Une belle carrière: Peggy Kamuf's Example

It is perhaps worth asking, because it is not absolutely clear, at least not to me, just what it is we are trying to mark and celebrate here in this special issue of Discourse. Is it a life? A work? A life's work? A corpus that includes some of the most important books, articles, and translations in the areas of eighteenth- to twenty-first-century French, American, and English literature and literary theory? A pedagogical practice that has spanned some forty-plus years and has had an inestimable influence on several generations of students, undergraduate and graduate, in both the United States and elsewhere? A professional life that has included administrative roles in pedagogical institutions, memberships in and affiliations with professional organizations, and, more recently, quasi-administrative roles overseeing Jacques Derrida's archives in the United States and helping to train at the Institut mémoires de l'édition contemporaine (Institute for Contemporary Publishing Archives, IMEC) the next generation of Derrida translators and scholars? We are no doubt celebrating all of that, but I would like to venture the hypothesis here that what we should also be celebrating is something that I don't think we should hesitate to call a career, a long and rich and successful career, that is, as one would say in French, une belle carrière.

Now, I know that the term "career" tends to have somewhat

Petropavlovsk, 2018.

negative connotations, perhaps even more so in English than in French, associated as it often is with the more mundane and practical aspects of what we do, with a more, as we say today, "transactional" view of what people such as Peggy do with their lives. And the notion of a career has no doubt been forever contaminated by careerism and careerists, people willing to do whatever it takes to get ahead or advance their careers, people seeking not just to be promoted but also to promote themselves, often in rather shameless ways. But it's an interesting word nonetheless, career, and it can be a rather admirable thing, something well worth celebrating in its fullness and completion, especially when it comes to someone such as Peggy Kamuf, who will have had, and this is well worth noting and celebrating, une très belle carrière. While all those other things I mentioned a moment ago—a life, a work, a life's work, a corpus, and a labor, even a pedagogy—will continue for a long time to come and more or less as they did in the past, as Peggy will continue to teach part-time, as it turns out, at the University of Southern California (USC), this coming fall (2018), one could still argue that Peggy's academic career—at the intersection of all these professional and institutional affiliations and responsibilities, not to mention being attached to a regular salary—has now come to an end. If someone wants to argue otherwise, then they will have to explain to me just what retirement means.

A career, then, as opposed to a life, a professional life, a life's work, an oeuvre, an occupation, a preoccupation: Peggy has had an extraordinary career at USC, though not only, of course, for she also taught at Miami University of Ohio and outside the United States for a time at the University Paris VIII Vincennes–St. Denis. A career academic in several institutions as a teacher, researcher, writer, translator, and administrator, Peggy has had an exemplary career, one that I think we should celebrate both for its own sake and in its particularity but also, I would like to argue here, because I don't know whether we will continue to speak of careers—and particularly of an academic career—for much longer. People will continue to teach, write, translate, and work in and for institutions, but I suspect that the word "career" will seem less and less appropriate for these activities, that the very notion of a career, both the word and the thing, may well be nearing the end of...