Derrida Seminars

Born on July 15th, 1930, in El Biar, Algeria, to a semi-secular Sephardic Jewish family, Jacques Derrida grew up among his peers playing soccer and imagining a future as a sports star. His upbringing was deeply marked by the Vichy regime’s “Jewish laws,” which interrupted his high school education in 1942, when he was expelled from school on his very first day. Despite the setbacks, in the late 1940s he attended the Lycée Bugeaud and, in 1949, moved to Paris to study philosophy.

While in Algeria Derrida had been inspired by Camus and Sartre. Once in Paris, he turned his attention to the works of Heidegger and Kierkegaard. He began preparing himself for the entrance exam to the prestigious École Normale Supérieure, to which he was admitted in 1952. There, he met, and became friends with, Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser and studied under Professor Jan Czarnecki, one of the intellectuals who signed, along with many others, the Manifesto of the 121, calling on the French Government—then headed by Michel Debré—to recognize the Algerian War not merely as an insurrection but as a legitimate struggle for independence.

At the intersection of the abstract and the concrete, Derrida began his lifelong career in philosophy, committing himself to the rigorous critique of words and concepts, and of the very medium through which the two of them are construed—language. His approach raised eyebrows among the more conservative proponents of a discipline eager to question everything but its own tools and foundation.

At once a philosophy of difference and deferral, deconstruction relies on the pursuit of what Derrida calls “traces,” chasing whatever marks of absence it can salvage to excavate the silences, unravel and undo the networks of relations that constitute the binaries that keep the dominant system of thinking intact, conditioning it to generate and perpetuate an intellectual hegemony that privileges presence over absence, essence over appearance, speech over writing, and, extending into political and ethical spheres, native over foreign, host over guest, human over nonhuman, man over woman, life over death. In its asymptotic approach to critique—deferential to the non-presence that structures all difference—deconstruction, in Derrida’s work, takes the form of an injunction to care, to thoughtfulness, critique, response and responsibility. At the same time, in the final fifteen years of his career, Derrida taught a series of seminars entitled “Questions of Responsibility,” through which he examined in minute detail the impasses or “aporias” of what we presume about the gift, secrecy, testimony, hospitality, forgiveness, and the death penalty.

Resistant to any definition and irreducible to the simplicity of a position, an analytical framework, or a method, deconstruction, as provocatively defined by Derrida himself, might be best understood following the etymology of the word “solicitation” as a way of shaking or making tremble, or translated, in his terms, as another name for justice and the impossible, and hence as an ongoing challenge to philosophical thinking.

After more than 40 years of sustained and unwavering commitment to such thinking, the prolific writer and voracious reader, as well as generous teacher and scholar, Jacques Derrida died in Paris on October 9th, 2004.

Derrida’s writing has developed a reputation for its difficulty, and indeed, his thought can be challenging. Yet not nearly as challenging as his handwriting. Deciphering that is a task that can almost excuse those who dismissed deconstruction as illegible. With patience, however, and following Derrida’s own traces, his writing becomes extraordinarily generative. It offers itself up to the reader generously and, in a way, embodies what deconstruction is and has always been about: it stages, for those who attend to it with care and persistence, the very experience of playfulness and ambiguity, of undecidability.

The alleged opacity of Derrida’s published works, though, is precisely what makes his seminars, in contrast, such a rich and valuable resource for students and scholars alike. More than anything else, Derrida was less a philosopher addressing an academic elite composed of his peers than a teacher who strived to transmit knowledge to his students and cultivate their critical and analytical skills. His seminars are a testament to his pedagogical commitments; they reveal his desire to be understood, as well as his relentless effort to encourage his students to be more courageous and intellectually responsible in their engagement with the realms of the social and the political.

Throughout his lifetime, Derrida remained concerned with the survival, the living and living on of his work and his writing. He often made, kept, and distributed several copies of his course materials, yet the seminars, as presented here, are disseminated against his explicit wishes. He would have preferred to revise these seminars before they were published—and indeed, the parts that were eventually published did undergo revision—but his heirs decided, following his death, and because tape-recordings of his classes were already circulating, to authorize their publication.

It is within the perspective of this decision that the Derrida Seminars Translation Project has been underway since 2008. When it was agreed, in collaboration with Éditions Galilée, and later, with Éditions du Seuil, to transcribe, edit, and publish Derrida’s teaching lectures, there was little question as to whether they should be translated into English. This is where the Derrida Seminars Translation Project (DSTP) entered the picture. A group of native English-speaking Derridean scholars, the DSTP is nothing more and nothing less than an intellectual community devoted to the systematic translation of the seminars into English for the University of Chicago Press shortly after they are published in French.

However, while this work of transcription, editing, and translation is ongoing, thanks to the collaboration of the UC Irvine Libraries and the Institut Mémoires des Éditions Contemporaines (IMEC), the Princeton University Library has made available a digital repository of Derrida’s seminar papers, hoping to increase access to these materials, and to make them as broadly and openly available as possible for students, scholars, and readers around the world. In this way students and scholars are able to follow the most intimate threads of Derrida’s thinking such as he caringly and meticulously wove for his audiences in the classroom.

The pages of this archive span more than 40 years of Derrida’s teaching career, offering the secrets and insights of a lifetime to be unpacked, nourished and contextualized, with the purpose of preserving Jacques Derrida’s memory, but also in the hope of enlarging the field of what it is possible to think.