Ryan S. Bingham is a doctoral candidate at the University of Chicago Divinity School, where he studies the work of Jacques Derrida at the intersections of the philosophy of religion and the study of religion, culture, and politics. His dissertation is entitled “A Materialism without Substance: Jacques Derrida and Questions of Responsibility at the Closure of Metaphysics.”

What excites you about philosophy?

If it’s possible to say so, I take interest in a certain “reason” that would be “without interest,” or rather, in a writing that draws out the contamination between the poles of the binary oppositions that are of capital interest to philosophy from Plato to Hegel (e.g., being/non-being, good/evil, life/death, form/matter, theory/practice, speech/writing). I study Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction of metaphysics with particular attention to its implications for religion, culture, and politics.

What is your favorite thing that you’ve written?

It’s a contest between a few parts of my dissertation (currently underway) on what Derrida, in his 1993 Specters of Marx, calls “a materialism without substance.” In one chapter, I pursue the trajectory of this “materialism” across Specters and look to its articulation as a deconstruction of religion and politics. In other chapters, and in my recent article, “Derrida, Différance, and a Materialism without Substance” (Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy 28 (2): 198–223), I find this “materialism” at work earlier in Derrida’s career, even in the emergence of his well-known thought of différance. But I also have a reading, presented at last year’s Derrida Today Conference, of an essay Derrida wrote during his first year as a student at the École Normale Supérieure, where I track the configuration of Derrida’s early notion of dialectic. I’ll only add that I find this “materialism” at work in Derrida’s transition from this notion of dialectic to his thought of différance.

What are you working on right now?

So a big part of Derrida’s “materialism without substance” is his recurrent effort in the interpretation of the khōra of Plato’s Timaeus, that “spacing” that is not yet the Aristotelian hulē, let alone materia, that “place” or “receptacle” that is ready to receive any and all forms, to give them place, without that place being proper to any of them. In the article I mentioned, I offer an initial reading of what appears to be Derrida’s first explicit effort at an interpretation of khōra, in his 1960–1961 course at the Sorbonne on “The Sensible.” Right now—and here I join Mauro Senatore, Thomas Clément Mercier, and Kristian Olesen Toft—I’m working on chapters that give detailed accounts of the 1970–1971 and 1985–1986 seminars in which Derrida returns to this interpretation of khōra, building it out and bringing it to bear on new questions concerning religion and politics. These readings articulate in turn what’s at stake in my reading of Specters.

What topic do you think is underexplored in philosophy?

I don’t want to say it too quickly, but I think this might be it: the politics of the religious inscription of philosophy. The past few decades have seen a lot of work calling into question or reexamining the notion of the secular, and I think that many of the questions opened up here ought to guide a great deal of future work in philosophy, including the future work of recently consolidated departments of “philosophy and religion.” If Derrida’s deconstruction of religion and politics has something to add to all of this, it comes in the form of the possibility of asking new questions about a certain kind of power move in philosophy, about the polemical or conflictual status of any appeal to a belonging of philosophy to this or that religious heritage. The politics of religious difference (whether inside or outside of philosophy) and the possibility of a new “tolerance” are at stake in the deconstruction of metaphysics. Andrea Cassatella does a nice job of looking in this direction in his recent book, Beyond the Secular: Jacques Derrida and the Theological-Political Complex, and I’ve got a review of it that will come out soon in The Journal of Religion.

What are your goals and aspirations outside work?

I want to be a good father to my daughter and a good friend. I want to take responsibility for how I live, to take seriously the questions of responsibility that come to me from living with family, friends, others, and other “others.”

What do you like to do outside work?

I like spending time with my two-year-old daughter. Her routine has taken some interesting turns recently, and she’s led most of them. Before we get ready for the day and make breakfast, she’s been claiming time to start the day by playing with blocks and reading books. (A couple of our favorites are Blueberries for Sal by Robert McCloskey and The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats.) We’ve also been going for walks before taking the car to the library, the park, or the grocery store. She’s been finding new ways to be involved in cleanup after meals too, and she’s recently enjoyed seeing her toy animals take charge of vacuuming the floor. When I take a moment for myself, I like to have something good to eat, go for a walk and sit outside, read a book, watch a movie, or get a good night’s sleep.

What is your favorite sound in the world?

My daughter’s laughter.

What’s your top tip or advice for APA members reading this?

It’s time to think carefully about how to advance thought amid accelerating institutional and technological transformation. It is likely that, at most, a chance handful of today’s most qualified candidates will find their way, after many years, into a tenured position. It wouldn’t be surprising very soon to find that most serious students of philosophy, in the APA and elsewhere, no longer belong to today’s academy. Those of us who care about the study of philosophy and the right to say anything should think carefully, together, about our forms of association, our relationships with academic and other institutions, the availability of new technologies for the dissemination of writing and independent study, and the possibility of decreasing the financial, geographical, and “work/life”-type burdens on emergent communities committed to a practice of thinking that rarely puts food on the table and doesn’t really belong anywhere but that bears significant implications for anything we might say or do.

This section of the APA Blog is designed to get to know our fellow philosophers a little better. We’re including profiles of APA members that spotlight what captures their interest not only inside the office, but also outside of it. We’d love for you to be a part of it, so please contact us via the interview nomination form here to nominate yourself or a friend.

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