About Professor DeArmitt

Professor Pleshette DeArmitt was Chair and Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Memphis.

Professor DeArmitt was a beloved teacher, mentor, and colleague. A leading scholar in the philosophical work of Julia Kristeva, Prof. DeArmitt joined the department in 2006, after holding visiting appointments at Grinnell College and Villanova University. She received her MA and PhD from DePaul University and her BA from Duquesne University. She had served as Chair of the Department of Philosophy since 2013.

Among her many honors and leadership positions, Prof. DeArmitt was a 2010 recipient of the American Post-doctoral Research Fellowship, awarded by the American Association of University Women (AAUW). She also served as the President of Société Américaine de Philosophie de Langue Française (SAPLF) and on the Committee on the Status of Women for the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP).

Prof. DeArmitt's research and teaching interests included contemporary continental philosophy, feminist theory, psychoanalysis, and social and political thought. She regularly taught undergraduate courses in feminist theory and 19th- and 20th-century continental philosophy. She taught graduate courses on Rousseau's moral psychology, Freud's metapsychology, Kristeva's philosophy of bios, and themes in contemporary continental philosophy.

Prof. DeArmitt published scholarly articles on Derrida, Kofman, and Kristeva in journals such as Mosaic, Parallax, Philosophy Today, Research in Phenomenology, and The Southern Journal of Philosophy. She was the author of The Right to Narcissism: A Case for an Im-possible Self-Love (Fordham University Press, 2013) and the co-editor of Sarah Kofman's Corpus (SUNY Press, 2008).

Selected Publications

Books and Collections

The Right to Narcissism: A Case for an Im-possible Self-Love (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013).

Editor, "Freudian Futures," Spindel Conference Supplement, Southern Journal of Philosophy 51 (2013).

Sarah Kofman's Corpus, eds. Tina Chanter and Pleshette DeArmitt (Albany: SUNY Press, 2008).

Epoché, eds. Pleshette DeArmitt and Kas Saghafi, "An Entrusted Responsibility: Reading and Remembering Jacques Derrida," vol. 10, iss. 2 (Spring 2006).

Articles/Chapters

"Cascade of Remainders," Derrida Today 7, 1 (forthcoming May 2014).

"Julia Kristeva's The Severed Head," Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy 12, 1 (2013).

"Conjuring Bodies: Kofman's Lessons on Death," Parallax 58 (January-March 2011).

"Resonances of Echo: A Derridean Allegory," Mosaic 41, 3 (2009).

"Sarah Kofman's Art of Affirmation, or the 'Non-illusory Life of an Illusion'," in Sarah Kofman's Corpus (Albany: SUNY Press, 2008).

Presentations

"Cascade of Remainders: Derrida on Ipseity and the Logic of the Remainder," Featured Session: "What Remains--Of Mastery and Ipseity," 3rd International Derrida Today Conference, University of California, Irvine (July 13, 2012).

"Kristeva's Radical Revaluation of (Women's) Work," The Kristeva Circle group session meeting, American Philosophical Association, Atlanta, GA (December 2012).

Invited Roundtable Speaker, Kristeva's Recent Work, The Kristeva Circle, Siena College, Loudonville, New York (October 2012).

"Narcissism of Minor Sexual Differences," philoSOPHIA: A Feminist Society, Miami University, Oxford, OH (April 2012).