In the 1960s a radical concept emerged from the great French thinker Jacques Derrida. He called the new process deconstruction. Rewriting the ways in which we use language and literature, deconstruction affected every form of intellectual thought, from literary criticism to popular culture. It also criticized the entire tradition of Western philosophy, from Plato to Bataille."

Acts of Literature, compiled in close association with Derrida, brings together a number of Derrida's writings on literary texts on the question of literature. These writings discuss literary figures such as Rousseau, Mallarme, Joyce, Shakespeare and Kafka. Comprising pieces spanning Derrida's career, the collection includes a substantial new interview with him on questions of literature, deconstruction, politics, feminism and history. Derek Attridge provides an introductory essay on deconstruction and the question of literature, and offers suggestions for further reading. These essays...

In this important new book, Jacques Derrida talks with Bernard Stiegler about the effect of teletechnologies on our philosophical and political moment. Improvising before a camera, the two philosophers are confronted by the very technologies they discuss and so are forced to address all the more directly the urgent questions that they raise. What does it mean to speak of the present in a situation of "live" recording? How can we respond, responsibly, to a question when we know that the so-called "natural" conditions of expression, discussion, reflection, and deliberation have been...

"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...

Parages brings together four essays by Derrida on the fictions of Maurice Blanchot. Three of the essays---Living On, - -Title To Be Specified, - and -The Law of Genre, - are by now canonical. The fourth, -Pace Not(s)- as well as Derrida's 1986 introduction to the French edition of the book, appear here in English for the first time. This was a breakthrough publication in the analysis of Blanchot, a notoriously difficult writer. It is safe to say Derrida contributed much to that writer's reputation in both French and English, always insisting on the philosophical...

This collection of essays and interviews, some previously unpublished and almost all of which appear in English for the first time, encompasses the political and ethical thinking of Jacques Derrida over thirty years. Passionate, rigorous, beautifully argued, wide-ranging, the texts shed an entirely new light on his work and will be welcomed by scholars in many disciplines--politics, philosophy, history, cultural studies, literature, and a range of interdisciplinary programs. Derrida's arguments vary in their responsiveness to given political questions--sometimes they are vivid polemics on...

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 "Etat 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...

This book makes available for the first time in English--and for the first time in its entirety in any language--an important yet little-known interview on the topic of photography that Jacques Derrida granted in 1992 to the German theorist of photography Hubertus von Amelunxen and the German literary and media theorist Michael Wetzel. Their conversation addresses, among other things, questions of presence and its manufacture, the technicity of presentation, the volatility of the authorial subject, and the concept of memory. Derrida offers a penetrating intervention with regard to the...

In subject and method, Alphonso Lingis s work has always defied easy categorization, largely owing to the interplay of theory and praxis inherent in his research. "Violence and Splendor "is a series of reflections grouped into five areas of inquiry: Spaces Within Spaces, Snares for the Eyes, The Sacred, Violence, and Splendor. Spaces Within Spaces explores multiple spaces of our lives the space of nomads, historical space, geological space, the cosmic space of religious ritual, and the metaphysical habitats of inmates of insane asylums. Snares for the Eyes analyzes the inner space of our...