French Literature Reviews - 2026

Anne Emmanuelle Berger, Le cœur au téléphone. Derrida et la question de l'auto-affection
Philosophy, Anthropology and Ideas

How do the questions of love and "sexual difference" intersect in the work of Jacques Derrida? Or, furthermore, the questions of the "sexual" and the affect? Of self-love and the love of the other? Can we think of the heart—its beat and its cry—in tandem with the political? In what ways, or to what extent, does this mode of thought engage with the problem of so-called sexual difference and gender hierarchy? And finally, why and how are these questions intimately articulated, from the very beginning, with Derrida’s project of deconstructing logocentrism?

In this essay, the author demonstrates the centrality of auto(hetero)affection in the work of Jacques Derrida, seeking to decode its epistemological, ethical, and political implications. She examines the persistence of two motifs running throughout the philosopher's oeuvre: "touch" and the "heart," analyzing their textual mechanics and conceptual scope. It was necessary for Derrida to "touch himself"—in every sense of the French expression—to touch the "touched" that he is, while also expressing himself through texts with a confessional structure or motif, for this dimension of his work and thought to fully emerge in our reading.

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Anne Emmanuelle Berger is Professor Emerita of French Literature and Gender Studies at Paris 8 University. She has co-founded and directed several research institutions in France focusing on gender and sexuality. Author of numerous works, including Le grand théâtre du genre. Identités, sexualités et féminisme en « Amérique » (Belin, 2013), she also edited Algeria in Others’ Languages (Cornell University Press, 2002) and co-edited, alongside Isabelle Alfandary and Jacob Rogozinski, Qui a peur de la déconstruction ? (PUF, 2023).

This essay places itself firmly within the traditions of contemporary deconstruction and feminist philosophy, engaging with the complex legacies of post-structuralist thought. By focusing on motifs such as the heart and the touch, the work examines how marginalized categories of affect and gender intersect with broader epistemological questions. The author investigates the internal tensions of logocentrism, tracing how the philosophical subject negotiates its own boundaries through self-relation and the address to the other. It offers a sustained meditation on the ways theoretical frameworks can account for embodied experience without reinscribing traditional hierarchies.

Readers interested in Continental philosophy, gender studies, and the ongoing reception of deconstruction will find this volume particularly illuminating. It serves as a valuable resource for scholars seeking to reevaluate the ethical and political dimensions of Derrida's project through the lens of auto-affection. Furthermore, it addresses advanced students and researchers who wish to understand the methodological stakes of reading philosophy alongside theories of sexuality. The open-access availability of the text makes it readily accessible to anyone exploring the intersections of psychoanalytic, literary, and philosophical inquiry.