Jacques Lezra

This essay asks why the concept of “institution” – ubiquitous, fundamental, the mark of what distinguishes human society from non-human animal groupings such as packs, herds, flocks, colonies or swarms – is so difficult to define. The essay introduces the concept of “defective institutions”. It offers definitions of “institution”, “defect” and “republicanism” in philological, philosophical, economic and sociological terms. It stresses the structural problem of offering definitions of these terms from within institutions that require such definitions, but which also serve as the condition of their intelligibility. Taking the anarcho-philosophical tradition as its starting point, it offers an alternative, which is also an alternative to the figures of governance associated with the liberal conception of the state: an aberrant republicanism comprised of defective institutions, and riddled with the necessity for its own abolition.

Le séminaire “La vie la mort” de Derrida opère, comme d’avance motivé par ses suites et comme contresigné par ce nom qui n’apparaît pas—le nom d’Épicure—un virage vers un matérialisme non productif, non représentationnel, dépourvu en quelque sorte de statut ontologique, voire non ontologisable, triomphant, normatif, voué à une économie de la cause. Nietzsche, lecteur antagonique d’Épicure (Lettre à Ménécée: “Accoutume-toi à considérer que la mort n'est rien pour nous”)—constitue son écran-substitut. Nietzsche, dont la lecture sert à fermer-ouvrir les grandes boucles du séminaire de Derrida. Il s’agit donc de fouiller “La vie la mort” à la recherche des traces de la rencontre Nietzsche-Épicure—une rencontre définitive, elle, bien qu’invisible et silencieuse, bien que presqu’illisible dans le texte de Derrida, au sujet du rapport “la vie la mort.”

This dissertation addresses the relation between the definitions of reading that function formally within the texts of Cervantes, Shakespeare and Descartes, and the historical and epistemological narratives that have traditionally served to explain or to replace that function. It argues that the non-coincidence of formal and semantic categories is a constitutive aspect of Measure for Measure, Don Quixote, and Descartes' Second Meditation, and that this non-coincidence arises at moments when questions of form are brought into the category of the aesthetic. Linguistic events may be understood to produce patterns of regression or displacement which coincide with a turn to patterns of linguistic substitution and valorizations of specific figures of speech . ;Icarus Reading is also concerned with the question of the historical "effect" or "ground" of such practice--particularly the question of the institutions and the ideologies that reading makes necessary. The apparent homology between aestheticization and the formation of ideology arises to supplement the absence of two related concepts, intention and subjectivity, without which the categories of form, matter, and "content" cannot be organized into a recognizable phenomenology of reading. ;The argument takes three directions: first, it re-casts the distinction between form and content in terms of the tropological distinction between substitution and institution. Secondly, it seeks to show how another classical distinction, that between form and matter, itself serves to efface such "traumas" by displacing the category of matter onto semantic units whose integrity is conceptually prior to the distinction. ;Finally, Icarus Reading identifies in each of these texts an effort to redefine the category of form as a rhetorical figure that functions to identify an absence. The dissertation concludes by considering the narrative that seems to join these linguistic "traumas" to their allegorizations, suggesting that its temporality resists being drawn into an analogy with the temporality of empirical events. This resistance generates an allegorical imperative that necessarily structures and makes radically uncognizable the relation between linguistic and empirical events

Alain Badiou’s Seminar: The One – Descartes, Plato, Kant (1983-1984) inaugurates "The Seminar, " the collection of transcribed and edited seminars that Badiou chose for publication from the sessions he held over his career. To its place opening "The Seminar" other, perhaps more important functions should be added, however. The Seminar: The One serves, with the companion seminar on the Infinite (1984-1985), as a bridge between Badiou’s Theory of the Subject (1982) and the work for which he is best known, Being and Event ( L'Être et l'Événement, 1988; English translation, 2005). 1 (His play Incident at Antioch, whose first drafts are written during the years that Badiou holds the seminars on The One and The Infinite, builds another, rather different, bridge.) At once quite technical and rather chatty, The One – Descartes, Plato, Kant offers a genealogy for two decisive steps in Badiou’s thought: his description and his axiomatization of the operation “counts-as-one.” It also – rather against the grain of these two steps; inchoately, controversially – offers a tentative engagement with the dangerous mode of parody.

A one-of-a-kind reference to the international vocabulary of the humanities This is an encyclopedic dictionary of close to 400 important philosophical, literary, and political terms and concepts that defy easy—or any—translation from one language and culture to another. Drawn from more than a dozen languages, terms such as Dasein (German), pravda (Russian), saudade (Portuguese), and stato (Italian) are thoroughly examined in all their cross-linguistic and cross-cultural complexities. Spanning the classical, medieval, early modern, modern, and contemporary periods, these are terms that influence thinking across the humanities. The entries, written by more than 150 distinguished scholars, describe the origins and meanings of each term, the history and context of its usage, its translations into other languages, and its use in notable texts. The dictionary also includes essays on the special characteristics of particular languages—English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. Originally published in French, this one-of-a-kind reference work is now available in English for the first time, with new contributions from Judith Butler, Daniel Heller-Roazen, Ben Kafka, Kevin McLaughlin, Kenneth Reinhard, Stella Sandford, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Jane Tylus, Anthony Vidler, Susan Wolfson, Robert J. C. Young, and many more.The result is an invaluable reference for students, scholars, and general readers interested in the multilingual lives of some of our most influential words and ideas. Covers close to 400 important philosophical, literary, and political terms that defy easy translation between languages and cultures Includes terms from more than a dozen languages Entries written by more than 150 distinguished thinkers Available in English for the first time, with new contributions by Judith Butler, Daniel Heller-Roazen, Ben Kafka, Kevin McLaughlin, Kenneth Reinhard, Stella Sandford, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Jane Tylus, Anthony Vidler, Susan Wolfson, Robert J. C. Young, and many more Contains extensive cross-references and bibliographies An invaluable resource for students and scholars across the humanities.

Translatability in natural languages today supports, and can only be understood in the context of, economic globalization, and the universalization of market logic. ‘Untranslatability’, as it is most often construed, does not provide a critical alternative to this logic: it bolsters it. A different account of untranslatability is required: this essay seeks to provide such. It finds in passages in Marx and in Derrida's Monolinguisme de l'autre, and in different translations of those texts, an untranslatability which is not one, irreducible to mathematical identity.