An edition of three essays by the leading French philosopher and theorist Jacques Derrida on the ethical, political and linguistic issues posed by the act of 'naming'. Passions: An Oblique Offering is a reflection on the question of the response, on the duty and obligation to respond, and on the possibility of not responding - which is to say, on the ethics and politics of responsibility. Sauf le nom (Post Scriptum) considers the problematics of naming and alterity, or transcendence, raised (...) inevitably by a rigorous negative theology. Much of the text is organised around close readings of the poetry of Angelus Silesius. The final essay, Khora, explores the problem of space or spacing, of the word 'khora' in Plato's Timaeus. Even as it places and makes possible nothing less than the whole world, 'khora' opens, dislocates and displaces all the categories that govern the production of that world, from naming to gender. (shrink)

The notorious French philosopher, literary critic and film star First translated in 1983, Dissemination contains three of Derrida's most central and seminal works: 'Plato's Pharmacy', 'The Double Session' and 'Dissemination'. The essays provide original readings of philosophy and literature, and present a re-evaluation of the logic of meaning and the function of writing in Western discourse. This is a groundbreaking work on the relationship and interplay between language, literature and philosophy.

Jacques Derrida’s Cinders is among the most remarkable and revealing of this distinguished author’s many writings. White Derrida customarily devotes his powers of analysis to exacting readings of texts from Plato and Aristotle to Freud and Heidegger, readers of Cinders will soon discover that here Derrida is engaged in a poetic self-analysis. Ranging across his numerous writings over the past twenty years, Derrida discerns a recurrent cluster of arguments and images, all involving in one way or another ashes (...) and cinders. First published in 1982, revised in 1987, and printed here in a bilingual edition, Cinders enables readers to follow the development of Derrida’s thinking from 1968 to the present as it defines itself as a persistent questioning of origins that invariably leads to the thought of ash and cinder. Written in a highly condensed poetic style, Cinders reveals some of Derrida’s most probing etymological and philosophical reflections on the relation of language to the human. It also contains some of his most essential elaborations of his thinking on the feminine and on the legacy of the Holocaust in contemporary poetry and philosophy.Uniquely accessible to readers who have only recently begun to read Derrida and essential for all those familiar with Derrida’s work, Cinders is an evocative and thoughtful contribution to our understanding of deconstruction. (shrink)

Originally published in 1995, Advances was first written by Jscques Derrida as a long foreword a book by one of his most promising former students, the philosopher Serge Margel's Le Tombeau du Dieu Artisan (The Tomb of the Artisn God). Derrida uncovers Margel's unique theory of the promise in relation to an an-archic, pre-chronological temporality, in conjunction with Margel's radical rereading of Plato's Timaeus. As Derrida states right away, Margel's reading is a new Demiurge. A new promise. A (...) new advance. This magisterial late essay is a conversation with Derrida's former student as well as an opening for new reflection on ecological and political crises that are all the more urgent today, when the possibility of death as a human race and the end of the world is more real than ever. (shrink)

In this newest installment in Chicago’s series of Jacques Derrida’s seminars, the renowned philosopher attempts one of his most ambitious goals: the first truly philosophical argument against the death penalty. While much has been written against the death penalty, Derrida contends that Western philosophy is massively, if not always overtly, complicit with a logic in which a sovereign state has the right to take a life. Haunted by this notion, he turns to the key places where such logic has (...) been established—and to the place it has been most effectively challenged: literature. With his signature genius and patient yet dazzling readings of an impressive breadth of texts, Derrida examines everything from the Bible to Plato to Camus to Jean Genet, with special attention to Kant and post–World War II juridical texts, to draw the landscape of death penalty discourses. Keeping clearly in view the death rows and execution chambers of the United States, he shows how arguments surrounding cruel and unusual punishment depend on what he calls an “anesthesial logic,” which has also driven the development of death penalty technology from the French guillotine to lethal injection. Confronting a demand for philosophical rigor, he pursues provocative analyses of the shortcomings of abolitionist discourse. Above all, he argues that the death penalty and its attendant technologies are products of a desire to put an end to one of the most fundamental qualities of our finite existence: the radical uncertainty of when we will die. Arriving at a critical juncture in history—especially in the United States, one of the last Christian-inspired democracies to resist abolition—The Death Penalty is both a timely response to an important ethical debate and a timeless addition to Derrida’s esteemed body of work. (shrink)

This paper relates the implications of Derrida’s reading to the historical context of the passage into philosophy and metaphysics as explained in classical works like Havelock’s Preface to Plato (1952). The paper shows the specific ways Derrida used to deconstruct Palto’s text and how this connects with the historical context of the text itself, the inception of philosophy and metaphysics as we know it now. The first step Derrida takes is showing the importance of the myth element (...) in the work’s structure. One is his etymological analysis of the word “pharmakon” and its double meaning. The second mechanism is the structural laws of oppositions, such as speech/writing, good/evil, life/death, first/second, and original/copy. The paper concludes that Derrida’s reading of Plato is different from Havelock’s in being a form of “textual contextualizing.” Derrida is putting Phaedrus in the wider project of the passage into philosophy and into the dawn of Western metaphysics, but unlike Havelock, he is concerned with textual mechanisms rather than historical turns. Derrida’s reading indicates that Plato introduced metaphysics and philosophy not merely by making up terms and expounding notions but, more importantly, by a set of textual mechanisms that will live on with Western philosophy and thought. (shrink)

These two lectures by Jacques Derrida, 'Foreigner Question: Come from Abroad' and 'Step of Hospitality/No Hospitality', derive from a series of seminars on 'hospitality' conducted by Derrida in Paris, January 1996. The book consists of two texts on facing pages. 'Invitation' by Anne Dufourmantelle appears on the left clarifying and inflecting Derrida's 'response' on the right. The interaction between them not only enacts the 'hospitality' under discussion, but preserves something of the rhythms of teaching. The book also characteristically combines careful (...) readings of canonical texts and philosophical topics with attention to the most salient events in the contemporary world, using 'hospitality' as a means of rethinking a range of political and ethical situations. For example, Antigone is revisited in light of the question of impossible mourning; the trial of Socrates is brought into conjunction with the televised funeral of François Mitterrand. (shrink)

In preparation for his article on Russell’s mathematical logic (1944), Gödel read carefully Peano’s Arithmetices Principia. His six pages of summary in the Gabelsberger shorthand contain a remarkable analysis of the formal structure of Peano’s proofs which is diametrically opposed to the common view that Peano’s treatise contained no formal deductive machinery.

In preparation for his article on Russell’s mathematical logic, Gödel read carefully Peano’s Arithmetices Principia. His six pages of summary in the Gabelsberger shorthand contain a remarkable analysis of the formal structure of Peano’s proofs which is diametrically opposed to the common view that Peano’s treatise contained no formal deductive machinery.

In ‘Reading and Its Discontents’, Anne Emmanuelle Berger makes a plea for the specificity of reading literature. Unlike other kinds of reading, the reading of literature has the unique ability to ‘keep the wound open’. As such, it can never be reduced, as some have recently tried, to just another form of culture production or to some politically motivated pedagogical therapeutics. It is also a type of reading, this essay will argue, that cannot be reduced (...) to the kind of silent reading that, as Derrida demonstrated in ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, has been the model and telos of reading since Plato. After a brief look at the controversy surrounding the history of silent reading, this essay looks at the question of reading in Plato and, especially, at the surprising number of references in the dialogues to Socrates as a reader. It then turns to Derrida’s reading of Plato in ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, first to Derrida’s critique of the Platonic model of reading and writing in the dialogues and then to the deployment of a new kind of philosophical reading and writing in Derrida’s own work, a reading that, as Berger herself suggests, is always also a writing, a reading that is itself then always double, at once silent and aloud. (shrink)

Heidegger’s reading of Plato is variable and multifaceted, giving way to different and, at times, opposing interpretations of Plato’s work. To give an example that is relevant to the following pape...

Few philosophers held greater fascination for Jacques Derrida than Martin Heidegger, and in this book we get an extended look at Derrida’s first real encounters with him. Delivered over nine sessions in 1964 and 1965 at the École Normale Supérieure, these lectures offer a glimpse of the young Derrida first coming to terms with the German philosopher and his magnum opus, Being and Time. They provide not only crucial insight into the gestation of some of Derrida’s primary conceptual (...) concerns—indeed, it is here that he first uses, with some hesitation, the word “deconstruction”—but an analysis of Being and Time that is of extraordinary value to readers of Heidegger or anyone interested in modern philosophy. Derrida performs an almost surgical reading of the notoriously difficult text, marrying pedagogical clarity with patient rigor and acting as a lucid guide through the thickets of Heidegger’s prose. At this time in intellectual history, Heidegger was still somewhat unfamiliar to French readers, and Being and Time had only been partially translated into French. Here Derrida mostly uses his own translations, giving his own reading of Heidegger that directly challenges the French existential reception initiated earlier by Sartre. He focuses especially on Heidegger’s Destruktion of the history of ontology, and indeed of ontology as such, concentrating on passages that call for a rethinking of the place of history in the question of being, and developing a radical account of the place of metaphoricity in Heidegger’s thinking. This is a rare window onto Derrida’s formative years, and in it we can already see the philosopher we’ve come to recognize—one characterized by a bravura of exegesis and an inventiveness of thought that are particularly and singularly his. (shrink)

Both an ideal entrée for beginning readers and a solid text for scholars, the second edition of Peter Kalkavage's acclaimed translation of Plato's _Timaeus_ brings enhanced accessibility to a rendering well known for its faithfulness to the original text. An extensive essay offers insights into the reading of the work, the nature of Platonic dialogue, and the cultural background of the _Timaeus_. Appendices on music, astronomy, and geometry provide additional guidance. A brief outline of the themes of the (...) work, a detailed glossary, and a selected bibliography are also included. (shrink)

Unable to respond to the questions, to all the questions, I will ask myself instead whether responding is possible and what that would mean in such a situation. And I will risk in turn several questions prior to the definition of a responsibility. But is it not an act to assume in theory the concept of a responsibility? Is that not already to take a responsibility? One’s own as well as the responsibility to which one believes one ought to summon (...) others?The title names a war. Which war?Do not think only of the war that broke out several months ago around some articles signed by a certain Paul de Man, in Belgium between 1940 and 1942. Later you will understand why it is important to situate the beginning of things public, that is the publications, early in 1940 at the latest, during the war but before the occupation of Belgium by the Nazis, and not in December 1940, the date of the first article that appeared in Le Soir, the major Brussels newspaper that was then controlled, more or less strictly, by the occupiers. For several months, in the United States, the phenomena of this war “around” Pula de Man have been limited to newspaper articles. War, a public act, is by rights something declared. So we will not count in the category of war the private phenomena—meetings, discussions, correspondences, or telephonic conclaves—however intense they may have been in recent days, and already well beyond the American academic milieu. Jacques Derrida is Directeur d’Études at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and also teaches at the University of California, Irvine. A teacher at Yale for ten years, he is the author of Mémoires: for Paul de Man .Peggy Kamuf is associate professor of French at Miami University. She is the author of Fictions of Feminism Desire: Disclosures of Heloise and Signature Pieces: On the Institution of Authorship . Her article “Pieces of Resistance” is forthcoming in Reading de Man Reading. (shrink)

This complex and subtle book is difficult to summarize. The author intends it as a supplement to existing commentaries on Plato’s Meno, rather than as a straightforward commentary of his own. His approach to Plato builds upon that of Leo Strauss, Jacob Klein, and the Tübingen School, but is not reducible to any of these and contains other influences as well, such as Heidegger. In addition to taking with minute seriousness the dramatic composition of the dialogue, Brague combines (...) precise and sensitive philological tools with a marked ontological interest. He reads the Platonic dialogue in a bipolar perspective. Dialogues are tests of friendship but at the same time, as "works" or literary texts rather than objects, they may have a sense in themselves. Brague cites Proust in this context, but one thinks also of Derrida. Consequently the dialogue has both an intrinsic order, corresponding to the rhythmic development of its theme, and also an allusive dimension or a lacuna suggested by the text, to be filled in by the reader. In a similar sense one may say that the theme of the Meno is bipolar. The first pole is the theme of the nature of the soul, hence of virtue, and more specifically, of Meno’s soul. Meno’s defective nature is the basis for a continuous "degradation" in the stages of the dialogue. Alternatively, it is the basis for Meno’s "anthropological" approach to virtue. The key to the Meno is that the Good is missing from the dialogue. This observation provides a transition to the second thematic pole. The structure of the dialogue reflects the stages of Plato’s esoteric teaching as presented by K. Gaiser : dialectic, geometry, politics. This raises a question for Brague, which he does not seem to me to answer : if this is the order of Plato’s secret system, how is the degraded presentation of the system, relative to Meno’s defective soul, isomorphic to the hierarchical structure of the system? Granting that politics is lower than dialectic, there must be a better and a worse presentation of politics. Brague’s approach entails that the degraded image of the structure nevertheless reveals the structure itself. But if the Good is absent from the image, how are we to infer that it is present in the structure? A similar problem suggests itself with respect to what Brague calls the key to the movement of the dialogue: the distinction between the limiting and the limited and correspondingly, "the powerlessness of the limit" in Meno’s case. In the last and longest section of the book, there are many fine analyses and illuminating insights, too many to do justice to here. One may call special attention to the connection between the episode of recollection and geometry on the one hand, and the duality of principles in Plato’s system. I also found unusually helpful Brague’s exposition of the "feminine" nature of Plato’s teaching of genesis, of the link between Plato’s use of anakineisthai and the dramatic device of a prologue, and the significance of katasëmainesthai in conjunction with the theme of "growing" and preserving virtuous youths. In sum: this is a book to be read carefully and slowly by every serious student of Plato. It is almost as difficult, and hence as controversial, as a Platonic dialogue. It is marked throughout, even when influenced by contemporary schools of thought, by a genuine interest in Plato’s manner of thinking and writing. This is not exactly a common property of contemporary books on Plato.—S.R. (shrink)

One of Jacques Derrida’s richest and most provocative works, Life Death challenges and deconstructs one of the most deeply rooted dichotomies of Western thought: life and death. Here Derrida rethinks the traditional philosophical understanding of the relationship between life and death, undertaking multidisciplinary analyses of a range of topics, including philosophy, linguistics, and the life sciences. In seeking to understand the relationship between life and death, he engages in close readings of Freudian psychoanalysis, the philosophy of Nietzsche and Heidegger, (...) French geneticist François Jacob, and epistemologist Georges Canguilhem. Derrida gave his “Life Death” seminar over fourteen sessions between 1975 and 1976 at the École normale supérieure in Paris as part of the preparation for students studying for the agrégation, a notoriously competitive qualifying exam. The theme for the exam that year was “Life and Death,” but Derrida made a critical modification to the title by dropping the coordinating conjunction. The resulting title of Life Death poses a philosophical question about the close relationship between life and death. Derrida argues that death must be considered neither as the opposite of life nor as the truth or fulfillment of it, but rather as that which both limits life and makes it possible. Through these captivating sessions, Derrida thus not only questions traditional understandings of the relationship between life and death, but also ultimately develops a new way of thinking about what he calls “life death.”. (shrink)

____Specters of Marx__ is a major new book from the renowned French philosopher Jacques Derrida. It represents his first important statement on Marx and his definitive entry into social and political philosophy. "Specter" is the first noun one reads in _The Manifesto of_ _the Communist Party._ But that's just the beginning. Once you start to notice them, there is no counting all the ghosts, spirits, specters and spooks that crowd Marx's text. If they are to count for something, however, one (...) must question the spectropoetics that Marx allowed to invade his discourse. In ____Specters of Marx,__ Derrida undertakes this task within the context of a critique of the new dogmatism and "new world order" that have proclaimed the death of Marxism and of Marx. (shrink)

Plato's Phaedo, written by legendary author Plato, is widely considered to be one of the greatest classic texts of all time. This great classic will surely attract a whole new generation of readers. For many, Plato's Phaedo is required reading for various courses and curriculums. And for others who simply enjoy reading timeless pieces of classic literature, this gem by Plato is highly recommended. Published by Classic Books International and beautifully produced, Plato's Phaedo (...) would make an ideal gift and it should be a part of everyone's personal library. (shrink)

Those who have read me, in particular those who have read “Paul de Man’s War,” know very well that I would have quite easily accepted a genuine critique, the expression of an argued disagreement with my reading of de Man, with my evaluation of these articles from 1940-42, and so on. After all, what I wrote on this subject was complicated enough, divided, tormented, most often hazarded as hypothesis, open enough to discussion, itself discussing itself enough in advance for (...) me to be able to welcome questions, suggestions, and objections. Provided this was done so as to demonstrate and not to intimidate or inflict wounds, to help the analysis progress and not to score points, to read and to reason and not to pronounce massive, magical, and immediately executor verdicts. Five of the six “responses” that I reread last night are written, as one used to say, with a pen dipped in venom. Less against the de Man of 1940-42, perhaps, then against me . Less against me, in truth, than against “Deconstruction” . How can the reader tell that these five “critical responses” are not “responses,” critical texts or discussions, but rather the documents of a blinded compulsion? First of all, the fact that they are all monolithic. They take into account none of the complications of which my text, this is the very least one can say, is not at all sparing. They never seek to measure the possibility, the degree, or the form, as always happens in an honest discussion, of a partial agreement on this or that point. No, everything is rejected as a block; everything is a block and a block of hatred. Even when, here or there, someone makes a show of being moved by my sadness or my friendship for de Man, it is in order to get the better of me and suggest that I am inspired only by friendship, which will appear ridiculous to all those who have read me. Inspired by friendship means for those people misled by friendship. How foreign this experience must be to them! Jacques Derrida is Directeur d’Études at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales as well as professor at the University of California, Irvine, and visiting professor at the Graduate School of the City University of New York. His most recent publication in English is the collection Limited Inc , which includes a new afterword, “Toward an Ethic of Discussion.” Peggy Kamuf is professor of French at the University of Southern California. Her most recent book is Signature Pieces: On the Institution of Authorship . She has also contributed essays to Reading de Man Reading and Responses: On Paul de Man’s Wartime Journalism , and is currently editing A Derrida Reader. (shrink)

One of the world's most famous philosophers, Jacques Derrida, explores difficult questions in this important and engaging book. Is it still possible to uphold international hospitality and justice in the face of increasing nationalism and civil strife in so many countries? Drawing on examples of treatment of minority groups in Europe, he skilfully and accessibly probes the thinking that underlies much of the practice, and rhetoric, that informs cosmopolitanism. What have duties and rights to do with hospitality? Should hospitality be (...) grounded on a private or public ethic, or even a religious one? This fascinating book will be illuminating reading for all. (shrink)

Using the philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy as an anchoring point, Jacques Derrida in this book conducts a profound review of the philosophy of the sense of touch, from Plato and Aristotle to Jean-Luc Nancy, whose ground-breaking book Corpus he discusses in detail. Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Edmund Husserl, Didier Franck, Martin Heidegger, Francoise Dastur, and Jean-Louis Chre;tien are discussed, as are Rene; Descartes, Diderot, Maine de Biran, Fe;lix Ravaisson, Immanuel Kant, Sigmund Freud, and others. The scope of Derrida’s (...) deliberations makes this book a virtual encyclopedia of the philosophy of touch (and the body). Derrida gives special consideration to the thinking of touch in Christianity and, in discussing Jean-Luc Nancy’s essay “Deconstruction of Christianity,” devotes a section of the book to the sense of touch in the Gospels. Another section concentrates on “the flesh,” as treated by Merleau-Ponty and others in his wake. Derrida’s critique of intuitionism, notably in the phenomenological tradition, is one of the guiding threads of the book. On Touching includes a wealth of notes that provide an extremely useful bibliographical resource. Personal and detached all at once, this book, one of the first published in English translation after Jacques Derrida’s death, serves as a useful and poignant retrospective on the work of the philosopher. A tribute by Jean-Luc Nancy, written a day after Jacques Derrida’s death, is an added feature. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Jacques Derrida INTERPRETING SIGNATURES (NIETZSCHE/HEIDEGGER): TWO QUESTIONS T1HE first question concerns die name Nietzsche, die second has to do with the concept of totality. Let us begin widi chapters 2 and 3 of Heidegger's Nietzsche — dealing with "The Eternal Recurrence of the Same" and "The Will to Power as Knowledge," respectively. We will be turning especially to the subsection on chaos ["The Concept of Chaos," I, pp. 562-70] (...) and to "The Alleged Biologism of Nietzsche" ["Nietzsches angeblicher Biologismus"]. In view ofme fact mat the same interpretation is regularly at work throughout, the risks involved in choosing diis strategy are, I hope, quite limited. In each instance, a single system of reading is powerfully concentrated and gadiered together. It is directed at gadiering togedier the unity and the uniqueness of Nietzsche's diinking, which, as a fulfilled unity, is itself in a fair way to being the culmination of occidental metaphysics. Nietzsche would be precisely at the crest, or ridge, atop the peak of diis fulfillment. And thus he would be looking at both sides, down both slopes. What about diis unity — diis doubled unity? What is its connection to the name — or rather, the signature — of Nietzsche? Does Heidegger take any account of this question — which others might call biographical, autobiographical, or autographical — of the singularity of a signature ostensibly the proper name of Nietzsche? To put the matter anodier way, if one can glimpse behind Heidegger's reading of Nietzsche the foundations of a general reading of Western metaphysics, men die question Translated by Diane Michelfelder and Richard E. Palmer. 246 Jacques Derrida247 arises: To what extent does this interpretation of metaphysics in its totality and as a whole contain an interpretive decision about die unity or singularity of thinking? And to what extent does this interpretive decision also presuppose a decision about die "biographical," about the proper name, the autobiographical, and about signature — about the politics of signature? ' Heidegger's position on this subject I will indicate first ofall widi a summarizing and simplifying statement, which one could, I hope, demonstrate is not wrong: there is a unity in Nietzschean thought even if it is not that of a system in the classical sense. This unity is also its uniqueness, its singularity. A thesis explicidy advanced by Heidegger is that every great thinker has only one thought. This uniqueness was neither constituted nor threatened, neither gadiered together nor brought about, through a name or proper name — nor by the life of Nietzsche, either normal or insane. This unique unity is something it draws from the unity of Western metaphysics which is gathered together mere at its crest, which one could also compare to the simple unity of a line created by a fold. The result of all this is that biography, autobiography, the scene or the powers of the proper name, of proper names, signatures, and so on, are again accorded minority status, are again given the inessential place diey have always occupied in the history ofmetaphysics. This points to the necessity and place of a questioning which I can only sketch here. Such would be a simplified version of the question. Now let us read Heidegger a little more closely and seek to confirm the strongest coherence of his interpretation or, beyond its coherence, his deepest thought. As a provisional concession to die classical norms of reading, let us take this book at its beginning, or even before its beginning at the beginning ofthe preface. Naturally, diis preface was, like so many odiers, written later. As we know, the book goes back to a series of lectures given between 1936 and 1940, and to some treatises written between 1940 and 1946. One should take most careful note of these dates if one is to bring this interpretation, as a whole and in detail, into connection with the historicopolitical and institutional field of its presentation. The preface, however, dates from 1961. The intention of the two pages in mis case, as almost always, is to justify the publication of this collection by reference to the essential unity ofits totality: "This publication, rethought (nachgedacht) as a whole (als Ganzes) should provide a glimpse ofthe path ofthought... (shrink)

I argue that the type of progress exhibited by philosophy is not that exhibited by science, but rather is akin to the kind of progress exhibited be someone becoming ‘older and wiser’. However, as actually-existing philosophy has gotten older, it has not always gotten wiser. As an illustration, I consider Rawls's conception of justification. I argue that Rawls's notion of what it is to have a philosophical justification exhibits no progress at all from Euthyphro's. In fact, drawing on a remark (...) of Wittgenstein's, I suggest that Rawls's conception is inferior to the situation as depicted in Plato's famous dialogue – because at least in the case of Plato's Euthyphro, there is no illusion of justification. (shrink)

Jacques Derrida is probably the most famous European philosopher alive today. The University of Nebraska Press makes available for the first English translation of his most important work to date, Glas. Its appearance will assist Derrida's readers pro and con in coming to terms with a complex and controversial book. Glas extensively reworks the problems of reading and writing in philosophy and literature; questions the possibility of linear reading and its consequent notions of theme, author, narrative, and discursive (...) demonstration; and ingeniously disrupts the positions of reader and writer in the text. Glas is extraordinary in many ways, most obviously in its typography. Arranged in two columns, with inserted sections within these, the book simultaneously discusses Hegel’s philosophy and Jean Genet’s fiction, and shows how two such seemingly distinct kinds of criticism can reflect and influence one another. The customary segregation of philosophy, rhetoric, psychoanalysis, linguistics, history, and poetics is systematically subverted. In design and content, the books calls into question “types” of literature (history, philosophy, literary criticism), the ownership of ideas and styles, the glorification of literary heroes, and the limits of literary representation. (shrink)

Given its brevity, Plato's Meno covers an astonishingly wide array of topics: politics, education, virtue, definition, philosophical method, mathematics, the nature and acquisition of knowledge and immortality. Its treatment of these, though profound, is tantalisingly short, leaving the reader with many unresolved questions. This book confronts the dialogue's many enigmas and attempts to solve them in a way that is both lucid and sympathetic to Plato's philosophy. Reading the dialogue as a whole, it explains how different arguments (...) are related to one another and how the interplay between characters is connected to the philosophical content of the work. In a new departure, this book's exploration focuses primarily on the content and coherence of the dialogue in its own right and not merely in the context of other dialogues, making it required reading for all students of Plato, be they from the world of classics or philosophy. (shrink)

In this series of dialogues, Derrida discusses and elaborates on some of the central themes of his work, such as the problems of genesis, justice, authorship and death. Combining autobiographical reflection with philosophical enquiry, Derrida illuminates the ideas that have characterized his thought from its beginning to the present day. If there is one feature that links these contributions, it is the theme of singularity - the uniqueness of the individual, the resistance of existence to philosophy, the temporality of the (...) singular and exceptional moment, and the problem of exemplarity. The second half of this book contains an essay by Maurizio Ferraris, in which he explores the questions of indication, time and the inscription of the transcendental in the empirical. A work of outstanding philosophy and scholarship, the essay is developed in close proximity to Derrida and in dialogue with figures such as Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Kant, Hegel and Heidegger. It thereby provides a useful introduction to the philosophy of one of Italy's most prominent philosophers as well as an excellent complement to Derrida's own ideas. A Taste for the Secret consists of material that has never before appeared in English. It will be of interest to second-year undergraduates, graduate students and academics in philosophy, modern languages, literature, literary theory and the humanities generally. (shrink)

In 1746 the French philosophe Condillac published his Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge , one of many attempts during the century to determine how we organize and validate ideas as knowledge. In investigating language, especially written language, he found not only the seriousness he sought but also a great deal of frivolity whose relation to the sober business of philosophy had to be addressed somehow. If the mind truly reflects the world, and language reflects the mind, why is (...) there so much error and nonsense? Whence the distortions? How can they be remedied? In The Archeology of the Frivolous , Jacques Derrida recoups Condillac's enterprise, showing how it anticipated--consciously or not--many of the issues that have since stymied epistemology and linguistic philosophy. If anyone doubts that deconstruction can be a powerful analytic method, try this. (shrink)

Linguists are becoming more and more interested in the genealogy of linguistics. And in reconstituting the history or prehistory of their science, they are discovering numerous ancestors, sometimes with a certain astonished recognition. Interest in the origin of linguistics is awakened when the problems of the origin of language cease to be proscribed and when a certain geneticism—or a certain generativism—comes back into its own. One could show that this is not a chance encounter. This historical activity is no longer (...) elaborated solely at the margins of scientific practice, and its results are already being felt. In particular, we are no longer at the stage of the prejudice according to which linguistics as a science was born of a single "epistemological break"—a concept, called Bachelardian, much used or abused today—and of a break occurring in our immediate vicinity. We no longer think, as does Maurice Grammont, that "everything prior to the nineteenth century, which is not yet linguistics, can be expedited in several lines."1 Noam Chomsky, in an article announcing his Cartesian Linguistics, which presents in its major lines the concept of "generative grammar," states: "My aim here is not to justify the interest of this investigation, nor to describe summarily its procedure, but instead to underline that by a curious detour it takes us back to a tradition of ancient thought, rather than constituting a new departure or a radical innovation in the domain of linguistics and psychology."2If we are to set ourselves down in the space of this "curious detour," we could not help encountering the "linguistics" of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. We would have to ask ourselves, then, in what ways Rousseau's reflections on the sign, on language, on the origin of languages, on the relations between speech and writing, and so on announce what we are so often tempted to consider as the very modernity of linguistic science, that is, modernity as linguistic science, since so many other "human sciences" refer to linguistics as their particular model. And we are all the more encouraged to practice this detour in that Chomsky's major references, in Cartesian Linguistics, are to the Logi cand General and Reasoned Grammar of Port-Royal, works that Rousseau knew well and held in high esteem.3 For example, on several occasions Rousseau cites Duclos' commentary on the General and Reasoned Grammar. The Essay on the Origin of Languages even closes with one of these citations. Thus Rousseau acknowledges his debt.1. Maurice Grammont, cited by Noam Chomsky, Cartesian Linguistics , p. 1.2. Chomsky, "De quelques constantes de la théory linguistique," Diogène, no. 51 ; my italics. See also Chomsky, Current Issues in Linguistic Theory , p.15 ff. There is an analogous gesture in Jakobson, who refers not only to Peirce and, as does Chomsky, to Humboldt but also to John of Salisbury, to the Stoics, and to Plato's Cratylus: see Jakobson, "A la recherche de l'essence du langage," Diogène, no. 51 .3. "I began with some book of philosophy, like the Port-Royal Logic, Locke's Essay, Malebranch, Leibniz, Descartes, etc." .Jacques Derrida, professor of the history of philosophy at the Ècole Normale Supérieure in Paris, is the author of, among other works, Writing and Difference, Of Grammatology, and Marges de la philosophie, from which the present essay is taken. His previous contribution to Critical Inquiry, "The Law of Genre," appeared in the Autumn 1980 issue. Alan Bass, a psychoanalyst, has published essays on deconstruction and psychoanalytic theory and practice. (shrink)

You'd never know Athens was locked in a life-or-death struggle from the tranquil and leisurely philosophical discussion that unfolds through the pages of the Republic...Plato's masterpiece continues to inform our questions and our thinking when it comes to being, truth, beauty, goodness, justice, community, the soul, and more." -From Dr. Littlejohn's Introduction. On the way back from a festival, Socrates is waylaid by some friends who compel him to go home with them. There he and his companions engage in (...) a long discussion about whether it is worse to suffer evil or to commit it. Far from being dry or abstract, Plato's dialogue is full of practical questions about the nature of justice, education, power, and virtue, and it ends with two of the most vivid myths ever devised by man. This Canon Classic is translated clearly by Benjamin Jowett, and unlike all other works of philosophy, it's actually fun to read. The Canon Classics series presents the most definitive works of Western literature in a colorful, well-crafted, and affordable way. Unlike many other thrift editions, our classics are printed on thicker text stock and feature individualized designs that prioritize readability by means of proper margins, leading, characters per line, font, trim size, etc. Each book's materials and layout combine to make the classics a simple and striking addition to classrooms and homes, ideal for introducing the best of literary culture and human experience to the next generation. This Worldview Edition features an introduction divided into sections on The World Around, About the Author, What Other Notables Said, Setting, Characters, & Plot Summary, Worldview Analysis, 21 Significant Questions & Answers, and Further Discussion & Review. (shrink)

This collection of essays and interviews, some previously unpublished and almost all of which appear in English for the first time, encompasses the political and ethical thinking of Jacques Derrida over thirty years. Passionate, rigorous, beautifully argued, wide-ranging, the texts shed an entirely new light on his work and will be welcomed by scholars in many disciplines--politics, philosophy, history, cultural studies, literature, and a range of interdisciplinary programs. Derrida's arguments vary in their responsiveness to given political questions--sometimes they are vivid (...) polemics on behalf of a position or figure, sometimes they are reflective analyses of a philosophical problem. They are united by the recurrent question of political decision or responsibility and the insistence that the apparent simplicity or programmatic character of political decision is in fact a profound avoidance of the political. This volume testifies to the possibility and the necessity of a philosophical politics. Negotiations assembles some of the most telling examples of the intrinsic relationship, so often affirmed by Derrida in more abstract philosophical terms, between deconstructive reading practices and what is called the "political"--more precisely, politics in an almost down-to-earth, pragmatic, and commonsense use of the word. Among the many subjects covered in the book are: the death penalty in the United States, the civil war in Algeria, globalization and cosmopolitanism, the American Declaration of Independence, Jean-Paul Sartre, the value of objectivity, politics and friendship, and the relationship between deconstruction and actuality. (shrink)

"You will never know, nor will you, all the stories I kept telling myself as I looked at these images." With these words Jacques Derrida opens his reading of Marie-Francoise Plissart's hundred-page photo-novel. Originally published in France in 1985, this tour de force of word and image is available in English for the first time. Plissart's visual narrative unfolds in photographs, and photographs of photographs, in a kind of silent cinematography. Derrida's polylogue explores gender, photographic genre, time, language, and (...) the interpretative act of seeing. The text and the photographs, each with its own structure and syntax, together illuminate what is at stake in the "right of inspection.". (shrink)

Reading you, I very quickly realized that you had no serious objections to make to me, as I will try to demonstrate in a moment. So I began to have the following suspicion: what if you had only pretended to find something to reproach me with in order to prolong the experience over several issues of this distinguished journal? That way, the three of us could fill the space of another twenty or so pages. My suspicion arose since you (...) obviously agree with me on this one point, at least: apartheid, the more it’s talked about, the better.But who will do the talking? And how? These are the questions.Because talking about it is not enough. On such a grave subject, one must be serious and not say just anything. Well, you, alas, are not always as serious as the tone of your paper might lead one to think. In your impatient desire to dispense a history lesson, you sometimes say just anything. The effect you produce is quite determined, but in order to arrive at it, you are willing to put forward any kind of countertruth, especially when, in your haste to object, you project into my text whatever will make your job easier. This is a very familiar scenario, as I will try to demonstrate as briefly as possible. Jacques Derrida, Directeur d’Etudes at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, is the author of, among other works, Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference, Margins of Philosophy, and Dissemination. His most recent contribution to Critical Inquiry, “Racism’s Last Word,” appeared in the Autumn 1985 issue. Peggy Kamuf teaches French at Miami University, Ohio. She is the author o Fictions of Feminine Desire. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Womb as Synecdoche: Introduction to Irigaray’s Deconstruction of Plato’s CaveKristi L. Krumnow (bio)“Le prisonnier n’était déjà plus dans une matrice mais dans une caverne, tentative de figuration, de métaphorisation, de la cavité utérine.”(347)1Entering the used bookstore in a university city not too far from Paris, I was anxious to find a copy of a certain Luce Irigaray book. When asked, the bookstore owner politely mocked me about wanting (...) one of her books. What could I possibly want that for? After all, the study of Irigaray was very popular in the 1970s and 1980s, but today, “C’est bien passé, Madame,” he enlightened me. While the bookshop owner was correct in assessing a time frame of the academic popularity of Irigaray’s work, I would argue that the work she did at the onset of 1970s feminism is no more passé than the philosophers she deconstructed. For this reason, I read Irigaray’s work alongside the work of founder-philosopher-father Plato, in order to highlight the timeless relevance of a supposed irrelevant work as “passé” as Luce Irigaray’s Spéculum de l’autre femme. In this analysis, I argue that the negligence of her reading of Plato’s cave and subsequent amnesia of it clearly substantiate her steadfast claim that masculine universality eradicates the feminine and does so quite ironically and even jarringly, as shown by the critical dismissal of Plato’s cave in Spéculum.2Irigaray’s work does indeed come out of a French national context highly invested in the studies of antiquity and, by the postwar ’60s and ’70s, in the questioning of social, cultural, and political institutions (Egéa-Kuehne 200; Leonard, “Irigaray’s Cave” 159–64; Leonard, “Classics” 143; Leonard,Athens 1–14), but this historical fact does not marginalize her work nor subject it to a mere temporal estrangement of feminism, as the male bookstore owner had insinuated. It certainly is a point of fact that Irigaray questioned the father of Western philosophical truth. In fact, reconsidering Plato was tempting to someone, like Luce Irigaray, invested in cultural and academic revolutions, someone who questioned and doubted, like other cultural revolutionaries3 of the late 1960s and early ’70s. The bookstore owner seemed to be saying that the tide has returned to normal, that is, the “normal” that signifies complacency, the “normal” that no longer questions the supposed truth-bearers. He seemed to be pontificating, “it is no longer status quo not to be status quo,” or more precisely, “The revolution is over. Now, go home, girls.” [End Page 69]Spéculum de l’autre femme, the WholeLuce Irigaray’s work Spéculum de l’autre femme [Speculum of the Other Woman]4 is anything but status quo. In an idiosyncratic prose indicative of her deconstructive project, Irigaray daringly reads untouched historical and philosophical works, ones that for millennia have remained a critical and foundational part of Western discourse. Her methodology is complex and knotty because the rhetoric used twists and winds through its own words, sentences, scenes, and discourse, thereby intentionally effecting an implosion within language.5 While on the one hand she innocently participates in an evaluation of Platonism that Derrida made fashionable a few years prior with “deconstruction” of “La Pharmacie de Platon” (Leonard, Athens 190), what she unveils by rereading Plato’s work à la Derrida is the proliferation and predominance of certain philosophical images and ideas. She names this proliferation “patriarchy,” referencing the “phallus” as the symbol of patriarchy and its dominant masculine discourse, thereby calling every thing masculine-related “phallologic,” all of which are neologisms borrowed and employed from either Derrida or her teacher Lacan. Inevitably, she centers her whole argument on certain Western texts as the cause and consequent advancement of the masculine. Spéculum appears daunting in its 462-page French original,6 although no less truncated, albeit ordered, footnoted, and proportionally spaced, in the English translation (Gill 9). In order to facilitate comprehension of a charged and impressive topic, Irigaray relies on images to elucidate her reading by employing ambitious albeit ancient Greek philosophical metaphors of light, sun, and vision. As she does... (shrink)

In 1996 Jacques Derrida gave a lecture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York on the occasion of Antonin Artaud: Works on Paper, one of the first major international exhibitions to present the avant-garde dramatist and poet's paintings and drawings. Derrida's original title, "Artaud the Moma," is a characteristic play on words. It alludes to Artaud's calling himself Mômo, Marseilles slang for "fool," upon his return to Paris in 1946 after nine years in various asylums, while playing off (...) of the museum's nickname, MoMA. But the title was not deemed "presentable or decent," in Derrida's words, by the very institution that chose to exhibit Artaud's work. Instead, the lecture was advertised as "Jacques Derrida... will present a lecture about Artaud's drawings." For Derrida, what was at stake was what it meant for the museum to exhibit Artaud's drawings and for him to lecture on Artaud in that institutional context. Thinking over the performative force of Artaud's work and the relation between writing and drawing, Derrida addresses the multiplicity of Artaud's identities to confront the modernist museum's valorizing of originality. He channels Artaud's specter, speech, and struggle against representation to attempt to hold the museum accountable for trying to confine Artaud within its categories. Artaud the Moma, as lecture and text, reveals the challenge that Artaud posed to Derrida—and to art and its institutional history. A powerful interjection into the museum halls, this work is a crucial moment in Derrida's thought and an insightful, unsparing reading of a challenging writer and artist. (shrink)

Chora L Works documents the unprecedented collaboration, initiated in 1985, between philosopher Jacques Derrida and architect Peter Eisenman on a project for the Parc de la Villette in Paris. Woven into the volume are discussion transcripts, candid correspondence, and essays, as well as sketches, presentation drawings, and models. Derrida and Eisenman's design process was guided by Plato's chora text from the Timeaus; their unique reciprocal relationship was an interchange - and transformation - of voices.

In the English-speaking world, Jacques Derrida’s writings have most influenced the discipline of literary studies. Yet what has emerged since the initial phase of Derrida’s influence on the study of English literature, classed under the rubric of deconstruction, has often been disowned by Derrida. What, then, can Derrida teach us about literary language, about the rhetoric of literature, and about questions concerning style, form, and structure? The Derrida Reader draws together a number of Derrida’s most interesting and (...) idiosyncratic essays that treat literary language, the idea of the literary, and questions of poetics and poetry. The essays discuss single tropes or concepts, a figure such as metaphor, the ideas of titles and signatures, proper names, and Derrida’s thinking on such subjects as undecidability or aporia. The editor’s introduction is a demonstration in practice of how Derrida reads and how he adapts the act of reading to the text or figure in question. The introduction also outlines each essay’s main points, its usefulness for reading literary texts, and its particular area of interest. The Derrida Reader thus provides students of literature with a focused, contextualized, and readily understandable volume. (shrink)

An inquiry into the problematic of perjury, or lying, and forgiveness from one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. “One only ever asks forgiveness for what is unforgivable.” From this contradiction begins Perjury and Pardon, a two-year series of seminars given by Jacques Derrida at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris in the late 1990s. In these sessions, Derrida focuses on the philosophical, ethical, juridical, and political stakes of the concept of responsibility. His (...) primary goal is to develop what he calls a “problematic of lying” by studying diverse forms of betrayal: infidelity, denial, false testimony, perjury, unkept promises, desecration, sacrilege, and blasphemy. Although forgiveness is a notion inherited from multiple traditions, the process of forgiveness eludes those traditions, disturbing the categories of knowledge, sense, history, and law that attempt to circumscribe it. Derrida insists on the unconditionality of forgiveness and shows how its complex temporality destabilizes all ideas of presence and even of subjecthood. For Derrida, forgiveness cannot be reduced to repentance, punishment, retribution, or salvation, and it is inseparable from, and haunted by, the notion of perjury. Through close readings of Kant, Kierkegaard, Shakespeare, Plato, Jankélévitch, Baudelaire, and Kafka, as well as biblical texts, Derrida explores diverse notions of the “evil” or malignancy of lying while developing a complex account of forgiveness across different traditions. (shrink)

An exploration of the political dimensions of forgiveness and repentance from Jacques Derrida. Perjury and Pardon is a two-year seminar series given by Jacques Derrida at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris during the late 1990s. In these sessions, Derrida focuses on the philosophical, ethical, juridical, and political stakes of the concept of responsibility. His primary goal is to develop what he calls a “problematic of lying” by studying diverse forms of betrayal: infidelity, denial, false testimony, (...) perjury, unkept promises, desecration, sacrilege, and blasphemy. This volume covers the seminar’s second year when Derrida explores the political dimensions of forgiveness and repentance. Over eight sessions, he discusses Hegel, Augustine, Levinas, Arendt, and Benjamin as well as Bill Clinton’s impeachment and Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu’s testimonies before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The seminars conclude with an extended reading of Henri Thomas’s 1964 novel Le Parjure. (shrink)

This is the first book to consider the debate between two of the most prominent philosophers and social theorists of the 20th century: Jacques Derrida and Jürgen Habermas. It presents a unique collection of articles by the two figures and by those who have written about them, and includes pieces published in English for the first time.The book will be of interest to students and scholars with an interest in the implications of Derrida's deconstruction and Habermas's critical theory for issues (...) such as international relations, Europe, tolerance, rights, multiculturalism and identity politics, and the nature of philosophy.Including an introduction to the differences and affinities between Derrida's and Habermas's works, introductions to each text, suggestions for further reading, and a bibliography, this book is the ideal starting point for students and scholars wishing to understand the relationship between these two great thinkers.Key Features: *Unique - the first Reader to consider the Habermas-Derrida debate*Features pieces by Habermas and Derrida published in English for the first time*Includes primary and secondary texts*Provides introductions to the debate and to each text, and suggestions for further reading. (shrink)

One of the most influential and controversial thinkers of the twentieth-century, Jacques Derrida’s ideas on deconstruction have had a lasting impact on philosophy, literature and cultural studies. Jacques Derrida: Basic Writings is the first anthology to present his most important philosophical writings and is an indispensable resource for all students and readers of his work. Barry Stocker’s clear and helpful introductions set each reading in context, making the volume an ideal companion for those coming to Derrida’s writings (...) for the first time. The selections themselves range from his most infamous works including Speech and Phenomena and Writing and Difference to lesser known discussion on aesthetics, ethics and politics. (shrink)

H. C. for Life, That Is to Say... is Derrida's literary critical recollection of his lifelong friendship with Hélène Cixous. The main figure that informs Derrida's reading here is that of "taking sides." While Hélène Cixous in her life and work takes the side of life, "for life," Derrida admits always feeling drawn to the side of death. Rather than being an obvious choice, taking the side of life is an act of faith, by wagering one's life on life. (...) H. C. for Life sets up and explores this interminable "argument" between Derrida and Cixous as to what death has in store deep within life itself, before the end. In addition to being a memoir, it is also a theoretical confrontation—for example about the meaning of "might" and "omnipotence," and a philosophical and philological analysis of the crypts within the vast oeuvre of Hélène Cixous. Finally, the book is Derrida's tribute to the thought of the woman whom he regards as one of the great French poets, writers, and thinkers of our time. (shrink)

"In this newest installment in Chicagos series of Jacques Derridas seminars, the renowned philosopher attempts one of his most ambitious goals: the first truly philosophical argument against the death penalty. While much has been written against the death penalty, Derrida contends that Western philosophy is massively, if not always overtly, complicit with a logic in which a sovereign state has the right to take a life. Haunted by this notion, he turns to the key places where such logic has been (...) established - and to the place it has been most effectively challenged: literature. With his signature genius and patient yet dazzling readings of an impressive breadth of texts, Derrida examines everything from the Bible to Plato to Camus to Jean Genet, with special attention to Kant and postWorld War II juridical texts, to draw the landscape of death penalty discourses. Keeping clearly in view the death rows and execution chambers of the United States, he shows how arguments surrounding cruel and unusual punishment depend on what he calls an 'anesthesial logic, ' which has also driven the development of death penalty technology from the French guillotine to lethal injection. Confronting a demand for philosophical rigor, he pursues provocative analyses of the shortcomings of abolitionist discourse. Above all, he argues that the death penalty and its attendant technologies are products of a desire to put an end to one of the most fundamental qualities of our finite existence: the radical uncertainty of when we will die. Arriving at a critical juncture in history - especially in the United States, one of the last Christian-inspired democracies to resist abolition - The Death Penalty is both a timely response to an important ethical debate and a timeless addition to Derridas esteemed body of work"--Unedited summary from book jacket. (shrink)

The Cratylus is Plato's principal discussion of language, and has generated immense interpretive controversy. This thesis offers a new interpretation of the Cratylus, starting from the idea that it is essentially a normative enquiry, to be interpreted alongside Plato's ethical and political works. Just as the Statesman attempts to determine the nature of the statesman, so too the basic project of the Cratylus is to discover what constitutes a true, correct name. But this aim is doomed in the (...) case of language: names turn out to be a kind of imitation, and as such incapable of real correctness. ;The Cratylus discusses two theories of 'the correctness of names': conventionalism and naturalism. First, Socrates refutes the conventionalist thesis that any name anyone sets down for an object is correct. This thesis is, I suggest, of interest as a reasonable way to support the commonsensical assumption that all actual names are correct--an assumption which would preclude Plato's normative project. Socrates then elaborates naturalism, with an outsize, vaguely playful etymological discussion which has baffled interpreters. I argue that the etymological section serves above all as an agonistic display, establishing the authority of the philosopher to determine the value of etymologising and to treat the subject of names as he deems fit. ;Etymology is succeeded by the mimetic account of names as imitations. This is followed by a 'reexamination' of naturalism in which Socrates apparently turns against it, concluding with a partial rehabilitation of convention. This conclusion is the other major interpretive stumbling-block of the Cratylus. Here I argue that no rejection of naturalism is implied. Rather, its status is shown to be limited by its own consequences--a paradox, but one which does amount to or entail conventionalism. This reading is developed further by reference to the similar position expressed in the Seventh Letter. ;An End-Note discusses the explanation of false statement presented in the Sophist: I argue against the common view that it uses syntactic ideas in a way which represents a significant departure from the Cratylus. (shrink)

Turnbull offers a close and detailed reading of the Parmenides, using his interpretation to illuminate Plato's major late dialogues. The picture presented of Plato's later philosophy is plausible, highly interesting, and original.