French Graduate Seminars, Trinity 2025, Seminar 3: Cambridge Exchange

Location: Hovenden Room, All Souls College

Speakers: Eve Judah (Newnham), Samuel Buchoul (Hughes Hall), and Wilfred Skinner (Fitzwilliam)

Eve Judah (Newnham): ‘“La Philosophie en effect”: An exchange of letters (Derrida-Nancy)’

Abstract: 
The aim of this paper is to introduce the book series, ‘La Philosophie en effet’, which was launched in 1973 by Jacques Derrida, Sarah Kofman, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Jean-Luc Nancy, and continued until 2023. If this series is best known for various major works published by Derrida and Nancy during the second half of its existence (Derrida’s Spectres de Marx, say, or Nancy’s Le Sens du monde), my research seeks to suspend exclusive attention to individually famous works and authors, to address more carefully the dynamics of intellectual production through which the series came into being and pursued its mission to interrogate the contemporary institutional conditions of philosophical work. Central to this project is the analysis of understudied archival material, notably that of the four-way correspondence around the series, as well as documents like group interviews, adverts in literary magazines and ‘manifestoes’... This paper will focus on an exchange which took place in 1979, between Derrida and Nancy, in which they discuss the immense difficulties they’ve had with editors, the possibility of closing down the series – or – if they were to keep it alive, the specific theoretical and political goals they would aim to pursue. As Nancy writes, “je serais capable de ponde un manuel de ‘la philo en en effet’”.

Biography:
Eve Judah is a PhD Student in French at the University of Cambridge, where she is also a Cambridge Trust Scholar and winner of a Vice-Chancellor’s Award. Her PhD project is called ‘La Philosophie en effet’: 50 years of philosophy, politics and publishing’. Before coming to Cambridge, she did her MA in Contemporary Philosophy at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris.

Samuel Buchoul (Hughes Hall): ‘A phenomenology of writing, after Sartre and Derrida’

Abstract:
How is writing different from all our other activities? This practice is central to virtually everyone — the student just like the engineer, the accountant, the scientist, the merchant, and of course, the novelist —, and yet everyone struggles to find features that would be strictly unique to it. Spontaneously, we think of writing as a sub-genre of communication, sharing some of the aspects of orality while excluding others. Derrida’s reconceptualisation of écriture explored this opposition with speaking, but he also contributed, through a reversal of the binary, to the difficulty of isolating this practice from others. Indeed, if everyday (‘restricted’) writing is only one form of a broader kind of inscription (‘generalised’ writing), then we must also consider painting or dancing as forms of this larger ‘writing’, and in fact, all cultural constructions in general if read as traces developing across time (politics, ideology) and natural phenomena alike (DNA). Why, then, calling all these things with the name of what is for most of us just one technological tradition amongst others?

In this paper, I will suggest that this tension invites us to go back to this practice of everyday writing, to unpack what happens to us as subjects, when we write, and see if it can be interpreted, indeed, as an operation without equal in our condition as humans. Derrida’s proposition that writing is always already editing, i.e., reconstructing meaning through a continuous engagement with the forms of language, evokes Sartre’s definition of freedom as a constant reinterpretation of our ‘situation’ through praxis. But the material we rework in writing isn’t just anything: when removing a subordinate clause or changing a prefix, we basically negotiate, bit by bit, the new value we feel justified attributing to the constitutive blocks of our inherited symbolic order: words. Writing, then, appears as the privileged terrain for every individual’s co-construction of the collective imaginary that is human culture.

Biography:
Samuel Buchoul is a second-year doctoral student in the Department of French, University of Cambridge. His project studies how writing has changed us as a species — that is, to assess whether writing may play a special, or perhaps even an essential role, in our condition as existential beings, i.e., as beings who experience finite time, angst, the necessity to create meaning, the challenges of subjectivity, agency, freedom, engagement, authenticity, responsibility, etc. This question is explored through a dialogue between Derrida’s grammatology and the existential philosophy of Heidegger and Sartre. What he proposes to call an ‘existential grammatology’ would amount to a new understanding of individual empowerment for the challenges of subjectivity today. Prior to the PhD, Samuel taught philosophy in high school, in France.

Wilfred Skinner (Fitzwilliam): ‘Les dernières vagues de l’Atlantique’: Chantal Akerman and Georges Perec in New York

Abstract:
In the early 70s, Chantal Akerman and Georges Perec saw in New York new ways of making art and negotiating with the geography of the city. Returning a few years later, they both made films there. The paper looks at a figure common to these films: New York as seen from a boat. 

Akerman’s News from Home (1976) and Histoires d’Amérique : Food, Family and Philosophy (1988), and Perec’s and Robert Bober’s Récits d’Ellis Island (1980) foreground this iconic image to signal a departure, an arrival and a stopover-detainment. The water and shorelines here offer ways of thinking through these writer-filmmakers’ relationships to avant-garde artistic practices as well as their own pasts. 

Inserted within forms which are ripe for transmission and sharing – news, histoires, récits, this figure becomes much more than a simple establishing, or closing, shot. Filming from a boat creates a powerful echo with stories of emigration and immigration, as told by Kafka and Singer, among others. These are explored most frontally in Perec’s Ellis Island text and Akerman’s 1988 film. But the figure also allows Akerman and Perec to explore ruptures and potentialities, endings and beginnings which are creative and spatial in nature. 
What did New York offer to them that Paris or Brussels perhaps did not? In what ways can their experiences of this city illuminate how Akerman and Perec handle more generally space and memory in their work? Such explorations will also bring in Perec’s Espèces d’espaces, Un Homme qui dort and its Melville intertext, other films Akerman made in New York, and polaroids Perec took during a cargo-ship voyage there. 

Biography:
Wilfred Skinner is a PhD candidate in French at the University of Cambridge. His thesis looks at the work of Chantal Akerman and Georges Perec across writing and the moving image. The ways they record interiors and cityscapes invite reflection on how we inhabit the world and process the past, especially the trauma of the Holocaust and its aftereffects.