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.”. (shrink)

Este ensayo se pregunta por qué el concepto de institución —omnipresente, fundamental, la marca que distingue a la sociedad humana de agrupaciones animales no humanas: jaurías, matanzas, rebaños, colmenas, exaltaciones— es tan difícil de definir; introduce el concepto de instituciones defectivas; ofrece definiciones de institución, defecto y republicanismo en registros filológicos, filosóficos, económicos y sociológicos; y enfatiza el problema estructural de ofrecer definiciones de estos términos desde dentro de instituciones que requieren tales definiciones, pero que también sirven como condición de (...) su inteligibilidad. Partiendo de la tradición anarcofilosófica, se ofrece una alternativa, que es también una alternativa a las figuras de gobierno asociadas a la concepción liberal del Estado: un republicanismo aberrante compuesto por instituciones defectivas, atravesado por la necesidad de su abolición. (shrink)

Lucretius's shadow is long and extends across the Humanities. Bringing together essays by scholars at the top of their field, this book examines the relationship between Lucretius and modernity. Nuanced and passionate, these essays offer an account of what is at stake when we claim Lucretius for modernity.

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. (shrink)

On the Nature of Marx's Things traces to Marx's earliest writings a Lucretianpractice that Lezra calls necrophilological translation.

Regress threatens throughout Lyotard’s Differend, especially where the argument appears to make normative ethical or political claims. How a term, a case or an example “links onto” a phrase serves as a way of examining how instituting can be non-regressively grounded, and with what consequences for abstract political subjectivity. The essay offers an alternative to liberal philosophical and jurisprudential schemata of political institution.

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. (shrink)

This book explores the interrelated subjects of philosophy of translation and the critique of globalization. Taking a specifically deconstructive-Marxist approach, Lezra examines the concept of translation through the lens of political philosophy, political economy and comparative literature.

Terrible ethics -- The ethic of terror -- Phares; or, divisible sovereignty -- The logic of sovereignty -- A Sadean community -- Materia in the critique of autonomy -- Three women, three bombs -- Distracted republic.