A new exhibit “Derrida in Photographs” is on view in the Special Collections and Archives lobby, just outside of our Reading Room on the fifth floor of Langson Library, from July 10 – August 10, 2012.  This exhibit is presented in tandem with the 3rd Derrida Today Conference, held at the University of California, Irvine, July 11-13, 2012. The exhibit includes a sample of the photographs from the Jacques Derrida Papers (MS-C001), housed in the Critical Theory Archive in the Special Collections and Archives Department at the University of California, Irvine.

The photographs in the Jacques Derrida Papers consist of approximately 60 color and black and white images of Derrida, both individual and group portraits. The exhibit includes publicity photographs, photographs which document Derrida’s participation at various conferences and other events, and a few examples of Derrida manuscripts. The collection includes publicity photographs, produced by Derrida’s publisher, and also

photographs which document Derrida’s participation at various conferences, most notably the 1997

Colloque de Cerisy, L’animal autobiographique. In these and other group photographs, Derrida is photographed with Gilles Deleuze andothers at Cerisy in 1972, with Francis Ponge, Harold Bloom, Louis Althusser, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Jorge Luis Borges, Hans Georg Gadamer, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Pierre Bourdieu, J. Hillis Miller, Ornette Coleman, Nelson Mandela, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Hélène Cixous, among others. Most of the photographs date from the 1980s and 1990s. The photographs are arranged chronologically in the exhibit.

Other archival and manuscript collections directly related to Derrida include: Safaa Fathy Video Recordings of Jacques Derrida Lectures (MS-C014); and Jacques Derrida Listserv Collection, 1991-1994 (MS-C008).