Introduction

Abstract

Beginning in 2008, with the French publication of volume 1 of The Beast and the Sovereign, Éditions Galilée, the University of Chicago Press, and an international editorial team initiated the process of editing, publishing, and translating, in reverse chronological order, the complete seminars of Jacques Derrida. These seminars, given variously at the Sorbonne, the École normale supérieure, the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Johns Hopkins University, Yale University, the University of California, Irvine, the New School for Social Research, the Cardozo Law School, and New York University, encompass material presented as early as 1959 and as late as 2003.With Derrida’s death in 2004, the seminar publications —projected to continue well into the 2050s — became the principal source of all Derrida’s future, posthumous publications, now under the direction of Katie Chenoweth, director of the Bibliothèque Derrida series at the French publishing house Éditions du Seuil. This special issue of Poetics Today addresses two questions that are raised by this enterprise: First, how does the publication, mediatization, and mass dissemination of Derrida’s teaching transform his corpus? Second, how does this corpus already speak to, anticipate, and preprogram the virtualization, translation, and transmission of the space of “the seminar”？