Abstract

In Trois ans avec Derrida (Three Years with Derrida), his biographer, Benoît Peeters, notes that Jacques Derrida’s seminar was designed “like a theoretical serial which, aside from its slumps and convolutions, nonetheless maintained a kind of suspense and featured genuine cliff-hangers at the end of each session” (Peeters, 2010). Can one truly compare a seminar to a novelistic device like that of deferred narrative? Such is the question to which I devote my attention in this article, a question which is discussed here in a dual — historical and formal — perspective. I thus ask “what is a seminar?” and how, in light of Derrida’s seminars in particular, it becomes a work. In closing, I meditate on the notion of “deferred thinking” in Derrida’s teaching, using the central concept of différance as my starting point.