“To be repeatable is by the same token to be alterable”: A Return to the Moment of Différance

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Published: Dec 31, 2025
DOI: https://doi.org/10.12681/syn.44017
Keywords:
Deconstruction Deconstruction at large Derrida Différance Conceptual art Sylvère Lotringer October journal Structura French Semiotext(e) Adrian Piper Nancy Spero Tel Quel Institutional Critique
Stamatina Dimakopoulou
National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
Abstract

This essay maps a range of responses and contexts of the reception of deconstruction in the US, as markers for the mediations of deconstruction, in order to revisit how deconstruction can be re-situated in its moment. Integral and defining for the time of poststructuralism, Derrida’s early thought not only expresses concerns about history and about the history of forms in ways that converge with similar critical interrogations in the US. These synchronicities also invite us to reflect on the demarcations of Derrida’s own thought: as it transpires, deconstructive impulses that were incommensurable or unreciprocated come, in retrospect, to attest to engendering potentialities that, perhaps, sometimes emerge despite or against the grain of Derrida's own thought.

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Author Biography
Stamatina Dimakopoulou, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens

Mata Dimakopoulou teaches at the Department of English Language and Literature of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. She has been Fulbright Visiting Scholar at New York University and has guest-lectured at Paris-Nanterre. She has a background in comparative literature and publications include articles and book chapters on Surrealism, modernist magazines, and artists and writers like Paul Auster, Sophie Calle, Vito Acconci, Robert Smithson, Frank O’Hara.  She is a founding member and co-editor of Synthesis: an anglophone journal of comparative literary studies. Under the auspices of CIVIS, the European Civic University, with Anne Reynes-Delobel, she has co-launched Transitive Modernities and is co-directing the international CIVIS research network Postracial Transmodernities: Afro-European Relations, Mediterranean Trajectories and Intercultural Reciprocities, devised and founded by Mina Karavanta. In collaboration with the Athens School of Fine Arts, she has co-devised The Tyvek Project, practice-based workshops on James Merrill’s ‘Self-Portrait in Tyvek Windbreaker’ and The New York Spanner, followed by an exhibition at Athens-based Atopos CVC. She is currently co-editing a volume on Tropes of Home: Homeless Inflections, and a special issue on Transitive Modernities: Territories and Temporalities (forthcoming in Synthesis). Her current research focuses on forms of vulnerability and reciprocity, examining a wide range of art forms, and a transcontinental theoretical, and literary corpus.

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