From Derrida’s seminars, this is the first I’ve ever read. It’s noticeably different from his writing style—it’s challenging and demanding, as expected, but didactically scaffolded in ways that betray meticulous seminar preparation and a well-developed educational purpose and mindset for teaching philosophy and philosophical thought.
The first lecture starts out with myths and fables around the “wolf” as an introductory representative of the “beast”; steers toward Hobbes’s Leviathan—his true target here—on a thorough and comprehensible path; and ends with a note on a passage from Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents. On the way, of course, one meets Aristotle, Plautus, La Fontaine, Rousseau, Nietzsche, and others from the list of usual suspects one would expect against the background of such a topic and an interrogation by Derrida.
There’s a lot of room in between for discussions (not part of the transcripts for various reasons), and I would have loved to be part of it. It’s riveting. Plus, it would certainly have incentivized me to finally learn French seriously, so I wouldn’t have to make do today with the English translation.
More seminar sessions to follow.
Derrida, Jacques. “First Session December 12, 2001.” In: The Beast & the Souvereign Vol.1, transl. Geoffrey Bennington. The Seminars of Jacques Derrida. Chicago UP: 2009.