Du rien-pour-nous que la mort: Derrida Épicure

Abstract

Derrida's Seminar “Life Death” operates, as if in advance motivated by its aftermath and as if countersigned by this name that does not appear—the name of Epicurus—a turn towards a non-productive, non-representational materialism, deprived in some way of ontological status, even non-ontologizable, triumphant, normative, dedicated to an economy of the cause. Nietzsche, antagonistic reader of Epicurus (Letter to Meneceus: “Accustom yourself to considering that death is nothing for us”)—is his screen, his substitute. Nietzsche, whose reading serves to close-open the great loops of Derrida’s seminar. It is a question, therefore, of turning over “Life Death” in search of the traces of the encounter Nietzsche-Epicurus, definitive, although invisible and silent, although almost illegible in the text of Derrida, of the relationship “life death.”

Keywords

• materialism
• mediation
• epicureanism
• encounter
• cause
• lucretius
• nietzsche