Kristian Olesen Toft

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PhD project: Absolute Passage - Derrida and the Question of Translation

Supervisors: Christian Benne (main), Carsten Meiner

My research concerns questions of translation in philosophy, in particular translation as a theoretical and practical problem in Jacques Derrida’s unpublished seminars from the 1979-1987 which I am consulting at the IMEC in Caen, France.

Although Derrida’s Des tours de Babel is a classic within Translation Studies, it has not been noted how it is constituted by material extracted from Derrida's seminar, which provides it with an important context, nor how it inaugurated a suite of eight years where translation was the main question treated in Derrida’s seminar, approached through readings of Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Fichte, Heidegger, Benjamin and Scholem, among others. My project traces this neglected trajectory which allows us to think the relation between deconstruction and translation anew.

I have translated Derrida and Lacan into Danish (forthcoming).

Affiliated with the research group Thinking the European Public of Letters (CEMES, KU) and the Centre for the Study of Nationalism (Engerom, KU).

Primary fields of research

Philosophy and Translation

Philosophical Nationality

Exemplarity

Jacques Derrida

Jacques Lacan