Advances

Originally published in 1995, Advances was first written by Jacques Derrida as a long foreword to a book by one of his most promising former students, the philosopher Serge Margel`s Le Tombeau du Dieu Artisan (The Tomb of the Craftsman). What Derrida uncovers for us is Margel`s own unique theory of the promise in relation to an an-archic, pre-chronological temporality, in conjunction with Margel`s radical rereading of Plato`s Timaeus. As Derrida states right away, Margel`s reading is a new one, a new reading of the Demiurge. A new promise. A new advance. In this magisterial late essay by Derrida, what the reader soon discovers is in part a conversation with his former student, as well as an opening for a new reflection on our current ecological and political crises that are all the more urgent today where the possibility of giving ourselves death as a human race and the end of the world is now, within an era of climate change, more real than ever.As part of Univocal`s Pharmakon series, this essay, itself published in advance, becomes a brief but powerful light pointing toward Univocal`s forthcoming publication of the translation of Serge Margel`s Le Tombeau du Dieu Artisan. "Once again the Timaeus, of course, but a different Timaeus, a new Demiurge, I promise."