• Colour drawing of a staged theatrical scene framed by two symmetrical classical structures with niches containing gilded statues, flanked by trees. At the centre, a painted backdrop shows an island within an archipelago, with a visible settlement; in the foreground, a vessel approaches the shore. Four figures stand before the backdrop holding branches and other objects. The composition is enclosed within a thin rectangular gold border.

Jean-Luc Nancy and Paragraph

By Peggy Kamuf In tribute to Jean-Luc Nancy, whose death was announced in August, Peggy Kamuf looks back on a landmark special issue of Paragraph (‘On the Work of Jean-Luc Nancy’, Paragraph, Vol. 16, Issue 2) which she edited in…

Photograph of Jean-Luc Nancy

OLR 40th Anniversary – Jean-Luc Nancy

In 1963, Jean-Luc Nancy tackled the subject of generational silence in his article ‘A Certain Silence’ (republished in OLR in 2005). Nancy, a well-known French philosophy and writer, wrote ‘A Certain Silence’ only a year after he graduated in Philosophy…

OLR 40th Anniversary – Jacques Derrida

  Continuing our celebrations of OLR’s 40th Anniversary and its widespread impact, this month we are highlighting Jacques Derrida’s ‘Let us not Forget—Psychoanalysis’. Initially presented orally as the introduction to René Major’s ‘Reason from the Unconscious’ on 16th December 1988…

CounterText: call for papers

CounterText Call for Papers Special Issue: Explorations in Electronic Literature Edited by Mario Aquilina and Ivan Callus An entire epoch of so-called literature, if not all of it cannot survive a certain technological regime of telecommunications. – Jacques Derrida, The…

Event of Style in Shakespeare’s Sonnets

The concept of the ‘event’ has accumulated around it a somewhat varied stream of interventions in contemporary philosophy and literary theory. In The Event of Style in Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) I tried to think of the event in relation…

OLR

The Political and/or Politics

By Jean-Luc Nancy “As an opening, a quick overview: if our politics [la politique] is no longer simply and strictly that of sovereign states, then it is no longer ‘politics’ as we have known it for a very long time…