讲座题目：Breaching Ethics: Performing Deconstruction
讲座学者： Laurent Milesi教授
讲座时间：2016年6月24日（周五）上午9:00-11:00
讲座地点：紫金港校区东五-201（东）
讲座内容简介：
In his essay on Emmanuel Levinas in Writing and Difference, ‘Violence and Metaphysics’, Jacques Derrida writes that ‘[t]here is a transcendental and preethical violence. [...] This transcendental violence, which does not spring from an ethical resolution or freedom, or from a certain way of encountering or exceeding the other, originally institutes the relationship [...]’. This provides the epigraph to the third chapter of Martin Hägglund's Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life, where he opposes the notion of an arche-violence indissociable from the affirmation of radical alterity in Derridean deconstruction to the recent emphasis on its alleged (Levinasian) ‘ethical motivation’. For Hägglund, this ‘constitutive violence’ can be traced right up to Derrida's later work on responsibility, justice and hospitality.
But whereas Hägglund anchors his corrective rereading of Derrida to Specters of Marx, since it is often claimed to have ushered in an ethical turn in Derrida's thinking by those other commentators, I would like to extend and reorient his argument to earlier interventions featuring the notion of ‘force’: the companion essay in Writing and Difference, ‘Force and Signification’, and Force of Law (both the ‘mystical foundation of authority’ as the forceful inaugural institution of law-as-justice, and the discussion of German Gewalt, connoting at once force, violence and power, in connection with Walter Benjamin). This will then be correlated to the issue of performativity at work in deconstruction, which Derrida himself recalled in ‘Marx and Sons’, his spirited rejoinder to those detractors who had failed to engage properly with Specters of Marx. Reworked from his fine-tuning of Austin's speech act theory in ‘Signature Event Context’ and the controversy that later ensued (e.g. Limited Inc), performativity will be seen as the underlying modus operandi for deconstruction's reclamation, through its linguistic (syntactical, lexical) strategies, of this pre-constitutive arche-trace prior even to the possibility of an ‘ethics’. In the interest of time, I shall limit my analysis to a few such well-known performative (i.e. also self-deconstructing) ‘formulas’, such as il y a làcendre (in Feu la cendre/Cinders, and its parallel in ‘Khôra’: il y a làkhôra), tout autreest tout autre (The Gift of Death), and l'un se garde de l'autre pour se faire violence (Archive Fever, which will be related to the notion of ‘auto-immunity’, from ‘Faith and Knowledge...’).
Laurent Milesi教授简介：
1992年获牛津大学文学博士学位，长期执教于英国卡迪夫大学，在英美文学研究和西方文论研究上具有国际影响力，已发表100余篇学术论文。他的博士论文《乔伊斯<芬尼根的觉醒>中“语法”与语言“本体”》及所发表的15篇论文，探讨乔伊斯作品中多种欧洲语言的主题内涵，奠定了他作为欧美乔伊斯研究专家的地位。他主编的《詹姆斯·乔伊斯与语言差异》由剑桥大学出版社出版。他对解构主义权威理论家德里达和女性主义著名理论家西苏的文论有深入的翻译和研究，已出版多部译著和论文。2017、2018他即将出版有关德里达和西苏的专著3部，译著1部。
他的学术兼职包括：《巴特研究》编辑顾问；《理论、文化与政治批评视角》合作编辑；《文字与文本：文学与语言学研究》主编；《反文本》编辑顾问；《布加勒斯特大学评论》编辑顾问；现代语言协会成员（1990-1992）；国际詹姆斯·乔伊斯学会董事会成员（1996-2002）；国际詹姆斯·乔伊斯学会成员；法国国家科研中心（ITEM-CNRS）詹姆斯·乔伊斯手稿研究小组成员；剑桥大学出版社、Blackwell、多伦多大学出版社论文审稿人；（英、法）国家科研基金评审；Leverhulme客座教授等。
他的研究领域包括：1） 20世纪（现代主义、后现代主义）英/美小说与诗歌，2）美国文艺复兴（少数族群）3）文学批评（包括文本研究和基因批评）4）批评与文化理论（包括最新潮流与趋势）5）翻译研究/理论6）当代法国哲学7）数字理论。
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外国文学研究所
2016年6月21日
