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Slought Foundation, Philadelphia, is pleased to announce Radical Atheism: Derrida’s Notion of Desire, a seminar by and public conversation with Martin Hägglund on Thursday, November 1, 2007 from 6:30-8:30pm, moderated by Jean-Michel Rabaté. This event is sponsored by the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania.
Martin Hägglund’s presentation is based on his forthcoming book Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life (Stanford University Press, Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics, 2008). Refuting the notion that there was an ethical or religious “turn” in Jacques Derrida’s thinking, Hägglund demonstrates that a radical atheism informs his writing from the beginning to the end. Atheism has traditionally limited itself to denying the existence of God and immortal life, without questioning the desire for God and immortal life. Thus, in traditional atheism mortal being is still conceived as a lack of being that we desire to transcend. In contrast, by developing the logic of radical atheism, Hägglund argues that the so-called desire for immortality dissimulates a desire for survival that precedes it and contradicts it from within.
The notion of survival that Hägglund articulates is quite incompatible with immortality, since it defines life as essentially mortal and as inherently divided by time. Mortal life is the possibility for both the desirable and the undesirable, since it opens the chance of life and the threat of death in the same stroke. Conversely, the immortality that religions posit as the most desirable (“the best”) is for Derrida the most undesirable (“the worst”), since immortality would put an end to the time of mortal life. Derrida himself has not provided a systematic account of his notion of desire and it has remained unexplored by his commentators, but Hägglund shows that it is altogether crucial for his thinking. In his lecture, Hägglund addresses the proliferation of apparently religious terms in Derrida’s later work—e.g. faith, messianicity, and God—which have given rise to numerous theological accounts of deconstruction. In contrast to these theological accounts, Hägglund argues that Derrida relies on the desire for mortal life to read even the most religious ideas against themselves.
 In conjunction with this event, Hägglund's recent article "The Necessity of Discrimination: Disjoining Derrida and Levinas"
in Diacritics 34:1 (Spring 2004) has been made available for download: http://slought.org/files/downloads/events/SF_1369[Hagglund].pdf
An audio recording of an interview with Derrida is also available for download from UBUWeb (transcribed in Derrida and Religion: Other Testaments, edited by Yvonne Sherwood and Kevin Hart [Routledge, 2005]): http://www.ubu.com/sound/derrida.html
Martin Hägglund is completing his Ph.D in Comparative Literature at Cornell University. He is the author of Chronophobia: Essays on Time and Finitude, which was published in Swedish in 2002. He has also edited and written the preface to the Swedish translation of Derrida's Spectres de Marx. In English, he has published essays in New Literary History (Spring 2006) and Diacritics (Spring 2004). His first book in English, entitled Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life, is forthcoming in the Meridian-series from Stanford University Press.
Organized by
Jean-Michel Rabaté
Media files on the Slought.org website are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
MLA Style:
Martin Hägglund. "Radical Atheism: Derrida's Notion of Desire." Slought Foundation Online Content. [01 November 2007;
Accessed 13 March 2010]. <http://slought.org/content/11369/>.
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