Life Death

Jacques Derrida

sept 2020 · University of Chicago Press

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The seventh in our series of Derrida's seminars, Life Death provides interdisciplinary reflections on the relationship of life and death—now in paperback.

One of Jacques Derrida’s most provocative works, Life Death deconstructs a deeply rooted dichotomy of Western thought: life and death. In rethinking the relationship between life and death, Derrida undertakes a multi-disciplinary analysis of a range of topics across philosophy, linguistics, and the life sciences. Derrida gave this seminar over fourteen sessions between 1975 and 1976 at the École normale supérieure in Paris to prepare students for the agrégation, a notoriously competitive exam. The theme for the exam that year was “Life and Death,” but Derrida made a critical modification to the title by dropping the coordinating conjunction. The resulting title of Life Death poses a philosophical question about the close relationship between life and death. Through close readings of Freudian psychoanalysis, the philosophy of Nietzsche and Heidegger, French geneticist François Jacob, and epistemologist Georges Canguilhem, Derrida argues that death must be considered neither as the opposite of life nor as the truth or fulfillment of it, but rather as that which both limits life and makes it possible. Derrida thus not only questions traditional understandings of the relationship between life and death but also ultimately develops a new way of thinking about what he calls “life death.”

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Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) was director of studies at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris, and professor of humanities at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of many books published by the University of Chicago Press. Pascale-Anne Brault is professor of French at DePaul University and is the translator of several books by Derrida. Peggy Kamuf is professor emerita of French and Italian and comparative literature at the University of Southern California. She has written, edited, or translated many books, by Derrida and others, and is coeditor of the series of Derrida’s seminars at the University of Chicago Press. Michael Naas is professor of philosophy at DePaul University and is the author of several books, most recently Plato and the Invention of Life.