The Text and the Living: Jacques Derrida between Biology and Deconstruction

Abstract

This paper gives an account of work in progress on ‘Derrida and Biology’ that takes its point of departure from Derrida's unpublished seminar La vie la mort (1975), the first six sessions of which are devoted to biology and, in particular, to the work of François Jacob, a genetic biologist known for his research on the DNA structure and the laws of heredity in the organization and evolution of the living. This seminar shows that Derrida's engagement with biology is already at work in his earliest texts, and in particular in Of Grammatology, where biology functions as the horizon in which notions like ‘differance,’ ‘archi-writing,’ ‘trace,’ and ‘text’ find their genetic-structural foundation and articulation. The goal is to demonstrate that only within this horizon one can understand the statement ‘there is nothing outside the text’ as well as the notion of the ‘general text’, widely misunderstood as the thesis of a hyperbolic hermeneutics.