Activity: Talk or presentation › Oral presentation
Description
This paper begins with Derrida’s statement in his last interview, Learning to Live Finally, that “survival . . . is the most intense life possible.” The focus is on the word “intense” and in particular on the forms of its appearance in the last four sessions of the 1975-76 Life Death seminar, which discuss Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle and were later reworked and published as “To Speculate—On ‘Freud’” in The Post Card. These forms include intensity, tension, and all those words which find their root in the Latin tendere, meaning to stretch. But because tendre or to stretch can also be written as bander in French, when we consider what is “the most intense,” we also consider what Derrida, in “To Speculate—On ‘Freud’,” terms a “bindinal economy. Economy of the tie or the bond (bind, band, double band, double bind, contra-band)” or what Robert Trumbull, in From Life to Survival, refers to as Derrida’s “logic of stricture.” Binding, says Trumbull, “can best be understood as a certain tension internal to the structure of life.” The paper concludes that the most intense life possible is the only possible measure of survival.