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  Presented by the Herman P. and Sophia Taubman Endowed Symposia in Jewish Studies Thursday, October 23 / 7:30 p.m. / Free UCSB Campbell Hall Keynote address for the international conference, “Irreconcilable Differences? Jacques Derrida and the Question of Religion,” October 23-25, 2003 at UCSB Description: "Living together": what does that mean? The connotations of "living together" are distributed from the best to the worst, here an inaccessible ideal, there a fatality that may be experienced as good, neutral or infernal. The best of "living together" is often associated with peace. However, even in the worst case, one cannot avoid "living together" with those closest--family, friends, fellow citizens--as well as with the most distant strangers, and even with one's enemies. The question of how to live "together" is simultaneously an obvious condition (how could one live otherwise?), and the promise or the despair of the always inaccessible. It leads to unsettling and far-reaching reflections on proximity and distance, identity and difference, violence and forgivenness. Addressing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the civil war in Algeria, the work of South Africa's "Truth and Reconciliation Commission," and our own "living together," Professor Derrida's lecture will invite us to rethink together the meaning of "togetherness" itself. Biographical Profile: Derrida is Professor of Philosophy and Directeur d’Études at the École des Hautes Études en Science Sociales in Paris. Since 1986 he has been Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, French, and Comparative Literature at UC Irvine. He also holds visiting professorships at New York University and the New School for Social Research. Derrida is one of the most prominent and influential contemporary philosophers. For the last forty years, his ground-breaking work of "Deconstruction" has profoundly shaped the course of philosophy, literary theory, art criticism, religious studies, and critical legal studies. Derrida also has been an active and outspoken critic of political issues such as South Africa's Apartheid, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the bloody civil war in his native Algeria, Human Rights abuses, French immigration laws, and the death penalty. His work has impacted contemporary political affairs around the world. Derrida is the author of over 50 books that have been translated into numerous languages. Born in 1930 to a Sephardic Jewish family in what was then French Algeria, Derrida was expelled from public school at age 10 as part of an anti-Semitic purge waged by the Vichy authorities in thrall to the Nazis. This event--his small share in a worldwide catastrophe--left him forever skeptical of educators, of intellectual prejudice, of any set of prefabricated "givens" (especially political attitudes), which too often enter our lives and shape our thinking without a vigorous examination. He moved to Paris in his teens and from 1952 to 1956 studied philosophy with the Marx and Hegel scholar, Jean Hyppolite, at the Ecole Normale Supérieure. He went on to earn a graduate a degree in philosophy at the Sorbonne and pursued a career in teaching. His profound impact on contemporary thought began in 1967 with the simultaneous publication of three major works (Speech and Phenomena, Writing and Difference, and Of Grammatology) -- works which began to articulate his extensive and radical critique of Western metaphysics; a critique which draws, in part, from the writings of Nietzche, Freud, Heidegger, Marx and Levinas. Since this first publication blitz, Derrida has gone on to publish over 45 books that have been translated in over 22 languages worldwide. His work has been read and disseminated by a broad range of cultures and disciplines, profoundly influencing fields as varied and disparate as art, literature, law, ethics, music, history, architecture and fashion. Politically active and deeply committed to furthering the course of social justice, Derrida has speculated that his early childhood experiences of intense anti-semitism which, among other things, led to his expulsion from the Algerian public schools at an early age, prompted him to devote his life work to rethinking positions of racism, power, and oppression using his sharp and surprising analytical skills to address the ways in which they overtly and covertly operate. As such his work has opened up spaces of critical thought to a wide variety of cultures and forces informing a wide range of human rights movements. A lifetime of teaching in both Europe and abroad, (Sorbonne, Ecole Normale Superieure, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Johns Hopkins University, Yale, The New School, NYU, UC Irvine) extensive publications and frequent activist interventions (France, Czechoslovakia, South Africa and the U.S.) have led him to become one of the most cited and influential contemporary intellectual figures. Paradoxically, a person who is at once both extremely private and extremely public, Derrida is one of the most important, profound and intriguing thinkers living today. The Herman P. and Sophia Taubman Foundation Endowed Symposia in Jewish Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara is cosponsored by UCSB Arts & Lectures, Department of Religious Studies, Hillel, and Interdisciplinary Humanities Center. |