This edition of the Recently Published Book Spotlight is about Kas Saghafi’s The World at the End of the World: A Spectro-poetics (SUNY, 2020). Saghafi is Associate Professor of Philosophy at University of Memphis. He is the author of Apparitions—Of Derrida’s Other (Fordham, 2010). His current book projects are Remains: Jacques Derrida and Jacques Derrida, Thinking What Comes, co-edited with Geoffrey Bennington (both Edinburgh UP).
Why did you feel the need to write this work?
This work imposed itself on me. After the unexpected and very sudden loss of my wife, Pleshette DeArmitt, who I had known for almost three decades and had been married to for twenty-five years, who was also philosopher and my best friend, I was forced almost immediately to deal with the question of death and what may follow it. It is customary for most people to rely on their faith or already-established beliefs to help them negotiate what can be an exceedingly difficult event in their life. However, without religious convictions or beliefs and the lack of already existing social, religious, or family principles or practices, I had to work out how to assess and cope with death while undergoing deep grief. As a result of a long process of feeling and thinking, in addition to reading works from all disciplines, I turned to the writings of Jacques Derrida.
Is it themes like these or others that made you turn to Derrida’s work? What insights did you have upon engaging it that made you think there was enough material for a book?
I was already interested in Derrida’s work from way back in graduate school. There are far too many themes, and not necessarily only the ones that you mention, that have interested me. I did not start out with any insights, but I had many questions regarding death, and what may occur after it, that pushed me to inquire into Derrida’s thinking. I was not sure at the beginning that I had enough material for a book.
Do you see any connections between your professional work and personal life?
Naturally, writing this work has meant that I have not been able to keep apart the so-called private from the public, as it is customary in scholarly work.
What is your work about?
This book is a work on loss, death, and mourning but it does not approach these topics in a personal way. The book was conceived based on an insight arising from Derrida, who writes in a very late work that the death of the other is “the end of the world,” not of a world, but of the world. Derrida’s very late texts, I believe, meditate on this link. Culturally, we are familiar with the end of the world as an apocalyptic and eschatological notion. In contrast, the thought of the end of the world in Derrida is a rethinking or a complete reassessment of the long-standing definition of the notion of “the world.” On the face of it, this may appear as a far-fetched notion, widely divergent from the accepted, every day or philosophical understanding of world, By going through a historical and etymological examination of the terms used in the languages of the West—kosmos, mundus, die Welt, le monde, the globe, etc.—to refer to what has been understood and referred to as world, I probe Derrida’s writings on death and mourning, world and the end of the world, survival and salut. Derrida’s taking up of the notion of “the end of the world,” my book argues, necessitates an engagement with the thought of salut. Salut is a French term with two simultaneously metonymical, duplicitous meanings and uses—one, in the constative, designating “salvation,” which Derrida analyzes and ties to discourses on religion, and the other, in the performative, meaning greeting or salutation to the other. If at every leave-taking or departure, there must be a goodbye and a “see you later,” my book asks whether it would be possible to dissociate a discourse on salut as greeting from a religious discourse on salvation? To try to respond, we would be compelled, I suggest, to pursue a new reading of salut as greeting and “a certain poetics.”
What topics do you discuss in the work, and why do you discuss them?
Apart from the notions of world and the end the world, the book (philosophically) delves into the topics of death, what may occur after life, mourning, survival, immortality, eternity, resurrection, eternal life, and the phantasm in order to come up with some answers to the vexing questions that had ensued for me. The book is also an exploration of the terminology that Derrida uses in his later work, in particular, the undecidable word salut.
How would you say your philosophy of death compares with Kierkegaard’s employment of it to develop a personal relationship with God or Heidegger’s attempt to use it to discover a more authentic self?
I would not say that I have a “philosophy of death,” but what I write about death is very different from Kierkegaard’s theological assumptions. I’m not sure if I read Heidegger as making an attempt to discover a more “authentic self,” but he does place a great value on Dasein’s relation to death as being one’s ownmost and what individualizes Dasein. In the book there is a specific chapter devoted to the question of death in Derrida arguing that his approach has been absolutely singular and very different from the tradition.
What directions would you like to take your work in the future?
The ideas of my current book are related to the book that I would like to write next. This is a book that I had planned to write with my spouse jointly, with both of us being responsible for different sections of it. Called Remains—Jacques Derrida, it is simultaneously an exploration of the notion of “the remainder” and remains [reste], in the sense of the remains of the dead but also what remains and what is left over. The volume includes, as an introductory chapter, a translation by Pleshette DeArmitt and myself of an article by Derrida entitled “Remain(s)—The Master or the Supplement of Infinity.” The book seeks to explain what Derrida means by “the remainder” and remains and argues that no ontology is able to give an account of the latter, as they overflow or exceed it.
What’s next for you?
I will be working on co-editing, with Geoffrey Bennington, and a team of translators, already hard at work, on two volumes of a collection of two dozen essays, texts, speeches, and interviews by Derrida, previously untranslated in English. Entitled Thinking What Comes, its title is derived from the title of a mainly political discussion that took place following the appearance of Specters of Marx. The collection includes articles on the archive, hospitality, the promise, addiction, the question of Europe as well as on Derrida’s experience at school.
I also hope to be able one day to write a book dedicated to my spouse called Meteor.
You can ask Kas Saghafi questions about his work in the comments section below. Comments must conform to our community guidelines and comment policy.
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Kas Saghafi
Kas Saghafi is Associate Professor of Philosophy at University of Memphis. He is the author of Apparitions—Of Derrida's Other (Fordham, 2010) and The World after the End of the World: A Spectro-poetics (SUNY, 2020). His current book projects are Remains: Jacques Derrida and Jacques Derrida, Thinking What Comes, co-edited with Geoffrey Bennington (both Edinburgh UP).
Nathan Eckstrand
Nathan Eckstrand is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Sam Houston State University. He was previously a Visiting Assistant Professor at Fort Hays State University and Marian University, and before that a Merton Teaching Fellow at Mercyhurst University in Erie, PA. Nathan previously served as editor-in-chief of the APA Blog, where he has worked since 2017. His dissertation, written under Fred Evans and defended in September 2014, is called “The Event of Revolution: Theorizing the Relationship between the State and Radical Change” and studies concepts of revolution from the Early Modern period to the present day. Nathan is also co-editor of Philosophy and the Return of Violence: Essays from this Widening Gyre, and has published articles on Deleuze, Foucault, Fanon, and Said. His most recent book, Liberating Revolution: Emancipating Radical Change from the State, is now available from SUNY Press.
Kas Saghafi provides an essential analysis of the term’ world’, but this usage us best grasped as it relates to ‘my world’ which is not the same as ‘your world’ or that which is called a ‘common world’. A common world is a linguistic achievement. Note Wittgenstein, “The world is everything that is the case’. ‘The world is the totality of facts, not of things.’ But, a fact needs to be interpreted. Hence, the primacy of my interpretation which may be congruent with, yet not exactly the same as any other perspective.
The reference to the end of the world in theology means the end of a ‘common world’. We relate to the end of time as far away, years, decades or historical eras. We do not grasp it as happening right now-this second or, if we do, we recoil in fear. ‘My death; means the end of ‘my world’ since no one else experiences the world exactly s I do. Your death means the end of your world. Worlds are ending all the time. Don’t wait for the Last Judgement- it takes place every day, (Camus)
Hence, death relates us to a primal evil- limited time. Hence, the necessity to grasp and do now what no one else may do. I personally hate time. It destroys any dream of an eternal essence, eternal achievement or an enduring satisfaction. ‘My world’ struggles to endure before the Apocalypse, not a common one- but mine!