Monthly Archives: November 2020

Riccardo Baldissone is Fellow at the University of Westminster, London. He is committed to a genealogical construction of Western texts that links the process of production of the logic of identity in classical ontology with the medieval emergence of conceptual discourse and the transformations of modern naturalism, in a project to overcome the double straitjacket […]

David Wills (bio)Brown University A review of Chamayou, Grégoire. A Theory of the Drone. Translated by Janet Lloyd, The New P, 2015. Grégoire Chamayou’s A Theory of the Drone (published in French in 2013) provides a provocative and insightful assessment of nearly ten years of drone warfare conducted by the US since sometime after its […]

Michael Peterson (bio)DePaul University. A review of Danowski, Déborah and Viveiros de Castro. The Ends of The World. Translated by Rodrigo Nunes, Polity, 2017. “The end of the world is a seemingly interminable topic – at least, of course, until it happens” (1). The opening words of Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s The […]

Arthur Holland Michel (bio)Centre for the Study of the Drone at Bard College A review of Jaffer, Jameel, editor. The Drone Memos: Targeted Killing, Secrecy, and the Law. The New Press, 2016. For those seeking to understand targeted killing policy under the Obama administration, The Drone Memos (2017), a collection of ten key legal documents, […]

Catherine Malabou (bio) Translated by Carolyn Shread (bio) I am honored by and grateful for Eyal Amiran’s invitation to respond to the articles included in this fine double issue of Postmodern Culture, “Of Biodeconstruction.” While it is not possible for me to address each article individually, since several offer direct critiques of my work, I […]

Riccardo Baldissone (bio)University of Westminster, London Buried for decades in a deep and stony prison, the high priest Tzinacàn at last deciphers the message hidden by his god on the living skin of his jaguar companion. Yet, he is no longer interested in deploying the power of his discovery to rescue himself. This bitter moment […]

Jonathan Basile (bio)Emory University This essay deconstructs Jane Bennett’s and Erwin Schrödinger’s theories of life to demonstrate the untenability of defining life on the basis of either identity (relation to self) or difference (relation to other). Because the living thing is undecidably self and other, its traditional bond to the self-relation of teleology is untenable. […]

Raoul Frauenfelder (bio)University of Salerno In his courses on the concept of nature, Merleau-Ponty discusses the ontological implications of biology and explores the limits and peculiarities of the preformationism and epigenesis theses. He refuses both explanations, finding that they are partial and introduces a third hypothesis that describes the genesis and structure of life as […]

Elina Staikou (bio)University of Winchester The essay situates the privileging of “autoimmunity” in Derrida’s late work in relation to Esposito’s philosophical paradigm of immunization. It shows that autoimmunity is prefigured by the hypotheses of absolute catastrophe and radical finitude put forward in Derrida’s “No Apocalypse, Not Now (Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles, Seven Missives)” and […]

Erin Obodiac (bio)UC Irvine Of Biodeconstruction (Part II) ventures through the door left open by the emergent questions, hesitations, and provocations about deconstruction, the philosophy of life, and the life sciences advanced in Of Biodeconstruction (Part I). Although Jacques Derrida’s writings on autoimmunity, pharmakon, life-death, the question of the animal, Geschlecht, cloning, living-on, the genetic […]