Jessica Marian

In this article, I argue that the style of Derrida's "Glas" is intimately linked with its philosophical project. Through an exploration of Derrida’s extensive word and name play, his gesturing towards implied meanings, connotative and non-linear argumentation and dis/mis-use of standard practices of academic citation and referencing, I argue that "Glas" stages an attempt to circumvent the possibility of a complete, closed text and an absolute philosophical position and that this attempt to avoid the absolute demands this different way of writing. I suggest that "Glas" is styled around the “decapitating” of metalanguage through a rhythmic “plunging” and “extracting” of the remaindered or excluded element in and out of the text.

This essay examines practices of evaluation in the archive of the important journal Critique, founded by Georges Bataille in 1946. The journal was a key forum for the development of postwar philosophy and theory in France, and its archive provides a unique resource for the study of the processes of evaluation and judgement that shaped the field. Considering a variety of archival materials (including advertisements for the journal, issue covers, tables of contents, author piece rate lists, letters and private communications) alongside reviews published in the journal, we examine the institutional processes, editorial practices and thus the more-or-less implied values that organised the journal’s operations. We argue that Critique’s archive reveals a complex, socially diffuse image of value and that the field of forces in which a volume is produced is multidimensional, integrating criteria from a plurality of different fields. The act of evaluative judgement encompasses capital; the prioritisation and ordering of content; operations of recommendation, friendship and mentorship; concerns for political impact; house codes; and norms of engagement.

THE RECEPTION OF JOHN GUILLORY’S PROFESSING CRITICISM (2022) HAS BEEN MARKED by conversations regarding the crisis of precarity at universities and the disjuncture between the working conditions of the ‘tenured’ professoriate and of the large and growing number of insecurely employed academics. This is in some ways surprising, given that only one of the book’s chapters deals directly with ‘The Permanent Crisis of Graduate Education’, and even this is only a supplement to the primary investigation into the formation and deformation of English literary studies as a discipline and profession. Guillory’s handling of the jobs crisis in that chapter has a complex relationship with the book’s central argument about the importance of delineating literary criticism and political or social critique as distinct operations, and the attempt to find an internal rationale for the discipline. Even if, as Sarah Brouillette has argued in her critical review of the text, Guillory himself attempts to ‘separate the material situation from the problem of justification’ (Brouillette), reception of the book has refused this compartmentalising. This is no doubt related to the fact that Guillory’s book was released in the midst of a dramatic uptick in worker organisation on university campuses—including the historic wave of graduate student strikes across the University of California system, and major strike and marking boycott actions in the United Kingdom. Australian campuses have been a part of this global phenomenon, and our reflections on Guillory here are informed by our own experiences as National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) delegates at the University of Melbourne since 2018. In this article, we explore some of the historical and conceptual issues Guillory raises throughout the book, in particular the notion of autonomy, in relation to the Australian context and reflect on the successes and importance of our union work both within and beyond the terms of Guillory’s analysis.

This article examines a series of pivotal moments in the history of the postwar French journal 'Critique', tracing the development, refinement, and reas- sertion of the journal’s singular style of critical practice. We present the journal’s founding documents and consider editor Georges Bataille’s identification of Maurice Blanchot as the guiding model for the journal. Then we examine two defining texts in the review’s development: Alexandre Kojève’s “Hegel, Marx and Christianity” (1946) and Alain Badiou’s “The (Re)commencement of Dia- lectical Materialism” (1967). Kojève’s celebrated article crystallised the ideals of the journal’s programme; Badiou’s article meanwhile tested those ideals, precipitating a minor editorial crisis.

According to biographer Benoît Peeters, Jacques Derrida was known to refer to the philosopher of science Georges Canguilhem as his “philosophical superego”. Drawing upon archival material and their respective work on the philosophy of education and of the living, we examine the deeply entwined philosophical and institutional trajectories of these two philosophers - from Derrida’s time in Canguilhem’s seminar room in the 1950s, through to Canguilhem’s late writing in the 1990s. While Canguilhem was profoundly critical of Derrida’s attention to writing as a philosophical problematic, and of his proposals for counter-programming the university, they shared a congruent commitment to the survival of the teaching of philosophy amidst upheavals within the French academy, science, and society. NB: This is the Author’s Original Manuscript (AOM) of a journal article which will be published by Taylor and Francis in Angelaki as: O’Neill C & Marian J (2026) Canguilhem as Derrida’s “Philosophical Superego”: Vitalism, Writing, and the Survival of Philosophy, Angelaki, Vol 31, No 6.| There are revisions between this and the final version of the article, including to the paper’s title.