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8-9 March 2007
How shall we read Derrida's 'Le Toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy' beyond the intimacy of the fraternal relation between Derrida and Nancy? Can this book initiate a thinking concerning the transformation, displacement and mutation of models of assumption and inheritance from the enlightenment and Abrhamic tradition regarding touch, haptology, materiality, the phenomenon and the political? As we enter into an epoch of new materialities for which we as yet have no theoretical vocabulary, and which deconstruction must address as its own future, is it possible to read the matters touched on by Derrida as indicative of a deconstruction-to-come? What is the future of this book and of the book in general, of writing, of the hand, of comprehension, of memory, of the machine, of the body, of the religious, of nature, and of the animal? How can we begin the deconstruction of the future and how can the corpus of Derrida point us towards the substance of this transformative critique?
Stephen Barker (UC Irvine)
Geoffrey Bennington (Emory)
Tom Cohen (SUNY, Albany)
Claire Colebrook (Edinburgh)
Marc Froment-Meurice (Vanderbilt)
Sean Gaston (Brunel)
J Hillis Miller (UC Irvine)
Christine Irizarry (English language translator, Le Toucher)
Martin McQuillan (Leeds)
The translation into English by Christine Irizarry of Jacques Derrida's On-Touching-Jean Luc Nancy is a momentous event in the arts and humanities. Of interest to scholars across a span of disciplines this book takes on the immense task of the deconstruction of the phenomenology of intuitionism and the philosophy of the sense of touch. It reads a history of philosophy including Plato, Aristotle, Levinas, Merleau-Ponty, Husserl, Heidegger, Descartes, Diderot, Kant, and Freud, taking as an anchoring point the work of Derrida's friend and colleague Jean-Luc Nancy. The book pays particular attention to Nancy's on-going deconstruction of Christianity and devotes a section to the sense of touch in the Gospels.
This two-day event seeks to begin the task of opening the critical commentary on this book with contributions from distinguished readers of Derrida.
The Critical Consciousness series promotes critical thinking as a key skill across the arts, humanities and cognate disciplines.
See also:
Critical Consciousness II:
'Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous: their psychonalyses', 1-3 June 2007
Entry is by ticket only, to register for a ticket please use this form:
Conference registration form
For information about other Critical Consciousness events please see this page.
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