Writing and Difference

Author: Jacques Derrida
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226816079
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 363

Book Description
First published in 1967, Writing and Difference, a collection of Jacques Derrida's essays written between 1959 and 1966, has become a landmark of contemporary French thought. In it we find Derrida at work on his systematic deconstruction of Western metaphysics. The book's first half, which includes the celebrated essay on Descartes and Foucault, shows the development of Derrida's method of deconstruction. In these essays, Derrida demonstrates the traditional nature of some purportedly nontraditional currents of modern thought—one of his main targets being the way in which "structuralism" unwittingly repeats metaphysical concepts in its use of linguistic models. The second half of the book contains some of Derrida's most compelling analyses of why and how metaphysical thinking must exclude writing from its conception of language, finally showing metaphysics to be constituted by this exclusion. These essays on Artaud, Freud, Bataille, Hegel, and Lévi-Strauss have served as introductions to Derrida's notions of writing and différence—the untranslatable formulation of a nonmetaphysical "concept" that does not exclude writing—for almost a generation of students of literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. Writing and Difference reveals the unacknowledged program that makes thought itself possible. In analyzing the contradictions inherent in this program, Derrida foes on to develop new ways of thinking, reading, and writing,—new ways based on the most complete and rigorous understanding of the old ways. Scholars and students from all disciplines will find Writing and Difference an excellent introduction to perhaps the most challenging of contemporary French thinkers—challenging because Derrida questions thought as we know it.

An Event, Perhaps

Author: Peter Salmon
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1788732839
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 321

Book Description
Philosopher, film star, father of “post truth”—the real story of Jacques Derrida Who is Jacques Derrida? For some, he is the originator of a relativist philosophy responsible for the contemporary crisis of truth. For the far right, he is one of the architects of Cultural Marxism. To his academic critics, he reduced French philosophy to “little more than an object of ridicule.” For his fans, he is an intellectual rock star who ranged across literature, politics, and linguistics. In An Event, Perhaps, Peter Salmon presents this misunderstood and misappropriated figure as a deeply humane and urgent thinker for our times. Born in Algiers, the young Jackie was always an outsider. Despite his best efforts, he found it difficult to establish himself among the Paris intellectual milieu of the 1960s. However, in 1967, he changed the whole course of philosophy: outlining the central concepts of deconstruction. Immediately, his reputation as a complex and confounding thinker was established. Feted by some, abhorred by others, Derrida had an exhaustive breadth of interests but, as Salmon shows, was moved by a profound desire to understand how we engage with each other. It is a theme explored through Derrida’s intimate relationships with writers such as Althusser, Genet, Lacan, Foucault, Cixous, and Kristeva. Accessible, provocative and beautifully written, An Event, Perhaps will introduce a new readership to the life and work of a philosopher whose influence over the way we think will continue long into the twenty-first century.

Deconstruction and Philosophy

Author: John Sallis
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226734390
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Book Description
Acknowledgments -- Note on Translations -- Introduction -- Deconstruction and the Inscription of Philosophy -- Infrastructures and Systematicity / Rodolphe Gasche -- Philosophy Has Its Reasons . . . / Hugh J. Silverman -- Destinerrance: The Apotropocalyptics of Translation / John P. Leavey, Jr. -- Deconstruction and the History of Metaphysics -- In Stalling Metaphysics: At the Threshold / Ruben Berezdivin -- Doubling the Space of Existence: Exemplarity in Derrida - the Case of Rousseau / Irene E. Harvey -- Regulations: Kant and Derrida at the End of Metaphysics / Stephen Watson -- A Point of Almost Absolute Proximity to Hegel / John Llewelyn -- Deconstruction and Phenomenology -- The Economy of Signs in Husserl and Derrida: From Uselessness to Full Employment / John D. Caputo -- The Perfect Future: A Note on Heidegger and Derrida / David Farrell Krell -- Deconstruction and the Possibility of Ethics / Robert Bernasconi -- Deconstruction--in Withdrawal? -- Following Derrida / David Wood -- Geschlecht II: Heidegger's Hand / Jacques Derrida -- Notes on Contributors -- Index.

Limited Inc

Author: Jacques Derrida
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810107880
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 169

Book Description
Signature event context -- Summary of "Reiterating the differences"--Limited Inc a b c -- Afterword : toward an ethic of discussion.

Biodeconstruction

Author: Francesco Vitale
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438468865
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 258

Book Description
In Biodeconstruction, Francesco Vitale demonstrates the key role that the question of life plays in Jacques Derrida's work. In the seminar La vie la mort (1975), Derrida engages closely with the life sciences, especially biology and evolution theory. Connecting this line of thought to his analysis of cybernetics in Of Grammatology, Vitale shows how Derrida develops a notion of biological life as itself a sort of text that is necessarily open onto further articulations and grafts. This sets the stage for the deconstruction of the traditional opposition between life and death, conceiving of death as an internal condition of the constitution of the living rather than being the opposite of life. It also provides the basis for the deconstruction of the rigidly deterministic concept of the genetic program, an insight that anticipates recent achievements of biological research in epigenetics and sexual reproduction. Finally, Vitale argues that this framework can enrich our understanding of Derrida's late work devoted to political issues, connecting his use of the autoimmunitarian lexicon to the theory of cellular suicide in biology.

Rogues

Author: Jacques Derrida
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804749510
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 204

Book Description
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.

Of Spirit

Author: Jacques Derrida
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226143194
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 152

Book Description
"I shall speak of ghost, of flame, and of ashes." These are the first words of Jacques Derrida's lecture on Heidegger. It is again a question of Nazism—of what remains to be thought through of Nazism in general and of Heidegger's Nazism in particular. It is also "politics of spirit" which at the time people thought—they still want to today—to oppose to the inhuman. "Derrida's ruminations should intrigue anyone interested in Post-Structuralism. . . . . This study of Heidegger is a fine example of how Derrida can make readers of philosophical texts notice difficult problems in almost imperceptible details of those texts."—David Hoy, London Review of Books "Will a more important book on Heidegger appear in our time? No, not unless Derrida continues to think and write in his spirit. . . . Let there be no mistake: this is not merely a brilliant book on Heidegger, it is thinking in the grand style."—David Farrell Krell, Research in Phenomenology "The analysis of Heidegger is brilliant, provocative, elusive."—Peter C. Hodgson, Religious Studies Review

Jacques Derrida

Author: Jason Powell
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 9780826494498
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 274

Book Description
At the time of his death in 2004, Jacques Derrida was arguably the most influential and the most controversial thinker in contemporary philosophy. This work offers a biographical overview of this important philosopher, drawing on Derrida's own accounts of his life as well as the narratives of friends and colleagues.

Jacques Derrida

Author: Zeynep Direk
Publisher: Taylor & Francis US
ISBN: 9780415235846
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 404

Book Description

Derrida

Author: Benoît Peeters
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745663028
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 462

Book Description
This biography of Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) tells the story of a Jewish boy from Algiers, excluded from school at the age of twelve, who went on to become the most widely translated French philosopher in the world – a vulnerable, tormented man who, throughout his life, continued to see himself as unwelcome in the French university system. We are plunged into the different worlds in which Derrida lived and worked: pre-independence Algeria, the microcosm of the École Normale Supérieure, the cluster of structuralist thinkers, and the turbulent events of 1968 and after. We meet the remarkable series of leading writers and philosophers with whom Derrida struck up a friendship: Louis Althusser, Emmanuel Levinas, Jean Genet, and Hélène Cixous, among others. We also witness an equally long series of often brutal polemics fought over crucial issues with thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, John R. Searle, and Jürgen Habermas, as well as several controversies that went far beyond academia, the best known of which concerned Heidegger and Paul de Man. We follow a series of courageous political commitments in support of Nelson Mandela, illegal immigrants, and gay marriage. And we watch as a concept – deconstruction – takes wing and exerts an extraordinary influence way beyond the philosophical world, on literary studies, architecture, law, theology, feminism, queer theory, and postcolonial studies. In writing this compelling and authoritative biography, Benoît Peeters talked to over a hundred individuals who knew and worked with Derrida. He is also the first person to make use of the huge personal archive built up by Derrida throughout his life and of his extensive correspondence. Peeters’ book gives us a new and deeper understanding of the man who will perhaps be seen as the major philosopher of the second half of the twentieth century.