CEFRES Team

Thomas Clément Mercier: Research and CV

Derrida’s Europes: Deconstruction, Marxism, Democracy

Research Area 1: Displacements, “Dépaysements” and Discrepancies: People, Knowledge and Practices

Research project :  Archives and Interculturality 

Contact: thomas.mercier@cefres.cz

Thomas Clément Mercier was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy degree in Political Theory by King’s College London (War Studies Department) in May 2017. He specializes in the study of violence, democratic legitimacy, and political resistance, at the intersection between international political theory and deconstruction. His research interests include critical international studies, postcolonial and decolonial thought, deconstructive biopolitics, gender studies and queer theory, animal and environmental ethics.

His research at CEFRES deals with Jacques Derrida’s relationship to Central and Eastern Europe, with a focus on his travels to the so-called ‘Eastern Bloc’ before and after the end of the Cold War. Special attention is given to Derrida’s arrest in Prague in 1981 as he was participating in clandestine seminars in support of Czechoslovak dissidents—intellectuals, philosophers and professors—in the context of his political-institutional engagements as Vice President of the Jan Hus Association. 

Thomas Clément Mercier’s research heavily relies on archival documents, letters and unpublished seminars, and blends biographical, historical, and political-theoretical analyses in order to elucidate a series of problems concerning the nature of Derrida’s political-institutional engagements:

  1. The articulation between the deconstruction of philosophy and the practical transformation of socio-political institutions, starting with Derrida’s critique of the institution of philosophy and its potential complicity with political or ideological forces;
  2. Derrida’s critical engagements with Marxist thought and politics, such as displayed by numerous unpublished seminars, notes, and personal letters from the 1960s and 1970s. These unpublished notes prefigure Specters of Marx (1993), wherein Derrida reassessed Marxism as an unavoidable part of the European heritage and promise, while opposing the narrative presenting neoliberalism as the homogeneous teleological destiny of ‘Europe’ in the wake of Marx’s supposed ‘death’. In doing so, Derrida aimed to challenge the Cold War narrative of a strict opposition between Western and Eastern Europe, between liberal and Marxist traditions;
  3. Derrida’s deconstruction of the idea of Europe — or, rather, ‘Europes’ — understood both as a philosophical concept and as a political notion. In several pre- and post-1989 texts, Derrida questioned the homogeneity and unity of the European heritage, and pluralised its legacies in view of offering a deconstructive analysis of democracy-to-come — an idea of Europe more open to its own heterogeneity.

Through the analysis of archival materials, Thomas Clément Mercier wishes to shed new light on the relationship between deconstruction, democratic theory, and Marxist thought, and to emphasise the ethical-political implications of Derrida’s thought as they appear as early as the 1970s.

Three articles on the topic have been published, and four others are currently under review. A monograph is also in preparation.

CV

Education

2017: PhD — King’s College, London (War Studies Dpt.). Thesis title: ‘The Violence of Legitimacy: Democracy, Power, Antagonism’, under the supervision of Professor Vivienne Jabri and Professor Mervyn Frost.

2007: Master’s Degree – Sciences-Po Paris, Joint degree (double Master’s) in International Relations (Professional Degree) and Political Science (Research Degree). 

2005: Master’s Degree – Université Paris-III (Sorbonne Nouvelle), Literature and Linguistics.

Selected publications

Edited volumes
Book chapter
  • ‘Resisting Legitimacy’, in Contending Legitimacy in World Politics: The State, Civil Society and the International Sphere in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Bronwyn Winter and Lucia Sorbera (London and New York: Routledge, 2017).
Articles
Published translations
Reviews
CEFRES Team

CEFRES Team of Researchers 2017-2018

István Pál Ádám

Contact: istvan.adam@cefres.cz

is from January 2016 until December 2017 a post-doctoral researcher at CEFRES and at the Faculty of Humanities of Charles University, benefitting from the support of the Charles University in Prague. His research project is entitled The Spatial Control of Central European Concierges and contributes to CEFRES research area 3.

Chiara Mengozzi

Contact: chiara.mengozzi@cefres.cz

is from January 2016 until December 2017 a post-doctoral researcher at CEFRES and at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University, benefitting from the support of the Charles University in Prague. From January 2018 she is a CEFRES associated researcher. Her research project is entitled Animal Matters. Challenging the Anthropological Difference and Literary Norms and contributes to CEFRES’s research area 2.

Calls for Papers, workshops

CFP – Disability, Health and Handicap in Social Sciences and Humanities

Interdisciplinary Workshop

Organizers: Kateřina Kolářová (Faculty of Humanities, Charles University, Prague – FHS UK), Martina Winkler (Christian-Albrechts-Universität, Kiel), Filip Herza (FHS UK / CEFRES), Kamila Šimandlová (FHS UK)
When: 17/2/2018
Where: Akademické Centrum, Husova 4a, Prague 1
Language: Czech
Deadline for submission: 20/12/2017

Concepts of disability, health, sickness, debility, biological precarity and stigmatization come to the foreground in recent debates in social sciences and humanities. This workshop wants to open floor for interdisciplinary exchanges between disability studies and other fields of social sciences and humanities. Calling for explorations of different methodological approaches, perspectives and theoretical conceptualizations of disability and difference, debility and biological precarity, body and corporeality, the workshop aims to deepen discussions of already established themes, as well as to strike new theoretical paths. We specifically encourage presentations working with intersectional approaches that link disability to other categories of difference and power, such as gender, sexuality, ethnicity and race, class, age, and other relevant categories.

Presentations may address:

  • Cultural representations, cultural practices and symbolical regimes of body, embodiment, health, sickness and disability
  • Symbolical regimes of disability (such as e.g. “compulsory able-bodiedness and abledmindedness”), their reproduction and disturbances past and present
  • Moral economies of disability and the concept of welfare state in the state socialism and the post-socialist period
  • Post-/colonial politics of disability
  • Transnational circulations and translations of disability theory and disability politics
  • Transformations of expert discourses in relation to health and dis/ability, alternative knowledges and forms of expertise between the 19th and the 21th centuries
  • Health as a moral imperative and platforms for emancipatory discourses and strategies
  • Politics of inclusion and (social) exclusion
  • Histories, politics and praxis of institutionalization and “deinstitutionalization”
  • Biopolitics of dis/ability
  • Intersectional methodologies

We kindly ask potential contributors to submit their proposals until 20 December 2017 at simandlova@outlook.com

Workshop is organized within the project “(Post)Socialist Modernity and social and cultural politics of disability” jointly funded by the Czech Science Foundation (GAČR) and Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), held by the Faculty of Humanities Charles University. The event is co-hosted by CEFRES and the Institute of Sociology of the Czech Academy of Sciences.

Calls for Papers, International Conference

CFP: The Wording of Thoughts: Philosophy From the Standpoint of Its Manuscripts and Archives

The Wording of Thoughts: Philosophy From the Standpoint of Its Manuscripts and Archives—Methodologies, Histories and Horizons

Organizer : Benedetta Zaccarello, CEFRES
When & Where : 7-9 June 2018, Prague
Deadline for applications : 21 January 2018
Language: English
Partners: ITEM, IMEC, Patočka Archives (Czech Academy of Sciences), FHS UK

Please send your proposal (title and 300 word-long abstract) and bio-bibliographical short notice to the following address: benedetta.zaccarello@cefres.cz

Philosophy is written, practiced, lived through: it is the translation of the experience of a thinking subjectivity in a conceptual alphabet and a verbal fabric. The I of philosophy is a chimera whose head tickles the heights of abstract concepts and universal discourses, while its body is grounded in the lived experience. At the hinge between these two realms called for by the speculative effort, stands the verbal material. Its meaning can only be determined taking into account its relationship to its contexts, the writing and reading practices surrounding it, the horizons of significations and even the implicit polemical charge which characterizes every philosophical contention. Likewise, the specificity of each theoretical expression is both the sine qua non condition for the perpetuation of a discipline looking to evolve and transcend its own categories, and the most subjective and personal aspect of a work that traditionally aims at the “neutrality” of abstraction.

The “making of a philosophical text”, including its cultural features and societal contingencies, challenges the representation of the discipline’s history as a series of abstract findings and innovative intuitions that constitute the landmarks of our paradigms. The philosopher who writes is the first inclined to erase the complex intricacies of the negotiations between existence and theory, between conceptual inventiveness and shared vocabulary inherited from a centuries-old tradition. Yet it is obvious that the dynamics of philosophy production and reception are a complex phenomenon whose writing nature is a crucial stake.

As reminded by Derrida reading Paul Valéry, such dimension of the philosopher’s work is constantly and almost physiologically overlooked in the representations of the discipline’s aims. Strong borders seem to delimitate fields renowned to be dissimilar, if not incompatible: philosophy and literature are therefore often seen as rival siblings, and their respective horizons do not take easily into account some elements that turn out to be indispensable to understand—from a dynamic, historical-cultural point of view—the production of theoretical prose. Likewise, and opposite to the tradition of the Romantic period for instance, intellectual work rarely binds philology and philosophy.

For all these reasons, the philosophical manuscript is an odd object that has only recently started to receive proper appraisal. In Europe nevertheless, the creation of archive centers gathering major philosophical data—such as Nietzsche, W. Benjamin or Kierkegaard—has sustained the memory of philosophical writing and enabled such “arches” to cross time waiting for the moment when, partly thanks to the development of digital humanities, these materials could get a much deserved attention. Thanks to the editing of philosophical manuscripts, the information contained by such media beyond the text itself turns out to be manyfold. The ontology that vitalizes and structures the hermeneutical gesture behind the work on manuscripts is indeed different. Such perspective enables to look at the evolution of a theoretical thought as a living and specific adventure, and the history of the discipline a dynamic, manifold and choral process. Still, not all the documents, as dispersed and little known traces of the philosophical practices, can be turned into books and remain hidden to the public eye. But it is beyond doubt that accessing these archives often enables to better understand the appearance, the method, the approach and even the sources, along with the polemical targets and the hints that published books tend to excise or dim.

Often only the specialists working on the critical edition of the works of a thinker-writer, or the archivists in charge of a fund are able to develop knowledge from such materials: working on archives demands time, and it does not match the rhythms imposed today to research and intellectual production. Therefore creativity expressed by researchers as they come up with ad hoc tools to publish or interpret a set of manuscripts has not yet been subjected to a comparative approach aiming at setting common methodological principles. If genetic criticism has developed since the 1970s an important set of tools and philological methodology specific to the study of writers’ manuscripts, little has been done to elaborate guidelines when dealing with philosophical archives.

This conference aims at establishing a dialogue between specialists from various countries and continents who have worked on different corpus so to sketch a few first methodological lines and establish a collaborative pioneer network. The publication of the conference proceedings should be a first cornerstone of this new consortium.
As the history of several philosophical archives and their anchoring in history as such, we hope to shed some light on these places as knowledge sources and field training and to advocate for the inclusion of such materials for a new approach to the history and the exegesis of theory. 

Four panels will be organized:

1 – Archives’ History/Histories. We welcome contributions dealing with the history of philosophical archives as institutions and how they became embedded in the cultural and social landscape of their time. On the other hand, the history of philosophy that can be reached through working on manuscripts shall be tackled.

2 – Conservation & Edition. The aim is to collect the testimonies of various specialists who have worked as curators and/or editors of philosophical manuscripts to better understand the specific challenges they may have met with each specific theoretical writing.  Issues pertaining to the digitalization of theoretical funds and to the intelligibility of its objects will also be addressed. We welcome papers on paradigmatic cases that can also fit within the 3rd type of propositions below.

3 – Editions & Exegesis: approaches and methodologies. Several contributions and a round table should open common methodological perspectives from the observation of several philosophical corpus. We aim at sketching a guideline applied to philosophical manuscripts, whether from the point of view of interpretation or of publishing.

4 – The Archives of Theory. This last panel aims at collecting propositions dealing with theoretical corpus outside philosophy, sic as literary theory, art history, science history, semiotics… This comparative perspective should bring up the specificities of this type of documents in their relation to the philosophical materials.

French Research Center in Humanities and Social Sciences – Prague