Derrida Seminars: A Digital Repository of Jacques Derrida’s Teaching Notes

Several of Derrida’s Seminars (and some related material) have been edited over the past several years (Galilée and then Seuil) and translated with University of Chicago Press. I’ve only looked at a few things at the IMEC archive – there are also papers at University of California, Irvine. Derrida’s library is in Princeton, and I’ve looked at a few things remotely (a planned trip was cancelled due to the pandemic, and I’ve not managed to get there since.) They are now digitising all the teaching material and making it available on this site. An extraordinary and extraordinarily useful project.

Here’s part of the explanation:

However, while this work of transcription, editing, and translation is ongoing, thanks to the collaboration of the UC Irvine Libraries and the Institut Mémoires des Éditions Contemporaines (IMEC), the Princeton University Library has made available a digital repository of Derrida’s seminar papers, hoping to increase access to these materials, and to make them as broadly and openly available as possible for students, scholars, and readers around the world. In this way students and scholars are able to follow the most intimate threads of Derrida’s thinking such as he caringly and meticulously wove for his audiences in the classroom. 

The pages of this archive span more than 40 years of Derrida’s teaching career, offering the secrets and insights of a lifetime to be unpacked, nourished and contextualized, with the purpose of preserving Jacques Derrida’s memory, but also in the hope of enlarging the field of what it is possible to think.

Update 24 October 2024: David Beer shared this discussion on the seminars from a few years ago