As neither alive nor dead —though deadly, as we had to learn again—the virus is the figure of the border. The border divides, of course, but thereby relates what it separates. The virus belongs to the living, but on its border, disrupting life from the outside. If Derrida once described deconstruction as a 'virology', it was to note its special interest in the constitutive failure of coding and de-coding, in the interruption of goal-directed reading processes: the virus as parasite that derails communication, whether biological, linguistic, or information-technological (Derrida 1994, 12). Deconstruction seeks to grasp this derailment as necessary for reproduction in general, including understanding as a form of recapitulation. As Derrida also points out in the same context, viruses can become a privileged figure here for another reason: as neither alive nor dead, they effect this disruption from a site that is not itself capable of self-reproduction, a capacity often seen as the very definition of life. A virus is said to be non-living because it can multiply or reproduce only inside living host cells that it hijacks. It has no cellular structure and lacks its own metabolism. But it is not exactly dead either, as it contains genetic information that, alas, can be reproduced.
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As of 9 March 2020, the 2019—20 Australian bushfire season known as the 'black summer' devastated an estimated 18.6 million hectares and killed one billion animals, driving several species to extinction. One month later, 900/0 of the world's human population found themselves in some form of lockdown in response to the global zoonotic novel coronavirus pandemic, provoking a marked statistical increase in domestic violence. 13 March, Breonna Taylor shot to death in her own apartment in Louisville in a home invasion by police. 25 May, the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis provokes mass protests against the killing of yet another black person by police, causing many to forego social distancing measures, leaving the safety of their homes and taking to the streets against systemic racism, particularly its institutionalization in what Blanchot, in one of his final writings, called l'intolérable répression policiére. On the side of the American Right, mask-wearing and distancing regulations became politicized by way of a newfound appreciation for 'bodily autonomy'.
{"title":"Domestic Violence and Metaphysics","authors":"P. Lynes","doi":"10.3366/drt.2020.0235","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/drt.2020.0235","url":null,"abstract":"As of 9 March 2020, the 2019—20 Australian bushfire season known as the 'black summer' devastated an estimated 18.6 million hectares and killed one billion animals, driving several species to extinction. One month later, 900/0 of the world's human population found themselves in some form of lockdown in response to the global zoonotic novel coronavirus pandemic, provoking a marked statistical increase in domestic violence. 13 March, Breonna Taylor shot to death in her own apartment in Louisville in a home invasion by police. 25 May, the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis provokes mass protests against the killing of yet another black person by police, causing many to forego social distancing measures, leaving the safety of their homes and taking to the streets against systemic racism, particularly its institutionalization in what Blanchot, in one of his final writings, called l'intolérable répression policiére. On the side of the American Right, mask-wearing and distancing regulations became politicized by way of a newfound appreciation for 'bodily autonomy'.","PeriodicalId":42836,"journal":{"name":"Derrida Today","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42367336","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Swagger replaces politics. Gesture replaces knowledge. Anger displaces art. Authority is overrun by mock-Caesarism and phony science. Catastrophe is run by the government. The world is given over to chancers, cronies and gangsters. Only the cynical and stupid are satisfied. An alarm is going off, but next door. They are throwing open shops and bars, and then all dying, but in another country. We are all, somehow, a little bit guilty, without knowing exactly how we could have stopped this happening. We are all perhaps sick without knowing it. I am, perhaps, sick. It is always tempting to see ourselves as living in a time of great undoing, and to look to history for precedents: Black Deaths, total war, the fall of empires. The western-educated look to western precedents pre- digested into western narratives in order to find lessons by comparing our present situation to that of fore-parents who were citizens of empires we now mostly revile. Yet the true precedents may be in the experience of the indigenous and ignored coping with colonialism. It is to the Ghost Dance, the Taiping Rebellion and the War of Canudos we should look in order to understand the fervour of everyone's seeking the return of an earlier dispensation. It is those who suffered the apocalypse of colonialism who are ahead of the west historically, in the same way that it is the peoples of Africa, the Middle East, South East Asia and Latin America who know more than westerners about corrupt, pseudo- democratic demagogues.
{"title":"Doing Undoing","authors":"N. Mansfield","doi":"10.3366/drt.2020.0236","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/drt.2020.0236","url":null,"abstract":"Swagger replaces politics. Gesture replaces knowledge. Anger displaces art. Authority is overrun by mock-Caesarism and phony science. Catastrophe is run by the government. The world is given over to chancers, cronies and gangsters. Only the cynical and stupid are satisfied. An alarm is going off, but next door. They are throwing open shops and bars, and then all dying, but in another country. We are all, somehow, a little bit guilty, without knowing exactly how we could have stopped this happening. We are all perhaps sick without knowing it. I am, perhaps, sick. It is always tempting to see ourselves as living in a time of great undoing, and to look to history for precedents: Black Deaths, total war, the fall of empires. The western-educated look to western precedents pre- digested into western narratives in order to find lessons by comparing our present situation to that of fore-parents who were citizens of empires we now mostly revile. Yet the true precedents may be in the experience of the indigenous and ignored coping with colonialism. It is to the Ghost Dance, the Taiping Rebellion and the War of Canudos we should look in order to understand the fervour of everyone's seeking the return of an earlier dispensation. It is those who suffered the apocalypse of colonialism who are ahead of the west historically, in the same way that it is the peoples of Africa, the Middle East, South East Asia and Latin America who know more than westerners about corrupt, pseudo- democratic demagogues.","PeriodicalId":42836,"journal":{"name":"Derrida Today","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45692684","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
As the lockdowns of 2020 came into place, subjecting many of us to forms of confinement, we may have been reminded of Derrida's thoughts on house arrest. Discussing the topology of sexual difference, he suggests that to be assigned female is to be destined for assignation résidence—the French term for house arrest— under the patriarchal economy of home which determines the 'proper place' of woman (Derrida 1995, 93—94). Derrida's formulation took on unexpected resonance when, at the height of the pandemic, the Hungarian government repealed its legal recognition of transgenderism: assignations of biological sex would now be strictly binary and permanent. The decision to place sexual difference under house arrest during a time of lockdown was not, I would argue, a coincidence. Rather, it was another kind of assignation, an act of discursive placing designed to eradicate transgenderism under the name of immunisation.
{"title":"Immunising Birthsex: Ontology's Place in the Pandemic","authors":"Christopher Griffin","doi":"10.3366/drt.2020.0232","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/drt.2020.0232","url":null,"abstract":"As the lockdowns of 2020 came into place, subjecting many of us to forms of confinement, we may have been reminded of Derrida's thoughts on house arrest. Discussing the topology of sexual difference, he suggests that to be assigned female is to be destined for assignation résidence—the French term for house arrest— under the patriarchal economy of home which determines the 'proper place' of woman (Derrida 1995, 93—94). Derrida's formulation took on unexpected resonance when, at the height of the pandemic, the Hungarian government repealed its legal recognition of transgenderism: assignations of biological sex would now be strictly binary and permanent. The decision to place sexual difference under house arrest during a time of lockdown was not, I would argue, a coincidence. Rather, it was another kind of assignation, an act of discursive placing designed to eradicate transgenderism under the name of immunisation.","PeriodicalId":42836,"journal":{"name":"Derrida Today","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42812800","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
How can one possibly explain 'people's propensity to believe lies', asks J. Hillis Miller? A 'scandal to cognition', he continues, is the difficulty in understanding why this propensity is so deeply rooted. How in the world can so many people be brought, for example, to vote against their own self-interest, to shoot themselves in the foot, so to speak? That seems an unfathomable mystery. (Miller 2016, 139) These questions, and the role of deconstruction as an analytic resource with which to answer them, are all the more urgent today. The already overwhelming threat of global warming that Miller was considering in 2015 (which has provoked unprecedented wild fires and floods around the world), is now accompanied by a global pestilence of historic proportions. Yet notwithstanding these crises, a significant number of people (particularly in North America) appear to have pre-emptively rejected the vaccine that has not yet been developed to prevent the SARS- COV-2 virus. An eq ually significant number refuse to make even the most basic efforts to limit its spread. Instead, taking a page out of the 'anti- vaccination playbook' (Ireland 2020), anti-masking groups in Canada, the US, and elsewhere are protesting against physical distancing, mandated mask-wearing, Contact tracing, and other proposed public health measures. Objections are made on the false grounds that non- medical face masks are harmful to health, and that the severity of the COVID-19 disease is misleadingly overstated.
{"title":"Lies in the Time of COVID","authors":"Stella Gaon","doi":"10.3366/drt.2020.0231","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/drt.2020.0231","url":null,"abstract":"How can one possibly explain 'people's propensity to believe lies', asks J. Hillis Miller? A 'scandal to cognition', he continues, is the difficulty in understanding why this propensity is so deeply rooted. How in the world can so many people be brought, for example, to vote against their own self-interest, to shoot themselves in the foot, so to speak? That seems an unfathomable mystery. (Miller 2016, 139) These questions, and the role of deconstruction as an analytic resource with which to answer them, are all the more urgent today. The already overwhelming threat of global warming that Miller was considering in 2015 (which has provoked unprecedented wild fires and floods around the world), is now accompanied by a global pestilence of historic proportions. Yet notwithstanding these crises, a significant number of people (particularly in North America) appear to have pre-emptively rejected the vaccine that has not yet been developed to prevent the SARS- COV-2 virus. An eq ually significant number refuse to make even the most basic efforts to limit its spread. Instead, taking a page out of the 'anti- vaccination playbook' (Ireland 2020), anti-masking groups in Canada, the US, and elsewhere are protesting against physical distancing, mandated mask-wearing, Contact tracing, and other proposed public health measures. Objections are made on the false grounds that non- medical face masks are harmful to health, and that the severity of the COVID-19 disease is misleadingly overstated.","PeriodicalId":42836,"journal":{"name":"Derrida Today","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43640541","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
During the second year of his seminar Perjury and Pardon, Derrida makes the somewhat offhanded suggestion that one might someday wish to draw up a list distinguishing all those thinkers who lived long enough to see the AIDS epidemic from all those who did not. It's 1999, and Derrida makes this curious suggestion in the midst of a discussion of the so-called 'contaminated blood' scandal that was preoccupying France at the time. Such a distinction, Derrida seems to imply, would allow one to make some general observations about the thought or rhetoric of two distinct groups of thinkers and writers separated in time by a global epidemic and everything that came with it. Derrida himself would thus obviously be among those in the first group, while Heidegger, whom Derrida mentions, would be in the second, which can help explain, we might speculate, why the trope or logic of autoimmunity became so important for the one and yet is absent in the other.
{"title":"Corona Vitae / Corona Mortis","authors":"Michael Naas","doi":"10.3366/drt.2020.0238","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/drt.2020.0238","url":null,"abstract":"During the second year of his seminar Perjury and Pardon, Derrida makes the somewhat offhanded suggestion that one might someday wish to draw up a list distinguishing all those thinkers who lived long enough to see the AIDS epidemic from all those who did not. It's 1999, and Derrida makes this curious suggestion in the midst of a discussion of the so-called 'contaminated blood' scandal that was preoccupying France at the time. Such a distinction, Derrida seems to imply, would allow one to make some general observations about the thought or rhetoric of two distinct groups of thinkers and writers separated in time by a global epidemic and everything that came with it. Derrida himself would thus obviously be among those in the first group, while Heidegger, whom Derrida mentions, would be in the second, which can help explain, we might speculate, why the trope or logic of autoimmunity became so important for the one and yet is absent in the other. ","PeriodicalId":42836,"journal":{"name":"Derrida Today","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44430523","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
These lectures outline the project of a general organology, which is to say an account of life when it is no longer just biological but technical, or when it involves not just organic matter but or...
{"title":"Elements for a General Organology","authors":"B. Stiegler","doi":"10.3366/drt.2020.0220","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/drt.2020.0220","url":null,"abstract":"These lectures outline the project of a general organology, which is to say an account of life when it is no longer just biological but technical, or when it involves not just organic matter but or...","PeriodicalId":42836,"journal":{"name":"Derrida Today","volume":"13 1","pages":"72-94"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2020-05-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47322606","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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