Mosaic Journal

Issue 56.3

Overview

Special Issue: Suicides I

Published: September 2023

View the issue introduction or see the issue summary and contents below.

8 essays, totalling 184 pages

$29.95 CAD

Issue Summary

Issue 56.3 collects essays from the Mosaic archive on the topic of suicide.

Contents

	The Werther Effect: The Esthetics of Suicide Tobin Siebers This essay was originally published in Mosaic 26.1.
	Re-Visioning the Death Wish: Donne and Suicide Mark Allinson This essay was originally published in Mosaic 24.1.
	Order Catastrophically Unknown David Wills The quandaries of Freud’s second metapsychological model, fully exposed in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” are analyzed via his analogy of the amoeba and its pseudopodium. Those quandaries emerge, on the one hand, as the problem of an inanimate that always already “mobilizes” the animate, and, on the other hand, as the impossible origin of what Derrida describes as autodeictic autobiography, understood here as life. This essay was originally published in Mosaic 44.4.
	The Legacy of Autoimmunity Elizabeth Rottenberg This essay examines the linguistic shift in Derrida’s late work from what might be called the “critical-linguistic” lexicon of terms such as “deconstruction,” “double bind,” and “différance” to the biological resonances of “autoimmunity.” It argues that the future depends on the legacy of this strange, illogical logic that is autoimmunity. This essay was originally published in Mosaic 39.3.
	Sidestepping: ‘Freud After Derrida’ Samuel Weber The thought of Freud accompanied the work of Derrida from beginning to end, even if its “concepts,” as Derrida wrote, were “inadequate” to the task it had set for itself. Derrida’s own notion of “auto-immunity” can thus be seen as an effort to rethink and elaborate the implications of Freud’s notion of a “death-drive.” But Freud’s concepts can also serve to rethink Derrida’s own project as well. Each comes and is “after” the other. This essay was originally published in Mosaic 44.3.
	Canadian Cultural Autoimmunity: Derrida and the Essence of Culture Garry Sherbert Canada’s association with the emergence of multiculturalism has created controversy by exposing the national culture to the risk of not being able to identify itself. Yet this risk has also made Canada more hospitable to cultural difference. Canada’s claim that it has “no official culture” manifests a Derridean gesture of emptying itself, a gesture that indicates a drive toward cultural autoimmunity. This essay was originally published in Mosaic 40.2.
	Ages of Cruelty: Jacques Derrida, Fethi Benslama, and their Challenges to Psychoanalysis Elisabeth Weber For Jacques Derrida, one of the most urgent tasks of philosophy today is to think “sovereignty” and the ways in which it is inseparable from the two “ages” of cruelty of today’s wars: one techno-scientific, from which the “cruor” of blood seems to have been wiped away, and another, bloodily “archaic,” reacting savagely to the first. Derrida and the French-Tunisian psychoanalyst Fethi Benslama assert that these two “ages” of cruelty are closely intertwined, and that for both of them, today’s media play a crucial role. For Derrida, the “revolution of psychoanalysis” would consist in addressing cruelty without alibi, without political, moral, theological, or other justifications, while refusing to neutralize ethics and politics, that is, the specific geo-political realm in which psychoanalytic theory and practice intervene. In this spirit, Benslama attempts an analysis of the particular new cruelty some Middle-Eastern countries are confronted with today. This essay was originally published in Mosaic 48.2.
	‘And yet’: Derrida on Benjamin’s Divine Violence Robert Zacharias Seeking to comment on the critical legacy of Jacques Derrida, this essay examines Derrida’s addition of a post-scriptum to his 1989 essay “First Name of Benjamin,” suggesting that the tension between the text’s formal body and its supplement is itself an argument for the value of formal risk and critical hesitation that raises the stakes of conventional criticism. This essay was originally published in Mosaic 40.2.