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Annual Zantop Lecture

Derrida and The Non-Political Opening of Politics, Geoffrey Bennington, Emory University

Tuesday, October 31, 2017
5:00pm – 6:30pm
Rockefeller 001
Intended Audience(s): Public
Categories: Clubs & Organizations, Conferences, Lectures & Seminars, Workshops & Training

In this talk I aim to show how Derrida’s early account of the trace as binding together in one and the same thought the structures of language, of temporalization, and of the relation to the other opens onto his later thinking on more obviously political issues such as sovereignty and democracy.  I will argue that this opening, akin to the “non-ethical opening of ethics” described in Of Grammatology, is not yet itself political in any of the traditional senses of that word (nor yet in the sense of what I call “the politics of politics”), but that it is nonetheless bound to become political, in a sense to be developed.

Geoffrey Bennington is Asa G. Candler Professor of Modern French Thought at Emory University and Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School.  He is the author of 16 books in English and French, and some 130 articles and chapters on philosophical and literary-theoretical topics.  His most recent books are Scatter I: The Politics of Politics in Foucault, Heidegger, and Derrida (Fordham UP, 2016) and Kant on the Frontier: Philosophy, Politics, and the Ends of the Earth (Fordham UP, 2017).  He is General Editor, with Peggy Kamuf, of the English language edition of The Seminars of Jacques Derrida at the University of Chicago Press, and has translated several books by Derrida.  He is currently working on Scatter II, which will include deconstructive readings of texts across the tradition of political philosophy, and on The Angel and the Beast: The Truth in Translation, on Martin Heidegger and Paul Friedländer.

Free and open to the public!

Sponsored by the Comparative Literature Program

 
For more information, contact:
Carol Bean-Carmody
carol.a.bean-carmody@dartmouth.edu
Permanent URL to this event: https://complit.dartmouth.edu/events/event?event=48174

Events are free and open to the public unless otherwise noted.