LAUSR

In the unpublished seminar Life Death [La vie la mort] from 1975, Derrida offers a careful reading of the question of sexual difference and reproduction in The Logic of Life by French biologist François Jacob. This reading gives us the opportunity to highlight the fundamental role played by sexual difference in Derrida’s deconstruction of the determination of life in Western tradition rooted in the so-called ‘metaphysics of presence’. As will be demonstrated, this determination exists in both ‘hard sciences’ and ‘the humanities’, and complicates the distinction between the two fields. However, as will also be demonstrated, it is possible, thanks to (a deconstruction of) biology, to describe the interplay of sexual difference as the irreducible condition of genesis and structure of living beings. In particular, once recognized that sexual difference is already at stake in the double-helix structure that allows DNA reproduction, that is, much earlier than the somatic identification that fixes it to ‘bodies’ as a presumed natural gender distinction, sexual difference can be freed from any ontological stabilization, understood as a difference in nature; it thus appears as the living articulation of the economy of diff erance. In this way it is possible to avoid the ‘risk’ rightly pointed out by Elizabeth Grosz, while opening up a different horizon in which (the deconstruction of) biology should enable us to understand the role played by sexual diff erance in the genesis and structure of the living ‘body’ in more rigorous terms: