“‘All culture is originally colonial’: Derrida, Algeria, and the Latin Empire”

Adam Stern, assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, will discuss a reading of Jacques Derrida’s writing on Algeria, Jewishness, and colonialism. Beginning with a controversial passage from his 1996 book, Monolingualism of the Other—“all culture is originally colonial”—the paper calls for a reinterpretation of Derrida’s intervention into the legacy of French Algeria as a reflection of his broader critique of Latin Christian hegemony.