This essay will concentrate, somewhat voyeuristically, on a particular and very special textual encounter. For if there is one text in the psychoanalytic tradition that will have caused Derrida to spill more ink than any other – it's Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle. For ten years, from 1970–1980, Derrida returns not once but three times, on three separate occasions, in three different contexts, to Freud's text on repetition compulsion and the death drive, each time devoting more time and energy – (...) that is to say, more pages – to it. As we will see in this essay, what emerges from this textual encounter is not only a new kind of pleasure; it is also a chance event of repetition that brings with it something strikingly new. (shrink)

Over the past decade, radical questioning of the grounds of Western epistemology has revealed that some antinomies of the aesthetic experience can be viewed as a general, yet necessarily open, model for human understanding. This book is a rigorous _explication de texte_ of a central text for this thesis, Kant's Analytic of the Sublime.

This article argues that Freud introduces the question of occultism in order to exclude the accident from the internal, psychical domain. The accident must be evacuated, for it is only by isolating a domain into which external randomness no longer penetrates that psychoanalysis gives itself a chance to be a science. And yet, as this article shows, the difference that makes all the difference when it comes to distinguishing science from superstition hinges on, and is determined by, chance — and (...) a literary encounter. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the scene of execution, on the essentially theatrical and spectacular nature of the death penalty. Reading Derrida but also Foucault, it argues that the scene in question involves not a literal seeing but a virtual or phantasmatic seeing, i.e. a specific kind of visibility that has important consequences for thinking the death penalty.

This essay addresses the ‘question’ of the death penalty in Derrida's Death Penalty Seminars: the question of the death penalty, if there is one, that is, if there is ‘la’ question de la peine de mort. For nothing is less certain. Not only must we speak of a proliferation of questions in the seminars, but we must also speak of Derrida's question about the question. How do the possibility and the reality of the death penalty, how does the question of (...) the death penalty, force us to ask a question not only about what comes before the question but also about the future of the question, that is, about the future of reason, the principle of reason, and what is proper to man? (shrink)

This paper discusses Jacques Derrida's Death Penalty Seminars (two consecutive seminars he gave at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in 1999–2000 and 2000–2001), as well as his 2000 Paris address to the States General of Psychoanalysis entitled “Psychoanalysis Searches the States of Its Soul.” The paper is magnetized by two questions: what does it mean to say, as Derrida says in his provocative statement at the end of his 1999 seminar, “even when the death penalty will have (...) been abolished . . . it will survive, there will still be some death penalty [même quand la peine de mort sera abolie . . . elle survivra, il y en aura encore]”? And why is psychoanalysis in a privileged position to address “this irreducible thing in the life of the animate being” that is the possibility of cruelty? (shrink)

_Psyche: Inventions of the Other_ is the first publication in English of the twenty-eight essay collection Jacques Derrida published in two volumes in 1998 and 2003. Advancing his reflection on many issues, such as sexual difference, architecture, negative theology, politics, war, nationalism, and religion, Volume II also carries on Derrida's engagement with a number of key thinkers and writers: De Certeau, Heidegger, Kant, Lacoue-Labarthe, Mandela, Rosenszweig, and Shakespeare, among others. Included in this volume are new or revised translations of seminal (...) essays. (shrink)

_Psyche: Inventions of the Other_ is the first publication in English of the twenty-eight essay collection Jacques Derrida published in two volumes in 1998 and 2003. In Volume I, Derrida advances his reflection on many topics: psychoanalysis, theater, translation, literature, representation, racism, and nuclear war, among others. The essays in this volume also carry on Derrida's engagement with a number of key thinkers and writers: Barthes, Benjamin, de Man, Flaubert, Freud, Heidegger, Lacoue-Labarthe, Levinas, and Ponge. Included in this volume are (...) new or revised translations of seminal essays, as well as three essays that appear here in English for the first time. (shrink)

This book is an exploration of the notion of "drive" as it passes from Kant's need of reason, to Freud's concept of hallucinatory wish fulfillment, to the relentless force of indifferentiation in Flaubert's Bouvard and Pécuchet.

This volume records a remarkable encounter in critical and philosophical thinking: a meeting of two of the great pioneers in contemporary thought, Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida, who are also bound together by friendship and a complex relation to their own pasts. More than a literary text with critical commentary, it constitutes an event of central significance for contemporary philosophical, literary, and political concerns. The book consists of _The Instant of My Death,_ a powerful short prose piece by Blanchot, and (...) an extended essay by Derrida that reads it in the context of questions of literature and of bearing witness. Blanchot's narrative concerns a moment when a young man is brought before a firing squad during World War II and then suddenly finds himself released from his near death. The incident, written in the third person, is suggestively autobiographical—from the title, several remarks in the text, and a letter Blanchot wrote about a similar incident in his own life—but only insofar as it raises questions for Blanchot about what such an experience might mean. The accident of near death becomes, in the instant the man is released, the accident of a life he no longer possesses. The text raises the question of what it means to write about a experience one cannot claim as one's own, and as such is a text of testimony or witness. Derrida's reading of Blanchot links the problem of testimony to the problem of the secret and to the notion of the instant. It thereby provides the elements of a more expansive reassessment of literature, testimony, and truth. In addressing the complex relation between writing and history, Derrida also implicitly reflects on questions concerning the relation between European intellectuals and World War II. (shrink)

This volume records a remarkable encounter in critical and philosophical thinking: a meeting of two of the great pioneers in contemporary thought, Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida, who are also bound together by friendship and a complex relation to their own pasts. More than a literary text with critical commentary, it constitutes an event of central significance for contemporary philosophical, literary, and political concerns. The book consists of _The Instant of My Death,_ a powerful short prose piece by Blanchot, and (...) an extended essay by Derrida that reads it in the context of questions of literature and of bearing witness. Blanchot's narrative concerns a moment when a young man is brought before a firing squad during World War II and then suddenly finds himself released from his near death. The incident, written in the third person, is suggestively autobiographical—from the title, several remarks in the text, and a letter Blanchot wrote about a similar incident in his own life—but only insofar as it raises questions for Blanchot about what such an experience might mean. The accident of near death becomes, in the instant the man is released, the accident of a life he no longer possesses. The text raises the question of what it means to write about a experience one cannot claim as one's own, and as such is a text of testimony or witness. Derrida's reading of Blanchot links the problem of testimony to the problem of the secret and to the notion of the instant. It thereby provides the elements of a more expansive reassessment of literature, testimony, and truth. In addressing the complex relation between writing and history, Derrida also implicitly reflects on questions concerning the relation between European intellectuals and World War II. (shrink)