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Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy

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—
ISSN:
1936-6280
Category:
PHILOSOPHY
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Latest articles

Ellipses, of Derrida and Glissant

2026-03-26

Xinyu H. Zhang

How to contain, to simultaneously host and hold ( con-tinere ) two thinkers––two irreducible figures of thought––with their two unexchangeable physical bodies? What will emerge out of it, and what will have already emerged out of it, by virtue of this sheer juxtaposition of the two, a parataxis itself initiated by a certain historical contingency, namely their contemporality or contemporariness, their having-found-themselves-together as mortal beings within discretely concrete time and space that is nevertheless structurally, experientially, and therefore differently shared, in which their paths overlay, intersect, reflect, emulate, traverse, subtend each other, sometimes confessedly so, yet more often unacknowledged: The “Long Twentieth Century,” the longue durée of colonialism, capitalism, and geopolitics; Algeria, Martinique, France, a concurrent Africa(n past) of which they were both dispossessed; an ever-globalizing earth, an unprecedentedly planetarized world? But, moreover, how do we think their contemporaneity––biographical, factual––when each of them is so remarkably a thinker of dis-continuity and dis-location, of anachrony and dis-placement, of the impossibility as well as undesirability of “identity,” of being self-identical?

Short Performances of Syntax

2026-03-26

Roshon S. Nandra

Whence does the speaking subject of language return? Return is the mark and trajectory of filiation. It transitively entails a prior departure and a place from which one had left—derivatively, on terms not of their own. The detour of language—its rupta via , its broken way—is inaugurated by an impossibility inherited in a primordial scene of usurpation. Dispossession here retroactively marks an originary scene of possession: The subject is inducted into a circuit of language that is not their own while a “ prior-to-the-first language” is postulated in the moment that it is dispossessed. Hence the desire to invent a “ pre-originary ” language is set into motion—to unite with the One that came before separation, before which one was separated, but one which could only be regarded as such after separation. The One—the impossibility—now remains to be fashioned, re-fashioned, or re-invented through another’s language, through the language of the Other. We are presented here with a knot of speech and language toward which Jacques Derrida attunes our attention—namely, the predicament of calling upon a language (the detour) to speak about the language (the impossibility) insofar as the latter “does not exist” and given “the absence of all metalanguage.” The former is a detour insofar as it can only inadequately translate the latter, for the latter is always subject to misrecognition in that it always remains to be given. Yet it is this impossibility and absolute resistance to translation that makes everything translatable. Derrida concludes this discussion concisely: “translation is another name for the impossible.” While the mother tongue [ la langue maternelle ] does not exist as such, it is not absent but in fact resides over all language and translation. It is thus the condition of possibility for conceiving of any notion of multilingualism. Though this language can only fail to be recognized as such in its absolute resistance to being understood or grasped through the Lacanian Symbolic (the register of order, language, and law), this prior-to-the-first language vies to be heard from within its detours.

Intelligibility and Its Limits

2026-03-26

Sidra Shahid

Paradigmatic perspectives on evil suggest that the presence of evil threatens the sense or intelligibility of the world by defeating our normative expectations. In this paper, I turn to Arendt, Améry, and Levinas to explore distinctive ways in which the relationship between evil and intelligibility can be understood. I argue that while Arendt’s account of radical evil problematically assumes that perpetrators evade (moral) comprehension, Arendt’s account of banal evil treats perpetrators as (morally) intelligible, and, as a result, makes evil morally tractable. In Arendt’s view, then, evil is intelligible. This, however, is not the final word on evil and intelligibility. A much-neglected way in which evil and intelligibility are related concerns how evil destroys the suffering subject’s ability to make sense of the world. In order to bring out this feature of evil, I put into dialogue Jean Améry’s first-person reports of his experiences of torture and internment, as chronicled in At the Mind’s Limits , with Emmanuel’s Levinas’s essay “Useless Suffering.” Reading Améry through Levinas reveals how suffering condemns the subject to sense-destroying isolation without recourse to intersubjective modes of sense-making. Together, Arendt, Améry, and Levinas reveal the distinctive ways in which the relationship between evil and intelligibility can be understood, whether we are considering the perpetrators of evil, victims, or spectators.