Thinking with Derrida Now – Workshop and Masterclass

Organized by Marie-Aude Baronian (ASCA)
May 31st and June 1st, 2021 | Please note that this event will take place on-site in Amsterdam | 1 ECTS for the masterclass

On Monday May 31, 2021 we will have a workshop with various invited speakers who will share their close engagement with Derrida’s work. On Tuesday June 1 we will have a Master Class with Joseph Cohen (School of Philosophy, University College Dublin, Ireland) and Raphael Zagury-Orly (Institut Catholique de Paris / CRAL –EHESS and Collège International de Philosophie) that will be open to PhD-students and RMA students.

The program will take place on site, with all the safety measures being observed very strictly. There is a limited amount of places available for both the masterclass and the workshop. Registration for the workshop is through ASCA. To enroll for the Masterclass, please message NICA at nica@hum.leidenuniv.nl, stating your name and affiliated university or institute.

Workshop

Monday, May 31 (9:30 am – 6:30 pm)
University of Amsterdam (on site, location TBA)
Registration at ASCA
This workshop aims at bringing together scholars from various orientations in the Humanities in order to discuss the place and the role of the work of Jacques Derrida in today’s context. Each invited speaker will hence present how the writings of Jacques Derrida affect their current research, concerns and reflections. Rather than exclusively proposing close exegesis of Derrida’s texts or chronological genealogies within his oeuvre, the workshop seeks to stress the relevance of Derrida’s thinking for addressing pressing issues and concepts that define and unpack our contemporaneity. The workshop will purposely not concentrate on a specific theme but it will give the speakers the opportunity to reflect upon why and how certain Derridean ideas are deeply challenging and (re)orienting the ways we think and we do research in the troubled epoch we are now facing. This could include questions on the status of the historical event and the question of testimony, hospitality/hostility, immigration and frontiers, otherness, forgiveness and justice, messianicity, animality, gender, colonialism and de-colonialism, non-Western thought, technology and trans-or post-humanism, or again the various effects of the gestures of deconstruction, to name here but a few. With a.o. Joseph Cohen, Nicolas de Warren, Joost de Bloois, Jakko Kemper, Esther Peeren, Monique Roelofs, Raphael Zagury-Orly.

Masterclass

Tuesday June 1st (2:00 – 6:00 pm)
University of Amsterdam (on site, location TBA)
Registration at NICA

“This law would signify the following to us: in the same place, on the same limit, where history is finished, there where a certain determined concept of history comes to an end, precisely there the historicity of history begins, there finally it has the chance of heralding itself –of promising itself. There where man, a certain determined concept of man, is finished, there the pure humanity of man, of the other man and of man as other begins or has finally the chance of heralding itself –of promising itself. In an apparently inhuman or else a-human fashion…”

This quote from Spectres of Marx (1994: 93) frames some of the issues that will be addressed in this Master Class. In line with the breakthroughs engaged by Derrida, philosophers Joseph Cohen and Raphael Zagury-Orly will propose a reflection on how we, today, think and relate to humanism. What remains of humanism? What may or can we still retain from the ideal of humanism for our contemporaneity? How have the catastrophes of our human history affected our humanistic ideals and can these still bring forth the possibilities of reaffirming themselves? Are we, today, facing a form of exhaustion or fatigue, of wears and tears which undermine the very sustainability of humanism?

And if so, is this voiding out of humanism an irresolvable and unescapable menace or does there lie within this voiding of norms, values, traditional conceptual reflexes a chance, something of a promise to reinvent the forms and the contents of another idea of human and of historicity beyond or otherwise than humanism? The philosophy of Jacques Derrida enables to tackle these contemporary questions and proposes novel trajectories both in the critical analysis of our history and its philosophical signification spurred on by a traditional idea of humanism as well as in the possibilities such a deconstruction can create for another human, another history, another history of the human. In other words, the Master Class will discuss the close and inextricable relation between history, justice, deconstruction, and an otherwise than humanism, that is: what of the future of the human?

The Master Class will be organized in two parts. In the first session, Cohen and Zagury-Orly will explicate specific and selected fragments from Derrida’s texts (Spectres of Marx, Force of Law, Monolingualism of the Other, and Aporias), and will reflect upon their impacts and traces on their own thoughts and writings. In the second session, they will present their current work on the questions of justice, history and catastrophes. During the Master Class, they will also share their experiences as formal students of Derrida and how he still represents today an ongoing source of inspiration and contestation for them.

Readings

• Selected fragments from Derrida’s Spectres of Marx (1994); Force of Law (1992); Monolingualism of the Other (1998); Aporias (1993).
• Cohen & Zagury-Orly, “Neither Crisis nor Apocalypse” (2020), in Il Nucleare : Una Questione Scientifica e Filosofica dal 1945 a Oggi / Nuclear Power: A Scientific and Philosophical Issue from 1945 to Today, (Ed. O. Ombrosi), Milan-Udine, Mimesis Edizioni, 2020, pp. 247-263.
• Cohen & Zagury-Orly, “History Supposes Justice”(2020), in Heidegger, Levinas, Derrida e o Niilismo, (Ed. H. Bensusan), Das Questões (v. 9 n. 1), Brasilia, Universidade de Brasilia, 2020, pp. 43-67.
• Cohen & Zagury-Orly, “Wears and Tears of the European Humanities” (2021), in On Institutions (Ed. G. Croci and S. Gerlek), Metodo. International Studies in Phenomenology and Philosophy, Vol. 8 (1), 2021.
  
  Joseph COHEN is Professor of Philosophy, University College Dublin (Ireland). He published Le Spectre juif de Hegel (Galilée, 2005); Le Sacrifice de Hegel (Galilée, 2007); Alternances de la métaphysique. Essais sur E. Levinas (Galilée, 2009) ; and in collaboration with R. Zagury-Orly, Judéités. Questions pour Jacques Derrida (Galilée, 2003); Derrida. L’Evénement déconstruction (Gallimard, 2013); Heidegger et ‘les juifs’ (Grasset, 2015). He recently published, with R. Zagury-Orly, “La Vérité suppose l’art suppose la justice / Wahrheit setzt Kunst setzt Gerechtigkeit voraus”, in O. Auer, Passe-Partout, (Passagen Verlag, 2019) and, in February 2021, L’Adversaire privilégié. Heidegger, les Juifs et nous (Galilée).
  
  Raphael ZAGURY-ORLY is Invited Professor of Philosophy, Institut Catholique de Paris (France). He published Questionner encore (Galilée, 2011); and in collaboration with J. Cohen, Judéités. Questions pour Jacques Derrida (Galilée, 2003); Derrida. L’Evénement déconstruction (Gallimard, 2013); Heidegger et ‘les juifs’ (Grasset, 2015). He is co-editor, with O. Ombrosi, of Derrida-Levinas. An Alliance Awaiting the Political (Mimesis, 2018). And recently published with J. Cohen, “La Vérité suppose l’art suppose la justice / Wahrheit setzt Kunst setzt Gerechtigkeit voraus”, in O. Auer, Passe-Partout, (Passagen Verlag, 2019) and, in February 2021, L’Adversaire privilégié. Heidegger, les Juifs et nous (Galilée). He is also Editor for Resling Press (Tel Aviv) of major works in French contemporary philosophy (Derrida, Levinas, Bataille and Deleuze).