Advances

Originally published in 1995, Advances was first written by Jacques Derrida as a long foreword to a book by one of his most promising former students, the philosopher Serge Margel’s Le Tombeau du Dieu Artisan (The Tomb of the Craftsman God). What Derrida uncovers for us is Margel’s own unique theory of the promise in relation to an an-archic, pre-chronological temporality, in conjunction with Margel’s radical rereading of Plato’s Timaeus. As Derrida states right away, Margel’s reading is a new one, a new reading of the Demiurge. A new promise. A new advance. 

In this magisterial late essay by Derrida, what the reader soon discovers is in part a conversation with his former student, as well as an opening for a new reflection on our current ecological and political crises that are all the more urgent today where the possibility of giving ourselves death as a human race and the end of the world is now, within an era of climate change, more real than ever.

As part of Univocal’s Pharmakon series, this essay, itself published in advance, becomes a brief but powerful light pointing toward Univocal’s forthcoming publication of the translation of Serge Margel’s Le Tombeau du Dieu Artisan. “Once again the Timaeus, of course, but a different Timaeus, a new Demiurge, I promise.”

Publicat initial in 1995, Advances a fost scris pentru prima data de Jacques Derrida ca o lunga prefata a unei carti a unuia dintre cei mai promitatori fosti studenti ai sai, The Tombeau du Dieu Artisan (Mormantul Zeului mesterului) al filosofului Serge Margel. Ceea ce descopera Derrida pentru noi este teoria unica a promisiunii a lui Margel in raport cu o temporalitate anarchica, precronologica, coroborata cu recitirea radicala a lui Margel a Timeului lui Platon.