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Notes
1 Mutsaers, Immunological Discourse in Political Philosophy, 95.
2 Ibid., 96.
3 Derrida, The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy, xl.
4 Ibid., xiv, emphasis in original.
5 Ibid., xv. With his reference to “unperceived entailment or dissimulated contamination,” Derrida is quoting from the preface of his original dissertation.
6 Cf. Arkady Plotnitsky’s essay on the violence presupposed by Derridean contamination, along with Douglas L. Donkel’s examination of the relationship between différance and contamination, Andrew Mitchell’s investigation of Derrida’s concept of contamination in relation to Heidegger, and Beata Stawarska’s reading of Derrida and Saussure on contamination and entrainment are notable exceptions.
7 See Niall Lucy’s A Derrida Dictionary, Simon Morgan Wortham’s The Derrida Dictionary, and Maria-Daniella Dick and Julian Wolfreys’s Derrida Wordbook. Although none of these texts provides a dedicated entry for ‘contamination’, the word does, however, appear a number of times in each, and, in the Derrida Wordbook, most notably in the entry devoted to “Virus.”
8 Derrida, The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy, xv.
9 Howells, Deconstruction from Phenomenology to Ethics, 38.
10 Derrida, The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy, xv. See also Leonard Lawlor, who notes that the word ‘dialectic’ is ‘virtually absent in Derrida’s “Violence and Metaphysics” […] and in Voice and Phenomena, and, by the time of “The Ends of Man” in 1968, it will have completely disappeared from Derrida’s lexicon of positive terms. Instead, the words “undecidability,” “contamination,” and, of course, “différance” will replace it’. See Lawlor, Derrida and Husserl, 140.
11 Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics,” 161.
12 Ibid., 112.
13 Ibid., 104. The word phenomenology, as John McCumber explains, is ‘composed of two Greek words “phenomenon” and “logos” […] The Greek phainomenon, for its part, has a good deal of structure: it is the present neuter middle participle of phainein, meaning to shine, show or bring to light. In the middle voice, this means to bring oneself to light, or to show oneself; and as a neuter participle, it refers to the action of doing this on the part of a thing. A “phenomenon” is thus something that brings itself to light as a thing’. See McCumber, Time and Philosophy, 162.
14 Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics,” 174.
15 Derrida, “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy,” 11.
16 Ibid., 11.
17 Mitchell, Cartographic Strategies of Postmodernity, 11.
18 Derrida, “White Mythology,” 73.
19 Ibid., 42.
20 Ibid., 48.
21 Ibid., 13.
22 Ibid., 18.
23 Derrida, Dissemination, 149.
24 Derrida, Of Grammatology, 34.
25 Ibid.
26 Derrida, “Rhetoric of Drugs,” 7.
27 Derrida, “At This Very Moment,” 162.
28 Ibid., 167.
29 Derrida, “On Reading Heidegger,” 171.
30 Ibid., 177–178, emphasis in original.
31 See also Derrida’s On Touching–Jean-Luc Nancy, first published in 2000, in which he explores the relationship between contamination, contact, and the figure of touch. See Derrida, On Touching, 75, 109.
32 “Contamination,” OED online.
33 Derrida, “On Reading Heidegger,” 172.
34 Ibid., 171.
35 Bennington and Derrida, Jacques Derrida, 73–74.
36 Ibid., 310.
37 Derrida, “Nietzsche and the Machine,” 56.
38 Ibid., 64.
39 Derrida, “Rhetoric of Drugs,” 23.
40 Ibid., 23.
41 Derrida, “The Spatial Arts,” 12.
42 Mitchell, Contagious Metaphor, 139.
43 Derrida, “Limited Inc a b c,” 59.
44 Derrida, “The Law of Genre,” 57.
45 Ibid., 57.
46 Derrida, “The Law of Genre,” 57–58. See also “Limited Inc,” in which Derrida also discusses repetition and iterability in terms of a process of contamination and a parasitic logic that ceaselessly undermines essentializing thought: ‘Iterability blurs a priori the dividing-line that passes between […] opposed terms, “corrupting” it if you like, contaminating it parasitically, qua limit. What is re-markable about the mark includes the margin within the mark. The line delineating the margin can therefore never be determined rigorously, it is never pure and simple’. “Limited Inc,” 70. Similarly, in a 1989 interview published as “This Strange Institution Called Literature,” Derrida explains that in the formation of an event, ‘What happens is always some contamination. The uniqueness of the event is this coming about of a singular relation between the unique and its repetition, its iterability. The event comes about, or promises itself initially, only by thus compromising itself by the singular contamination of the singular and what shares it. It comes about as impurity–and impurity here is chance’. Derrida, “This Strange Institution Called Literature,” 68–69.
47 Derrida, “The Law of Genre,” 59.
48 Kelsen, Pure Theory of Law, 1.
49 Derrida, “Force of Law,” 997.
50 Ibid.
51 Ibid., 159.
52 See, for instance, Teubner’s edited collection Autopoietic Law (1987), which contains Luhmann’s essay “The Unity of the Legal System,” and Luhmann’s Law as a Social System (trans. of Das Recht der Gesellschaft, 1993).
53 Davies, “Derrida and Law: Legitimate Fictions,” 221.
54 Ibid.
55 Long, “Derrida Interviewing Derrida: Autoimmunity and the Laws of the Interview,” 106.
56 Rottenberg, “The Legacy of Autoimmunity,” 3.
57 Derrida, Specters of Marx, 141, 201.
58 Ibid., 177, emphasis in original.
59 Long, “Derrida Interviewing Derrida,” 107.
60 Anderson and Mackay, Intolerant Bodies,149–150.
61 Ibid.
62 Ibid., 146.
63 Ibid., 144.
64 Ibid., 145.
65 Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” 80, n. 27.
66 Cohen, A Body Worth Defending, 35.
67 Ibid., 36.
68 Fischer, “On Metaphor: Reciprocity and Immunity,” 149–50. Fischer does, however, suggest that the ‘self–nonself’ metaphor that accompanied and subtended the biomedical concept of autoimmunity has, within scientific writing ‘run its course’.
69 Cohen, A Body Worth Defending, 36–37.
70 Ibid., 38, 40.
71 W. J. T. Mitchell, “Picturing Terror: Derrida’s Autoimmunity,” 282.
72 Lewis, “Of (Auto-)Immune Life: Derrida, Esposito, Agamben,” 215.
73 Derrida “Autoimmunity,” 124.
74 Lewis, “Of (Auto-)Immune Life: Derrida, Esposito, Agamben,” 216.
75 Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” 63, emphasis in original.
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Peta Mitchell
Peta Mitchell is Vice Chancellor’s Research Fellow at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia, where she is a Chief Investigator in QUT’s Digital Media Research Centre and a member of the Urban Informatics Research Lab. She is author of Cartographic Strategies of Postmodernity (Routledge 2008) and Contagious Metaphor (Bloomsbury 2012), and co-author of Imagined Landscapes: Geovisualizing Australian Spatial Narratives (Indiana University Press 2016). Mitchell’s research more broadly spans communication and media studies, critical and cultural theory, cultural and media geography, and human–computer interaction. She is currently engaged in research projects focused on digital and networked contagion, digital geographies and rapid spatial analytics, and digital media, placemaking, and location awareness. Email: [email protected]