Day 1 • Thursday, Oct. 24

Robertson Bowl 001

Overflow: Robertson Bowl 002 (via simulcast)

3 p.m.

Welcome Remarks: Eduardo Cadava and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

3:15 – 4:30 p.m.

Gil Anidjar, Columbia University, “De Inimicii”
Moderator: Vance Smith

4:45 – 6 p.m.

Catherine Malabou, New York University, “Dezoning History, Unchaining Archives, Desymbolizing Finitude”
Moderator: Andrew Cole

6:15 – 8 p.m.

Welcome reception, Louis A. Simpson International Building

Exhibition: “Annotations and the Book as Archive in Derrida’s Library,” Special Collections, Firestone Library, Level C

Day 2 • Friday, Oct. 25

Betts Auditorium, School of Architecture

10  – 11:15 a.m.

Eyal Weizman, Goldsmiths, University of London, “Ungrounding"
Moderator: Spyros Papapetros

11:30 a.m. – 12:45 p.m

Anne Berger, University at Buffalo, “Politics of the Heart”
Moderator: Javier Guerrero

Lunch Break

Exhibition: “Annotations and the Book as Archive in Derrida’s Library,” Special Collections, Firestone Library, Level C

2:15 – 3:30 p.m.

Axelle Karera, Emory University, “Sans Invitation! A Planetary Test of Hospitality”
Moderator: Nick Nesbitt

3:45 – 5 p.m.

Thangam Ravindranathan, Brown University, “The Banana and the Sovereign”
Moderator: Monica Huerta

5:15 – 6:30 p.m.

Jennifer Bajorek, Hampshire College, “Derrida in Benin”
Moderator: Chika Okeke-Agulu

Day 3 • Saturday, Oct. 26

Betts Auditorium, School of Architecture

10  – 11:15 a.m.

Erin Graff Zivin, University of Southern California, “Preparing to Improvise: The Shape of Deconstruction to Come”
Moderator: Gabriela Nouzeilles

11:30 a.m. – 12:45 p.m

Kir Kuiken, University at Albany, “Traces of the Earth and the Ends of Worlds:Derrida’s Geo-Philosophy.”
Moderator: Karen Emmerich

Lunch Break

2:15 – 3:30 p.m.

Elissa Marder,  Emory University, “Derrida’s Tongues” 
Moderator: Brigid Doherty

3:45 – 5 p.m.

Elisabeth Weber, University of California, Santa Barbara, “Insomniac Returns: Shoah,
Nakba”
Moderator: Divya Cherian

5:15 – 6:30 p.m.

Paul Preciado, LUMA Arles, “Beyond Heidegger’s Geschlecht: Toward a Dysphoric Reading of Derrida”
Moderator: Yve-Alain Bois

7 p.m.

Hors d’oeuvres and dinner (7:30 p.m.) for participants • Palmer House, 1 Bayard Lane

Gil Anidjar

Gil Anidjar is Professor in the Department of Religion and the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS) at Columbia University. His teaching and research focuses on the relations between Jews and Arabs, political theology, race and religion, Christianity, and continental philosophy He is the author of “Our Place in al-Andalus”: Kabbalah, Philosophy, Literature in Arab Jewish Letters (2002), The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy (2003), Semites: Race, Religion, Literature (2008), Blood: a Critique of Christianity (2014), and Qu’appelle-t-on Destruction? Heidegger, Derrida (2017). He has edited Derrida’s Acts of Religion (2002), and has translated several of Derrida’s essays. His most recent book is the forthcoming On the Sovereignty of Mothers: The Political as Maternal (2024).

Jennifer Bajorek

Jennifer Bajorek is Professor of Comparative Literature and Visual Studies at Hampshire College. Her teaching and research focus on questions at the intersection of philosophy, photography, art, and poetry, with a particular interest in the aesthetic aftermaths of colonialism in French and Francophone worlds, and a cultural and geographic focus on Africa. She is the author of Counterfeit Capital: Poetic Labor and Revolutionary Irony (2008) and of Unfixed: Photography and Decolonial Imagination in West Africa (2020), and the translator of Derrida’s and Bernard Stiegler’s Echographies of Television. Her research and curatorial projects have been supported by fellowships or grants from the Mellon Foundation, the Marion and Jasper Whiting Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, the London Centre for Arts and Cultural Exchange, the Clark Art Institute, the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, and a Creative Capital/Arts Writers Grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation.

Anne Emmanuelle Berger

Anne Emmanuelle Berger is Professor Emerita of French literature and Gender Studies at Université Paris VIII and currently Visiting Melodia E. Jones Chair in French Studies at the University of Buffalo. Initially a specialist of nineteenth-century French poetry and twentieth-century French thought (especially deconstruction and psychoanalysis), she has been writing mainly for the past fifteen years on the epistemology and intellectual history of the field of gender and sexuality studies in the Western world, the politics of language(s), and the relations among literature, philosophy, and politics. She is the author or editor of many books in French and English, including Algeria in Others’ Languages (2002) and The Queer Turn in Feminism (2014). Her most recent publications include Qui a peur de la deconstruction? (2023), co-edited with Isabelle Alfandary and Jacob Rogozinski. She is currently finishing a book on the exhaustion of the epistemological paradigm of “sexuality,” entitled The End of Sexuality.

Erin Graff Zivin

Erin Graff Zivin is Professor of Spanish and Portuguese and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California, where she also directs the USC Dornsife Experimental Humanities Lab. Her research focuses on modern and contemporary Latin American literature and media, deconstruction, the relationship between ethics, politics, and aesthetics, and the intersection of philosophy and critical theory more broadly. She is the author of The Wandering Signifier: Rhetoric of Jewishness in the Latin American Imaginary (2008), Figurative Inquisitions: Conversion, Torture, and Truth in the Luso- Hispanic Atlantic (2014), and Anarchaeologies: Reading as Misreading (2020). She is co-editor of Terror: La perspectiva hispana (2020), and editor of The Marrano Specter: Derrida and Hispanism (2017).

Axelle Karera

Axelle Karera is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Emory University. She works at the intersection of twentieth-century continental philosophy, the critical philosophy of race (particularly Black critical theory), contemporary critical theory, and the environmental humanities. In addition to forthcoming work on Blackness and ontology, she is currently finishing her first monograph, titled The Climate of Race: Blackness and the Pitfalls of Anthropocene Ethics, in which she examines the question of relationality in new materialist ontology and speculative realism’s purported return to metaphysics. The book attempts to discern the ethical crux of critical thought in the age of the Anthropocene, aiming to attend to its powerful — and perhaps even necessary — disavowals on matters pertaining to racial ecocide

Kir Kuiken

Kir Kuiken is Associate Professor of English at the University at Albany and a member of the Derrida Translation Project. His areas of research include Romantic literature and culture, Romantic moral and political philosophy, and contemporary political and aesthetic theory. He is the author of Imagined Sovereignties: Toward a New Political Romanticism (2014) and editor, with Deborah Elise White, of Haiti's Literary Legacies: Romanticism and the Unthinkable Revolution (Bloomsbury, 2022). He is currently working on a manuscript entitled Adrift on the Earth: The Caribbean, Romanticism and Geo-Poetics which examines shifting conceptions of the Earth and ecology in the nineteenth century through the lens of contemporary Caribbean writing, locating a “geo- poetics” that extends from the nineteenth century to the present — the era of the Anthropocene.

Catherine Malabou

Catherine Malabou is Professor of Philosophy at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University, at the European Graduate School, and in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine. She is also presently Otto Mainzer and Ilse Wunsch Mainzer Global Distinguished Professor at New York University. She is the author of several books, including The Future of Hegel (1996), Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing (2004), The New Wounded (2007), The Ontology of the Accident (2009), Before Tomorrow: Epigenesis and Rationality (2014), Morphing Intelligence: From IQ Measurement to Artificial Brains (2018), Pleasure Erased: The Clitoris Unthought (2020), Plasticity: The Promise of Explosion (2022), Stop Thief: Anarchy and Philosophy (2023), and, with Derrida, Counterpath (1999).

Elissa Marder

Elissa Marder is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Emory University. Her areas of specialization include nineteenth- and twentieth-century French, British, and American Literature, literary theory, psychoanalysis, feminist theory, film, and photography. She was a founding member of the Emory Psychanalytic Studies Program and her publications include Dead Time: Temporal Disorders in the Wake of Modernity (Baudelaire and Flaubert) (2001) and The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Psychoanalysis, Photography, Deconstruction (2012). She is currently working on several new projects, including a book tentatively titled Poetry By Other Means (on Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin’s Late Writings) and a study of early nineteenth-century French Literature, titled Revolutionary Perversions.

Paul Preciado

Paul Preciado is a philosopher, curator, and transgender activist whose work focuses on applied and theoretical topics relating to identity, gender, pornography, architecture, and sexuality. He has taught at the Université Paris VIII, directed the Independent Studies Program at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona (MACBA), and served as Curator of Public Programs for documenta 14 in Kassel and Athens. He is the author of Countersexual Manifesto (2002), Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era (2008), Pornotopia (2014), Can the Monster Speak? (2020), and, most recently, Dysphoria Mundi (2022). He also has directed the recent film Orlando: My Political Biography (2023), which has received several awards, including the Teddy Award for Best Documentary Film and the Tagesspiegel Reader’s Jury Award at the Berlin International Film Festival, and Special Mention for the Chantel Akerman Award at the Jerusalem Film Festival. He is currently in residence at LUMA Arles, France.

Thangam Ravindranathan

Thangam Ravindranathan is Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Brown University. Her teaching and research interests include twentieth- and twenty-first- century literature and critical theory, narratives of travel and space, the contemporary novel, the question of the animal, and literature and ecology. She is the author of Là où je ne suis pas: récits de dévoyage (2012), Behold an Animal: Four Exorbitant Readings (2020) and, with Antoine Traisnel, of Donner le change: L’impensé animal (2016). Her current book project, titled Unearthly Literature, inquires into literature's ways of registering environmental degradation, with a particular focus on novels and critical thought from the postwar decades. She is also presently co-editing, with Nathalie Dupont, a special issue of Substance on “Trees,” as objects of figuration, preoccupation, and long cohabitation in a global cultural, literary, philosophical and environmental imagination.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is University Professor at Columbia University, and a founding member of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. She is the author of over 200 articles and several books, including In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (1987), The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues (1990), Thinking Academic Freedom in Gendered Post-Coloniality (1993), Outside in the Teaching Machine (1993), A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Present (1999), Death of a Discipline (2003), Other Asias (2005), and An Aesthetic Education in the Age of Globalization (2012). She also translated and introduced Derrida’s Of Grammatology (1976; 2016) and is presently finishing a book on W. E. B. Du Bois entitled My Brother, Burghardt.

Elisabeth Weber

Elisabeth Weber is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research interests include French philosophy and theory, psychoanalysis and trauma studies, German Judaism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, an German literature from the nineteenth century to the present. Her research and teaching focuses on the ways in which literature and critical theory can contribute to an exploration of trauma, of human rights and their violations. She is the author of Verfolgung und Trauma. Zu Emmanuel Levinas’ Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence (1990) and Kill Boxes: Facing the legacy of U.S. sponsored torture, indefinite detention and drone warfare (2017). She also has edited Questioning Judaism (2004), a collection of interviews with Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, Emmanuel Levinas, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, and others, and Living Together: Jacques Derrida’s Communities of Violence and Peace (2013).

Eyal Weizman

Eyal Weizman is the founder and director of Forensic Architecture and Professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is the author of Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (2012), The Conflict Shoreline: Colonialism as Climate Change in the Negev Desert (2015), The Least of all Possible Evils: A Short History of Humanitarian Violence (2017), Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability (2019), and, with Matthew Fuller, Investigative Aesthetics: Conflicts and Commons in the Politics of Truth (2021). He has held positions in several universities worldwide, including Princeton University, ETH Zurich, and the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. He is a member of the Technology Advisory Board of the International Criminal Court and of the Centre for Investigative Journalism and, in 2019, he was elected life fellow of the British Academy.

Moderators from Princeton

Yve-Alain Bois, Institute for Advanced Study, Emeritus
Andrew Cole, English
Divya Cherian, History
Brigid Doherty, German and Art History
Karen Emmerich, Comparative Literature
Javier Guerrero, Spanish and Portuguese
Monica Huerta, English
Nick Nesbitt, French and Italian
Gabriela Nouzeilles, Spanish
Chika Okeke-Agulu, Art History

This symposium has received the generous support of the Council of the Humanities, Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, Program in Translation, Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities, Department of English, Department of French and Italian, Department of Comparative Literature, Department of German, Program in European Cultural Studies, Firestone Library Special Collections, Department of French and Francophone Studies at Brown University, and Department of Comparative Literature at Emory University.