-My death--is it possible?- That is the question asked, explored, and analyzed in Jacques Derrida's new book. -Is my death possible?- How is this question to be understood? How and by whom can it be asked, can it be quoted, can it be an appropriate question, and can it be asked in the appropriate moment, the moment of -my death-? One of the aporetic experiences touched upon in this seminal essay is the impossible, yet unavoidable experience that -my death- can never subject to an experience that would be properly mine, that I can have, and account for, yet that there is,...

This volume collects twenty-three interviews given over the course of the last two decades by Jacques Derrida. It illustrates the extraordinary breadth of his concerns, touching upon such subjects as the teaching of philosophy, sexual difference and feminine identity, the media, AIDS, language and translation, nationalism, politics, and Derrida's early life and the history of his writings. Often, as in the interview on Heidegger, or that on drugs, or on the nature of poetry, these interviews offer not only an introduction to other discussions, but something available nowhere else in his work....

In this stimulating and often startling book, Derrida examines the various -resistances- to analysis-conceived not only as a phenomenon theorized at the heart of psychoanalysis, but as psychoanalysis's resistance to itself. The book comprises three essays devoted to Freud, Lacan, and Foucault.

This volume contains the speech given by Derrida at Emmanuel Levinas's funeral on December 27, 1995, and his contribution to a colloquium organized to mark the first anniversary of Levinas's death. For both thinkers, the word adieu names a fundamental characteristic of human being: the salutation or benediction prior to all constative language (in certain circumstances, one can say adieu at the moment of meeting) and that given at the moment of separation, sometimes forever, as at the moment of death, it is also the a-dieu, for God or to God before and in any relation to...

Philosopher, literary critic, translator (of Nietzsche and Benjamin), Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe is one of the leading intellectual figures in France. This volume of six essays deals with the relation between philosophy and aesthetics, particularly the role of mimesis in a metaphysics of representation. Comment 1997] -Typography is a book whose importance has not diminished since its first publication in French in 1979. On the contrary, I would say, it is only now that one can truly begin to appreciate the groundbreaking status of these essays. The points it makes, the way it...

"I have but one language--yet that language is not mine." This book intertwines theoretical reflection with historical and cultural particularity to enunciate, then analyze this conundrum in terms of the author's own relationship to the French language. The book operates on three levels. At the first level, a theoretical inquiry investigates the relation between individuals and their "own" language. It also explores the structural limits, desires, and interdictions inherent in such "possession," as well as the corporeal aspect of language (its accents, tones, and rhythms) and the question of...

This volume records a remarkable encounter in critical and philosophical thinking: a meeting of two of the great pioneers in contemporary thought, Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida, who are also bound together by friendship and a complex relation to their own pasts. More than a literary text with critical commentary, it constitutes an event of central significance for contemporary philosophical, literary, and political concerns. The book consists of The Instant of My Death, a powerful short prose piece by Blanchot, and an extended essay by Derrida that reads it in the context of...

What should we make of the return to the sacred evidenced by the new vitality of churches, sects, and religious beliefs in many parts of the world today? What are the boundaries between the essential traits of religion and those of ethics and justice? Is there a "truth" to religion? This remarkable volume includes reflections on such questions by three of the most important philosophers of our time--Jacques Derrida, Gianni Vattimo, and Hans-Georg Gadamer. Together with other distinguished thinkers, they address a wide range of questions about the meaning, status, and future prospects of...

What should we make of the return to the sacred evidenced by the new vitality of churches, sects, and religious beliefs in many parts of the world today? What are the boundaries between the essential traits of religion and those of ethics and justice? Is there a "truth" to religion? This remarkable volume includes reflections on such questions by three of the most important philosophers of our time--Jacques Derrida, Gianni Vattimo, and Hans-Georg Gadamer. Together with other distinguished thinkers, they address a wide range of questions about the meaning, status, and future prospects of...

Something of a historical event, this book combines loosely "autobiographical" texts by two of the most influential French intellectuals of our time. "Savoir," by Helene Cixous, is a brief but densely layered account of her experience of recovered sight after a lifetime of severe myopia, an experience that ends with the unexpected turn of grieving for what is lost. Her literary inventiveness mines the coincidence in French between the two verbs "savoir" (to know) and "voir" (to see). Jacques Derrida's "A Silkworm of One's Own" complexly muses on a host of autobiographical, philosophical, and...