Taking as its point of departure several of Derrida's later works (from "Faith and Knowledge" and The Work of Mourning to Rogues and Learning to Live Finally), ...

Miracle and Machine is a sort of "reader's guide" to Jacques Derrida's 1994 essay "faith and knowledge," his most important work on the nature of religion in general and on the unprecedented forms it is taking today through science and the ...

Taking on the Tradition focuses on how the work of Jacques Derrida has helped us rethink and rework the themes of tradition, legacy, and inheritance in the Western philosophical tradition. It concentrates not only on such themes in the work of Derrida but also on his own gestures with regard to these themes—that is, on the performativity of Derrida’s texts. The book thus uses Derrida’s understanding of speech act theory to reread his own work. The book consists in a series (...) of close readings of Derrida’s texts to demonstrate that the claims he makes in his work cannot be fully understood without considering the way he makes those claims. The book considers Derrida’s relation to the Greek philosophical tradition and to his immediate predecessors in the French philosophical tradition, as well as his own legacy within the contemporary scene. Part I examines Derrida’s analyses of Plato and Aristotle on the themes of writing and metaphor. Part II looks at themes of donation, inheritance, pedagogy, and influence in relation to Derrida’s readings of the works of Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and Jean-Pierre Vernant. Part III considers the promises and legacies of Derrida’s work on autobiography, friendship, and hospitality, themes Derrida has recently taken up in his readings of Martin Heidegger, Maurice Blanchot, and Emmanuel Levinas. In the Conclusion, the author analyzes what Derrida has recently called a “messianicity without messianism” and shows how Derrida develops two different notions of the future and of legacy: one that always determines a horizon for the donation and reception of any legacy or tradition, and one that leaves open a radically unknown and unknowable future for that legacy and tradition. (shrink)

This essay analyzes Derrida’s questioning of the relationship between “Theory and Practice” in his recently published seminar of 1976–1977 of this same title. It traces Derrida’s reading of this relationship in Marx and Marxism, beginning with various interpretations of the famous line from Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach,” “Philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; what is important is to transform it.” The essay tries to argue that Derrida’s reading of theory and practice in Marx should be used in (...) the end to reread Derrida himself and so rethink the relationship between theory and practice in deconstruction and, especially, in pedagogy. After tracking the places where Derrida’s seminar, first presented in Paris to help prepare students for the 1977 agrégation exam in philosophy on the theme of “Theory and Practice,” repeated, overlapped with, or anticipated many prior and subsequent treatments of similar themes in Derrida’s published works, the essay concludes that no seminar—and Derrida’s seminars are exemplary in this regard—can be restricted to the time in which they are given but are always, like Derrida’s “specters of Marx,” non-contemporaneous with themselves, in a word, “out of joint.”. (shrink)

Beginning with a reading of Plato's Statesman, this work interrogates the relationship between life and being in Plato's thought. It argues that in his later dialogues Plato discovers--or invents--a form of true or real life that transcends all merely biological life and everything that is commonly called life.

This essay demonstrates that in his 1999–2000 Death Penalty Seminar Jacques Derrida pursues the deconstruction of political theology that he had been pursuing in a more or less explicit fashion for more than two decades. Derrida's interest in the theme of the death penalty can be traced back in large part, it is argued, to the theological and essentially Judeo-Christian origins that Derrida finds in discourses both for and against the death penalty. This emphasis on the theological origins of the (...) death penalty helps explain why Derrida spends much more time questioning the principles, rhetoric, and images of abolitionist discourses than pro–death penalty discourses. For Derrida, this essay concludes, a critique or deconstruction of discourses surrounding the death penalty is never more critical than in a putatively postreligious, secular age. In the end, Derrida hopes to provide what may be the very first philosophical abolitionist discourse, one that argues against the death penalty without relying on the language, tropes, symbols, and images of Judeo-Christian theology. (shrink)

This essay examines the critical role played by comedy and laughter in Plato. It begins by taking seriously Plato's critique of comedy and his concerns about the negative effects of laughter in dialogues such as Republic and Laws. It then shows how Plato, rather than simply rejecting comedy and censuring laughter, attempts to put these into the service of philosophy by rethinking them in philosophical terms. Accordingly, the laughable or the ridiculous is understood not just in relation to the ugly (...) or the ignoble, as it is in Homer, but in relation of blindness, ignorance, and falsity. By taking up such a philosophical perspective, one can then distinguish what truly is laughable from what merely appears so. It is in this way that Plato is able to explain why Socrates appeared so ridiculous to the multitude but was known to be anything but to those who were able to see him with philosophical eyes, that is, those who were able to attend to what I call the spectacle of laughter. The paper concludes... (shrink)

The End of the World and Other Teachable Moments follows the remarkable itinerary of Jacques Derrida’s final seminar, “The Beast and the Sovereign”, as the explicit themes of the seminar—namely, sovereignty and the question of the animal—come to be supplemented and interrupted by questions of death, mourning, survival, the archive, and, especially, the end of the world. The book begins with Derrida’s analyses, in the first year of the seminar, of the question of the animal in the context of his (...) other published works on the same subject. It then follows Derrida through the second year of the seminar, presented in Paris from December 2002 to March 2003, as a very different tone begins to make itself heard, one that wavers between melancholy and an extraordinary lucidity with regard to the end. Focusing the entire year on just two works, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Martin Heidegger’s seminar of 1929–30, “The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics,” the seminar comes to be dominated by questions of the end of the world and of an originary violence that at once gives rise to and effaces all things. The End of the World and Other Teachable Moments follows Derrida as he responds from week to week to these emerging questions, as well as to important events unfolding around him, both world events—the aftermath of 9/11, the American invasion of Iraq—and more personal ones, from the death of Maurice Blanchot to intimations of his own death less than two years away. All this, the book concludes, makes this final seminar an absolutely unique work in Derrida’s corpus, one that both speaks of death as the end of the world and itself now testifies to that end—just one, though hardly the least, of its many teachable moments. (shrink)

During the final decade of his life, Jacques Derrida came to use the trope of autoimmunity with greater and greater frequency. Indeed it today appears that autoimmunity was to have been the last iteration of what for more than forty years Derrida called deconstruction. This essay looks at the consequences of this terminological shift for our understanding not only of Derrida's final works (such as Rogues) but of his entire corpus. By taking up a term from the biological sciences that (...) describes the process by which an organism turns in quasi-suicidal fashion against its own self-protection, Derrida was able to rethink the very notion of life otherwise and demonstrate the way in which every sovereign identity, from the self to the nation-state to, most provocatively, God, is open to a process that both threatens to destroy it and gives it its only chance of living on. (shrink)

This essay traces the history of Jacques Derrida's engagement with the question of the animal and the methodology Derrida follows in his 2008 The Animal That Therefore I Am . As Derrida demonstrates, the history of philosophy is marked from its inception by an attempt to draw a single, indivisible line between humans and all other animals by attributing some capacity to humans (e.g., language, culture, mourning, a relationship to death) and denying it to animals. Derrida thus begins by questioning (...) the supposed fact that animals do not have such and such a capacity or attribute but then quickly turns to questioning the principle by which philosophers have claimed that humans do . In all his work on the animal, therefore, Derrida questions the confidence with which humans attribute certain capacities to themselves while denying them to animals, all in the name of a pervasive and yet repressed violence against the animal world. (shrink)

In his final seminar, The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 2 , Jacques Derrida spends the entire year reading just two texts, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Martin Heidegger’s Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. This essay looks in detail at Derrida’s treatment of this latter and, in particular, at Derrida’s emphasis on the Heideggerian notion of Walten in this work. The essay begins by considering several of Derrida’s prior engagements with Heidegger, especially in Of Spirit and the “Geschlecht” essays, and their (...) analyses of such themes as Geist or spirit, sexual and species difference, violence, and ontotheology. The essay then develops the relationship between what Derrida considered to be the hyper-sovereignty of Walten and Derrida’s own notions of autoimmunity and différance, before concluding with the question of why Derrida would think it necessary to devote so much of his final seminar to this Heideggerian notion. (shrink)

Jacques Derrida has written much in recent years on the topic of mourning. This essay takes Derrida's insights into mourning in general and collective mourning in particular in order to ask about the relationship between mourning and politics. Taking a lead from a recent work of Derrida's on Jean-François Lyotard, the essay develops its argument through two examples, one from ancient Greece and one from twentiethcentury America: the role mourning plays in the constitution and maintenance of the state in Plato's (...) Laws and the controversy surrounding the consecration of the tomb of the Unknown Soldier of Vietnam in Arlington National Cemetery. This latter example provides the occasion for questioning the possibilities of mourning the unknown or the unidentifiable and for addressing some of the ways in which the United States has mourned or failed to mourn, remembered or failed to remember, in the wake of September 11. (shrink)

This essay traces the history of Jacques Derrida's engagement with the question of the animal and the methodology Derrida follows in his 2008 The Animal That Therefore I Am . As Derrida demonstrates, the history of philosophy is marked from its inception by an attempt to draw a single, indivisible line between humans and all other animals by attributing some capacity to humans and denying it to animals. Derrida thus begins by questioning the supposed fact that animals do not have (...) such and such a capacity or attribute but then quickly turns to questioning the principle by which philosophers have claimed that humans do . In all his work on the animal, therefore, Derrida questions the confidence with which humans attribute certain capacities to themselves while denying them to animals, all in the name of a pervasive and yet repressed violence against the animal world. (shrink)

This essay takes as its point of departure Jacques Derrida’s analysis of the phantasm of a mother tongue in his recently published seminar from 1995–1996 on hospitality (Hospitalité I, Éditions du Seuil, 2021). The essay begins by showing that Derrida’s analysis of this phantasm is per­fectly consistent with several of his most important works of the 1960s (from Of Grammatology to Voice and Phenomenon) on the auto-affection of speech and the phantasm of self-presence to which it gives rise. But the (...) essay then demonstrates how those earlier analyses of language and voice are supplemented in Hospitalité by important reflections on what were then very new teletechnologies—including the cell or mobile phone—that do not, as we might have thought, deflate the phantasm of self-presence and of a natural mother tongue but actually lend themselves to it. What these teletechnologies thus end up underscoring, according to Derrida, is the original exappropriation at the heart of all language, including the so-called mother tongue. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 45, Issue 2, pp 191 - 213 With the recent publication of Jacques Derrida’s seminar of 1964–65, Heidegger: The Question of Being and History, it has become abundantly clear that when the full history of Derrida’s half-century-long engagement with Heidegger is finally written a special place will have to be reserved for the question of history itself, and especially the question of history or historicity in its irreducible relationship to language and to violence. In this essay, I (...) look at just a few key passages from “Violence and Metaphysics,” first published in 1964, and Derrida’s seminar on Heidegger from that same year in order to try to isolate what appears to be an important transitional moment in Derrida’s rethinking of the questions of language, violence, and history, in large part, it seems, thanks to, or accompanied by, Heidegger. Indeed, while Derrida’s engagement with Heidegger over the next four decades will go on to include questions of technology, the animal, species difference, sexual difference, and so on, the relationship between language, history, and violence that came to draw his attention in the early 1960s and that would be crucial to what Derrida will go on to call deconstruction will continue to haunt him, as I will suggest in conclusion, right up to his very last seminar, The Beast and the Sovereign, in 2002–2003. (shrink)

The word floruit is typically used to designate the year around which a thinker or writer is thought to have ‘flourished’. Traditionally, that age is set at forty. In this paper, I ask whether texts too might be assigned a time of flourishing, a floruit – or perhaps more than one – that would no longer be attached to the life of the author but to the unique time of the trace or the archive, a flourishing that might best be (...) thought in terms of what Derrida called survivance or living-on. I develop this notion of a flourishing beyond the life of the author, indeed beyond the human altogether, by returning to Glas, a text that was published forty years ago and that is soon to undergo – or at least this is my hope – a new infusion of critical interest and a new flourishing. I argue that by returning to Glas and its seminal analyses of Hegel and Genet on the themes of life, death, blood, spirit, glory, the death penalty, the proper of man, and so on, we will be better able to understand and take the measure of Derrida's return to these same themes in his final seminars a quarter of a century later. (shrink)

_Rogues_, published in France under the title _Voyous_, comprises two major lectures that Derrida delivered in 2002 investigating the foundations of the sovereignty of the nation-state. The term "_État voyou_" is the French equivalent of "rogue state," and it is this outlaw designation of certain countries by the leading global powers that Derrida rigorously and exhaustively examines. Derrida examines the history of the concept of sovereignty, engaging with the work of Bodin, Hobbes, Rousseau, Schmitt, and others. Against this background, he (...) delineates his understanding of "democracy to come," which he distinguishes clearly from any kind of regulating ideal or teleological horizon. The idea that democracy will always remain in the future is not a temporal notion. Rather, the phrase would name the coming of the unforeseeable other, the structure of an event beyond calculation and program. Derrida thus aligns this understanding of democracy with the logic he has worked out elsewhere. But it is not just political philosophy that is brought under deconstructive scrutiny here: Derrida provides unflinching and hard-hitting assessments of current political realities, and these essays are highly engaged with events of the post-9/11 world. (shrink)

This essay attempts to lay out the three principal theses of Jacques Derrida’s 1994-1995 “Faith and Knowledge,‘ Derrida’s most sustained but also most challenging work on the nature of religion and the relationship between religion and science. After demonstrating through these three theses that religion and science not only share a common source-or have a common genesis-but are in what Derrida calls an autoimmune relationship to one another, the essay puts these theses to the test by reading a brief passage (...) near the middle of the essay where Derrida recounts the genesis of “Faith and Knowledge‘ itself Derrida’s seemingly anecdotal recounting of this genesis is thus shown to reflect the three theses of “Faith and Knowledge,‘ the way in which, in a word, the breath of creation, or the miracle of religion, is always doubled, supplemented, and thus contaminated by the machine of science and tele-technology. (shrink)

Water, hydōr: it is the first word of ancient Greek philosophy, the word used by Thales, the first philosopher, to describe the material principle subtending all things. By the time of Plato, philosophers were proposing other kinds of non-material principles to explain diverse phenomena, principles like soul, mind, or ideas. But Plato would continue to be interested in—even fascinated by—water, water in every imaginable form, at once pure and impure, transparent and troubled, drinkable and undrinkable, flowing and still, fresh and (...) salt, shallow and deep. In this paper, I look at Plato’s fascination with and fundamental ambivalence toward water, his understanding of water as both a political question and a philosophical problem. I suggest by the end of the paper, using the work of Jacques Derrida in “Plato’s Pharmacy” to guide my argument, that, for Plato, water was at once the greatest danger for philosophy and its most powerful resource. (shrink)

This essay returns to Of Grammatology, Derrida’s seminal work of 1967, in order to demonstrate the key role played by the category of interiority in that work and in deconstruction more generally. The essay show how Derrida traces the values associated with interiority in his readings of Plato, Rousseau, and Levi-Strauss in order to argue that the opposition between interiority and exteriority is not one philosophical opposition among others but the single most powerful and persistent opposition in Western philosophy, organizing (...) everything from the relationship between speech and writing to that between presence and absence, essence and accident, even life and death. We thus come to see through a reading of this early work of Derrida’s that deconstruction will have been from its very inception a deconstruction of any claims to an inside that would come before or exclude its outside, that is, a deconstruction of every phantasm of interiority. (shrink)

Plato's Animals examines the crucial role played by animal images, metaphors, allusions, and analogies in Plato's Dialogues. These fourteen lively essays demonstrate that the gadflies, snakes, stingrays, swans, dogs, horses, and other animals that populate Plato's work are not just rhetorical embellishments. Animals are central to Plato's understanding of the hierarchy between animals, humans, and gods and are crucial to his ideas about education, sexuality, politics, aesthetics, the afterlife, the nature of the soul, and philosophy itself. The volume includes a (...) comprehensive annotated index to Plato’s bestiary in both Greek and English. (shrink)

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 Jabès, Louis Marin, Sarah Kofman, Gilles Deleuze, Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-François Lyotard, Max Loreau, Jean-Marie Benoist, Joseph Riddel, and Michel Servière. 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 _. (shrink)

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 Jabès, Louis Marin, Sarah Kofman, Gilles Deleuze, Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-François Lyotard, Max Loreau, Jean-Marie Benoist, Joseph Riddel, and Michel Servière. 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 _. (shrink)

In the three essays that make up this stimulating and often startling book, Jacques Derrida argues against the notion that the basic ideas of psychoanalysis have been thoroughly worked through, argued, and assimilated. The continuing interest in psychoanalysis is here examined in the various "resistances" to analysis—conceived not only as a phenomenon theorized at the heart of psychoanalysis, but as psychoanalysis's resistance to itself, an insusceptibility to analysis that has to do with the structure of analysis itself. Derrida not only (...) shows how the interest of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic writing can be renewed today, but these essays afford him the opportunity to revisit and reassess a subject he first confronted in 1966. They also serve to clarify Derrida's thinking about the subjects of the essays—Freud, Lacan, and Foucault—a thinking that, especially with regard to the last two, has been greatly distorted and misunderstood. The first essay, on Freud, is a tour de force of close reading of Freud's texts as philosophical reflection. By means of the fine distinctions Derrida makes in this analytical reading, particularly of _The Interpretation of Dreams,_ he opens up the realm of analysis into new and unpredictable forms—such as meeting with an interdiction. Following the essay that might be dubbed Derrida's "return to Freud," the next is devoted to Lacan, the figure for whom that phrase was something of a slogan. In this essay and the next, on Foucault, Derrida reencounters two thinkers to whom he had earlier devoted important essays, which precipitated stormy discussions and numerous divisions within the intellectual milieus influenced by their writings. In this essay, which skillfully integrates the concept of resistance into larger questions, Derrida asks in effect: What is the origin and nature of the text that constitutes Lacanian psychoanalysis, considering its existence as an archive, as teachings, as seminars, transcripts, quotations, etc.? Derrida's third essay may be called not simply a criticism but an appreciation of Foucault's work: an appreciation not only in the psychological and rhetorical sense, but also in the sense that it elevates Foucault's thought by giving back to it ranges and nuances lost through its reduction by his readers, his own texts, and its formulaic packaging. (shrink)

Class Acts examines two often neglected aspects of Jacques Derrida's work as a philosopher, his public presentations at lectures and conferences and his teaching, along with the question of the "speech act" that links them. What, Michael Naas asks, is one doing when one speaks in public in these ways? The book follows Derrida's itinerary with regard to speech act theory across three public lectures, from 1971 to 1997, all given, for reasons the book seeks to explain, in Montreal. In (...) these lectures, Derrida elaborated his critique of J. L. Austin and his own subsequent redefinition of speech act theory. The book then gives an overview of Derrida's teaching career and his famous "seminar" presentations, along with his own explicit reflections on pedagogy and educational institutions beginning in the mid-1970s. Naas then shows through a reading of three recently published seminars-on life death, theory and practice, and forgiveness-just how Derrida the teacher interrogated and deployed speech act theory in his seminars. Whether in a conference hall or a classroom, Naas demonstrates, Derrida was always interested in the way spoken or written words might do more than simply communicate some meaning or intent but might give rise to something like an event. Class Acts bears witness to the possibility of such events in Derrida's work as a pedagogue and a public intellectual. (shrink)

This chapter will make ample use of Derrida's self‐analysis in “We Other Greeks,” especially as concerns the important role played by what might be called “the question of inclusion and exclusion” in Derrida's work on the Greeks. But it will then go on to make a claim that Derrida would have no doubt hesitated to grant, namely, that among all of Derrida's engagements with the Ancient Philosophy a single figure, Plato, and a single dialogue of Plato's, the Phaedrus, indeed a (...) single scene within that dialogue–Socrates’ critique of writing – played a central and unparalleled role in Derrida's work from the beginning right up until the end. The chapter shows this by looking not so much at the essay in which Derrida treats this scene in detail, his essay “Plato's Pharmacy,” but at Derrida's other works from around the same time and then at some of his very last publications. (shrink)

Derrida à Montréal n'est pas le titre d'une pièce de théâtre, mais celui d'un essai qui suit, en trois actes, trois événements singuliers qui ont eu lieu à Montréal et auxquels Jacques Derrida a participé en 1971, en 1979 et en 1997. Au "Premier Acte", Michael Naas relit de près la première communication du philosophe, "Signature événement contexte", un texte qui prend très au sérieux - et les critique tout à la fois - la théorie des speech acts de John (...) L. Austin et les questions du contexte, de la présence, de l'écriture, de l'événement et de la signature qui lui sont liées. Au "Deuxième Acte", on retrouve Derrida traitant de ces mêmes questions, mais d'un point de vue politique où il s'intéresse aux "Déclarations d'Indépendance". Enfin, au "Troisième Acte", Derrida poursuit cette discussion ininterrompue qui se concentre, une fois de plus, sur ces mêmes aspects, mais à la lumière de la notion d'événement. C'est comme si Montréal avait chaque fois été la scène rêvée où Derrida avait pu explorer ces questions pour lui cruciales."--Page 4 de la couverture. (shrink)