This extraordinary book offers a clear and compelling biography of Jacques Derrida along with one of Derrida's strangest and most unexpected texts. Geoffrey Bennington's account of Derrida leads the reader through the philosopher's familiar yet widely misunderstood work on language and writing to the less familiar themes of signature, sexual difference, law, and affirmation. In an unusual and unprecedented "dialogue," Derrida responds to Bennington's text by interweaving Bennington's text with surprising and disruptive "periphrases." Truly original, this dual and dueling text (...) opens new dimensions in Derrida's thought and work. "Bennington is a shrewd and well-informed commentator whose book should do something to convince the skeptics... that Jacques Derrida's work merits serious attention."—Christopher Norris, _New Statesman & Society_ "Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida have presented a fascinating example of what might be called post-structuralist autobiography."—Laurie Volpe, _French Review_ "Bennington's account of what Derrida is up to is better in almost all respects—more intelligent, more plausible, more readable, and less pretentious—than any other I have read."—Richard Rorty, _Contemporary Literature_. (shrink)

One of the most significant contemporary thinkers in continental philosophy, Jacques Derrida’s work continues to attract heated commentary among philosophers, literary critics, social and cultural theorists, architects and artists. This major new work by world renowned Derrida scholar and translator, Geoffrey Bennington, presents incisive new readings of both Derrida and interpretations of his work. Part one sets out Derrida’s work as a whole and examines its relevance to, and ‘interruption’ of, the traditional domains of ethics, politics and literature. The second (...) part of the book presents compelling insights into some important motifs in Derrida’s work, such as death, friendship, psychoanalysis, time and endings. The final section introduces trenchant appraisals of other influential accounts of Derrida’s work. This influential and original contribution to the literature on Derrida is marked by a commitment to clarity and accuracy, but also by a refusal to simplify Derrida’s often difficult thought. (shrink)

Introduction Someone comes and says something. Without really needing to think, I understand what is said, refer it without difficulty to familiar codes, ...

Recent developments in literary theory, such as structuralism and deconstruction, have come under attack for neglecting history, while historically-based approaches have been criticized for failing to take account of the problems inherent in their methodological foundations. This collection of essays is unique in that it focuses on the relation between post-structuralism and historical (especially Marxist) literary theory and criticism. The volume includes a deconstructive reading of Marx, essays that relate history to the philosophical and institutional context, and a number of (...) studies of particular texts, literary and non-literary, which pose the question of history and literary theory with particular force. (shrink)

This article maps, across a wide range of works, the coordinates of Derrida's thinking of democracy and its relevance to a series of crucial concepts, from difference to autoimmunity. Distinguishing Derrida's idea of a “democracy to come” from the Kantian ideal, Bennington links it to Aristotle's insistence upon multiplicity and to a thinking of deviance and perversion, an appropriately deconstructive logic for thinking an absence of telos in democracy to come.

Beginning with his famous 1963 lecture on Foucault, Derrida repeatedly invokes a line from Kierkegaard, often translated from his French as ‘the instant of decision is madness,’ without ever giving a precise reference or subjecting that sentence to anything like a reading in the Derridean sense. This paper tracks some of the unsuspected complexities that emerge when that sentence is located in Kierkegaard and the Pauline tradition to which Kierkegaard is appealing. It is suggested that the singular functioning of this (...) sentence in Derrida nonetheless, in its very failure to read, shows up something of the madness, folly or stupidity at play in Kierkegaard's thinking, and thus performs in its repetitions something of the unreadability that opens the possibility of reading itself. (shrink)

This article maps, across a wide range of works, the coordinates of Derrida's thinking of democracy and its relevance to a series of crucial concepts, from difference to autoimmunity. Distinguishing Derrida's idea of a “democracy to come” from the Kantian ideal, Bennington links it to Aristotle's insistence upon multiplicity and to a thinking of deviance and perversion, an appropriately deconstructive logic for thinking an absence of telos in democracy to come.

The telephone is taken as a privileged figure for discussing the relationship between Cixous and Derrida, particularly as it figures in some of Cixous's late work, and especially Hyperdream. It is suggested that the telephonic relation essentially involves interruption as well connection, and that this structure leads to reformulations of issues such as possibility and impossibility, life and death.

In his seminars on the death penalty, Derrida consistently describes Kant's arguments in favor of capital punishment as “rigorous” and explicitly relates that rigor to the mechanisms of execution and the subsequent rigor mortis of the corpse. ‘Rigor’ has also often been a contested term in descriptions of deconstruction: different commentators have either deplored or celebrated the presence or the absence of rigor in Derrida's work. Derrida himself uses the term a good deal throughout his career, usually in a positive (...) sense, although he also at least once, in passing, suggests the need to question the rigor of the concept of rigor itself. In this paper, I will outline the place of Kant in the Death Penalty Seminars and suggest that it is the very rigor attributed to Kant that makes him (rather than some other writers—whether supporters or opponents of the death penalty—whose arguments seem less rigorous to Derrida) an exemplary object for deconstructive attention, not for the first time in Derrida's work. Broadening the focus beyond the texts Derrida explicitly analyzes, I suggest that this kind of attention can also be fruitfully brought to bear on some more general arguments in Kant about right and justice. In conclusion, I suggest some implications of this situation for the still difficult issue of the more general relation between deconstruction and critique in the Kantian sense. (shrink)

"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. (shrink)

"This double issue in the ICA Documents series brings together material which grew out of a major conference held in 1985 on the philosophical dimensions of the postmodernist debate, and three autumn seminars from our French Thinkers series..."--Ed. note.

The principle whereby any bit of deconstruction brings with it all of deconstruction must affect the philosophical understanding of art usually subsumed under the title ‘aesthetics’. There can in principle be no deconstructive aesthetics (any more than there could be a deconstructive ethics or a deconstructive epistemology. Aesthetics in general is mortgaged to sensory perception, and from very early Derrida ‘perception does not exist’. Whence his interest in blinking, blindness and the trait of drawing. But the trace is not the (...) trait, colour too is differential, and aesthetic judgement in general is thereby marked with a secret ‘political’ dimension. (shrink)

This article examines three textual moments that might plausibly have found their way into Derrida’s late Beast and Sovereign seminars, but that Derrida appears to avoid or overlook. Aristotle’s discussion in the Politics of the “One Best Man” scenario is placed in the context of his earlier characterizations of the naturally apolitical man as akin either to a beast or to a god; Bataille’s late descriptions of sovereignty as a kind of self-perverting hyperbolic structure are juxtaposed with some of Derrida’s (...) own formulations about sovereign autoimmunity; Heidegger’s discussion, in a seminar nominally about Hölderlin, of a striking formula from Sophocles is shown to capture something of the “outlaw” status of the sovereign as Derrida describes it. (shrink)

The motif of dust, especially in Richard II, is foregrounded as a complex figure of the deconstruction of sovereignty in Shakespeare.

It is argued that attempts to archive Derrida’s work and treat it in the standard terms of intellectual history are short-circuited by arguments within his work that undermine the coherence of the concept of archive as it is deployed in such historical descriptions. Drawing on a range of Derrida’s early and late writings and more especially his readings of Freud, it is suggested that Derrida’s claim that psychoanalysis ought to provoke a revision of the terms historians use to discuss it (...) is a fortiori valid for deconstruction. (shrink)

Following Derrida's identification of the death-penalty as the transcendental of penal law in general, this essay traces the logic of its justification by the talionic principle in Kant and Hegel. Showing how the death penalty is in fact the only case in which the talionic principle operates without mediations or a calculus of equivalents, it is argued that this im-mediacy locates the death penalty contradictorily at both the height of the rational and the depth of the barbaric. This allows the (...) further suggestion that the concept of sovereignty functions as a non-dialectical attempt to resolve that contradiction, but one that leaves the Kantian attempt to defend the principles of sovereignty paradoxically outside the law it was concerned to defend, ex lex, treasonable, thus opening onto deconstructive possibilities beyond Kant's explicit claims. (shrink)

At an important moment in his reading of Heidegger in Geschlecht III, Derrida wields a pair of semi-technical terms from his own earlier work, and uses them to identify a classical, indeed Aristotelian, vein in Heidegger’s reading of Trakl. This gesture is complex, both in that, in spite of appearances, the Mehrdeutigkeit Heidegger identifies in Trakl is not essentially to do with the term Geschlecht, and in that Derrida’s presentation of Aristotle’s views about polysemia is perhaps over-simplified, or at least (...) leaves open the possibility of a more generous reading. Derrida’s notion of dissemination is shown not to entail a mere exacerbation of polysemia, but a quasi-semantic re-marking of the “syntax” that allows for any semantic effects at all. It is suggested that the fact that this marking can be described by Derrida as “monotonous” might open onto a slightly different reading both of Aristotle’s understanding of pollachos legomenon and pros hen, and Heidegger’s understanding of the Einklang of Trakl’s poetry. (shrink)

How might Derrida be said to greet Jean-Luc Nancy in Le Toucher? What kind of handshake does he offer? Derrida explicitly mentions the handshake at the very centre of his book, in the tangent devoted to Merleau-Ponty. A reading of this moment reveals an exemplary case of what happens when Derrida reads apparently ‘fraternal’ texts, and opens up further levels of difference. What then if we consider Nancy's response to Derrida, when the recipient of the handshake shakes back? By examining (...) Nancy's various (mis-)readings of Derrida's famous phrase ‘la différance finie est infinie’ it is possible to trace a subtle but irreducible non-reciprocity in this relationship, represented in the handshake of the ‘salut’ as greeting and valediction, beyond all safety or salvation. (shrink)