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)

One could accuse me here of making a big deal and a whole history out of words and gestures that remain very clear. When Madame de Mainternon says that the King takes her time, it is because she is glad to give it to him and takes pleasure from it: the King takes nothing from her and gives her as much as he takes. And when she says, “I give the rest to Saint-Cyr, to whom I would like to give (...) all,” she is confiding in her correspondent about a daily economy concerning the leisures and charities, the works and days of a “grande dame” somewhat overwhelmed by her obligations. None of the words she writes has the sense of the unthinkable and the impossible toward which my reading would have pulled them, in the direction of giving-taking, of time and the rest. She did not mean to say that, you will say.What if … yes she did [Et si].And if what she wrote meant to say that, then what would that suppose? How, where, on the basis of what and when can we read this letter fragment as I have done? How could we even hijack it as I have done, while still respecting its literality and its language? End of the epigraph. Jacques Derrida is Directeur d’Études at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, and professor of French, University of California, Irvine. In the past year, he has published Le Problème de la genèse chez Husserl , Mémoires d’aveugle, l’autoportrait et autres ruines , L’Autre Cap , and Circonfession in Jacques Derrida, with Geoffrey Bennington . Peggy Kamuf is professor of French at the University of Southern California and Directeur de Programme, Collège International de Philosophie in Paris. She is the author of Signature Pieces: On the Institution of Authorship and most recently has edited A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds. (shrink)

Jacques Derrida is one of the most prolific and influential contemporary French intellectuals. Twenty-two essays and excerpts from Derrida's writings over the last twenty-five years are gathered in this accessible introduction, _A Derrida Reader_. The book's five sections are carefully introduced by the editor, and each selection of Derrida's work is presented succinctly in context. A general introduction to the volume by Peggy Kamuf provides an original interpretation and overview of Derrida's work and philosophy.

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)

Before I even begin, before even a preface or an epigraph, allow me to make two confessions or concessions. Both of them have to do with the fable and the phantasm, that is to say, with the spectral. The fabulous and the phantasmatic have a feature in common: stricto sensu and in the classical sense of these terms, they do not pertain to either the true or the false, the veracious or the mendacious. They are related, rather, to an irreducible (...) species of the simulacrum or of virtuality. To be sure, they are not truths or true statements as such, but neither are they errors or deceptions, false witnesses or perjuries. (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)

This book consists of a series of essays that all turn around questions of the address of speech or writing. They argue and demonstrate that meaning is not just a matter of the active intention of a subject (for example, speaker, writer, or other signatory of a meaningful act) but also of its reception at another's address. The book's main concern is therefore with a theory of meaning and of action that is not centered on the intentional, self-conscious subject. The (...) fifteen chapters explore this problematic within three broad areas: love, jealousy, and sexual difference; fiction or literature; and political or public discourse. The book engages principally with contemporary French thought and includes important new readings of work by Jacques Derrida, He;lène Cixous, Maurice Blanchot, and Jean-Luc Nancy. (shrink)

Is _giving_ possible? Is it possible to give without immediately entering into a circle of exchange that turns the gift into a debt to be returned? This question leads Jacques Derrida to make out an irresolvable paradox at what seems the most fundamental level of the gift's meaning: for the gift to be received as a gift, it must not appear as such, since its mere appearance as gift puts it in the cycle of repayment and debt. Derrida reads the (...) relation of time to gift through a number of texts: Heidegger's _Time and Being,_ Mauss's _The Gift,_ as well as essays by Benveniste and Levi-Strauss that assume Mauss's legacy. It is, however, a short tale by Baudelaire, "Counterfeit Money," that guides Derrida's analyses throughout. At stake in his reading of the tale, to which the second half of this book is devoted, are the conditions of gift and forgiveness as essentially bound up with the movement of dissemination, a concept that Derrida has been working out for many years. For both readers of Baudelaire and students of literary theory, this work will prove indispensable. (shrink)

Is _giving_ possible? Is it possible to give without immediately entering into a circle of exchange that turns the gift into a debt to be returned? This question leads Jacques Derrida to make out an irresolvable paradox at what seems the most fundamental level of the gift's meaning: for the gift to be received as a gift, it must not appear as such, since its mere appearance as gift puts it in the cycle of repayment and debt. Derrida reads the (...) relation of time to gift through a number of texts: Heidegger's _Time and Being,_ Mauss's _The Gift,_ as well as essays by Benveniste and Levi-Strauss that assume Mauss's legacy. It is, however, a short tale by Baudelaire, "Counterfeit Money," that guides Derrida's analyses throughout. At stake in his reading of the tale, to which the second half of this book is devoted, are the conditions of gift and forgiveness as essentially bound up with the movement of dissemination, a concept that Derrida has been working out for many years. For both readers of Baudelaire and students of literary theory, this work will prove indispensable. (shrink)

Hélène Cixous is arguably the most insightful and unbridled reader of Jacques Derrida today. In _Insister,_ she brings a unique mixture of scholarly erudition, theoretical speculation, and breathtaking textual explication to an extremely close reading of Derrida's work. At the same time, _Insister_ is an extraordinarily poetic meditation, a work of literature and of mourning for Jacques Derrida the person, who was a close friend and accomplice of Cixous's from the beginning of their careers. In a melodic stream-of-consciousness Cixous speaks (...) to Derrida, to his memory and to the words he left behind. She delves into the philosophical spaces that separated them, filling them out to create new understandings, bringing Derrida's words back to life while insisting on our inability to ever truly communicate through words. "More than once we say the same words," Cixous writes, "but we do not live them in the same tone." _Insister of Jacques Derrida_ joins _Veils,_ the two loosely autobiographical texts of Derrida and Cixous published together by Stanford in 2001. (shrink)

_Psyche: Inventions of the Other_ is the first publication in English of the twenty-eight essay collection Jacques Derrida published in two volumes in 1998 and 2003. Advancing his reflection on many issues, such as sexual difference, architecture, negative theology, politics, war, nationalism, and religion, Volume II also carries on Derrida's engagement with a number of key thinkers and writers: De Certeau, Heidegger, Kant, Lacoue-Labarthe, Mandela, Rosenszweig, and Shakespeare, among others. Included in this volume are new or revised translations of seminal (...) essays. (shrink)

_Psyche: Inventions of the Other_ is the first publication in English of the twenty-eight essay collection Jacques Derrida published in two volumes in 1998 and 2003. In Volume I, Derrida advances his reflection on many topics: psychoanalysis, theater, translation, literature, representation, racism, and nuclear war, among others. The essays in this volume also carry on Derrida's engagement with a number of key thinkers and writers: Barthes, Benjamin, de Man, Flaubert, Freud, Heidegger, Lacoue-Labarthe, Levinas, and Ponge. Included in this volume are (...) new or revised translations of seminal essays, as well as three essays that appear here in English for the first time. (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)

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 book, by one of the most challenging contemporary thinkers, begins with an essay that introduces the principal concern sustained in the four succeeding ones: Why are there several arts and not just one? This question focuses on the point of maximal tension between the philosophical tradition and contemporary thinking about the arts: the relation between the plurality of the human senses—to which the plurality of the arts has most frequently been referred—and sense or meaning in general. Throughout the five (...) essays, Nancy’s argument hinges on the culminating formulation of this relation in Hegel’s Aesthetics and The Phenomenology of Spirit—art as the sensible presentation of the Idea. Demonstrating once again his renowned ability as a reader of Hegel, Nancy scrupulously and generously restores Hegel’s historical argument concerning art as a thing of the past, as that which is negated by the dialectic of Spirit in the passage from aesthetic religion to revealed religion to philosophy. (shrink)

“What if the death penalty were a drug?” This question opens the essay and is pursued through two very different kinds of texts. On the one hand, Derrida's 1999–2000 Death Penalty Seminar is brought to bear for its analysis of what is called there the “anesthesial logic” of capital punishment. This logic, Derrida argues, has determined both pro– and anti–death penalty discourses since at least the mid-eighteenth century. On the other hand, the essay gathers evidence of events that led, in (...) 2010, to the unavailability in the United States of sodium thiopental—the anesthetic component of the three-drug protocol of the lethal injection—which forced many death penalty states to halt executions. Current events thus confirm the philosopher's analysis that anesthesia is indeed the lynchpin of the apparatus of state-sanctioned executions. But the analysis of this anesthesial logic also leads one to pose the further question of who is being anesthetized by this protocol and its discursive devices: the sentenced or the sentencers? (shrink)

Though it reflects on the play of Paine's name and links it can establish, this essay is concerned with the role of fiction in the performativity of texts, both literary and nonliterary, and especially texts which, like Thomas Paine's Common Sense, affect to abjure any literariness for their political efficacy. The author reads Paine with Blanchot in elucidating the power of a certain fictionality, at work for instance in the performatives that found a democratic nation.

This essay proceeds from the assertion that Derrida’s work has consistently been concerned with translation. This has been clearly evident since “Plato’s Pharmacy”. This concern comes to the fore in Geschlecht III, where countless features of Heidegger’s language are underscored as untranslatable. This does not prevent Derrida from proposing re-translations, of doing what he describes as “harassing” Heidegger’s language “with wave after wave of touches, caresses, and blows.” Untranslatability, as he argues here and elsewhere, is simply a matter of economy, (...) of the one-word-for-one-word principle, according to which standard every text is untranslatable. But translation is also for Derrida a touchstone for the broadest questions posed by or to philosophy. One such important question or problem is hospitality, which, as he asserts in his 1995–1996 seminar on the topic, is “basically the same problem” as translation. This confluence of the questions of hospitality and translation is particularly relevant for his reading of Heidegger’s essay on Trakl, “Die Sprache im Gedicht.”. (shrink)

In the wake of Derrida’s disappearance, this essay asks the question of how to take responsibility, now, for the world one is left to bear. It retraces the path Derrida followed in thinking the event of a coming world and isolates a number of concepts that assumed prominence in his late work: sovereignty, unconditionality, possibility, ipseity. Drawing on the essay “The Reason of the Strongest” in Rogues, it discerns an important distinction made between sovereignty and unconditionality, and situates Derrida’s work (...) as an explicit rethinking of the concept of possibility. It argues that this work offers significant leverage, conceptually and practically, on the legacy of sovereignty as the right of the strongest. (shrink)

This essay traces the insistent and repeated attention Christopher Johnson pays to the episode in Tristes tropiques that Lévi-Strauss calls ‘The Writing Lesson’ and that Derrida reads as a parable...

Derrida's seminar The Death Penalty is to an important extent taken up with unpacking the significance of the fact that there is in our Western tradition no philosophy as such against the death penalty. This essay follows the seminar into the heart of its engagement with that legacy, where it traces out the condition of its own interested abolitionist stand. This condition is named ‘the heart of the other in me’, which is the pulse of every finitude, every ‘my’ life. (...) It also gives the impulse in this essay to follow the thread of the ‘heart’ across the seminar's readings of Rousseau, Genet, Hugo and Camus. (shrink)

Following on from Derrida's reading of The Merchant of Venice, Act 4, scene 1, this essay bids to make some headway against all the currents of kind and kindness bound up in the deal between Antonio and Shylock. What kind of play is this? What is the play of kind? Who is kind? What kind of future is waiting to be born? These and other kinds of questions are hauled up by the net cast into Shakespeare's teeming language.

This book brings together for the first time five recent essays by Jacques Derrida, which advance his reflections on many issues: lying, perjury, forgiveness, confession, the profession of faith, and, most recently, cruelty, sovereignty, and capital punishment. Strongly linked by their attention to "performatives" and the "as if," the essays show the necessity of thinking beyond the category of acts that are possible for a subject. Derrida argues forcefully that thought must engage with the im-possible, that is, the order of (...) the unforeseeable event, the absolute future still to come. This acute awareness of the limits of performative programs informs the essays throughout and attunes them closely to events of a world undergoing "globalization." The first essay, "History of the Lie," reviews some classic and modern definitions of the lie, while renewing questions about what is called lying, as distinguished from other forms of nontruth. This inventive analysis is followed by "Typewriter Ribbon," which examines at length the famous lie recounted by Rousseau in his _Confessions_, when he perjured himself by accusing another of his own crime. Paul de Man’s reading of this textual event is at the center of Derrida’s patient, at times seriously funny analyses. "_Le parjure_, Perhaps" engages with a remarkable novel by Henri Thomas that fictionalizes the charge of perjury brought against Paul de Man in the 1950s. Derrida’s extraordinary fineness as a reader and thinker of fiction here treats, to profound effect, the "fatal experience of perjury." The two final essays, "The University Without Condition" and "Psychoanalysis Searches the States of Its Soul," address the institutions of the university and of psychoanalysis as sites from which to resist and deconstruct the nontruth or phantasm of sovereignty. For the university, the principle of truth remains at the core of its resistance; for psychoanalysis, there is the obligation to remain true to what may be, Derrida suggests, its specific insight: into psychic cruelty. Resistance to the sovereign cruelty of the death penalty is just one of the stakes indicated by the last essay, which is the text of a keynote address to the "States General of Psychoanalysis" held in Paris, July 2000. Especially for this volume, Derrida has written "Provocation: Forewords," which reflects on the title _Without Alibi_ while taking up questions about relations between deconstruction and America. This essay-foreword also responds to the event of this book, which Peggy Kamuf in her introduction presents as event of resistance. _Without Alibi_ joins two other books by Derrida that Kamuf has translated for Stanford University Press: _Points...: Interviews, 1974-1994_ and _Resistances of Psychoanalysis_. (shrink)