Jacques Derrida

Jacques Derrida is, in the words of the New York Times, "perhaps the world's most famous philosopher if not the only famous philosopher." He often provokes controversy as soon as his name is mentioned. But he also inspires the respect that comes from an illustrious career, and, among many who were his colleagues and peers, he inspired friendship. The Work of Mourning is a collection that honors those friendships in the wake of passing. Gathered here are texts letters of condolence, memorial essays, eulogies, funeral orations written after the deaths of well-known figures: Roland Barthes, Paul de Man, Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Edmond Jab\u00e8s, Louis Marin, Sarah Kofman, Gilles Deleuze, Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Fran\u00e7ois Lyotard, Max Loreau, Jean-Marie Benoist, Joseph Riddel, and Michel Servi\u00e8re. With his words, Derrida bears witness to the singularity of a friendship and to the absolute uniqueness of each relationship. In each case, he is acutely aware of the questions of tact, taste, and ethical responsibility involved in speaking of the dead the risks of using the occasion for one's own purposes, political calculation, personal vendetta, and the expiation of guilt. More than a collection of memorial addresses, this volume sheds light not only on Derrida's relation to some of the most prominent French thinkers of the past quarter century but also on some of the most important themes of Derrida's entire oeuvre-mourning, the "gift of death," time, memory, and friendship itself. "In his rapt attention to his subjects' work and their influence upon him, the book also offers a hesitant and tangential retelling of Derrida's own life in French philosophical history. There are illuminating and playful anecdotes how Lyotard led Derrida to begin using a word-processor; how Paul de Man talked knowledgeably of jazz with Derrida's son. Anyone who still thinks that Derrida is a facetious punster will find such resentful prejudice unable to survive a reading of this beautiful work." Steven Poole, Guardian "Strikingly simpa meditations on friendship, on shared vocations and avocations and on philosophy and history." Publishers Weekly

I shall speak of ghost, of flame, and of ashes. These are the first words of Jacques Derrida's lecture on Heidegger. It is again a question of Nazism of what remains to be thought through of Nazism in general and of Heidegger's Nazism in particular. It is also "politics of spirit" which at the time people thought they still want to today to oppose to the inhuman. "Derrida's ruminations should intrigue anyone interested in Post-Structuralism...This study of Heidegger is a fine example of how Derrida can make readers of philosophical texts notice difficult problems in almost imperceptible details of those texts." David Hoy, London Review of Books "Will a more important book on Heidegger appear in our time? No, not unless Derrida continues to think and write in his spirit...Let there be no mistake: this is not merely a brilliant book on Heidegger, it is thinking in the grand style." David Farrell Krell, Research in Phenomenology "The analysis of Heidegger is brilliant, provocative, elusive." Peter C. Hodgson, Religious Studies Review

"The English version of Dissemination is] an able translation by Barbara Johnson . . . . Derrida's central contention is that language is haunted by dispersal, absence, loss, the risk of unmeaning, a risk which is starkly embodied in all writing. The distinction between philosophy and literature therefore becomes of secondary importance. Philosophy vainly attempts to control the irrecoverable dissemination of its own meaning, it strives--against the grain of language--to offer a sober revelation of truth. Literature--on the other hand--flaunts its own meretriciousness, abandons itself to the Dionysiac play of language. In Dissemination--more than any previous work--Derrida joins in the revelry, weaving a complex pattern of puns, verbal echoes and allusions, intended to 'deconstruct' both the pretension of criticism to tell the truth about literature, and the pretension of philosophy to the literature of truth."--Peter Dews, New Statesman

Is giving possible? Is it possible to give without immediately entering into a circle of exchange that turns the gift into a debt to be returned? This question leads Jacques Derrida to make out an irresolvable paradox at what seems the most fundamental level of the gift's meaning: for the gift to be received as a gift, it must not appear as such, since its mere appearance as gift puts it in the cycle of repayment and debt. Derrida reads the relation of time to gift through a number of texts: Heidegger's Time and Being, Mauss's The Gift, as well as essays by Benveniste and Levi-Strauss that assume Mauss's legacy. It is, however, a short tale by Baudelaire, "Counterfeit Money," that guides Derrida's analyses throughout. At stake in his reading of the tale, to which the second half of this book is devoted, are the conditions of gift and forgiveness as essentially bound up with the movement of dissemination, a concept that Derrida has been working out for many years. For both readers of Baudelaire and students of literary theory, this work will prove indispensable.

In Archive Fever, Jacques Derrida deftly guides us through an extended meditation on remembrance, religion, time, and technology—fruitfully occasioned by a deconstructive analysis of the notion of archiving. Intrigued by the evocative relationship between technologies of inscription and psychic processes, Derrida offers for the first time a major statement on the pervasive impact of electronic media, particularly e-mail, which threaten to transform the entire public and private space of humanity. Plying this rich material with characteristic virtuosity, Derrida constructs a synergistic reading of archives and archiving, both provocative and compelling."Judaic mythos, Freudian psychoanalysis, and e-mail all get fused into another staggeringly dense, brilliant slab of scholarship and suggestion."—The Guardian"[Derrida] convincingly argues that, although the archive is a public entity, it nevertheless is the repository of the private and personal, including even intimate details."—Choice"Beautifully written and clear."—Jeremy Barris, Philosophy in Review"Translator Prenowitz has managed valiantly to bring into English a difficult but inspiring text that relies on Greek, German, and their translations into French."—Library Journal

The Gift of Death, Jacques Derrida’s most sustained consideration of religion, explores questions first introduced in his book Given Time about the limits of the rational and responsible that one reaches in granting or accepting death, whether by sacrifice, murder, execution, or suicide. Derrida analyzes Czech philosopher Jan Patocka’s Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History and develops and compares his ideas to the works of Heidegger, Lévinas, and Kierkegaard. One of Derrida’s major works, The Gift of Death resonates with much of his earlier writing, and this highly anticipated second edition is greatly enhanced by David Wills’s updated translation. This new edition also features the first-ever English translation of Derrida’s Literature in Secret. In it, Derrida continues his discussion of the sacrifice of Isaac, which leads to bracing meditations on secrecy, forgiveness, literature, and democracy. He also offers a reading of Kafka’s Letter to His Father and uses the story of the flood in Genesis as an embarkation point for a consideration of divine sovereignty. “An important contribution to the critical study of ethics that commends itself to philosophers, social scientists, scholars of religion . . . [and those] made curious by the controversy that so often attends Derrida.”—Booklist, on the first edition

First published in 1967, Writing and Difference, a collection of Jacques Derrida's essays written between 1959 and 1966, has become a landmark of contemporary French thought. In it we find Derrida at work on his systematic deconstruction of Western metaphysics. The book's first half, which includes the celebrated essay on Descartes and Foucault, shows the development of Derrida's method of deconstruction. In these essays, Derrida demonstrates the traditional nature of some purportedly nontraditional currents of modern thought-one of his main targets being the way in which "structuralism" unwittingly repeats metaphysical concepts in its use of linguistic models. The second half of the book contains some of Derrida's most compelling analyses of why and how metaphysical thinking must exclude writing from its conception of language, finally showing metaphysics to be constituted by this exclusion. These essays on Artaud, Freud, Bataille, Hegel, and L vi-Strauss have served as introductions to Derrida's notions of writing and diff rence-the untranslatable formulation of a nonmetaphysical "concept" that does not exclude writing-for almost a generation of students of literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. Writing and Difference reveals the unacknowledged program that makes thought itself possible. In analyzing the contradictions inherent in this program, Derrida foes on to develop new ways of thinking, reading, and writing, -new ways based on the most complete and rigorous understanding of the old ways. Scholars and students from all disciplines will find Writing and Difference an excellent introduction to perhaps the most challenging of contemporary French thinkers-challenging because Derrida questions thought as we know it.

In the first volume of his extraordinary analysis of the death penalty, Jacques Derrida began a journey toward an ambitious end: the first truly philosophical argument against the death penalty. Exploring an impressive breadth of thought, he traced a deeply entrenched logic throughout the whole of Western philosophy that has justified the state's right to take a life. He also marked literature as a crucial place where this logic has been most effectively challenged. In this second and final volume, Derrida builds on these analyses toward a definitive argument against capital punishment. Of central importance in this second volume is Kant's explicit justification of the death penalty in the Metaphysics of Morals. Thoroughly deconstructing Kant's position which holds the death penalty as exemplary of the eye-for-an-eye Talionic law Derrida exposes numerous damning contradictions and exceptions. Keeping the current death penalty in the United States in view, he further explores the "anesthesial logic" he analyzed in volume one, addressing the themes of cruelty and pain through texts by Robespierre and Freud, reading Heidegger, and in a fascinating, improvised final session the nineteenth-century Spanish Catholic thinker Donoso Cortes. Ultimately, Derrida shows that the rationality of the death penalty as represented by Kant involves an imposition of knowledge and calculability on a fundamental condition of non-knowledge that we don't otherwise know what or when our deaths will be. In this way, the death penalty acts out a phantasm of mastery over one's own death. Derrida's thoughts arrive at a particular moment in history: when the death penalty in the United States is the closest it has ever been to abolition, and yet when the arguments on all sides are as confused as ever. His powerful analysis will prove to be a paramount contribution to this debate as well as a lasting entry in his celebrated oeuvre.

Following on from The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume I, this book extends Jacques Derrida's exploration of the connections between animality and sovereignty. In this second year of the seminar, originally presented in 2002 2003 as the last course he would give before his death, Derrida focuses on two markedly different texts: Heidegger's 1929 1930 course The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, and Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. As he moves back and forth between the two works, Derrida pursuesthe relations between solitude, insularity, world, violence, boredom and death as they supposedly affect humans and animals in different ways. Hitherto unnoticed or underappreciated aspects of Robinson Crusoe are brought out in strikingly original readings of questions such as Crusoe's belief in ghosts, his learning to pray, his parrot Poll, and his reinvention of the wheel. Crusoe's terror of being buried alive or swallowed alive by beasts or cannibals gives rise to a rich and provocative reflection on death, burial, and cremation, in part provoked by a meditation on the death of Derrida's friend Maurice Blanchot. Throughout, these readings are juxtaposed with interpretations of Heidegger's concepts of world and finitude to produce a distinctively Derridean account that will continue to surprise his readers.

In February 1988, philosophers Jacques Derrida, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe came together in Heidelberg before a large audience to discuss the philosophical and political implications of Martin Heidegger's thought. This event took place in the very amphitheater in which, more than fifty years earlier, Heidegger, as rector of the University of Freiburg and a member of the Nazi Party, had given a speech entitled "The University in the New Reich." Heidegger's involvement in Nazism has always been, and will remain, an indelible scandal, but what is its real relation to his work and thought? And what are the responsibilities of those who read this work, who analyze and elaborate this thought? Conversely, what is at stake in the wholesale dismissal of this important but compromised twentieth-century philosopher? In 1988, in the wake of the recent publication of Victor Farias's Heidegger and Nazism, and of the heated debates that ensued, these questions had become more pressing than ever. The reflections presented by three of the most prominent of Heidegger's readers, improvised in French and transcribed here, were an attempt to approach these questions before a broad public, but with a depth of knowledge and a complex sense of the questions at issue that have been often lacking in the press. Ranging over two days and including exchanges with one another and with the audience, the discussions pursued by these major thinkers remain highly relevant today, especially following the publication of Heidegger's already notorious "Black Notebooks," which have added another chapter to the ongoing debates over this contested figure. The present volume recalls a highly charged moment in this history, while also drawing the debate toward its most essential questions.

In February 1988, philosophers Jacques Derrida, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe came together in Heidelberg before a large audience to discuss the philosophical and political implications of Martin Heidegger's thought. This event took place in the very amphitheater in which, more than fifty years earlier, Heidegger, as rector of the University of Freiburg and a member of the Nazi Party, had given a speech entitled "The University in the New Reich." Heidegger's involvement in Nazism has always been, and will remain, an indelible scandal, but what is its real relation to his work and thought? And what are the responsibilities of those who read this work, who analyze and elaborate this thought? Conversely, what is at stake in the wholesale dismissal of this important but compromised twentieth-century philosopher? In 1988, in the wake of the recent publication of Victor Farias's Heidegger and Nazism, and of the heated debates that ensued, these questions had become more pressing than ever. The reflections presented by three of the most prominent of Heidegger's readers, improvised in French and transcribed here, were an attempt to approach these questions before a broad public, but with a depth of knowledge and a complex sense of the questions at issue that have been often lacking in the press. Ranging over two days and including exchanges with one another and with the audience, the discussions pursued by these major thinkers remain highly relevant today, especially following the publication of Heidegger's already notorious "Black Notebooks," which have added another chapter to the ongoing debates over this contested figure. The present volume recalls a highly charged moment in this history, while also drawing the debate toward its most essential questions.

Jacques Derrida's revolutionary approach to phenomenology, psychoanalysis, structuralism, linguistics, and indeed the entire European tradition of philosophy-called deconstruction-changed the face of criticism. It provoked a questioning of philosophy, literature, and the human sciences that these disciplines would have previously considered improper. Forty years after Of Grammatology first appeared in English, Derrida still ignites controversy, thanks in part to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's careful translation, which attempted to capture the richness and complexity of the original. This fortieth anniversary edition, where a mature Spivak retranslates with greater awareness of Derrida's legacy, also includes a new afterword by her which supplements her influential original preface. Judith Butler has added an introduction. All references in the work have been updated. One of contemporary criticism's most indispensable works, Of Grammatology is made even more accessible and usable by this new release.

First published in 1972, Dissemination contains three of Derrida's most central and seminal works: 'Plato's Pharmacy', 'The Double Session' and 'Dissemination'. The essays present a re-evaluation of the logic of meaning and the function of writing in Western discourse and explore the relationship and interplay between language, literature and philosophy. The text includes a substantial introduction and additional notes on the text by Barbara Johnson.

First published in 1992. "Acts of Literature", compiled in close association with Derrida, brings together for the first time a number of Derrida's writings on literary texts on the question of literature. The essays discuss literary figures such as Rousseau, Mallarme, Joyce, Shakespeare and Kafka. Comprising pieces spanning Derrida's career, the collection includes a substantial new interview with him on questions of literature, deconstruction, politics, feminism and history. Derek Attridge provides an introductory essay on deconstruction and the question of literature, and offers suggestions for further reading. These essays examine the place and function of literature in Western culture. They highlight Derrida's interest in literature as a significant cultural institution and as a peculiarly challenging form of writing, with inescapable consequences for our thinking about philosophy, politics and ethics. This book should be of interest to undergraduates and academics in the field of literary theory and criticism and continental philosophy.

“More than fifteen years ago,” Jacques Derrida writes in the prologue to this remarkable and uniquely revealing book, “a phrase came to me, as though in spite of me. . . . It imposed itself upon me with the authority, so discreet and simple it was, of a judgment: ‘cinders there are’ (il y a lÀ cendre). . . . I had to explain myself to it, respond to it-or for it.” In Cinders Derrida ranges across his work from the previous twenty years and discerns a recurrent cluster of arguments and images, all involving in one way or another ashes and cinders. For Derrida, cinders or ashes-at once fragile and resilient-are “the better paradigm for what I call the trace-something that erases itself totally, radically, while presenting itself.”In a style that is both highly condensed and elliptical, Cinders offers probing reflections on the relation of language to truth, writing, the voice, and the complex connections between the living and the dead. It also contains some of his most essential elaborations of his thinking on the feminine and on the legacy of the Holocaust (both a word-from the Greek hÓlos, “whole,” and kaustÓs, “burnt”-and a historical event that invokes ashes) in contemporary poetry and philosophy. In turning from the texts of other philosophers to his own, Cinders enables readers to follow the trajectory from Derrida’s early work on the trace, the gramma, and the voice to his later writings on life, death, time, and the spectral. Among the most accessible of this renowned philosopher’s many writings, Cinders is an evocative and haunting work of poetic self-analysis that deepens our understanding of Derrida’s critical and philosophical vision.

For Strasbourg consists of a series of essays and interviews about the city of Strasbourg and the philosophical friendships Jacques Derrida developed there over a period of some forty years. Written just months before his death, the opening essay, "The Place Name(s): Strasbourg," recounts in detail, and in very moving terms, Derrida's deep attachment to this French city on the border between France and Germany. More than just a personal narrative, however, the essay is a profound interrogation of the relationship between philosophy and place, philosophy and language, and philosophy and friendship. As such, it raises a series of philosophical, political, and ethical questions that might all be placed under the aegis of what Derrida once called "philosophical nationalities and nationalism." The other three texts included in the book are long interviews/conversations between Derrida and his two principal interlocutors in Strasbourg, Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. These interviews are significant both for the themes they focus on (language, politics, friendship, death, life after death, and so on) and for what they reveal about Derrida's relationships to Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe. Filled with sharp insights into one anothers' work and peppered with personal anecdotes and humor, the interviews bear witness to the decades-long intellectual friendships of these three important contemporary thinkers. This collection thus stands as a reminder of and testimony to Derrida's unique relationship to Strasbourg and to the two thinkers most closely associated with that city.

For Strasbourg consists of a series of essays and interviews about the city of Strasbourg and the philosophical friendships Jacques Derrida developed there over a period of some forty years. Written just months before his death, the opening essay, "The Place Name(s): Strasbourg," recounts in detail, and in very moving terms, Derrida's deep attachment to this French city on the border between France and Germany. More than just a personal narrative, however, the essay is a profound interrogation of the relationship between philosophy and place, philosophy and language, and philosophy and friendship. As such, it raises a series of philosophical, political, and ethical questions that might all be placed under the aegis of what Derrida once called "philosophical nationalities and nationalism." The other three texts included in the book are long interviews/conversations between Derrida and his two principal interlocutors in Strasbourg, Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. These interviews are significant both for the themes they focus on (language, politics, friendship, death, life after death, and so on) and for what they reveal about Derrida's relationships to Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe. Filled with sharp insights into one anothers' work and peppered with personal anecdotes and humor, the interviews bear witness to the decades-long intellectual friendships of these three important contemporary thinkers. This collection thus stands as a reminder of and testimony to Derrida's unique relationship to Strasbourg and to the two thinkers most closely associated with that city.

In this newest installment in Chicago's series of Jacques Derrida's seminars, the renowned philosopher attempts one of his most ambitious goals: the first truly philosophical argument against the death penalty. While much has been written against the death penalty, Derrida contends that Western philosophy is massively, if not always obviously, complicit with a logic in which a sovereign state has the right to take a life. Haunted by this notion, he turns to the key places where such logic has been established - and to the place it has been most effectively challenged: literature. With his signature genius and patient yet dazzling readings of an impressive breadth of texts, Derrida examines everything from the Bible to Plato to Camus to Jean Genet, with special attention to Kant and post-World War II juridical texts, to draw the landscape of death penalty discourses. Keeping clearly in view the death rows and execution chambers of the United States, he shows how arguments surrounding cruel and unusual punishment depend on what he calls an "anaesthesial logic," which has also driven the development of death penalty technology from the French guillotine to lethal injection. Confronting a demand for philosophical rigor, he pursues provocative analyses of the shortcomings of abolitionist discourse. Above all, he argues that the death penalty and its attendant technologies are products of a desire to put an end to one of the most fundamental qualities of our finite existence: the radical uncertainty of when we will die. Arriving at a critical juncture in history - especially in the United States, one of the last Christian-inspired democracies to resist abolition - The Death Penalty is both a timely response to an important ethical debate and a timeless addition to Derrida's esteemed body of work.

Throughout his long career, Jacques Derrida had a close, collaborative relationship with "Critical Inquiry" and its editors. He saved some of his most important essays for the journal, and he relished the ensuing arguments and polemics that stemmed from the responses to his writing that "Critical Inquiry" encouraged. Collecting the best of Derrida's work that was published in the journal between 1980 and 2002, "Signature Derrida" provides a remarkable introduction to the philosopher and the evolution of his thought. These essays define three significant "periods" in Derrida's writing: his early, seemingly revolutionary phase; a middle stage, often autobiographical, that included spirited defense of his work; and his late period, when his persona as a public intellectual was prominent, and he wrote on topics such as animals and religion. The first period is represented by essays like "The Law of Genre," in which Derrida produces a kind of phenomenological narratology. Another essay, "The Linguistic Circle of Geneva," embodies the second, presenting deconstructionism at its best: Derrida shows that what was imagined to be an epistemological break in the study of linguistics was actually a repetition of earlier concepts. The final period of Derrida's writing includes the essays "Of Spirit" and "The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)" and eulogies for Michel Foucault, Louis Marin, and Emmanuel Levinas, in which Derrida uses the ideas of each thinker to push forward the implications of their theories. Gathering a small but crucial portion of the oeuvre of this singular philosopher, "Signature Derrida" is the most wide-ranging, and thus most representative, anthology of Derrida's work to date.

Throughout his long career, Jacques Derrida had a close, collaborative relationship with "Critical Inquiry" and its editors. He saved some of his most important essays for the journal, and he relished the ensuing arguments and polemics that stemmed from the responses to his writing that "Critical Inquiry" encouraged. Collecting the best of Derrida's work that was published in the journal between 1980 and 2002, "Signature Derrida" provides a remarkable introduction to the philosopher and the evolution of his thought. These essays define three significant "periods" in Derrida's writing: his early, seemingly revolutionary phase; a middle stage, often autobiographical, that included spirited defense of his work; and his late period, when his persona as a public intellectual was prominent, and he wrote on topics such as animals and religion. The first period is represented by essays like "The Law of Genre," in which Derrida produces a kind of phenomenological narratology. Another essay, "The Linguistic Circle of Geneva," embodies the second, presenting deconstructionism at its best: Derrida shows that what was imagined to be an epistemological break in the study of linguistics was actually a repetition of earlier concepts. The final period of Derrida's writing includes the essays "Of Spirit" and "The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)" and eulogies for Michel Foucault, Louis Marin, and Emmanuel Levinas, in which Derrida uses the ideas of each thinker to push forward the implications of their theories. Gathering a small but crucial portion of the oeuvre of this singular philosopher, "Signature Derrida" is the most wide-ranging, and thus most representative, anthology of Derrida's work to date.