Corona Vitae / Corona Mortis

Abstract

During the second year of his seminar Perjury and Pardon, Derrida makes the somewhat offhanded suggestion that one might someday wish to draw up a list distinguishing all those thinkers who lived long enough to see the AIDS epidemic from all those who did not. It's 1999, and Derrida makes this curious suggestion in the midst of a discussion of the so-called 'contaminated blood' scandal that was preoccupying France at the time. Such a distinction, Derrida seems to imply, would allow one to make some general observations about the thought or rhetoric of two distinct groups of thinkers and writers separated in time by a global epidemic and everything that came with it. Derrida himself would thus obviously be among those in the first group, while Heidegger, whom Derrida mentions, would be in the second, which can help explain, we might speculate, why the trope or logic of autoimmunity became so important for the one and yet is absent in the other.