Learning to Read "Life Death" Finally: Francesco Vitale's Epigenetic Criticism

The publication of Francesco Vitale's Biodeconstruction: Jacques Derrida and the Life Sciences is an event that should leave no one interested in deconstruction in general or Derrida in particular indifferent. For Biodeconstruction will turn out to be one of the central and most significant books in the proliferating "genre" of works about Derrida's engagement with the life sciences. After periods in which Derrida criticism focused on "Derrida and Phenomenology," "Derrida and Literature," "Derrida and Religion," and so on, this new chapter in Derrida Studies promises to bring Derrida's work to bear on important contemporary debates about the nature of life, the relationship between life and technology, between the life sciences and the human sciences, even debates around genetic testing, the ethics of cloning, and so on. Such debates will be greatly enriched by Vitale's book and by the upcoming publication of Derrida's 1975–1976 seminar Life Death, which Vitale read in manuscript form and so was able to put at the center of this new work.¹

But Vitale's Biodeconstruction has an even more ambitious agenda. In addition to making important claims about the development of deconstruction in relation to the life sciences, a topic that, Vitale convincingly shows, was important to Derrida from as early as the 1960s and remained of interest to him right up through later works on the notion of "autoimmunity," Biodeconstruction gives us nothing less than a new reading of deconstruction itself. According to Vitale, deconstruction will have been from the beginning biodeconstruction, even if it is only now that we are beginning to recognize this fact, only now that we are beginning to see the full implications of the fact that deconstruction was from the very beginning a rethinking of life, of bios, in its most fundamental form. If Biodeconstruction thus focuses—as its subtitle, Jacques Derrida and the Life Sciences, suggests—on a reading of Derrida on the life sciences, it extends to Derrida's writing and thinking in general, and thus his works about phenomenology, psychoanalysis, structuralism, politics, the archive, speech act theory, even literature. In the end, it is unclear whether there is anything about deconstruction that can remain unaffected or unscathed, immune, as it were, from this rethinking or reevaluation through the lens of the life sciences and the question of life.

Biodeconstruction works on several fronts and follows at least three different but intersecting trajectories. It is, first of all, as advertised, a "thematic" reading of Derrida in relation to the life sciences, a reading of Derrida's explicit engagement with theorists of evolutionary biology, ethology, and genetics, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s but continuing on into the 1990s. It is also a reading of Derrida's entire corpus or trajectory on these questions of life in and through his engagement with the history of philosophy, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, even literature. Vitale thus follows Derrida from his early readings of Husserl and Freud through later readings of Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, and others on the question of life and biologism up through his adoption of the vocabulary of "autoimmunity" in late works on politics and the democracy-to-come. Finally, Biodeconstruction is a reading of Derrida in conjunction with several contemporary discourses in the biological sciences (on epigenetics, cell death, and so on) that help bolster, from a scientific perspective, some of the claims Derrida makes about life. These three trajectories or itineraries are, of course, closely intertwined, and when taken together they demonstrate the development or evolution of Derrida's own thought with regard to evolution, life, and our understanding of the history of the living. We thus see, with Vitale's help, that deconstruction will have always been biodeconstruction and that, in a certain sense, this book, however perceptive and original, could not but have been written. Of course, that should not mitigate in the least, quite the contrary, our gratitude to Francesco Vitale for going ahead and actually writing it.

Vitale begins Biodeconstruction at the end before then returning to the beginning. He begins by citing...