Joanny Moulin
“Life as Writing in Derrida’s La vie la mort“
Malice, the Journal of Literatures and Cultures of the Digital Era
n°10 (juillet 2020)
In any case, already from its biological level, the living is textual, and life is writing: as bios (βίος), and already in its less specific, infra-human form as zoe (ζωὴ), life is a form of writing, a graph (γράφειν) — “it is always a gram (engram or program)”. Around the fifth seance of La vie la mort Derrida is working on this edge, so to speak, between zoe and bios, on this threshold on which, for the ancient Greeks, says Agamben, the slave stands: “And if, for the Greeks, the human defines itself by a dialectic between physis and nomos, zoe and bios, then the slave, like the naked life, stands on the threshold which separates and conjugates them”.