Today was the first day of the Derrida Today conference. I won’t write much, but wanted to catalogue here the excellent address by Andrew Benjamin on Derrida, Heidegger, their readings of Sophocles, and the possibility of ever being without, outside, above, beyond the law. He wasn’t mentioned, but this would resonate very well with some of Agamben’s work.
An over-riding sense for me, today, however, was the vast variety of discipline’s in which Derrida’s work is taken up within. It is, in the least, exceedingly difficult to have a conversation across these disciplines. Any cross-disciplinary conversation, it would seem to me, cannot be conducted on the basis of the name “Derrida” as signifying some kind of united body. The disturbance that was the phenomenal reception of Derrida, in particular in the US (and the number of US scholars here for the conference is considerable), still seems too great. I wonder if it will subside at some point.
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