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ABSTRACT
In August 1999, Jacques Derrida gave a number of lectures and seminars in Melbourne and Sydney. The seminar of 13 August, held at Sydney's Seymour Centre Theatre, was open to the public. It consisted of a question-and-answer session with Genevieve Lloyd, David Wills, Paul Patton and Penelope Deutscher. Its title, 'Themes from Recent Work', reflected interests in the work from Specters of Marx (1994) onwards which some, including Paul Patton, have referred to as deconstruction in its affirmative phase. What follows is a by-no-means verbatim record of the event. Rather it is but one member of the audience's account of what transpired in the seminar – an account which is therefore necessarily selective and pressed through the grid of my own quasi-philosophical interests. Following this account of the seminar, I offer some marginal notes on the open discussion following the seminar, then, finally, some reflections on a particular matter discussed at the dinner which followed that – madness.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. ‘Messianic structure of consciousness' is Lloyd's term which, later, Derrida also wants to question since, as the quotation in footnote 4 (below) shows, messianicity is not simply a matter of consciousness but also of, for example, speaking, promising and justice.
2. This is presumably a reference to Derrida's Origins of Geometry (Citation1978b).
3. The relevant passage from Freud's ‘Mourning and Melancholia' (Citation1957, p. 255) reads as follows:
In the first place, normal mourning, too [as well as melancholia?], overcomes the loss of the object, and it, too, while it lasts, absorbs all the energies of the ego. Why, then, after it has run its course, is there no hint in its case of the economic condition for a phase of triumph? I find it impossible to answer this objection straight away…. Possibly, however, a conjecture will help us here. Each single one of the memories and situations of expectancy which demonstrate the libido’s attachment to the lost object is met by the verdict of reality that the object no longer exists; and the ego, confronted, as it were with the question whether it shall share this fate, is persuaded by the sum of the narcissistic satisfactions it derives from being alive to sever its attachment to the object that has been abolished.
4. On this matter, Derrida writes (in a passage also reproduced in the Seminar programme):
When I insisted in Specters of Marx on messianicity, which I distinguished from messianism, I wanted to show that the messianic structure is a universal structure. As soon as you address the other, as soon as you are open to the future, as soon as you have a temporal experience of waiting for the future, of waiting for someone to come: that is the opening of experience. Someone is to come, is now to come. Justice and peace will have to do with this coming of the other, with the promise. Each time I open my mouth, I am promising something. When I speak to you, I am telling you that I promise to tell you something, to tell you the truth. Even if I lie, the condition of my lie is that I promise to tell you the truth. So the promise is not just one speech act among others; every speech act is fundamentally a promise. This universal structure of the promise, of the expectation for the future, for the coming, and the fact that this expectation of the coming has to do with justice — that is what I call the messianic structure. (1997, p. 22–23)
5. See Margins of the discussion #1, below.
6. See Margins of the discussion #2, below.
7. A polite reference possibly to Wills's own Prosthesis (Citation1995) – or his father's?
8. See Margins of the discussion #3, below.
9. The Mabo case was a landmark High Court case which established native title as a right in property. Officially known as Mabo and others v Queensland (No 2) (1992), the case brought by Eddie Mabo and fellow Mer Islanders successfully challenged and overturned the idea that Australian territory belonged to no one at the time of British colonisation – the doctrine of terra nullius. It was highly influential in the passing of the 1993 Native Title Act (Cth).
10. This may be a reference to Heidegger's re-reading of the Anaximander fragment in Early Greek Thinking (Citation1975).
11. A possible uptake might involve using Derrida's ‘being just with the other' for a revised version of Lyotard's (Citation1984) différend.
12. See Margins of the discussion #4, below.
13. The reference here may be (since the question was mooted) to claims by the Australian Prime Minister of the day, John Howard, that today's Australians are not responsible for the crimes of their forebears.
14. My colleague Steve Maras, also at the seminar, and whom I thank for his unending hospitality, notes that questions of patent rights, copyright and intellectual property rights do not figure in this reply. Is this absence pertinent?
15. This is a reference, presumably, to Derrida's critique of Foucault's Madness and Civilisation (Citation1967) in ‘Cogito and the History of Madness' (Citation1978a).
16. Towards the end of ‘Politics and Friendship' (Citation1993, p. 231), Derrida goes so far as to refer to ‘genealogico-deconstructive research'.