In this paper I examine the meaning of birth in the work of Agamben, Esposito, and Derrida, paying particular attention to how it operates in their analyses of citizenship and national belonging. I show that Agamben views birth as negative, Esposito proposes a positive conception, and Derrida's writings imply an understanding that is ambivalent. Then, by focusing on the phenomenon of multiple citizenship, I argue for the value of the Derridean view.

The aims of the present paper is to analyse the specific visual regime of some never-before-exhibited photographs displayed at the photographic exhibition organised for the 60th anniversary of the Liberation of Mauthausen camp in 2005. I will proceed accordingly to a three steps process. First of all, I will try to show how photographs can be considered as a form of writing, namely a “light writing”. I will then provide a general overview of the catalogue of the exhibition but through (...) a decomposition and reassembly of the photographic images, trying to work for a decentralization of the gaze beyond the documentary value of these photographs. Finally, I will draw some conclusions, proposing further reflections on photography as “trace” and “supplement” of the visible. (shrink)

Part of a series on the question of what is the good life, the essay is structured as a montage. Part 1 contests the received notion that death is exterior to the work of Deleuze. To this end, it gathers together a telegraphic collection of examples – ‘corpses’ in his corpus – that invariably show up whenever the question is raised. Part 2 attempts a Deleuzian move: it puts death to work. If death is not nothing, it argues, it must (...) be productive of something absolutely new. Drawing upon Blanchot's seminal essay, ‘The Two Versions of the Imaginary’, it makes the case that this creation is the cadaver: the first time-image. (shrink)

Derrida’s highly personal mourning texts are collected and published in a unique book under the title The Work of Mourning edited by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, two outstanding translators of Derrida’s works. The English collection is published in 2001, while the French edition came out later in 2003 titled Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde. In his deconstructed eulogies, Derrida, being in accordance with ‘the mission impossible’ of deconstruction, namely, ‘to allow the coming of the entirely other’ in (...) its otherness, seems to find his own voice. In my paper, I will focus on this special segment of Derrida’s death-work ; namely, on his mourning texts written for his dead friends, paying special attention to the rhetoric ‘circling around’ fidelity, friendship, and the other in his textual mourning. (shrink)

English title: Ricoeur and Derrida — the Heritage of Death. In this article the author juxtaposes two different attempts of defending life against Heidegger’s horizon of death (Sein zum Tode) (the survie (survival) of Jacques Derrida and the “Living up to Death” of Paul Ricoeur). Their false proximity introduces a new insight into the discussion about the paradoxical positiveness of deconstruction. Ricoeur’s concept of life makes impossible the understanding of deconstruction as faithfulness to the other not in his identity, but (...) precisely in his otherness. (shrink)

La deconstrucción, en el pensamiento de Jacques Derrida y Jean-Luc Nancy, expresa loslímites del «ser en conjunto», al desafiar los conceptos tradicionales de fraternidad, amistado democracia. En este texto pretendemos incidir en la tangente entre Derrida y Nancy,poniendo en cuestión la prescripción ético-política inherente a la expresión «vivir juntos».Intentamos recorrer la línea, sutil pero decisiva, que marca la distancia y, como tal, lasingularidad de estos pensamientos en la filosofía contemporánea.

Partimos de una revisión crítica de la interpretación canónica del tema platónico del cuidado de la muerte propia como condición típica del filósofo: el Fedón no propone algo así como una “preparación a la muerte”, sino más bien una resistencia intensamente reflexiva del alma frente al proceso natural de la muerte. Entendemos que la fenomenología heterológica de Lévinas permite formalizar este vitalismo hiperbólico de raíz platónica a través de la categoría del “ser contra la muerte”, en sistemática polémica con el (...) famoso “ser para la muerte” de Heidegger. Lévinas permite una comprensión filosófica del natural “miedo a la muerte” de todo ser vivo: el permanente “aplazamiento” de la última hora da tiempo y posibilidad a un Deseo del Otro, impensable en cambio en las coordenadas del solipsismo existenciario heideggeriano. (shrink)

In The Poetic Axis of Ethics, Kelly Oliver argues that in Derrida's The Beast and the Sovereign Volume II, a line of poetry from Celan becomes the axis around which Derrida's analysis of world, death, and ethics revolves: ‘Die Welt ist fort, ich muß dich tragen’ [The world is far away, I must carry you]. Oliver maintains that the Celan fragment, which is repeated in nearly every session, is not only the axis around which Derrida binds the unlikely duo Robinson-Heidegger, (...) but also it is a performance of a certain poetic world making that Derrida proposes as a counterbalance to sovereign world building. (shrink)

During the final decade of his life, Jacques Derrida came to use the trope of autoimmunity with greater and greater frequency. Indeed it today appears that autoimmunity was to have been the last iteration of what for more than forty years Derrida called deconstruction. This essay looks at the consequences of this terminological shift for our understanding not only of Derrida's final works (such as Rogues) but of his entire corpus. By taking up a term from the biological sciences that (...) describes the process by which an organism turns in quasi-suicidal fashion against its own self-protection, Derrida was able to rethink the very notion of life otherwise and demonstrate the way in which every sovereign identity, from the self to the nation-state to, most provocatively, God, is open to a process that both threatens to destroy it and gives it its only chance of living on. (shrink)

This text explores the problem of transcendental stupidity in Sigmund Freud, Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida’s works, seeking to combine it with the paradoxical figure of Oedipus in psychoanalytical and philosophical tradition and the symptomatic situation of some important animals in analyses and therapies. The case of the Man of the Wolves, the case of Mr. Sergei K. Pankejeff described in Aus der Geschichte einer infantilen Neurose, a fundamental dream in contemporary culture history, would be the point of departure.