Derrida's Boys

Type: 
Lecture
Audience: 
Open to the Public
Building: 
Nador u. 9, Monument Building
Room: 
Popper Room
Friday, January 25, 2013 - 1:00pm
Add to Calendar
Date: 
Friday, January 25, 2013 - 1:00pm to 2:40pm

The Department of Gender Studies

2012-2013 Public Lecture Series

presents

Michael O’Rourke

"Derrida’s Boys"

13 p.m., Friday 25 January 2013, Popper Room

As Geoffrey Bennington predicted in Other Analyses Jacques Derrida has become the subject for the most complacent “biographical writing” with biographies from Jason Powell and David Mikics and more recently, Benoît Peeters'  Derrida: A Biography. The latter is framed as a “non-intellectual biography” which would attend to that which usually gets left out in this genre and according to Peeters one of the things that drops out in traditional biographical texts is “childhood”. And yet, his own biography devotes just 25 pages to the first eighteen years of Derrida’s life.  In this paper I will attempt to think about what it might mean to write a non-hierarchical, “multiple”, “layered” and “fractal” biography of Derrida and I am tempted, at once, to call this puerile genre of writing (which shifts between biography and autobiography) an “auto-boy-ography”. Reading Derrida boyishly would necessitate imagining him as a "forever child" and recognizing the child-like wonder of deconstruction. Combining autobiographical reflection (Derrida’s and my own) and philosophical enquiry (Derrida’s and my own) a boyish reading of Derrida would pass though such scenes as Derrida as a young boy in Algiers, his dreams of becoming a footballer or a movie star,  his relationship to his mother and siblings, his fascination with monsters, his circumcision, his tears and depression, boys in Derrida's texts, the figure of the disciple or acolyte.  I call this genre "auto-boy-ography" to mark the perverdeformation of the genre I am gesturing at. Biography as self-interruptive, never fully, auto-matically itself can only work in a time that is out of joint. The other of the auto is what Bennington, in an act of betrayal, calls the “autro”. Derrida is, as Bennington says “the authror of everything he writes”, an “autrobiographical animal”. So, in one further twist,  I would like to call this paper my autro-boy-ographical animal or even my autro-boy-o-thanato-hetero-graphical “opus” for Derrida.

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Michael O’Rourke lectures in the School of Psychotherapy at Independent Colleges, Dublin and writes mostly about the intersections between queer theory and continental philosophy. Among other things, he is currently writing a book called Queering Speculative Realism. Some of his many publications can be found here: http://independentcolleges.academia.edu/MichaelORourke