Completing the translation of Derrida's monumental work _Right to Philosophy_, _Eyes of the University_ brings together many of the philosopher's most important texts on the university and, more broadly, on the languages and institutions of philosophy. In addition to considerations of the implications for literature and philosophy of French becoming a state language, of Descartes' writing of the _Discourse on Method_ in French, and of Kant's and Schelling's philosophies of the university, the volume reflects on the current state of research (...) and teaching in philosophy and on the question of what Derrida calls a "university responsibility." Examining the political and institutional conditions of philosophy, the essays collected here question the growing tendency to orient research and teaching towards a programmable and profitable end. The volume is therefore invaluable for the light it throws upon an underappreciated aspect of Derrida's own engagement, both philosophical and political, in struggles against the stifling of philosophical research and teaching. As a founding member of the Research Group on the Teaching of Philosophy and as one of the conveners of the Estates General of Philosophy, Derrida was at the forefront of the struggle to preserve and extend the teaching of philosophy as a distinct discipline, in secondary education and beyond, in the face of conservative government education reforms in France. As one of the founders of the Collège International de Philosophie, he worked to provide a space for research in and around philosophy that was not accepted or legitimated in other institutions. Documenting and reflecting upon these engagements, _Eyes of the University_ brings together some of the most important and incisive of Derrida's works. (shrink)

This chapter discusses and revisits the question of anti-Semitism as it emerges especially in the Dialectic of Enlightenment. Dialectic of Enlightenment, then, articulates the history of figuration in which domination takes place, tracing the politicoeconomic forces of fascism and capitalism to a mode of representation that is the condition for their emergence as historical possibilities in the first place. The case of anti-Semitism is exemplary in this history and in the dialectic of individuals and social and cultural forces. As Max (...) Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno explain, anti-Semitism condemns individuals as Jews, in effect denying them their individuality, and yet condemns Jews because of their individuality or particularity. The potential for freedom from anti-Semitism thus lies in a strategic deployment of the position of this particularity. (shrink)

Werner Hamacher, one of the most important and original theorists working in literary criticism and continental philosophy, explores topics at the intersection of philosophy, literary studies and politics.

This is the first authoritative, book-length study of what Heidegger called "thinking poetics." _That Is to Say_ conducts its analysis of Heideggerian poetics by expounding the sense of language from the perspective of fundamental ontology. This project is carried out in readings of the pertinent chapters of _Being and Time_, the lectures on Hölderlin, "The Origin of the Work of Art," and _On the Way to Language_. The book is guided by a question that no other writer on Heidegger has (...) yet asked: Why should _poiesis_ provide a privileged access to the specificity of the poetic? With this question guiding his quite unorthodox analyses of Heidegger's texts on poetics and the work of art, the author sheds new light on every aspect of Heidegger's philosophy. The analyses devoted to Heidegger's idea of a proximity between thinking and poetry, his conception of Hölderlin as _the_ poet, of poetic experience, and of the privilege he accords the name reveal a series of presuppositions and necessary assumptions in Heidegger's conception of poetry that not only remain unthought by Heidegger himself, but that, strictly speaking, cannot be thought in terms of what Heidegger understood by thinking. _That Is to Say_ points to the limits of poetics with regard to the work of art, and in particular the literary work. In doing so, it gestures toward new ways of doing justice to the literary and to art in general. (shrink)

This volume reflects Jacques Derrida's engagement in the late 1970s with French political debates on the teaching of philosophy and the reform of the French university system. He was a founding member of the Research Group on the Teaching of Philosophy, an activist group that mobilized opposition to the Giscard government's proposals to "rationalize" the French educational system in 1975, and a convener of the Estates General of Philosophy, a vast gathering in 1979 of educators from across France. While addressing (...) specific contemporary political issues on occasion, thus providing insight into the pragmatic deployment of deconstructive analysis, the essays deal mainly with much broader concerns. With his typical rigor and spark, Derrida investigates the genealogy of several central concepts which any debate about teaching and the university must confront. Thus there are essays on the "teaching body," both the faculty _corps_ and the strange interplay in the French tradition between the mind and body of the professor; on the question of age in teaching, analyzed through a famous letter of Hegel; on the class, the classroom, and the socio-economic concept of class in education; on language, especially so-called "natural languages" like French; and on the legacy of the revolutionary tradition, the Estates General, in the university. The essays are linked by the extraordinary care and precision with which Derrida undertakes a political intervention into, and a philosophical analysis of, the institutionalization of philosophy in the university. (shrink)