Jacques Derrida - Geschlecht III : sex, race, nation, humanity

Jacques Derrida

Edited by Geoffrey Bennington, Katie Chenoweth, and Rodrigo Therezo

Translated by Katie Chenoweth and Rodrigo Therezo

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

2020 by The University of Chicago

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Published 2020

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN -13: 978-0-226-67746-0 (cloth)

ISBN -13: 978-0-226-68539-7 (e-book)

DOI : https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226685397.001.0001

Originally published in French as Geschlecht III. Sexe, race, nation, humanit ditions du Seuil, 2018.

www.centrenationaldulivre.fr

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Derrida, Jacques, author. | Bennington, Geoffrey, editor. | Chenoweth, Katie, editor, translator. | Therezo, Rodrigo, editor, translator.

Title: Geschlecht III : sex, race, nation, humanity / Jacques Derrida ; edited by Geoffrey Bennington, Katie Chenoweth, Rodrigo Therezo ; translated by Katie Chenoweth, Rodrigo Therezo.

Other titles: Geschlecht III. English

Description: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019027816 | ISBN 9780226677460 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226685397 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH : Heidegger, Martin, 18891976. | SexAnthropological aspects. | SexPolitical aspects.

Classification: LCC B 3279. H 49 D 483813 2020 | DDC 193dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019027816

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI / NISO Z 39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

This edition presents the reader with a text that seemed lost forever. Although Derrida himself never published the third Geschlecht text, he named itas such or indirectlymultiple times during the two last decades of his life. As the publication of Geschlecht IV in 1994 already makes clear, Derrida never abandoned the desire to write Geschlecht III, even if that desire was deferred as often as the will to fulfill it was expressed. This desire even magnetized all the other Geschlechter before or at the moment of their birth, as Derrida tells us from the opening words of Geschlecht I, in a footnote placed after the title:

This essay [... ], like the following one (Heideggers Hand [Geschlecht II]), will have to content itself with sketching in a preliminary fashion an interpretation to come in which I would like to situate Geschlecht in Heideggers path of thought. In his path of writing as welland the imprint, or inscription marked by the word Geschlecht will not be innocent here. I will leave this word in its own language for reasons that should impose themselves on us in the course of this very reading. And it is certainly a matter of Geschlecht (the word for sex, race, family, generation, lineage, species, genre), and not of Geschlecht as such: one will not so easily clear away the mark of the word (Geschlecht) that blocks our access to the thing itself (the Geschlecht); in that word, Heidegger will much later remark the imprint of a blow or strike (Schlag). He will do so in a text we will not speak of here but toward which this reading is heading, and by which, in truth, I know it is already being magnetized: Die Sprache im Gedicht: Eine Errterung von Georg Trakls Gedicht (1953), in Unterwegs zur Sprache (Pfullingen: Neske, 1959); Language in the Poem: A Discussion on Georg Trakls Poetic Work, in On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz (New York: Harper & Row, 1971).

This last text is mentioned several times in Geschlecht II, where Derrida explains that he had dedicated to it a hundred or so pages in the course of a seminar titled The Ghost of the Otherthe first in a series of four seminars given under the general title Philosophical Nationality and Nationalism (198488). These hundred or so pages on Heideggers essay on Trakl do correspond in part, as Derrida himself says, to a thirty-three-page text that he did not read at a conference organized by John Sallis at Loyola University in Chicago in March 1985. The lecture as Derrida delivered it would go on to become Heideggers Hand (GeschlechtII); the text he decided to forgo delivering should have been titled GeschlechtIII: I will not give this part of my lecture, which should have been titled GeschlechtIII and whose (typed) manuscript has been photocopied and distributed to some of you so that a discussion of it might be possible. I will confine myself then to a very cursory sketch of it. At first glance, then, it seems legitimate to identify this manuscript as the whole of Geschlecht III. And yet, given the way Derrida describes it as a first French version, incomplete and provisional, we might suspect that Geschlecht III in fact corresponds to the hundred or so pages of the seminar rather than to an incomplete, thirty-three-page typescript. The latter indeed constitutes what Derrida refers to, on the last page of the typescript, as a transcription of only a part of the hundred or so pages (or roughly a hundred pages) of Geschlecht III: The transcription of the seminar had to stop here, for lack of time. Five sessions, or roughly a hundred pages, remain to be transcribed. Please do not circulate this sketch of a rough draft: provisional and incomplete! If we compare the Loyola typescript and the text of the seminar where Geschlecht III beginsnamely, the end of the seventh session of the 198485 seminarwe may better understand the meaning of the words transcribe and transcription here: what is at stake is a minimal revision or editing of a text initially destined for those in attendance at the first seminar Derrida gave at the EHESS (cole des Hautes tudes en Sciences Sociales) in Paris. A comparison of these two versions of the beginning of Geschlecht III reveals that the differences are limited for the most part to typographical and stylistic corrections, with several exceptions that we will indicate when called for. This practice of transcribing a text initially written for his seminar so as to transform it into a work published outside of that immediate context was common for Derrida; the particular case of Geschlecht II is exemplary for us here.

Indeed, the published version of Geschlecht II is itself a transcription of the two sessions (the sixth and nearly all of the seventh) that immediately precede Geschlecht III in the 198485 seminar. This published transcription sticks very close to the original, such that it would be difficult here, too, to locate any significant differences. This is what for us justifies the decision to publish Geschlecht III as such, even though Derrida himself never did, for reasons that are unknown. In addition to the fact that Derrida himself names