Biography, biology, biopolitics

Pedagogical presentation of the course

This Teaching Unit consists of two weekly classes, one taught by S. Lojkine, the other by F. Manzari. It is mutualized as a 3rd year Bachelor 3 and 1st year Master's course.

The aim of this course is to introduce students to French Theory, i.e. the French theoretical and critical thought that developed from the 1960s onwards in the wake of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Lacan. The texts that will be studied in this course lie at the frontier between philosophy, the humanities and literature.

From the point of view of method, the stakes of this course are threefold :

• learning to read difficult texts,
• understand, synthesize and reformulate abstract reasoning,
• circulate between theory and literature, between reasoning and example
.

This know-how forms an essential basis for the exercise of the dissertation in general and the problematization of subjects, but also and above all for the theorized development of a research project in literature, with a view to the Master's degree. Indeed, the emphasis in the course will be on the deconstructive approach to the notions and themes addressed, as initiated by Jacques Derrida. Deconstruction is a powerful theoretical tool for tackling and problematizing the major questions running through the human sciences today, and making the link between literary heritage, contemporary creation and societal issues.

Program 2020-2021 : Biology, Biography, Biopolitics

Why Life death?

Derrida wrote enormously, the whole of his work is not to this day finished publishing. This year we'll be focusing on the seminar La vie la mort, held at the Ecole normale supérieure in 1975-1976 and published by Seuil in April 2019. It is therefore a text that has only been accessible to the general public for a very short time that we will be discovering together. As usual, Derrida proceeds by commenting on the philosophical readings he is currently engaged in. The subject of his seminar is in a way dictated by the syllabus imposed on his philosophy students at the ENS, who are preparing for the agrégation and have to work on "Life and Death" as part of their competitive examination. The thread running through the seminar is a book by François Jacob, La Logique du vivant, published by Gallimard in 1970, which Derrida reads in relation to Canguilhem, the most famous philosopher of science at the time. At the time, biology was undergoing a revolution, with the discovery of DNA (1953) and the genetic program it contains. DNA is the logic of life.

Here we are, seemingly far removed from literature, and even from traditional moral, aesthetic and political philosophy. Derrida, however, sets out to deconstruct this new epistemological field that is opening up and that we call the life sciences. He first demonstrates that their underlying theoretical model, their reference model, is linguistics. More precisely, text, the logic of text, the principles of coding, programming, production and selection that text implements and allows us to think about. Thinking about the living according to the new paradigms of contemporary biology requires us to think about text, its conditions of production, and hence the impossibility of its origin. To understand this, Derrida first calls upon Nietzsche : the Ecce homo, which he reads as a deconstruction of autobiography, and the lectures On the future of our educational institutions, where Nietzsche prophesies the death of culture from its massification. Just as he reads Jacob with Canguilhem, Derrida reads Nietzsche with Blanchot and Heidegger, who wrote about him. Nietzsche is the architect, in philosophy, of a revolution at least as important as the discovery of DNA in biology. This /// One of the challenges of this course will be to understand how, for Derrida, these two revolutions are articulated. To do so, we will study Derridza's personal relationship to autobiography, as developed in particular in Circonfessions.

We are struck, finally, in reading Derrida, by the appearance of a whole series of notions that have taken on a familiar resonance for us that Derrida in 1975 could not have imagined: program, code, self-reproduction, selection have taken on a new meaning for us in the 21st century, one that no longer has anything to do with the book, or even with writing in the humanist sense of the term. Code and program govern the rise of computing, which is taking on a growing and now even decisive importance in our lives, in our civilization. Today, computer science is itself undergoing its own revolution, with the development of artificial intelligence and its neural networks, which are taking up the challenge of self-reproduction, hitherto reserved (Jacob's thesis) for the living, by integrating into the program the randomness of selection and the possibility of self-generation of selection criteria. The scientific challenge has shifted from life to consciousness, from biology to cognitive science. Is the life of consciousness possible without the unconscious, or from an unconscious remodeled and rethought by technology? The Freudian hypothesis of Beyond the Pleasure Principle takes on a new relief here, as the debate rages between psychoanalysis and neuro-psychology: we will confront Freud's text, Lacan's and Derrida's reading of it, with the hypotheses and questionings of S. Dehaene and C. Malabou.

The place of literature

Based on Derrida's seminar La vie la mort, published in 2019, we will draw out the unexpected articulation, proposed by Derrida, between biology, as a science reducing the development of the living to a writing, and (auto)biography, which in order to write life presupposes freezing the living as dead at the risk of betraying its purpose. This articulation raises the fundamental question, for literary studies, of the place of literature in the general field of the humanities.

How can we understand, grasp, measure the articulation between biology and biography ? To achieve this, Derrida sets out to deconstruct the boundary between life and death bequeathed to us by our culture and philosophical tradition. To this end, he calls on the 3rd^e book of Hegel's The Science of Logic, and his dialectical thinking of life as a moment in the process of the development of the idea. But in Hegel's logic, the ultimate form of the living is not the human individual  it's the state, thought of as a living political organism. Thinking life-death without a break leads to a political thinking of life, to thinking the fulfillment of life in politics.

There would thus be a third writing of life, which would proceed from both biology and literature, and would be political, would structure the political organization of our societies : a biopolitics. This biopolitics, whose contours Michel Foucault had drawn, and on which Giorgio Agamben has continued to reflect, is entering a crisis today. But is it really politics that is coming to an end? Or rather, upstream of it, the very procedures of writing life ?

Works on the program

• Jacques Derrida, La vie la mort [1975-1976], Seuil, 2019
• Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce homo [1888], trans. Jean-Claude Hémery, Gallimard, Folio bilingue, 2012