Abstract

This special issue began as a 2004 conference in honor of Jacques Derrida at Cornell University, organized by Philip E. Lewis. The topic selected for the conference was “Literature and Democracy,” and a citation from Derrida's “Passions: An Oblique Offering” served as point of departure: “No democracy without literature; no literature without democracy” [28]. This issue is a logical extension of that conference, offering a range of papers on various aspects of Derrida's thinking of democracy, some of which deal also with literature.