Life Death and Difference: Philosophies of Life between Hegel and Derrida

The point of departure of my work is the reading of the unpublished seminar La vie la mort, which Derrida gave in 1975, and whose final part, “To Speculate—on Freud,” was published in The Postcard. The first part is devoted to the biology of the time and, in particular, to the reading of François Jacob’s The Logic of Life, a book in which Derrida finds the resources to account for the genesis and structure of the living in terms of trace and text. The seminar begins under the aegis of Hegel, whose authority would consist in giving the most accomplished formulation of the philosophical concept of life. It is with Hegel that one must engage to formulate a different concept of life, freed from the metaphysical presuppositions that, to begin with the opposition between life and death, could secretly influence, once again, the sciences of life. This is what is at stake in contemporary biology, which aims at emancipating itself from philosophy, as well as in the deconstruction of the concept of life.