"The name: What does one call thus? What does one understand under the name of name? And what occurs when one gies a name? What does one give then? One does not offer a thing, one delivers nothing, and still something comes to be, which comes down to giving that which one does not have, as Plotinus said of the Good. What happens, above all, when it is necessary to sur-name, renaming there where, precisely, the name comes to be found lacking? What makes the proper name into a sort of sur-name, pseudonym, or cryptonym at once singular and singularly untranslatable?" Jacques Derrida thus poses a...

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...

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...

These two lectures by Jacques Derrida, "Foreigner Question" and "Step of Hospitality/No Hospitality," derive from a series of seminars on "hospitality" conducted by Derrida in Paris, January 1996. His seminars, in France and in America, have become something of an institution over the years, the place where he presents the ongoing evolution of his thought in a remarkable combination of thoroughly mapped-out positions, sketches of new material, and exchanges with students and interlocutors.

As has become a pattern in Derrida's recent work, the form of this presentation is a...

O Freunde, es gibt keinen Freund - dieser enigmatische Satz am Anfang von Derridas Buch zitiert eine ganze Tradition philosophischer, politischer und literarischer Texte von Aristoteles ber Montaigne, Nietzsche und Kant bis zu Carl Schmitt, Bataille und Blanchot. Er erffnet jeweils eine Theorie der Freund- und Feindschaft, deren politische Implikationen Derrida herausarbeitet. In unserer Tradition, so die Hypothese des Buchs, ist die Genealogie des Politischen mit dem Paar Bruder/Freund verbunden. Der Begriff des Politischen wie der der Freundschaft greifen zurck auf einen fragwrdigen...

Vortrag im Rahmen eines Seminars mit dem Titel "Ist es möglich, vom Ereignis zu sprechen?" unter der Leitung von Gad Soussana und Alexis Nouss, Montréal 2000.§Wenn es darum geht, die Beziehung des "Sprechens" zum "Ereignis" zu klären, gibt es mindestens zwei Möglichkeiten: Zum einen gibt es das Sprechen über ein Ereignis, das Benennen und Beschreiben dessen, was geschehen ist; zum anderen gibt es ein performatives Sprechen, das selbst Ereignis ist, wie zum Beispiel ein Geständnis oder eine Verurteilung. Ist das Sprechen über ein Ereignis in gewisser Weise unmöglich, weil es immer...