On Sex, Race, Nation, Humanity: Reading Derrida’s Geschlecht III

This event focuses on a recently discovered text by the late Franco-Algerian philosopher Jacques Derrida. Geschlecht III, rediscovered in the Derrida archive and newly published in French (forthcoming in English), is the “missing” installment in Derrida’s four-part series on Martin Heidegger and the German word Geschlecht(meaning, among other things, “sex,” “race,” and “species”). Geschlecht III presents us with one of Derrida’s most sustained engagements with Martin Heidegger, in which Derrida tracks a subtle but powerful nationalistic undercurrent in Heidegger’s thought.

Katie Chenoweth (Princeton University) is one of the co-editors of Geschlecht III in French (Seuil, 2018) and co-translator of the English edition (Chicago, forthcoming 2020). She directs the “Bibliothèque Derrida” series at Éditions du Seuil.

Rodrigo Therezo (University of Freiburg) is the author of the preface to Geschlecht III. He is co-editor of the French edition and co-translator of the forthcoming English edition.

David Wills (Brown University) is the author of many books, most recently Killing Times: The Temporal Technology of the Death Penalty (Fordham, 2019). He is one of the foremost translators of Derrida’s work into English.

Moderated by Emily Apter, Professor, Department of French Literature, Thought, and Culture, and Chair of Department of Comparative Literature, NYU.

In English

Sponsored by the Department of French Literature, Thought, and Culture and the Department of Comparative Literature