The Movement of a Pas

This chapter follows Derrida’s reading of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle as an “athetic” text that offers a “logic of reproduction” quite unlike François Jacob’s. Derrida’s reading of Freud, undertaken in the last four sessions of his La vie la mort seminar, is both radical and of enormous importance for all the disciplines.

Institutions of the “Yes”

Derrida returns to the questions of academic freedom, teaching as auto-reproduction, and the biological-biographical body by considering Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo before turning to his earlier (1872) On the Future of our Educational Institutions. Central to this chapter is Derrida’s inheritance of Nietzsche’s autograph-signature.

Double Helix

Derrida’s performative reading of François Jacob’s account of DNA reproduction in The Logic of the Living focuses on Jacob’s interpretation of DNA as a logocentric text, one that is essentially without survival value. In line with other modern biologists, Jacob confuses metaphor and concept. He also looks forward to man’s “cerebral” (eugenic) control over evolution.

Schools of Life

Derrida, teaching at the time of this seminar as an agrégé-répetiteur at the ENS in Paris, suggests that François Jacob’s interpretation of the DNA reproductive program transfers easily to the philosophical institution where teaching, under the direction of state authorities, takes place as auto-reproduction. Derrida questions the fate of the body and of academic freedom in this context of teaching as mechanical reproduction of sameness.

Rhythmos

This final chapter highlights the life death movement that Derrida reads in the texts of Nietzsche and especially Freud, suggesting that the end of movement, rhythmos, is death (without opposition).

Life Worth More Than Life

The “normal (i.e., rational) man” ideal that fueled the eugenics movement has found its way into current (both religious and “non-speciesist”) ethics. The situation examined in this chapter is one in which a sovereign knower determines moral worth based on a “double-body” standard.

Speaking into a Dead Man’s Ear

What Alexander Graham Bell considered his most important, if least known, invention, the ear phonautograph, was designed to “bring the deaf to speech.” This chapter links Derrida’s suggestion that invention has become production to Marx’s blurring of reproduction-production and to Bell’s eugenics initiatives designed to eliminate reproduction between deaf mutes who, like foreigners, suffered from “broken speech.”

Introduction

During the 1975–76 academic year, Jacques Derrida delivered a seminar titled La vie la mort at the Paris École Normale Supérieure (ENS). At the time, Derrida was teaching at the ENS as an agrégé-répétiteur preparing students for the agrégation de philosophie exams. As I suggest in the ...