Volume 2 of Jacques Derrida’s The Beast and the Sovereign begins with “I am alone,” which can be taken to mean “I am alone in my world, I end with my world, and my world ends with me.” Beyond the ends and limits of my world, I remember, anticipate, and imagine other worlds and the worlds of the other; beyond the end and death of my world, I am remembered, anticipated, and imagined in the world of the other. But what of the distance between these worlds? What hospitality does one world show another? How will what was me and mine alone carry on in the care of the other?
Celan’s “Die Welt is fort, ich muss dich tragen [The world is gone, I have to carry you]” haunts Derrida’s final seminar: from the fourth session, where Derrida reads “the world has gone, in the absence or distance of the world, I must, I owe it to you, I owe it to myself to carry you, [. . .] one on one, like wearing mourning or bearing a child, basically where ethics begins,” to the hypothesis of the final session that, if the world is gone, one can either “carry the other out of the world, where we share at least this knowledge [. . .] that there is no longer a world, a common world” or “do things so as to make as if there were just a world, and to make the world come to the world, to make as if—.” Celan's line, similarly, haunts this seminar.
This seminar imagines a collision with postcolonial, psychoanalytic, ecological, spectral, literary, cinematic, post-apocalyptic, Heideggerian, or Merleau-Pontyian worlds, and invites papers which consider the conditional configurations and limits of worlds: What constitutes the limits of a world? How does one inherit, or bear a world that is gone? How does one forget, or deny a world that is gone? How does one share without common ground? How does one reach across an unbreachable distance? What migrates beyond the end? How may the ethical begin with a rethinking of where the world ends? Papers might consider how what speaks to Derrida in “the world is gone, I must carry you” could sound differently in other mediated historical, political, and literary contexts.