Deborah Goldgaber

We speak of cutting-edge biotechnologies in the same terms we speak of word processing. For example, CRISPR, a genomic 'editing' tool, 'cuts' and 'pastes' bits of errant DNA. 1 Heredity, according to this way of talking, is a mutable text. This seems so natural because DNA, at least since the discovery of its structure and function, has been called a code, a code that is 'read', 'transcribed' and 'translated'. 2 So ubiquitous is this way of talking that it is difficult, at least for the layperson, to resist the assumption that genetic processes are, in some sense, textual. Only scare quotes around terms like 'read' raise a cautionary sign. On closer inspection, however, the fact that 'the central biological problem of DNA-based protein synthesis come to be metaphorically represented as an information code and a writing technologyand consequently a 'book of life'-is surprising, even perplexing, historian of science Lily E. Kay argues. 3 According to Kay, it was not representational or technical accuracy that impelled the adoption of scriptural and information-theoretic metaphors during the golden age of genomic discovery (1953-70). If not for epistemic reasons, however, why would scientists adopt the metaphor? What did it mean for the group of scientists from disparate fields who worked to 'crack' the genetic code and what should we make of it today? Kay poses and seeks to answer these questions by reconstructing the self-understandings and motivations of the central actors involved-a transdisciplinary alliance of scientists and researchers spanning North America and Europe and

In this paper, I argue that poet M. Nourbese Philip's Zong! allows us to radically rethink the possibility of historical restitution and recovery—and this may be so even if this restitution is not possible for us. The formal ideas in Zong!, I argue, imply a metaphysical and ontological revolution in the way memory and mnesic traces are to be conceived. The credibility of the voices and narratives that Zong! retrieves cannot be certified by his-torical-epistemological conceptions of evidence but rather find their warrant in alternative, ontological (or hauntological) registers.

Abstract: Recently, influential critics have argued that feminist accounts of the bodyare insufficientlyrealist and materialist.These emphasize the body’ssocial or discursive ‘construction’ at the expense of biological morphogenesis. The way feminists ‘bracket’ the body’sbiological statusprevents them from theorizing the relation and interaction of social and biological forces. While these materialist critiquescorrectlydiagnose issues with certain anti-realist accounts of embodi-ment,which contestthat the bodyhas a biological essence, most feminist ac-counts of embodiment,Iargue, are not anti-realist in this respect.Indeed, con-trary to an increasinglyinfluential view,feminist accounts of discursive construction are not inherentlyanti-realist or anti-materialist.The real issue with constructivist accounts is not thatthey exclude the body’sorganic or bio-logical substance, as the materialists argue, but rather the assumption that dis-cursive construction refers exclusively to culturalprocesses. Thus, Ipropose re-readingfeminist new materialist critiques as motivatingthe extension of ‘discur-sive construction’ beyond the human.

Abstract: In “History of Sexuality” (Vol I.) Foucault argued that repression is the wrong model of power, understanding it in exclusively negative terms, as external to the body it constrains and inhibits. Power may also be positive, productive, and constitutive of the body and its possibilities. Thus, an adequate account of the relation between cultural forces and the body, Foucault argues, must challenge the “repressive hypothesis” (RH). Contemporary feminist accounts of the body are structured by this same oppositional view of power Foucault assumed: to call on Rosi Braidotti’s distinction, discursive (cultural) forces are either negative or repressive (potestas) or positive and empowering (potentia). In this paper I argue that this opposition forecloses several possibilities for thinking the morphogenetic role of culture. In particular, it assumes wrongly that repressive relations cannot be productive.

This article explores the ways new materialism centers the problem of morphogenesis-and de-centers language and culture-in philosophical accounts of corporeality. Attention to organic structures gives insight into the entanglement of nature and culture obscured by tendencies to think matter as lacking agential features. I suggest, in conclusion, that new materialism may operate with a notion of "entangle-ment" or "intra-activity" that is too productive. New materialisms may require a more pliable set of distinctions to capture the relations between morphogenetic forces.

Abstract: In “History of Sexuality” (Vol I.) Foucault argued that repression is the wrong model of power, understanding it in exclusively negative terms, as external to the body it constrains and inhibits. Power may also be positive, productive, and constitutive of the body and its possibilities. Thus, an adequate account of the relation between cultural forces and the body, Foucault argues, must challenge the “repressive hypothesis” (RH). Contemporary feminist accounts of the body are structured by this same oppositional view of power Foucault assumed: to call on Rosi Braidotti’s distinction, discursive (cultural) forces are either negative or repressive (potestas) or positive and empowering (potentia). In this paper I argue that this opposition forecloses several possibilities for thinking the morphogenetic role of culture. In particular, it assumes wrongly that repressive relations cannot be productive.

Malabou's work challenges philosophical habits of bracketing the body's materiality in accounts of subjectivity and lived experience. The New Wounded (2012) and Self and Emotional Life (2013) encourage us to consider how neuronal matter might be internal to accounts of subject formation and power while What Should We Do with our Brain? (2008) asks how the " discovery " of brain plasticity should alter conceptions of practical and political limits. The title can also be read as a pointed question to a philosophical tradition that has tended to treat claims about the nature of matter either with disinterest—as too reductive to be of interest—or with scepticism—as if the materialist gesture amounted to reasserting the priority of deterministic matter over the plasticity culture.

abstract: In Of Grammatology, Derrida asserts the absolute generality of the trace, arguing that it pertains to life and its material basis. However, it has been difficult for Derrida's interpreters to identify the warrant for this generality claim. Recently, Martin Hägglund has offered an influential defense of the generality of the trace by grounding it in the form of finite life (survival). However, as Catherine Malabou's critique of the grammatological project suggests, any such attempt is programmed to fail. On her view, writing never was and never could be general; by linking the trace to the model of writing or inscription, Derrida limited the generality of the trace and its pertinence for any philosophical materialism. Materiality, Malabou argues, is what will always necessarily escape every model of inscription. To think the generality of the trace requires thinking a nongraphic trace. Insofar as Malabou's notion of " plasticity " does this, it should be understood as heir to Derrida's notion of writing. However, I argue, Derrida's notion of " writing " was always already nongraphic, or plastic in a way that Malabou and other interpreters have failed to factor.

This is the second and final volume of Jacques Derrida's seminar on the death penalty, given at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (Paris) from December 2000-March 2001. (The first volume of the seminar, covering the previous year's lectures, was published in both French and English (and reviewed in this journal). In this second volume, Derrida argues that justifications for retributive justice and the death penalty (DP) are indissociable and that this poses a particular problem for death penalty abolition. If retributivism and DP are indissociable, then abolition of DP would necessarily involve a radical re-assessment of the value and meaning of retribution. Insofar as this has not occurred—even where we have seen de jure abolition—we should, Derrida suggests, be suspicious of progressivist interpretations of global trends towards abolition. Before turning to its main claims, some context for this seminar. Derrida's two-year research project on the death penalty was his penultimate seminar; it was followed by the Beast and the Sovereign (2001-2003) and preceded by Perjury and Pardon (1997-1999). Broadly speaking, in these seminars Derrida is concerned with traditional attributes of sovereign power: the right to take life—to let live or let die—to pardon, to penalize, and punish. The constellation of questions around sovereignty connects Derrida's late research to Michel Foucault's work on disciplinary and bio-power, and Agamben's work on sovereignty, political theology and, more specifically, homo sacer. Though Derrida does little to bring the results of his research in conversation with these other philosophers, these seminars provide rich material for scholars interested in making these connections explicit. This volume will be of particular interest to those interested in how Derrida's work on sovereignty intersects with Continental philosophers such as Foucault and Agamben, and to Derrida scholars interested in this last phase of his thought. It should also be of interest to at least two other groups: 1) those concerned with philosophical justifications for retributive justice and 2) scholars working in the area of political theology interested in tracing what Derrida refers to as the " filiation " between philosophical, theological and political ideas about power and punishment. **** Philosophical accounts of retribution distinguish between legitimate forms of retribution—legally administered punishment based on the principle of jus talionis—and illegitimate forms of retribution—based on desire for revenge, or blood-lust. In terms of jus talionis, Derrida writes, the death penalty (DP) is " the legal phenomenon, distinct from simple murder in principle, intention, and spirit, distinct from vengeance and sacrifice, inscribed in a law applied by a state " (40). As this definition makes explicit, the principle of retributive justice is rigorously distinguished from vengeance or sacrifice. Jus talionis, like for like or " eye for an eye " demands penalties unstintingly proportioned to guilt.

In On Touching, Derrida commends philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy for ‘taking into account [the] plasticity and technicity “at the heart” of the “body proper”’. Specifying the meaning of this plasticity and technicity’ Derrida writes, the ‘[s]upplementarity of technical prosthetics originarily spaces out, defers, or expropriates all originary properness: there is no “the” sense of touch, there is no “originary” or essentially originary touching before it’. What is ‘proper’ or ‘original’ to the body, it seems, is not any set of properties or capacities – including sensorial or perceptual powers – but rather the ‘plastic and substitutive structure of prosthetics’, the very possibility of the body’s ‘technical’ supplementation.

Abstract: What permits us to speak of the biological and the technical in terms of message, code, program?  Does doing so suggest a deeper ontological implication between the biological and the technical than has usually been presupposed, or is it a matter merely of metaphor, based on the formal resemblance—isomorphism—between biological and technical processes, on the one hand, and linguistic texts on the other?  Derrida’s Of Grammatology argues for the former, developing an account of arche-writing—the most general concept of the gramme—which both justifies this ontological extension of writing and, in doing so, gives us the resources to think the radical entanglement and mutual displacement of the biological and the technical.

Derrida powerfully critiques a certain philosophical view of language—logocentrism—and the ideal of translation it implies. According to this ideal, the function of language is to express meaning while the task of translation is to find an equivalent expression for this meaning in the target language.

Derrida’s critique consists, first, in showing that logocentrism entails thinking of meaning as radically transcendent to language and, secondly, that such transcendental meanings are impossible. Meaning is necessarily language-like; therefore it cannot anchor language, nor assure the possibility of successful linguistic equivalence between languages. The philosopher John Searle has argued that if we accept Derrida’s claim about meaning, we must also accept the nonsensical view that language is a meaningless game of reference between signifiers without resolution.

According to Derrida, this interpretation of the claim that meaning is textual assumes what it ought to contest: the absolute difference between signifier and the signified. In fact, the signified element is not “outside” the text, depending on language users to give and restore meaning—it is inscribed on the “inside.” Derrida argues that language is “parasitically” structured—or iterable, one set of differential elements encode another, texts are nested in other texts. The difference between signifier and signified, then, is something like the difference between negative and positive space, latent and manifest content, or again, as Derrida suggests between a parasite and host. “Meaning” is the inter-modal effect of differences resonating in other differences.

Deconstructively speaking, translation is not a derivative linguistic practice with respect to establishing meaning but essential and primary. Indeed, texts are defined by their capacity to “translate” heterogeneous texts. More narrowly, deconstructive theories of translation help us to see how the ideal of inter-linguistic equivalence masks the productive role of translation and the power of translational practices to enrich and shape language.