Jacques Lezra

University of California, Riverside, Dept of Hispanic Studies, Faculty Member

New York University, Comparative Literature, Spanish, Faculty Member

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Papers by Jacques Lezra

How Modern is Freedom of the Will?: Epicurean Encounters Across Time and Disciplines

Uncountable Matters

<p>This chapter seeks to show how the most consequential contemporary critiques of mediatio... more <p>This chapter seeks to show how the most consequential contemporary critiques of mediation—found in the work of Quentin Meillassoux and Alain Badiou—reinstall a form of species-humanism under cover of a procedure of mathematical abstraction that Marx (and Melville) have already put in question. Here—and returning to the distinctive imbrication of things with the matter of poetic expression and with the expression of what comes to be called subjectivity that so captivates Marx about Lucretius's poem—it is John Donne, Pablo Neruda, and again Freud who provide us with a contemporary account of de-theologized fetishism on which to build a critico-political project in the wake of Marx's writing.</p>

One Badiou? Parodies of Philosophy

Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy

Alain Badiou’s Seminar: The One – Descartes, Plato, Kant (1983-1984) inaugurates "The Semina... more Alain Badiou’s Seminar: The One – Descartes, Plato, Kant (1983-1984) inaugurates "The Seminar," the collection of transcribed and edited seminars that Badiou chose for publication from the sessions he held over his career. To its place opening "The Seminar" other, perhaps more important functions should be added, however. The Seminar: The One serves, with the companion seminar on the Infinite (1984-1985), as a bridge between Badiou’s Theory of the Subject (1982) and the work for which he is best known, Being and Event (L'Être et l'Événement, 1988; English translation, 2005).1 (His play Incident at Antioch, whose first drafts are written during the years that Badiou holds the seminars on The One and The Infinite, builds another, rather different, bridge.) At once quite technical and rather chatty, The One – Descartes, Plato, Kant offers a genealogy for two decisive steps in Badiou’s thought: his description and his axiomatization of the operation “count...

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Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831)

Edinburgh Encyclopaedia of Modern Criticism and Theory

De la naturaleza de las cosas de Marx

The Schema of Institution

Philosophy Today

Regress threatens throughout Lyotard’s Differend, especially where the argument appears to make n... more Regress threatens throughout Lyotard’s Differend, especially where the argument appears to make normative ethical or political claims. How a term, a case or an example “links onto” a phrase serves as a way of examining how instituting can be non-regressively grounded, and with what consequences for abstract political subjectivity. The essay offers an alternative to liberal philosophical (Arendt, Nussbaum) and jurisprudential (Marbury v. Madison) schemata of political institution.

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DU RIEN-POUR-NOUS QUE LA MORT: DERRIDA ÉPICURE NOTHING FOR US BUT DEATH: DERRIDA EPICURE

Sintesis, 2021

Le séminaire "La vie la mort" de Derrida opère, comme d'avance motivé par ses suites et comme con... more Le séminaire "La vie la mort" de Derrida opère, comme d'avance motivé par ses suites et comme contresigné par ce nom qui n'apparaît pas-le nom d'Épicure-un virage vers un matérialisme non productif, non représentationnel, dépourvu en quelque sort de statut ontologique, voir non ontologisable, triomphant, normatif, voué à une économie de la cause. Nietzsche, lecteur antagonique d'Épicure (Lettre à Ménécée: "Accoutume-toi à considérer que la mort n'est rien pour nous")-constitue son écran-substitut. Nietzsche, dont la lecture sert à fermer-ouvrir les grandes boucles du séminaire de Derrida. Il s'agit donc de fouiller "La vie la mort" à la recherche des traces de la rencontre Nietzsche-Épicure-une rencontre définitive, elle, bien qu'invisible et silencieuse, bien que presqu'illisible dans le texte de Derrida, au sujet du rapport "la vie la mort."

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"Triomphes d'Épicure"

Cet étrange anneau ne dit oui à la vie que dans l'équivoque surdéterminante du triomphe de la vie... more Cet étrange anneau ne dit oui à la vie que dans l'équivoque surdéterminante du triomphe de la vie, du triomphe sur la vie, du triomphe marqué dans le sur d'un survivre. Derrida, "Survivre" 1 En tout cas la traduction étrange de Sache par cause est portée par la suite, lorsque Heidegger enchaîne, "die Sache, der Streitfall", la chose, le cas litigieux est en soi-même "ist in sich selbst Aus-einander-setzung." Derrida, "La vie la mort" 2 Mais non, il n'est pas là, rien à voir, on n'y touche pas, Épicure, dans le séminaire que nous lirons ensemble, le séminaire de Jacques Derrida "La vie la mort," conduit durant les années 1975-1976. "Mes chances," le grand essai de Derrida sur l'Épicurisme et sur la chute, le cas, cadere et fallentel le cas-chute, si peu dévié, qui hante la Sache quand elle devient der Streitfall (litige, différend)n'arrivera que sept ans plus tard, en 1982. Lucrèce, lui, "disciple sombre, mais venu à la clarté," comme 3 l'appelle Nietzsche; Lucrèce, qui est toujours en retard, ou qui arrive trop tôt comme le dit toujours Nietzsche, Lucrèce n'apparaîtra chez Derrida qu'en 1989, dans le cadre du séminaire "Manger l'autre." C'est là que Derrida commentera des vers du De rerum natura, seulement certains, se gardant dans ces pages toujours inédites de faire paraître le poème complet-et, même là, dans ce séminaire, ce ne sera qu'au travers de la traduction-adaptation que fait Michel Deguy du poème Latin. 4 Or, bien en avance de ces "rencontres" (je vois que vous devinez déjà le registre, l'institution même, que je "sup-pose" ici), bien en avance de ces rencontres explicitement épicuriennes, Derrida se meut déjà dans le jardin qu'enclosent, ou qu'ouvrent, les phrases célèbres que j'ai un peu mâchées pour en faire mon titre. Le lexique de la cause, celui qui noue les trois boucles du séminaire "La vie la mort," y joue constamment, à travers, ou de travers, comme obliquement : comme si, dans les matériaux que manie Derrida (le Nietzsche de Heidegger, les textes de Jacob, ceux de Nietzsche), quelque chose de cette "rencontre" qui reste encore à venir entre Derrida et Épicure était "portée par la suite" de certaines rencontres, comme enchaînée. Sans qu'on puisse pour autant dire qu'il y a, au sens classique, au sens

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The Schema of Institution

Philosophy Today, 2022

Regress threatens throughout Lyotard's Differend, especially where the argument appears to make n... more Regress threatens throughout Lyotard's Differend, especially where the argument appears to make normative ethical or political claims. How a term, a case or an example "links onto" a phrase serves as a way of examining how instituting can be non-regressively grounded, and with what consequences for abstract political subjectivity. The essay offers an alternative to liberal philosophical (Arendt, Nussbaum) and jurisprudential (Marbury v. Madison) schemata of political institution.

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12. Translation

Necrophilology

Imaginary Labour

Art and Class Struggle

ARTMargins, 2021

What do we need to know about “art” or “class struggle” before considering their relation to one ... more What do we need to know about “art” or “class struggle” before considering their relation to one another? Could you describe a specific work or text that might serve as an illustration of class struggle or as an exploration of the problem of representing it? Let us say that visual art, broadly speaking, does express the worldview of the dominant class. What kind of art then expresses the worldview of, say, hedge fund managers? Does the dialectic of the visible and invisible still hold for conceptual and post-conceptual art? What alternative critical apparatus would you propose, since neither Lenin nor John William Cooke seemed to care much for art. Why should we?

Cervantes on “Derrida”: Hispanism in the Open

The Marrano Specter, 2017

This essay describes and addresses the difficulty that Hispanism has in imagining its foundations... more This essay describes and addresses the difficulty that Hispanism has in imagining its foundations and origination. It reads Cervantes’s novela ejemplar “El licenciado Vidriera” as an allegory of disciplinarity and disciplinarization, which the novela treats as a matter inextricable from the sense of touch. This Cervantic, early-modern account of the primal relation between discipline and touch, the essay suggests, anticipates and allows us to see unexpected consequences to Derrida’s quite radical approach to disciplinarity.

Relation

Thinking with Balibar, 2020

On the Nature of Marx’s Things

Lucretius and Modernity, 2016

“It goes without saying that but little use can be made of Lucretius” [Es versteht sich, dass Luc... more “It goes without saying that but little use can be made of Lucretius” [Es versteht sich, dass Lucretius nur wenig benutzt werden kann].1 So, by way of preface or prophylaxis, opens the fourth of Marx’s Notebooks on Epicurean Philosophy, composed around 1839 as Marx was preparing his doctoral dissertation. A long list of citations from De Rerum Natura (DRN) follows, and then Lucretius is put to use—as Plutarch’s antagonist, in the long battle over the Epicurean tradition. In these early, informal notes by a young dissertator the reception of Lucretius hangs in the balance; what Althusser refers to as an “underground current” of the materialism of the encounter surfaces and is soon, over the course of the next 15 years, rechanneled or resubmerged.2 An account of mediation at odds with the mechanics, the economics, of use presents itself here, to be translated, never entirely successfully, first into the great Hegelian lexicon that the young Marx and his preceptors were unfolding, then into the languages of political economy. What sorts of use can be made of a thing? In what respects is Lucretius something to be used?

Lucretius and Modernity

Lucretius and Modernity, 2016

‘This untranslatability which is not one’

Paragraph, 2015

Translatability in natural languages today supports, and can only be understood in the context of... more Translatability in natural languages today supports, and can only be understood in the context of, economic globalization, and the universalization of market logic. ‘Untranslatability’, as it is most often construed, does not provide a critical alternative to this logic: it bolsters it. A different account of untranslatability (and, by extension, of what it means for expressions in natural languages to be ‘translatable’) is required: this essay seeks to provide such. It finds in passages in Marx and in Derrida's Monolinguisme de l'autre, and in different translations of those texts, an untranslatability which is not one, irreducible to mathematical identity.

Helen’s List

PMLA, 2015

The battle is not yet joined, and the poet has listed for us the array of warriors, of ships, of ... more The battle is not yet joined, and the poet has listed for us the array of warriors, of ships, of forces. “tell me now,” the poet of The Iliad has sung, in Richmond Lattimore's translation, “you Muses who have your homes on Olympos. / For you, who are goddesses, are there, and you know all things, / and we have heard only the rumor of it and know nothing. / Who then of those were the chief men and the lords of the Danaäns?” (2.484-88). Then the catalog: the list. In the Homeric tradition, a catalog unrolls under the guarding eye of the Muses, the witnesses, under the keeping and inspiring eye of divine and distant figures who have seen the scene, whose witnessing we imagine, from whom we borrow the faint authority we wear when we begin our own songs. These Homeric lists seem to us scattershot today—this ship here, that one there, a warrior next to another warrior simply on the grounds that, yes, there he stands. And yet to the extent that they turn on the authority of the fact, of a divine witness who reports this disorder and from whom we take the rumors of the fact, Homer's lists are at core structured, signed, legitimated. The Iliad is not only the story of the encounter between Trojans and Achaeans; it is also the story of the encounter between two phenomenologies—one envisioning orders of events, names on a list, as they present themselves to us, rumored, accidentally, contingently; another envisioning the order of what presents itself according to the signature of the presiding Muse, according to an immanent principle of structure derivable, if at all, from the totality of the list. These two encounters and these two phenomenologies don't line up; they're fought on different fields and at different levels; they have different scopes. One phenomenology is in principle endless—there's always another matter at hand; we cannot foreclose the possibility that another ship will appear; and the chaos of the battle always means that another figure, foe or friend, may step before us when we least expect it. The other is always bounded, limited on both sides by the immanent unfolding of its principle: that this or that friend or foe should have appeared makes manifest, sub specie aeternitatis, the reason for his, or her, appearing.

Art and class struggle: The Diagrammatic Imaginary

Escritura e Imagen, 2021

Il est peu contesté que la lutte des classes soit le «maître mot» de la théorie marxiste. Bensuss... more Il est peu contesté que la lutte des classes soit le «maître mot» de la théorie marxiste. Bensussan and Labica, Dictionnaire critique du marxisme Five women work with their hands. They look at one another; at their work; at their tools: the spindle, distaff, and of course the wheel. The bare feet of the middle three form a triangle that catches and holds a ball of yarn, freshly spun. Behind them, second plane, five more women. Two steps up; light streams into the alcove here, from a source hidden behind a wall. These five women dress differently-more sumptuous cloth; their feet, unseen. If they're at work it's unclear on what: one, helmeted, raises her hand as if to strike another. Two watch: a play? The last turns away and looks across her left shoulder toward the first plane and perhaps beyond, to catch my eyes. Third plane, behind this scene: a tapestry, a white bull carrying off the figure of a naked woman. The palette: the range of browns; an ochre-d red; a mid-range blue, highlighted in clear whites; white. The brush-stroke: loose, daubed. Barely an edge or a line; an enhanced and accelerating gradient. What quality shared by members of each group allows me to imagine that they form a class? Thus the semantics of Velázquez's "Las Hilanderas (La fábula de Aracne)", from roughly 1657. What qualities of the canvas allow me to imagine these classes to be at war? Thus the painting's syntax. I'm standing in front of "Las Hilanderas", as I have so many times before. The motley of interpretations is before me too: iconographic, formal, historicist. I find war and classes there as well: Arachne against Athena; humans and gods; Jupiter and Europa; the purchasing class and the weaving class, in the twinned spaces of the tapestry factory of Santa Isabel, in Madrid; the war between the line drawn by the gazes that draw me in or draw me to them (the woman in the middle plane looking out; the bull's one eye, reaching out from the tapestry) and the spiral that winds from the uncarded wool hanging, massive, unformed, on the wall; through the whirl of its production in the first plane; up the steps and into the matter of the tapestries that form the canvas's third plane, hung on the virtual plane that's both a fourth, receding plane and the material support for the whole fraught architecture: the canvas. (Icons: the spinning wheel; the ladder; circle/line). Today I have different questions. My eyes come back, as they do most times, to the blank wheel in motion almost at the plane of the canvas.

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