Kas Saghafi, “The Desire for Survival,” in Desire in Ashes: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, ed. Simon Morgan Wortham and Chiara Alfano (Bloomsbury, 2015), 144. As Saghafi and others note, survivance and heritability as originally grounded in absence grounds Derrida’s vast corpus. But see his poignant “Living on: Border Lines,” in Deconstruction and Criticism: Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Geoffrey H. Hartman, and J. Hillis Miller (Continuum Books, 1979), 75–176.
Haddad argues that the nature of absence in inheritance-as-survivance places us under an “injunction to inherit from the past in a very specific way.” See Samir Haddad, Derrida and the Inheritance of Democracy (Indiana University Press, 2013), 3.
Alexie Yurchak, “Bodies of Lenin: The Hidden Science of Communist Sovereignty,” Representations, no. 129 (1995): 116–57. See also Anton Vidokle’s film trilogy This Is Cosmos (2014), The Communist Revolution Was Caused by the Sun (2015), and Immortality and Resurrection for All! (2017), reviewed in Tohu Magazine →.
Richard Iveson. “The Immense Work of Mourning: A Review of Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume II,” zoogenesis: Thinking Animals, Encounter, and Other Stuff (blog), June 4, 2013 →.
Philippe Lynes, “General Ecology: Life Death on Earth in Derrida and Others” (PhD diss., Philosophy, Concordia University, 2017).
Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overdetermination—An Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 257–337.
Gerald Vizenor, “The Ruins of Representation: Shadow Survivance and the Literature of Dominance,” American Indian Quarterly 17, no. 1 (1993); and “Aesthetics of Survivance,” in Natural Reason and Cultural Survivance (University of Nebraska Press, 2009). See also James MacKay, “Introduction,” Studies in Native American Literatures 23, no. 4 (2011): 6–7.
We’ve seen a similar sort of debate break out about the idea of nomadism, Relation, and original multiplicity in the works of Édouard Glissant, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari. See, for instance, Neal A. Allar, “Rhizomatic Influence: The Antigenealogy of Glissant and Deleuze,” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 6, no. 1 (2019): 1–13; and Barbara Glowczewski, Indigenising Anthropology with Guattari and Deleuze (Edinburgh University Press, 2019). For the conflation of influence and ordinal time, see Chadwick Allen, who in his review of the collected volume Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence wrote that the timing of the publication was off, since Vizenor had long left his residency as a radical outsider even as the concept of survivance had become ubiquitous—meaning, one imagines, dated. The ordinal logics are clear enough in both cases: it would have been if it had been, but now it is a has-been. Chadwick Allen, “Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence (review),” Studies in Native American Languages 23, no. 4 (2011): 120–24.
“Up Close with Gerald Vizenor,” Legacy, August 19, 2015, University of Minnesota College of Liberal Arts.
Gerald Vizenor, Native Liberty: Natural Reason and Cultural Survivance (University of Nebraska Press, 2009).
The raw fact that a plurality of voices preexists the subject and her enunciations would hardly have shocked Derrida, Bakhtin, or Benveniste.
Sarah Viren, “The Native Scholar Who Wasn’t,” New York Times Magazine, May 25, 2021 →.
Antonio Gramsci, The Southern Question (Bordighera Press, 1995).
Vine Deloria, Jr., God is Red (Fulcrum, 1973).
Kyle Whyte, “Indigenous Science (Fiction) for the Anthropocene: Ancestral Dystopias and Fantasies of Climate Change Crisis,” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 1, no. 1–2 (March 2018): 224–42.
Zoe Todd, “Fish, Kin and Hope: Tending to Water Violations in amiskwaciwâskanhikan and Treaty Six Territory,” Afterall, no. 43 (Spring–Summer 2017): 102–7.
See, for instance, Landscapes of Exposure in Modern Environments, ed. Michelle Murphy, Gregg Mitman, and Christopher Sellers (University of Chicago Press, 2004); and Elizabeth Hoover, The River Is in Us: Fighting Toxics in a Mohawk Community (University of Minnesota Press, 2017).
This text was first delivered as a talk at the “Survivance” edition of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt’s New Alphabet School, held in Porto, Portugal, July 2021. It was originally published on the School’s blog →.