In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Introduction
  • Dawne McCance

you understand, within every sign already, every mark or every trait, there is distancing, the post, what there has to be so that it is legible for another, another than you or me, and everything is messed up in advance, cards on the table.

Derrida, The Post Card

Considering the time it takes to organize a major international conference, the events themselves are remarkably brief. Or so I have come to conclude on the basis of the three conferences I organized as Mosaic editor: The Photograph (2004), Following Derrida Legacies (2006), and Freud After Derrida (2010). From distribution of the Call to arrival of the participants, each conference was a good two years in the making, feats of organization that I could not possibly have undertaken without stellar staff and student interns. Each time, they assumed responsibility for coordinating the vetting of submissions, for correspondence, promotion, funding applications, travel arrangements, student grants, ground transportation, room bookings, receptions and meals, program printing, and so on — so much so, that for me, each conference unfolded as some kind of miracle, running so smoothly, meals appearing, buses there just when you need them, and not the least, participants from around the world gathering together for an amazing few days of concerned conversation. In my life as an academic, a teacher and writer, these are the days that matter most to me. I love to meet distinguished scholars whose work I have been reading and teaching for years, but even more, I love to have serious students [End Page v] meet them, listen to, and even speak with them. I love the way that institutional hierarchies and disciplinary boundaries collapse at these events, where the listening is respectful and the responses invariably generous, whether the speaker be a student or a world-famous scholar. Because the Mosaic conference experiences have been so full for me, I have been twice tempted to try for “one more.”

This is the first of two special issues that collects selected proceedings from the October 2010 conference, Freud After Derrida. The event featured five extraordinary keynote speakers, three of whose papers are included in this issue, with the two others to appear in the December 2011 proceedings special. In addition to the keynote speakers, the Freud After Derrida program included close to one hundred presentations, among them papers given by graduate students from seventeen different countries. Although not all of these papers could be included in the two proceedings issues, those that are published in this and the next Mosaic issue will give readers a good sense of what discussions the conference involved. I wish to extend special thanks here to Laura Cardiff, Production Manager at Mosaic until July 15, 2011, at which point she left to study Law at the University of Toronto. Authors published in the present issue will know how gratifying it is to work with her, and will appreciate both her impeccable copy-editing and production skills and her always gentle demeanour. Authors publishing in the December 2011 issue will welcome, as I do, the experience, professionalism, and tact of our new Production Manager, Andrée-Anne Boisvert.

I have to admit that the conference title, Freud After Derrida, is my own doing. I did run it by David Farrell Krell—a keynote speaker, published in this issue—who gave me two thumbs up. Even after that, however, I reflected on it for several months, a process with which those of you who are journal editors may be all too familiar. It is at once unsettling and exhilarating to send out a Call for a conference or special issue, as if one could glean some sense of “what’s going on,” or better, “what will be going on two or three years from now,” even while realizing that as far as one can see is not very far at all. In this case, my provocation came from both Freud and Derrida, not one before or after the other, so much as the impossibility of establishing, on the basis of their work, the linearity of inheritance, textuality, or indeed, and perhaps especially, of “life” and “death.”

As keynote speaker, Samuel Weber, points out...

pdf

Share