Sex, Race, Nation, Humanity: Derrida’s Geschlecht III

A Conference on a Newly Re-discovered Text

April 8-9, 2019

Richard Hoggart Building 137a, Goldsmiths, University of London

This two-day conference focuses on a recently discovered text by the late Franco-Algerian philosopher Jacques Derrida.  Geschlecht III, rediscovered in the Derrida archive and newly published in French (forthcoming in English), is the “missing” installment in Derrida’s four-part series on Martin Heidegger and the German word Geschlecht (meaning, among other things, “sex,” “race,” and “species”).  Geschlecht III presents us with one of Derrida’s most sustained engagements with Heidegger, a meticulous reading of what he will call Heidegger’s “national-humanism”: the nationalistic undercurrent in Heidegger’s thought that posits German and Germany as the privileged media through which to think the essence of the human and its relationship to the fate of the West. 

PROGRAMME

Monday, April 8

10:00 am – 10:15 am
Welcome
Julia Ng, Goldsmiths; Katie Chenoweth, Princeton

10:15 am – 1:15 pm
Panel 1 : 120 minutes
Simon Glendinning (LSE), “A Different Sexuality”
Paul Davies (Sussex), “Reading in Silence”
Sarah Wood (OLR/Angelaki), “The Game is Up”

Chair: Naomi Waltham-Smith, Warwick

1:15 pm – 2:45 pm
Lunch Break

2:45 pm – 3:45 pm
Keynote 1 : 60 minutes
Geoffrey Bennington (Emory), “Dissemination and Polysemia Again: The Place of Aristotle in Derrida’s Reading of Heidegger”

4:00 pm – 5:00 pm
Keynote 2 : 60 minutes
Katie Chenoweth (Princeton), “Faute de frappe: Derrida’s Typos”

5 :15 pm – 6 :15 pm
Keynote 3 : 60 minutes
Rodrigo Therezo (Freiburg), “From the Ashes: The Phoenix Motif in Geschlecht III”

Chair: Julia Ng, Goldsmiths

Tuesday, April 9

10:30 am – 12:00 pm
Panel 2 : 90 minutes
Simon Wortham (Kingston), “Metonym and Place: To Gather and to Leap”
Naomi Waltham-Smith (Warwick), “Unflappable”

Chair: Mauro Senatore, Durham

12:00 pm – 2:00 pm
Lunch Break

2:00 pm – 3:30 pm
Panel 3 : 90 minutes
Mauro Senatore (Durham), “A Nietzschean-Type Perspectivism: Heidegger’s Thesis on the Animal After Derrida”
Tobias Keiling (Wuppertal), “Denying Solace, Deferring Redemption: Remarks on Derrida’s Analysis of Heidegger’s ‘Promise’”

Chair: Josh Cohen, Goldsmiths

3:45 pm – 5:15 pm
Panel 4 : 90 minutes
Adam Rosenthal (Texas A&M), “Establishing Paternity, or Geschlecht and the Future of Family”
Elina Staikou (Winchester), “‘Prior-to-the-first’: Thinking Geschlecht with Surrogacy”

Chair: Lynn Turner, Goldsmiths

Click here for a printable version of the programme, and here for the abstracts.