Founded in 1967, the year of Canada's centennial, Mosaic is an interdisciplinary journal devoted to publishing the very best critical work in literature and theory. The journal brings insights from a wide variety of disciplines to bear on literary texts, cultural climates, topical issues, divergent art forms and modes of creative activity. Mosaic combines rigorous scholarship with cutting-edge exploration of theory and literary criticism. It publishes contributions from scholars around the world and it distributes to 34 countries. In North America, Mosaic is read by subscribers in almost every state and province. It can be found in over 500 of the world's major university and college libraries.
Vol. 40, no 2 (juin 2007)
À PROPOS DE CE NUMÉRO
The essays in this very special issue of Mosaic were presented at the international and interdisciplinary conference, Following Derrida: Legacies, held at the University of Manitoba in October 2006. Set to mark the second anniversary of Jacques Derrida’s death, the conference was a celebration of his life and work. Over the course of four days, more than 120 presenters explored the legacies of Derrida's truly remarkable body of work, and a selection of these rich and varied papers have been published in this issue. A collective work of mourning, the issue remembers Derrida by reflecting on the promise engaged by his work. Two of the keynote speakers at the conference, Catherine Malabou and Michael Naas, were able to contribute their addresses to this collection, along with eighteen other contributors: Majero Bouman, Mahité Breton, Leonard Lawlor, Nick Mansfield, Joana Masó, Gabriela Garcìa Hubard, Javier Bassas Vila, Santiago Borja, Pamela McCallum, Ginette Michaud, Peter W. Milne, Marie-Eve Morin, John Mowitt, Tilottama Rajan, Marta Segarra, Garry Sherbert, Hugh J. Silverman, H. Peter Steeves, Josh Toth, Joris van Gorkom, Robert Zacharias.
ARTICLES
Michael Naas
Comme si, comme ça: Phantasms of Self, State, and a Sovereign God
By examining the relationship between sovereignty and the unconditional in several of Derrida’s works from Speech and Phenomenon to Glas, “Faith and Knowledge” to Sovereignties in Question, this paper asks whether a deconstructive thinking of sovereignty can help determine and change for the better the deconstructive processes already at work in ourselves, our political systems, and our religious institutions.
Catherine Malabou
Again: “The wounds of the Spirit heal, and leave no scars behind”
This famous phrase from the Phenomenology of Spirit, which was interpreted in the twentieth century as an expression of Hegel’s logocentrism, could well know a new destiny. Particularly because of scientific discoveries concerning the importance of stem cells, the phrase allows one to examine the question of regeneration in regard to scarring. Such reworking leads to a new questioning of the trace.
Peter Milne
Sans, and the Law of the Law: Following Derrida Following Kant
In his famous reading of Kant’s aesthetics in The Truth in Painting, Derrida raises the problem of framing, particularly with regard to the attempt to frame art. This paper attempts to link this to Derrida’s later work on reason and the event through the figures of judging and juridical space, asking what it might mean to “come after” Derrida, to “follow” him.
Ginette Michaud
Courir à toute vietesse. Note télégraphique sur un poème de pensée de J. D.
Ce texte propose une lecture d’un fragment inédit du Séminaire de Jacques Derrida (actuellement en cours d’édition) dans lequel il commente deux vers du poète John Donne. Les questions de la survie, de la vie et de la vitesse, de la jouissance au présent du passé, de la mélancolie se trouvent puissamment condensées et relancées par Derrida dans cet hétéroautoportrait émouvant dessinant d’un trait vif toute sa pensée.
Leonard Lawlor
The “Weak” Response to the Suffering of the Living: An Attempt to Follow Derrida
This essay attempts to discover a solution to what Derrida has called the problem of “the worst”: unconditional inhospitality leads to suicide. The solution consists in the construction of a “recipe”: unconditional hospitality. In seven steps, the recipe tells us how to internalize others (non-human animals in particular, the living) without destroying their singularity.
Marta Segarra
Friendship, Betrayal, and Translation: Cixous and Derrida
This essay examines Cixous’s “L’amour du loup” along with Derrida’s Politics of Friendship, not so much in order to trace reciprocal influences, but as one of the many acts or performances of a “poetical friendship” that binds Derrida’s and Cixous’s texts together, even those which do not openly address each other.
Robert Zacharias
“And yet”: Derrida on Benjamin’s Divine Violence
Seeking to comment on the critical legacy of Jacques Derrida, this essay examines Derrida’s addition of a post-scriptum to his 1989 essay “First Name of Benjamin,” suggesting that the tension between the text’s formal body and its supplement is itself an argument for the value of formal risk and critical hesitation that raises the stakes of conventional criticism.
Joris Van Gorkom
What if? On Respect, Secret, and Spectre
Heidegger’s reading of Kant’s respect aims at revealing the ontological structure of subjectivity: its ability to recognize beings as such. However, this reading neglects the secrecy of the law, which will come to haunt this phenomenological as such. The following paper interprets this haunting in Derrida’s reformulation of Kant’s “as if.”
Tilottama Rajan
Derrida, Foucault, and the University
Reading between Derrida and Foucault, this paper situates deconstruction within Foucault’s reorganization of knowledge in The Order of Things. While Foucault abandons this work for a history of material practices, Derrida’s writings on the university continue it, but with a new and strategically Foucaultian focus on governmentality and power.
Nick Mansfield
Under the Black Light: Derrida, War, and Human Rights
This essay investigates how Derrida’s deconstruction of the oppositions between, on the one hand, war and peace as discussed by Levinas, and, on the other, Carl Schmitt’s conception of the political in terms of the friend/enemy distinction, helps us to understand the present unstable relationship between war and human rights.
Marie-Eve Morin
The Self, The Other, and the Many: Derrida on Testimony
This essay takes up the question of whether the self constitutes the other (as Husserl believed) or whether the other institutes the self (as Levinas argues). It examines how Derrida’s concept of testimony and his work on the structure of the sign leads us away from this debate into a necessary openness to plurality or community.
John Mowitt
“Reason thus Unveils Itself”
This essay examines the emergence of deconstruction from phenomenology by tracing the figure of the veil in Derrida’s reading of Husserl. I argue that this figure establishes an important engagement with the tactics of anti-colonial resistance. Tracing the intricate presence of what in Veils is called “disunveiling” across several of Derrida’s texts, I suggest that his own project includes a meditation on the encounter between politics and theory.
H. Peter Steeves
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 marked by the lure of “closure.” This essay, after Derrida, explores the relationships among mourning, writing, forgetting, and naming.
Mahité Breton
Rêve qui peut : la pensée du rêve dans Fichus
Dans son discours de réception du prix Adorno, publié ensuite sous le titre Fichus, Jacques Derrida déploie 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. Cet essai explore les lignes de forces de cette pensée, son jeu dans la langue et au sein de l’institution, et son rapport à une critique éveillée et vigilante.
Joana Masó , Gabriela García Hubard. Javier Bassas Vila, and Santiago Borja
“Echo-graphic Images”: Writing or Piercing the Visible
This paper explores the richness of Prégnances, Derrida’s text on Colette Deblé’s wash drawings. Three movements will lead to the specificity of the Derridian approach to visual arts: the rhetoric of the trait in the “ecographic quotation,” the unexplored meaning of the syntagm “ecographic images” as “aphasic images,” and Derrida’s criticism on the visible, which will justify our proposal of a piercing vision.
Pamela McCallum
Questions of Haunting: Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx and Raymond Williams’s Modern Tragedy
Both Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx and Raymond Williams’s Modern Tragedy address the question of how the present is haunted by the persistence of past revolutions. This article constructs a dialogue between Derrida and Williams that foregrounds crucial questions about the two books for critical reflection.
Josh Toth
A Certain Perhaps: Touching on the Decisiveness of Derrida’s Indecision
This paper explores Derrida’s use and understanding of the term “perhaps”—and, by extension, his use and understanding of concepts like indecision and spectrality. In highlighting Derrida’s strange certainty about the ethics of uncertainty, it considers the fact that the imperative to endure the ordeal of indecision is seemingly and necessarily anterior to any such ordeal.
Majero Bouman
Racism’s Specters: Inheriting the Unthought Future
The Derrida of Specters of Marx haunts the Derrida of “Racism’s Last Word,” a temporal complex that prompts this paper’s two questions: “is the specter that which has never been manifest?” and “what might be the mourning of a ghost?”
Garry Sherbert
Canadian Cultural Autoimmunity: Derrida and the Essence of Culture
Canada’s association with the emergence of multiculturalism has created controversy by exposing the national culture to the risk of not being able to identify itself. Yet this risk has also made Canada more hospitable to cultural difference. Canada’s claim that it has “no official culture” manifests a Derridean gesture of emptying itself, a gesture that indicates a drive toward cultural autoimmunity.
Hugh J. Silverman
Response-abilities for Legacies: Jacques—on vous suit à travers vos textes
Questions of responsibility and legacy pervade Derrida’s later work. How can there be a response, legacy, remainder? How is respons-ability the capacity to respond without any expectation of a reply, and yet to respond nevertheless?