A collection of occasional pieces and interviews, in English and French, on philosophy, literature, art, architecture and politics.

The 15 essays gathered in this volume attempt to ask questions about reading, and more especially about the minimal preliminary gesture of opening a book in order to read. What makes reading possible and impossible, and how are that possibility and impossibility figured in the texts we read? The concern here is not with 'how to read', nor with the 'fate of reading', but with a much more modest, but perhaps also more nagging, question: what does reading demand if it is to be reading? What is reading, reading itself? One constant thread here is this: reading entails the unreadable. The...

The 26 extant sessions of the 'Frontiers' seminar held at the University of Sussex, 1989-92

A theoretical and deconstructive analysis of the function of maxims, generalizations and other law-like statements in eighteenth-century French writing.

Lyotard has been associated primarily in the English-speaking world with the 'postmodern debate', but his work is of a breadth and importance beyond what this would suggest. This book, the first general introduction to Lyotard's work to appear in any language, presents the arguments which mark the crucial moments of a complex career, taking as its guiding thread Lyotard's preoccupation with the event (perhaps the major concern of recent French thought) through his reflections on desire, production, justice and language. Lyotard's fundamental drive to account for the event takes his work...

Frontier: the border between two countries; the limits of civilization; the bounds of established knowledge; a new field of activity. At a time when all borders, boundaries, margins, and limits are being--often violently--challenged, erased, or reinforced, we must rethink the concept of frontier itself. But is there even such a concept? Through an original and imaginative reading of Kant, Geoffrey Bennington casts doubt upon the conceptual coherence of borders.

The frontier is the very element of Kant's thought yet the permanent frustration of his conceptuality. Bennington brings out the...

Frontier: the border between two countries; the limits of civilization; the bounds of established knowledge; a new field of activity. At a time when all borders, boundaries, margins, and limits are being--often violently--challenged, erased, or reinforced, we must rethink the concept of frontier itself. But is there even such a concept? Through an original and imaginative reading of Kant, Geoffrey Bennington casts doubt upon the conceptual coherence of borders.

The frontier is the very element of Kant's thought yet the permanent frustration of his conceptuality. Bennington brings out the...

"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...

The Marrano Specter brings together work by major scholars who collectively pursue the reciprocal influence between Jacques Derrida and Hispanism: his reception within intellectual circles in Spain and Latin America, on the one hand, and the Hispanist or marrano inflection of Derrida's philosophical writings on the other.

The Marrano Specter pursues the reciprocal influence between Jacques Derrida and Hispanism. On the one hand, Derrida's work has engendered a robust conversation among philosophers and critics in Spain and Latin America, where his work circulates in excellent translation, and where many of the terms and problems he addresses take on a distinctive meaning: nationalism and cosmopolitanism; spectrality and hauntology; the relation of subjectivity and truth; the university; disciplinarity; institutionality.

Perhaps more remarkably, the influence is in a profound sense reciprocal:...