Sex, Race, Nation, Humanity: Derrida’s Geschlecht III (Goldsmiths, April 8-9, 2019)

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

A Conference on a Newly Re-discovered Text

April 8-9, 2019

Richard Hoggart Building 137a, Goldsmiths, University of London

This two-day conference 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 Heidegger, a meticulous reading of what he will call Heidegger’s “national-humanism”: the nationalistic undercurrent in Heidegger’s thought that posits German and Germany as the privileged media through which to think the essence of the human and its relationship to the fate of the West.