Deconstruction at large

PDF
Published: Dec 31, 2025
DOI: https://doi.org/10.12681/syn.44008
Keywords:
Jacques Derrida Deconstruction Deconstruction at large Race and racism Institutional Critique University without condition Decoloniality Collège international de philosophie Humanities and Literature Hospitality Living Together
Mina Karavanta
National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
Apostolos Lampropoulos
University Bordeaux Montaigne
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6809-7054
Abstract

The opening of deconstruction to the reinvention of the future, not as a messianic yet-to-come, but as a future that is present and seeks representation and recognition, is what we identify as the at large of deconstruction. Deconstruction is not merely a performance of the repressed contradictions and silenced aporias that reveal the center of the text elsewhere but is primarily an affirmation of the coming of what the text has excluded.

Article Details
  • Section
  • Articles
Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

The copyright for articles in this journal is retained by the author(s), with first publication rights granted to the journal. By virtue of their appearance in this open access journal, articles are free to use with proper attribution. Synthesis retains the worldwide right to reproduce, display, distribute, and use published articles in all formats and media, either separately or as part of collective works for the full term of copyright. This includes but is not limited to the right to publish articles in an issue of the Journal, copy and distribute individual reprints of the articles, authorize reproduction of articles in their entirety, and authorize reproduction and distribution of articles or abstracts thereof by means of computerized retrieval systems.

Downloads
Download data is not yet available.
Author Biographies
Mina Karavanta, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens

Mina Karavanta is Associate Professor of Literary Theory, Cultural Studies and Global Anglophone Literature in the Faculty of English Studies of the School of Philosophy of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. She specializes in decolonial and postcolonial studies, critical theory and comparative literature and has published articles in international academic journals such as boundary 2, Feminist Review, Modern Fiction Studies, Mosaic, Symplokē, Journal Of Contemporary Theory. Her work has also appeared in various edited volumes including more recently “Specters of the Aegean” in Decoloniality in the Break of Global Blackness, Eds. Michaeline A. Chrichlow and Patricia M. Northover (Routledge, 2025) and “Archipelagic Thought as World Literature: Glissant, Wynter and Derrida’s Genres of the World” in Theory as World Literature, Ed. Jeffrey Di Leo (Bloomsbury, 2025). She has co-edited Interculturality and Gender, with Joan Anim-Addo & Giovanna Covi, (London: Mango Press, 2009) and Edward Said and Jacques Derrida: Reconstellating Humanism and the Global Hybrid, with Nina Morgan (London: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2008). Her forthcoming book is Migrations of the Human, Decolonial Subjectivities in the Long Present (Liverpool University Press).

Apostolos Lampropoulos, University Bordeaux Montaigne

Apostolos Lampropoulos is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University Bordeaux Montaigne. He has taught at the University of Cyprus for several years; he has also been Stanley J. Seeger Fellow at Princeton University (2003-2004), a Marie Curie Fellow and Visiting Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania (2014), and Visiting Fellow at the cluster of excellence Temporal Communities: Doing Literature in a Global Perspective of the Free University of Berlin (2022). He has published the monograph Le Pari de la description (L’Harmattan, 2002) and completed the monograph Gastrotopies: Athens 1990-2024. He has co-edited the special issues “Configurations of Cultural Amnesia” (with V. Markidou; journal Synthesis, 2010) and “Learning from documenta” (with E. Rikou and E. Yalouri; journal FIELD, 2021), as well as the volumes States of Theory (with A. Balasopoulos; Metaichmio, 2010; in Greek), AutoBioPhagies (with M. Chehab; Peter Lang, 2011), Textual Layering (with M. Margaroni and Ch. Hadjichristos; Lexington Books, 2017), Écriture littéraire, écriture musicale dans la littérature et les arts (with B. Bloch and P. Garcia; Presses universitaires de Bordeaux, 2017), Value (with E. Rikou and E. Yalouri; Nissos, 2019 ; in Greek), Débordements (with J.-P. Engélibert and I. Poulin; Presses universitaires de Bordeaux, 2022) and Repenser la différance sexuelle (with M. de Gandt ; Hermann, forthcoming in 2026). He has translated into Greek A. Compagnon’s Le Démon de la théorie (Metaichmio, 2003), J. Culler's On Deconstruction (Metaichmio, 2006) and, with E. Pyrovolakis, the volume Jacques Derrida by Jacques Derrida and Geoffrey Bennington (Nissos, 2019). He has been part of curatorial/research projects in collaboration with artists, anthropologists, and cultural theorists. He co-curated (with P. Rehberg) the exhibition Intimacy: New Queer Art from Berlin and Beyond (December 2020 – August 2021) at the Schwules Museum in Berlin. He is currently finalizing a book project around the notion of critical intimacy.

References
Ahmed, Sara. Living a Feminist Life. Duke University Press, 2017.
Balibar, Étienne. Equaliberty. Trans. James Ingram. Duke University Press, 2014.
—. On Universals. Constructing and Deconstructing Community. Trans. Joshua David Jordan. Fordham University Press, 2020.
Bourcier, Sam. Le pouls de l’archive, c’est en nous qu’il bat. Cambourakis, 2025.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. One Planet, Many Worlds. The Climate Parallax. Brandeis University Press, 2023.
Châtelet, François – Derrida, Jacques – Faye, Jean-Pierre – Lecourt, Domi-nique. Le rapport bleu: Les sources historiques et théoriques du Col-lège international de philosophie. Presses universitaires de Nanterre, 2019.
Dussel, Enrique. Philosophy of Liberation. Trans. Aquilina Martinez – Chris-tine Morkovsky. Orbis Books, 1985.
Derrida, Jacques. Aporias. Trans. Thomas Dutoit. Stanford University Press, 1993.
—. “Circumfession”. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington. In Derrida, Jacques – Ben-nington, Geoffrey. Jacques Derrida. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington. The University of Chicago Press, 1993.
—. Specters of Marx. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. Routledge, 1994.
—. Monolingualism of the Other, or, The Prosthesis of Origin. Trans. Patrick Mensah. Stanford University Press, 1998.
—. “Marx & Sons”. In Sprinker, Michael (ed.). Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx. Jacques Derrida, Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, Antonio Negri, et al. Verso, 1999, pp. 213-269.
—. “The Future of the Profession or the University Without Condition (Thanks to the ‘Humanities,’ What Could Take Place Tomorrow).” In Cohen Tom (ed.). Jacques Derrida and the Humanities: A Critical Reader. Cam-bridge University Press, 2001, pp. 24–57.
—. “Geopsychoanalysis ‘and the rest of the world.’”. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. In Psyche. Inventions of the Other, Volume I. Ed. Peggy Kamuf – Eliza-beth Rottenberg. Stanford University Press, 2007, pp. 318-343.
—. “Psyche: Invention of the Other.” Trans. Catherine Porter. In Psyche. In-ventions of the Other, Volume I. Ed. Peggy Kamuf – Elizabeth Rotten-berg. Stanford University Press, 2007, pp. 1-47.
—. “Letter to a Japanese Friend.” Trans. David Wood and Andrew Benjamin. In Psyche. Inventions of the Other, Volume II. Ed. Peggy Kamuf – Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford University Press, 2008, pp. 1-6.
—. The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume II. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington. The University of Chicago Press, 2010.
—. “Avowing — The Impossible: ‘Returns’, Repentance and Reconciliation.” Trans. Gil Anidjar. In Weber Elizabeth (ed.). Living Together. Jacques Derrida’s Communities of Violence and Peace. Fordham University Press, 2013, pp. 18-44.
Derrida, Jacques – Sprinker, Michael. “Politics and Friendship: An Interview with Jacques Derrida”. Trans. Robert Harvey. In Kaplan E. Ann – Sprinker Michael (eds.). The Althusserian Legacy. Verso, 1993, pp. 184-231.
Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Richard Philcox. Grove Press, 2004.
Glissant, Édouard. Treatise on the Whole World. Trans. Celia Britton. Liver-pool University Press, 2020.
Hesse, Barnor. “Racialized Modernity: An Analytics of White Mythologies.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 30:4 (2007): 643-663.
—. “Derrida’s Black Accent: Decolonial Deconstruction.” ReOrient 8.1. (2023): pp. 4-33.
Mignolo, Walter. “Eurocentrism and Coloniality.” In On Decoloniality: Con-cepts, Analytics, Praxis. With Catherine Walsh. Duke University Press, 2018, pp. 194-201.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Fragile Skin of the World. Trans. Cory Stockwell. Poli-ty Press, 2021.
Povinelli, Elizabeth A. Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism. Duke University Press, 2011.
—. Geontologies. A Requiem to Late Liberalism. Duke University Press, 2016.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Appendix: Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Can the Subaltern Speak? Reflections on the History of an Idea. Ed. Rosalind C. Morris. Columbia University Press, 2010, pp. 237-291.
Wynter, Sylvia. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argu-ment.” CR: The New Centennial Review 3:3 (2003), pp. 257-337.
—. “Human Being as Noun ? Or Being Human as Praxis? Towards the Auto-poetic Turn/Overturn: A Manifesto.” Unpublished manuscript, 2007. <https://bcrw.barnard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Wynter_TheAutopoeticTurn.pdf> (last vis-it: 27 December 2025).
Zenetti, Marie-Jeanne. “Théorie, réflexivité et savoirs situés: la question de la scientificité en études littéraires”. In Zenetti, Marie-Jeanne – Bujor, Flavia – Coste, Marion – Paulian, Claire – Rundgren, Heta – Turbiau, Aurore (eds). “Situer la théorie : pensées de la littérature et savoirs si-tués (féminismes, postcolonialismes).” Fabula-LhT: littérature, his-toire, théorie 26 (2021). <https://www.fabula.org/lht/26/zenetti.html> (last visit: 27 Decem-ber 2025)
Most read articles by the same author(s)