which is published in The Postcards: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond (1980) and draws upon the last part of his unedited lecture course on La Vie la mort (taught in 1975), Jacques Derrida engages a close reading of Sigmund Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle. This article focuses on the deconstruction o...

This article explores the hypothesis formulated by Derrida in his early work that structuralism is Aristotelian in foundation. To this end, it traces Derrida’s engagement with Aristotle’s Physics between the seminal essays “Force and Signification” (1963) and “Ousia and Grammē” (1968). On the one hand, it demonstrates that Derrida reads Aristotle’s...

This article focuses on the constellation of texts in which Derrida engages with the autobiographical question raised by Heidegger in his lectures on Nietzsche. It argues that Derrida takes this question (“Who is Nietzsche?”) as the point of departure not only of two di-verging approaches to the problem of the signature of the philoso-pher, but als...

The following pages can be read as a preliminary study on Derrida’s thought of the usure. The point of departure is the reading of Levinas’ treatment of the spatial metaphor (such as “the Most-High” and “absolute exteriority”) that Derrida mobilizes in “Violence and Metaphysics. An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas” (1964). What is at stake...

This essay aims to bring to light a specific movement elaborated by Derrida in Of Grammatology, which goes from the experience of dispossession in speech and the economy of signs that replaces speech itself with writing, through the chains of supplements, to the merging of language and auto-erotism into the differentiated totality of auto-affection...