Michael Naas

«To do justice to Freud»: the history of madness in the age of psychoanalysis

When Elisabeth Roudinesco and Rene Major did me the honor and kindness of inviting me to a commemoration that would also be a reflection, to one of these genuine tributes where thought is plied to fidelity and fidelity honed by thought, I did not hesitate for one moment. First of all, because I love memory. This is nothing original, of course, and yet how else can one love? Indeed, thirty years ago, this great book of Foucault was an event whose repercussions were so intense and multiple that I will not even try to identify much less measure them deep down inside me. Next, because I love friendship, and the trusting affection that Foucault showed me thirty years ago, and that was to last for many years, was all the more precious in that, being shared, it corresponded to my professed admiration. Then, after 1972, what came to obscure this friendship, without, however, affecting my admiration, was not, in fact, alien to this book, and to a certain debate that ensued-or at least to its distant, delayed, and indirect effects. There was in all of this a sort of dramatic chain of events, a compulsive and repeated precipitation that I do not wish to describe here because I do not wish to be alone, to be the only one to speak of this after the death of Michel Foucaultexcept to say that this shadow that made us invisible to one another, that made us not associate with one another for close to ten years (until 1

One Nation … Indivisible: Jacques Derrida on the Autoimmunity of Democracy and the Sovereignty of God

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 Derridas 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.

The Last of the Rogue States: The "Democracy to Come," Opening in Two Turns

I have already played a great deal with this verbal thing voyou, this idiom of recent or modern French invention (dating back only to the nineteenth century, to the beginning, therefore, of an urban society entering the age of industrial capitalism), an idiom of popular origin and barely French, but also, in spite of or actually because of all this, an untranslatable, or barely translatable, incrimination, a sort of French interjection or exclamation, ‘‘voyou!’’ which, I neglected to say, can be turned by means of an intonation into something tender, affectionate, maternal (my maternal grandmother used to call me this when I was a child, pretending to be angry with me, ‘‘voyou, va! ’’ [‘‘you little rascal!’’]). I have played a great deal with this word, which, while remaining untranslatable, nonetheless becomes in the expression ‘‘Etat voyou’’ a more-than-recent translation, almost still brand new, barely used, approximate, franglaise, of the Anglo-American ‘‘rogue state’’—that so-very-singular indictment I discovered for the first time in my own language a little more than a year ago, and doubly associated with the state, when it was announced after a cabinet meeting that the president and

History's Remains: Of Memory, Mourning, and the Event

Jacques Derrida has written much in recent years on the topic of mourning. This essay takes Derridas insights into mourning in general and collective mourning in particular in order to ask about the relationship between mourning and politics. Taking a lead from a recent work of Derridas on Jean-Francois Lyotard, the essay develops its argument through two examples, one from ancient Greece and one from twentiethcentury America: the role mourning plays in the constitution and maintenance of the state in Platos Laws and the controversy surrounding the consecration of the tomb of the Unknown Soldier of Vietnam in Arlington National Cemetery. This latter example provides the occasion for questioning the possibilities of mourning the unknown or the unidentifiable and for addressing some of the ways in which the United States has mourned or failed to mourn, remembered or failed to remember, in the wake of September 11.

Derrida’s Flair (For the Animals to Follow...)

This essay traces the history of Jacques Derrida’s engagement with the question of the animal and the methodology Derrida follows in his 2008 The Animal That Therefore I Am . As Derrida demonstrates, the history of philosophy is marked from its inception by an attempt to draw a single, indivisible line between humans and all other animals by attributing some capacity to humans (e.g., language, culture, mourning, a relationship to death) and denying it to animals. Derrida thus begins by questioning the supposed fact that animals do not have such and such a capacity or attribute but then quickly turns to questioning the principle by which philosophers have claimed that humans do . In all his work on the animal, therefore, Derrida questions the confidence with which humans attribute certain capacities to themselves while denying them to animals, all in the name of a pervasive and yet repressed violence against the animal world.

Violence and Historicity: Derrida’s Early Readings of Heidegger

With the recent publication of Jacques Derrida’s seminar of 1964–65, Heidegger: The Question of Being and History, it has become abundantly clear that when the full history of Derrida’s half-century-long engagement with Heidegger is finally written a special place will have to be reserved for the question of history itself, and especially the question of history or historicity in its irreducible relationship to language and to violence. In this essay, I look at just a few key passages from “Violence and Metaphysics,” first published in 1964, and Derrida’s seminar on Heidegger from that same year in order to try to isolate what appears to be an important transitional moment in Derrida’s rethinking of the questions of language, violence, and history, in large part, it seems, thanks to, or accompanied by, Heidegger. Indeed, while Derrida’s engagement with Heidegger over the next four decades will go on to include questions of technology, the animal, species difference, sexual difference, and so on, the relationship between language, history, and violence that came to draw his attention in the early 1960s and that would be crucial to what Derrida will go on to call deconstruction will continue to haunt him, as I will suggest in conclusion, right up to his very last seminar, The Beast and the Sovereign, in 2002–2003.

Television and modernity: Jacques Derrida and the religion of the media

This essay looks at the distinctions Jacques Derrida makes in several later works between the three Abrahamic monotheisms in terms of their reaction to or appropriation of tele-technology and the media. At the center of the essay is Derrida’s provocative claim that there is an essential relationship between mediatization, globalization – what Derrida calls globalatinization – and religion and that, since globalization is first and foremost a Christian phenomenon, only Christianity really deserves to go by the name of religion.

PLATO AND THE SPECTACLE OF LAUGHTER

Abstract This essay examines the critical role played by comedy and laughter in Plato. It begins by taking seriously Platos critique of comedy and his concerns about the negative effects of laughter in dialogues such as Republic and Laws. It then shows how Plato, rather than simply rejecting comedy and censuring laughter, attempts to put these into the service of philosophy by rethinking them in philosophical terms. Accordingly, the laughable or the ridiculous is understood not just in relation to the ugly or the ignoble, as it is in Homer, but in relation of blindness, ignorance, and falsity. By taking up such a philosophical perspective, one can then distinguish what truly is laughable from what merely appears so. It is in this way that Plato is able to explain why Socrates appeared so ridiculous to the multitude but was known to be anything but to those who were able to see him with philosophical eyes, that is, those who were able to attend to what I call the spectacle of laughter. The paper concludes by following the curious role played by laughter in the very dialogues where it seems least appropriate, namely, the dialogues recounting the trial and death of Socrates.

“World, Solitude, Finitude”: Derrida’s Final Seminar

AbstractIn his final seminar, The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 2 (2002–2003), Jacques Derrida spends the entire year reading just two texts, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Martin Heidegger’s Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. This essay looks in detail at Derrida’s treatment of this latter and, in particular, at Derrida’s emphasis on the Heideggerian notion of Walten (as sovereign power or originary violence) in this work. The essay begins by considering several of Derrida’s prior engagements with Heidegger, especially in Of Spirit and the “Geschlecht” essays, and their analyses of such themes as Geist or spirit, sexual and species difference, violence, and ontotheology. The essay then develops the relationship between what Derrida considered to be the hyper-sovereignty of Walten and Derrida’s own notions of autoimmunity and differance, before concluding with the question of why Derrida would think it necessary to devote so much of his final seminar to this Heideggerian notion.

The Promise of Other Voices: Response to Sarah Hammerschlag, Martin Hägglund, Penelope Deutscher, and Rodolphe Gasché

I would like to begin by expressing my deep gratitude to Sarah Hammerschlag, Martin Hägglund, Penelope Deutscher, and Rodolphe Gasché for their extremely generous, challenging, and helpful remarks, for their provocations and invitations to develop in greater detail and sometimes in different directions a few of the themes treated in Miracle and Machine.1 It is a rare honor to have one’s work read with this degree of attention and sophistication by such accomplished scholars in the areas of contemporary philosophy and theology. I knew in advance that I would not be disappointed by these responses, but for the life of me, I never expected this. By a stroke of good fortune—for I do not believe there was any collusion on their part—these four sets of comments really span the entire book, addressing not only its central arguments but its guiding themes and images, even its form and style. Since I cannot possibly do justice to all these comments in just a few pages, I would like to select just a few passages from each in the hopes that they will lead to future discussions not just of my work but, especially, of theirs and of the places where our works intersect.