Abstract
This essay argues for the irreducible and ineradicable role played by chance, accident, contingency, or what is called here dumb luck in all human affairs, including ethics. It begins by recounting an exemplary story of dumb luck from Herodotus’s Persian Wars before moving on to Jacques Derrida’s analysis of luck or contingency in his recently published seminar Life Death (1975–1976). The essay follows Derrida’s reading of François Jacob’s The Logic of the Living in order to show how this Nobel Prize–winning geneticist tried to minimize or exclude, to the detriment of his own theory, the role of contingency or luck in his understanding of the genetic program. The essay concludes with a brief tale from the American novelist Don DeLillo that helps illustrate how a certain dumb luck informed, as always, at once the writing of this essay and the very invitation that led to it.
Published Version
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