Pub: Simon Glendenning, DERRIDA: A VERY SHORT INTRODUCTION.

Glendinning, Simon.  Derrida: a Very Short Introduction.  Oxford: OUP, 2011.

• Explores Derrida's main books and essays and considers his central themes to provide a comprehensive picture of his work
• Explains the theory of deconstruction and refutes the claims that it is negative and destructive
• Defends Derrida against some of the attacks from the analytical philosophical community whilst explaining why it is that his work inspires such passionate criticism
• Seeks to give the newcomer a sense of Derrida's challenge to the philosophical tradition, combined with some understanding of the range of reactions that challenge has provoked
• Part of the bestselling Very Short Introductions series - over three million copies sold worldwide

Jacques Derrida, the French philosopher, developed his critical technique known as 'deconstruction'. His work is associated with ideas surrounding both post-structuralism and post-modern philosophy, and he was known to have challenged some of the unquestioned assumptions of our philosophical tradition.

In this Very Short Introduction, Simon Glendinning explores both the difficulty and significance of the work of Derrida. He presents Derrida's challenging ideas as making a significant contribution to, and providing a powerful reading of, our philosophical heritage. Defending Derrida against many of the charges that were placed against him, he attempts to show why Derrrida's work causes such extreme reactions.

Glendinning explains Derrida's distinctive mode of engagement with our philosophical tradition, and shows that this is not a merely negative thing. By exploring his most famous and influential texts, Glendinning shows how and why Derrida's work of deconstruction is inspired not by a 'critical frenzy', but by a loving respect for philosophy.

http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780192803450.do

Documentary: THE RIGHT TO PHILOSOPHY, October 29, 2012.

A Documentary by Yuji Nishiyama: The Right to Philosophy: Traces of the International College of Philosophy

What are we allowed to believe about the Right to Philosophy, about the Future of the Humanities?

Saturday 29 October 11:00―14:00  
The Cinema, Birkbeck College, 43 Gordon Square, London
Followed by a panel discussion with the director Yuji Nishiyama (Tokyo Metropolitan University)T

This is the first documentary film on the International College of Philosophy (Collège international de Philosophie: CIPH), founded by, among others, Jacques Derrida and François Châtelet in 1983 in Paris.

Through interviews with the key figures in the CIPH, the film explores the "question of the institution", the relationship between philosophy and institutions—a topic that was central for deconstruction as elaborated and practiced by Derrida. The aim of this film is to consider the possibilities of the humanities in general and philosophy in particular under the current conditions of global capitalism.

Among its many provocations, the film contrasts the notion of "intersection" established by the Collège with that of the inter-disciplinarity of Cultural Studies or Comparative Studies departments in the Anglo-Saxon academic landscape. Enlightening and provocative, this film is essential viewing for those engaged in the humanities.

"A wonderful cinematic documentary open to many contexts, an exceptional film about the topic of philosophy that demands a viewing from multiple angles."―Naoki Sakai

This screening is organized as part of the international symposium ‘Humanities After Fukushima’, which is inspired by the film and tries to address issues surrounding humanities education and research in the age of crisis.

For more details please visit our event registration site: http://www.eventbrite.com/event/2154622534.

See the trailer here: http://youtu.be/Ps4VhUAhxSc.

"Derrida and the Theologico-Political: from Sovereignty to the Death Penalty," Spindel 2011, Department of Philosophy, University of Memphis, September 29-October 1, 2011.

Drawing on Derrida’s later seminars on “sovereignty” (published in 2008 and 2010) and “the pardon” (with a particular emphasis on the yet-to-be-published “death penalty” seminars), the speakers of the 30th Annual Spindel Conference will address Derrida's analyses of “the theologico-political” in works of philosophy, political theory, religion, and literature. By theologico-political, Derrida referred to the unacknowledged theological roots of political concepts, modern political institutions, and practices. Putting into question the supposed secularism of the modern nation-state, Derrida’s later writings undertake an extensive study of the relation between sovereignty, the death penalty, and the “theologico-political.” Devoted to detailed and painstaking examinations of major texts of philosophy and literature by Plato, Rousseau, Kant, Schmitt, Heidegger, La Fontaine, Hugo, Camus, and Genet, among others, the seminars enrich the elaboration of the theologico-political in already published works. Featuring some of Derrida’s foremost interpreters and translators, the conference aims to further this exploration. Derrida's Seminars From the beginning of his teaching career at the Sorbonne in 1960 to his last seminars at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in 2003, Jacques Derrida completely wrote out all his lectures and seminars. Presented over twelve to fifteen weeks a year, these seminars, in addition to the scores of books that he published during his lifetime, amount to some 14,000 printed pages in 43 volumes. They thus constitute an invaluable addition to the already existing corpus. A decision was made by Derrida’s heirs to edit and publish these seminars. These heretofore unpublished seminars will appear in reverse chronological order, published by Editions Galilée in France and the University of Chicago Press in the English-speaking world. Information about the seminars can be found at http://derridaseminars.org. Roundtable A special roundtable discussion will be held following the individual paper presentations. Presenters Kamuf, Bennington, Naas, Oliver, Dutoit, and Rottenberg will participate in the roundtable. http://www.memphis.edu/philosophy/spindel_2011.php

Derrida Conference, Goethe University, March 14-16, 2012.

In the wake of the thought of Jacques Derrida, the claim of philosophy can be understood as the opening of new paths, the disrupting of closures. But who makes deconstruction? Who makes it present? Can it be made present? How can deconstruction continue? And in what does the movement of this thinking today consist?

From the beginning, the question of the presence of philosophy has been a question of its progress. However, after Derrida, this question not only presents itself once more, but also in a different way. With him, language, conceptual thinking, as well as linguistic performance as questioning self-reference, have been decidedly transformed. The approaches associated with the name Derrida move in a relation of tension to philosophy as a discipline, and evade that understanding of philosophy that grasps its time in concepts and its activity as conceptual work. In and through acts of deconstruction, this work opens up the concept, beginning from a variety of newly conceptualized turns and neologisms, which consist as much in turning away, turning against, turning astray, as well as turning to rigorous objections.

Meanwhile, deconstructive turns and practices themselves appear, and come to take on, terminological and disciplinary forms. Today, therefore, the problem arises as to what extent acts of deconstruction, practices that work with and against the concept, the very concept of the concept, as well as the concept of philosophy and of other disciplines, can be thought. Do acts of deconstruction, which in part turn away from the concept or turn against it, still move in tension with the classical understanding of such conceptual work? Or has the deconstructive encounter with concepts ceased, transforming the nature of thinking itself? How can it still succeed in this thinking, which moves beyond concepts by means of concepts?

The aim of this conference is to provide a space to develop, problematize, and discuss the formation of concepts after Derrida. The question of the presence and future of deconstruction arises thereby as a double question: It is not only a question of clarifying where the key problems of a deconstructive thinking could be situated, but also a question of what ways of describing such problems become possible.

Possible paper topics include:

An-arché and violence
Literature, writing, and voice
Ontology and hauntology
Sovereignty, eleutheria, and exousia
L’animot and anthropology
The spacing of time, deferred action (Nachträglichkeit), and iteration
Responsibility and law
Intersubjectivity and alterity
Aporia, method, and dialectic
Cognition and epoché
Geometry and genealogy

http://www.derrida-frankfurt.net/?lang=en

Villa-Ignacio, Teresa. Review of Patrick O'Connor, DERRIDA: PROFANATIONS. NDPR (July 2011).

O'Connor, Patrick.  Derrida: Profanations.  London: Continuum, 2010.

In this volume, Patrick O'Connor makes the compelling argument that Derrida's fifty-year writing career was dedicated to a philosophy of profanation. As the key operation of deconstruction, profanation entails both a laying bare of the constructedness or profane character of anything deemed sacred and enables an exploration of the significance of profanation as a ubiquitous existential and relational condition. O'Connor engages with an impressive range of texts by Derrida and the philosophers who have come before and after him. He argues that Derrida's critiques of Husserlian phenomenology, Hegelian temporality, Heideggarian ontology, Levinasian alterity, and Christian charity, as well as Derrida's own ethical and political philosophies, are all articulations of ubiquitous profanation, finitization, contingency, and the potential contamination of any identity by all other identities. The book also includes relevant comparisons of Derridean arguments with those of his contemporaries, including Agamben, Žižek, and Badiou, among others.  

The author notes that his book shares many affinities with Leonard Lawlor's Derrida and Husserl: The Basic Problem of Phenomonology and Martin Hägglund's Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life, and he candidly situates his work as a critique of the ethical, religious, and messianic turns in Derridean studies. While students of religious studies, ethical philosophy, and political philosophy may be most interested in the chapters specifically addressing their fields, those interested in Derridean studies and continental philosophy in general will be intrigued by O'Connor's tracing of profanation as an argumentative thread running from the early to the late Derrida.

http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/24776/?id=24331

Derrida Today Conference 2012, University of California, Irvine, July 11-13, 2012.

KEYNOTES (in alphabetical order):

Tom Cohen (University of Albany)
Penelope Deutscher (Northwestern University)
Elisabeth Roudinesco (University of Paris VII – Denis Diderot)
David Wills (University of Albany, SUNY)

CALL FOR PAPERS:

The Derrida Today Conference will focus on the ongoing value of Derrida’s work to the political-ethical, cultural, artistic and public debates and 0philosophical futures that confront us.

The conference will be broadly interdisciplinary and invites contributions from a range of academic, disciplinary and cultural contexts. We will accept papers and panel proposals on any aspect of Derrida’s work or deconstruction in relation to various topics and contemporary issues, such as: philosophy, phenomenology and other theoretical/philosophical thinkers, literature, psychoanalysis, architecture and design, law, film and visual studies, haptic technologies, photography, art, music, dance, embodiment, feminism, race and whiteness studies, politics, ethics, sociology, cultural studies, queer theory, sexuality, education, science (physics, biology, medicine, chemistry), IT and multimedia, technology, etc. 

Visit: http://derridatoday.mq.edu.au/conference.html.

Marder, Elissa. Review of Peggy Kamuf, TO FOLLOW. NDPR (April 2011).

Kamuf, Peggy.  To Follow: the Wake of Jacques Derrida. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2010.

Peggy Kamuf long ago established herself as one of Jacques Derrida's most discerning readers and finest translators, but in To Follow: the Wake of Jacques Derrida, she offers her readers a rare opportunity to follow her as she works through critical questions in Derrida's thinking in the wake of his death. The book comprises seventeen beautifully written and delicately interwoven chapters, composed before and after Derrida's death in October 2004. In each chapter, Kamuf picks up on a word or phrase (what she calls a "watchword") in Derrida's writings in order to attend to the critical inventions and political interventions called forth by and in his thought.

This illuminating and moving book is also explicitly a work of mourning. Following Derrida's life-long work on mourning, Kamuf begins her book by pointing out that mourning does not begin with the other's death but is at work from the beginning in the names by which we come to know ourselves and through which we are called by others: "From the very first, every name, anyone's name, names a site of mourning to come." And if, as Kamuf suggests, the name is itself another name for mourning, this is because every name bears the trace of a division within: to be what we call a name, a name must be repeatable in the absence of the one to whom it ostensibly "belongs" and therefore must always be able to live on after the death of its bearer. In this sense, then, a proper name is not the property of the person named as it is also borne and carried by those who follow. It will follow from this that mourning is always already at work in every relation with the other. Mourning conditions all ethical positions and political actions and cannot be relegated to a uniquely personal experience in spite of (or perhaps even because of) the singular unbearability that attends each person's "personal" experience of loss.

Thus, although To Follow is punctuated by several poignant "personal" anecdotes (culled from her long professional and personal relationship with Derrida as critic, translator, and friend), its primary critical focus (and philosophical appeal) resides in the way that Kamuf cares for Derrida's legacy by caring about the ways in which his own inimitable texts are themselves responsive readings to the question of what it means to inhabit or inherit a tradition. Inheritance, Kamuf reminds us, is not a positive value that is passively received, but rather requires attentive and attuned reading. Throughout the book, Kamuf explores how Derrida's legacy takes the form of haunting questions that ask us to keep watch for what cannot be seen, known, or understood in advance: "The watch watches for -- it knows not what may come. This vigilance does not anticipate or expect an arrival that will put an end to or interrupt its waiting, but nonetheless it watches for another's coming to interrupt it" (11). . . .

Visit: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=23389.

Joseph, John E. "What If Derrida Was Wrong About Saussure?" TIMES HIGHER EDUCATION SUPPLEMENT April 14, 2011.

Daylight, Russell.  What If Derrida Was Wrong About Saussure?.  Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2011.

This book is the first systematic analysis of all of Derrida's published pronouncements on Saussure's Cours, including its impassioned rejection of writing as only a secondary representation of language, the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign and the problem of its existence in time. The last is, more precisely, one of the topics pursued seriously by Saussure that Derrida never took up - thus allowing him to depict Saussure as implying certain ideas that in fact he directly rejected.

Daylight patiently combs through the fine silk weave on which Derrida has painted his broad brushstrokes. He leads us step by step through each of Derrida's readings of Saussure, then sometimes back again through the same texts as we proceed to the next set of Derridean claims. Daylight sees his task not as defending Saussure from falsehoods, but showing that Derrida's interpretation is by no means the only possible one. . . .

Read the rest here: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=415785&c=1.

Marder, Michael. Review of Simon Skempton, ALIENATION AFTER DERRIDA. NDPR (November 2010).

Skempton, Simon.  Alienation after Derrida.  London: Continuum, 2010.

It is no secret that contemporary philosophy is under the spell of the Other. A host of rather automatic, ethico-political associations follows the invocations of "otherness" like a comet-tail: hospitality, respect, tolerance, diversity, multiculturalism, etc. We are urged to come to terms with that which is alien, to learn to live with foreignness, to recognize the uncanny -- in Freud's vernacular, the "strangely familiar" -- within us, to derive our very sense of identity from alterity. The approaches to alterity, in turn, may be broadly classified into those that are purely formal in their refusal to endow the Other with determinate features or objective characteristics and those that fill it with concrete, infinitely variable content, depending on the Other's race, sex, gender, economic status, and so on. Still, regardless of the elected framework and of the qualifier "radical" often attached to it, "otherness" is domesticated not only as a hegemonic concept that, rather than awakening, brings critical thinking to a halt, but also as a bearer of intransigent humanism, willing to confer this title on no being other than human. Although the current theoretical interest in animal alterities goes a long way toward undoing such domestication, it is ultimately insufficient for the purpose of questioning the hegemonic status of the Other.

What is required, in addition to a thorough de-humanization of the concept, is its historicization thanks to a sound philosophical genealogy, extending all the way back to the ancient Greek heteron and, more recently, to Hegel's dialectics. To understand the current emphasis on alterity, we ought to situate it within the current "trans-valuation of values," as Nietzsche puts it, where the highest -- from the metaphysical standpoint -- values are debased and the lowest elevated, that is to say, where the same, the proper, and the identical cede their privileged place to the other, the alien, and the non-identical. This lopsided dialectic indicates, however, that the Nietzschean trans-valuation is far from being complete: in its second stage, at the threshold of which we find ourselves today, it will necessitate a de-hierarchization of the already inverted values, so that alterity, too, would lose its newly acquired transcendental status, just as sameness and identity did in twentieth-century thought. The promise of deconstruction lies, precisely, in its ability to inspire this post-metaphysical thrust "beyond the same and the other."

Simon Skempton glimpses the promise of deconstruction in the fifth (and final) chapter of his book, dedicated to "Deconstructive De-alienation." Despite a token tribute to alterity, the other and the same trade places so vertiginously in his text that the metaphysical distinction is wholly transformed, if not leveled. For example:

Alienation is the effacement of this instituting activity, of différance, through the latter's objectification . . . This is an alienation of subjectivity insofar as subjectivity is the opening to the other. Thus alienation is a suppression of otherness, and de-alienation is then an opening to and welcoming of the other. This may seem paradoxical, as it means that alienation suppresses alienness and de-alienation welcomes the alien. (170) 

The core argument of Alienation after Derrida hinges on aligning différance -- the difference from and the deferral of identity -- with "inalienable alienation" (4), which has been, traditionally, covered over and disavowed by the metaphysical yearning for originary wholeness and purity. This disavowal is the reason why classical critiques of alienation, relying upon the myth of an undisturbed, paradisiacal, originary unity, are read as "the effacement . . . of différance," while deconstructive de-alienation is invested with the positive function of affirming that which has been effaced. But it is also the reason why theories of alienation have become outmoded in the second half of the twentieth century, after the metaphysics of presence and of the proper had been relentlessly debunked, first and foremost by deconstruction itself. The anachronism of a return to alienation in the aftermath of its discrediting as a philosophical fiction is at the heart of this study, which wishes to carve out a niche for the concept already processed by the deconstructive machinery and, thus, purged of metaphysical overtones. . . .

Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=21909.

Simms, Karl. Review of Gert-Jan van der Heiden, THE TRUTH (AND UNTRUTH) OF LANGUAGE. NDPR (November 2010).

van der Heiden, Gert-Jan.  The Truth (and Untruth) of Language: Heidegger, Ricoeur and Derrida on Disclosure and Displacement.  Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 2010.

Van der Heiden's project is deceptively modest: to understand how Heidegger, Ricoeur and Derrida address poetic language and truth through the twin concepts of disclosure and displacement. This, of course, already presupposes much: that truth is to be found in poetic language rather than any other sort (scientific, propositional, etc.), and that the concepts of disclosure and displacement are central to discerning a certain commonality of purpose between these three thinkers.

Van der Heiden's book is organised into four principal chapters: 'Heidegger on Disclosure and Language', 'The Transference of Writing', 'Inventions of Metaphor', and 'Mimesis in Myth and Translation'. . . .

Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=21870.

Hammerschlag, Sarah. Review of Steven Shakespeare, DERRIDA AND THEOLOGY. NDPR (August 2010).

Shakespeare, Steven.  Derrida and Theology.  London: Continuum, 2009.

What is most impressive about Steven Shakespeare's Derrida and Theology is its clarity and accuracy. Considering that the subject matter concerns Jacques Derrida's relevance to the field of theology, this is saying something indeed. It is a given that Derrida's arguments are notoriously difficult to parse and even more difficult to translate into prose untainted by jargon. But these issues become further complicated when the factors of religion or theology are introduced. For the past three decades critics have been debating over the potential theological significance of Derrida's conceptual battery. Depending on whom one reads, différance is either a principle of sheer nihilism or another name for the unknowable God of Eckhartian mysticism. Steven Shakespeare has the wisdom to resist both alternatives. Rather, he provides a sensible and balanced tour of the major Derrida works, focusing in particular on those that deal in themes directly referencing both the Christian and Jewish religious traditions, such as circumcision, messianicity, and the gift. All this makes Shakespeare's book eminently useful.

Derrida and Theology seems intended for an audience versed in theology but acquainted with Derrida only through hearsay, or by way of one of his interpreters. One of Shakespeare's primary purposes in the book is to correct the misrepresentations of Derrida in heavy circulation and to replace them with a guide for the theologically invested reader, one that will send her back to the texts to explore for herself. The strengths of this approach are quite clear, but it does have one considerable drawback: it leaves Shakespeare without any definitive point to make on the relation between Derrida and theology.

Anyone searching for the book's argument will be hard pressed to find a decisive statement on the matter. The closest Shakespeare comes are statements such as the following:

I am not claiming that Derrida is endorsing an alternative theological approach, even one as strangely heterodox as the one suggested here. However, his work does open possibilities for the theological imagination that are not shut down by his suspicion of the God of pure presence. (77)

One would assume that this claim would be followed by a clear delineation of said possibilities, and perhaps finally by some meditation on the most fruitful among them. Rather, Shakespeare continually defers on the specifics, allowing the answer to remain open-ended. We could of course read this as a sign of his respect for Derrida's own conceptualization of messianicity which insists that a true messianic awaiting resists predetermining the horizon for what can and may appear. Let us suppose, however, that this was indeed Shakespeare's intention. Certainly it would be an approach (perhaps the only one) that showed respect for Derrida's method. However, it would also sabotage the very claim being made. After all, such a position takes us no further than Derrida's own, and seems to suggest even that constructive theology built on a Derridian framework would have to fail before it had even begun, for the very act of fulfilling possibilities, utilizing the theological imagination, would betray the openness that the notion of messianicity demands. Should we read Shakespeare's book then as enacting the deconstruction of its own claims? Perhaps, but Shakespeare seems far too earnest about the theological potential of Derridian concepts for me to fully accept this reading. Rather, he seems very earnestly to be establishing the conditions under which Derrida could be seen as a resource for the theological imagination. While Shakespeare does make a distinction between the early Derrida and the late Derrida, he sees a unified set of concerns in Derrida's writings, none of which would be irrelevant to theology. . . .

Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=20787.

Earlie, Paul. Review of David Mikics, WHO WAS JACQUES DERRIDA?. MOR July 6, 2010.

Mikics, David. Who Was Jacques Derrida? An Intellectual Biography. New Haven: Yale UP, 2010.

Before he ever puts pen to paper, the biographer of Jacques Derrida is faced with an immense stumbling block: a body of work which is in many ways anathema to the art of biography. For David Mikics's Who Was Jacques Derrida? - which claims to be the first objective account of the life and work of 'the most famous North African thinker (along with Albert Camus) since Augustine' - the stakes are dauntingly high. Derrida spent the greater part of his philosophical career demonstrating the dangers inherent in simplifying or unifying the meaning of a text or a corpus; the same holds true, no doubt, for the art of biography.

David Mikics surmounts this difficulty by largely jettisoning biographical detail from the pages of Who Was Jacques Derrida? The reader looking for the standard staples of biography - a robust genealogy, the drama of intellectual apprenticeship, lurid details of trysts and other romantic entanglements - will be for the most part disappointed. Mikics's primary focus is the structural and genetic relationship between Derrida's texts: a task he takes up with admirable skill and scholarly rigour. . . .

Read the rest here: http://metapsychology.mentalhelp.net/poc/view_doc.php?type=book&id=5624&cn=394.

Pub: Jacques Derrida, COPY, ARCHIVE, SIGNATURE. NDPR (July 2010).

Derrida, Jacques.  Copy, Archive, Signature: a Conversation on Photography. Trans. Jeff Fort. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2010.

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 distinctive nature of photography vis-à-vis related technologies such as cinema, television, and video. Questioning the all-too-facile divides between so-called old and new media, original and reproduction, analog and digital modes of recording and presenting, he provides stimulating insights into the ways in which we think and speak about the photographic image today. Along the way, the discussion fruitfully interrogates the question of photography in relation to such key concepts as copy, archive, and signature. Gerhard Richter introduces the volume with a critical meditation on the relationship between deconstruction and photography by way of the concepts of translation and invention. Copy, Archive, Signature will be of compelling interest to readers in the fields of contemporary European critical thought, photography, aesthetic theory, media studies, and French Studies, as well as those following the singular intellectual trajectory of one the most influential thinkers of our time.

Further information may be found here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0804760977/ref=pe_5050_16318010_snp_dp.

"Derrida -- the Father of Deconstruction." THE PHILOSOPHER'S ZONE June 26, 2010.

Did you know there's a recipe out there for deconstructed Caesar salad? Or that you can buy a pair of deconstructed jeans? But deconstruction is not really about ripping the hems or serving all the ingredients separately instead of together in a bowl. It's a way of reading philosophical texts and this week we examine the work of the man who coined the term (and sometimes wished he hadn't): the French philosopher Jacques Derrida.

Download the audio or read the transcript here: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/philosopherszone/stories/2010/2933615.htm.

Cfp: "Deconstructing Democracy." DERRIDA TODAY (November 2011).

Deconstructing Democracy: CFP The November, 2011 issue of Derrida Today will be a special issue on “Deconstructing Democracy.” Derrida’s evocation of a “democracy-to-come” is most famously associated with global politics immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the announcement of a New World Order. Over subsequent years, the term recurred in Derrida’s discussions of religion, sovereignty, justice, human rights and the War on Terror. How adaptable was this deconstructive construction of democracy, and how well has it survived into the era after both established communism and evangelical neo-conservatism, the era of stalemate in Iraq and Afghanistan, of the Global Financial Crisis and Climate Change? Far from being a mere restatement or celebration of Derrida’s own discussions of democracy, this issue will hope to encourage a critical re-appraisal of the relationship between deconstruction and the democratic: • What are the horizons of the deconstruction of democracy with, beyond or against Derrida; with, beyond or against democracy? • Does ‘democracy-to-come’ have an enduring legacy? • What does deconstruction have to offer democratic thinking now? • Does deconstruction help us re-think the strengths and limitations of democracy both as it is currently practiced and as an idea? • Whatever happened to the ‘New International?’ • Is deconstruction democratic? Contributors should send a 250-word proposal and a 100-word Bio, to dteditors@gmail.com by June 30, 2010. Complete papers will be due by December 31, 2010.

Derrida Seminar Translation Project (University of Chicago Press).

The writings of French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) constitute one of the major intellectual achievements of the twentieth century. His many works have had immense influence on developments in the humanities, especially in philosophy, literary studies, and religion, but as well in many other fields. Derrida was also a renowned teacher. Called “seminars,” these courses were in fact fully written lectures that usually followed a theme for twelve to fifteen weeks a year. The materials of these lecture-seminars—accumulated over more than forty years and estimated at some 14,000 pages—remain almost wholly unpublished. They thus represent an extraordinary and inestimable supplement to the work Derrida published in his lifetime. Each seminar theme is developed incrementally, with thoroughness but often in surprising ways. Even though each annual course of lectures stands alone, of great interest as well are the many links to be made to Derrida’s published work. The development, continuity, but also the diversity of his thought is shown on a different scale in the seminars, broader in some respects and more detailed in others. Their publication will contribute invaluable resources to other scholars for many years into the future. The decision by Derrida’s heirs to edit the unpublished seminars led to the formation of an editorial team that, under the guidance of Marguerite Derrida, began its work in 2006. This team assembles a group of well-known scholars of Derrida’s thought: Geoffrey Bennington (Emory University, USA), Marc Crépon (École Normale Supérieure, France), Thomas Dutoit (Université Lille-III, France), Peggy Kamuf (University of Southern California, USA), Michel Lisse (Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium), Marie-Louise Mallet (independent scholar, France), and Ginette Michaud (Université de Montréal, Canada). Following the plan to publish first Derrida’s last two-year seminar (2001-2003) and to proceed thereafter in reverse chronological order, the team entrusted the editing of La Bête et le souverain, volumes I and II to Lisse, Mallet, and Michaud. The first volume was brought out in 2008 by Éditions Galilée, Derrida’s long-standing publisher in Paris, with volume II scheduled to appear in 2009. Subsequent volumes will be edited by different members of the editorial team in accordance with the editorial principles adopted for the initial volumes. Concurrently, the Derrida Seminars Translation Project was formed in 2006 and started planning an English-language edition of the French series. This edition, The Seminars of Jacques Derrida, has now begun to appear, co-edited by Geoffrey Bennington and Peggy Kamuf and published by the University of Chicago Press. In addition, a team has been assembled of other experienced translators of Derrida who will be responsible for translating the initial volumes in the series. The first volume of The Seminars of Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume I, translated by Geoffrey Bennington, appeared in 2009. The plan is to publish a new series volume annually (“Forthcoming volumes"). In 2009, the six-member team of the DSTP received a Collaborative Research grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (Peggy Kamuf, Project Director). Administered at the University of Southern California, this grant will help support the activities of the DSTP for three years, providing research assistance and teaching release for the translators as well as funding the annual summer workshop at IMEC, the archive facility in Caen, France, which houses some of Derrida’s papers. Further information may be found here: http://www.derridaseminars.org/index.html.

Wills, David. Review of Jacques Derrida, THE BEAST AND THE SOVEREIGN. NDPR (April 2010).

Derrida, Jacques. The Beast and the Sovereign. Vol. 1. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2009. This is the inaugural volume of the proposed complete transcription of seminars taught by Derrida from 1959-2003, being published by Editions Galilée in French and the University of Chicago Press in English translation (the editors have helpfully provided page references to the Galilée edition in the margins of the Chicago volume). The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume 1 is the first part (2001-02) of a two-year series on the topic announced by the title, the second of which (from 2002-03, the last year Derrida gave his Paris seminar) is currently being translated. Volume I contains 13 sessions held from December 12, 2001 to March 27, 2002. The seminars will initially be published topic by topic in reverse chronological order. For the complete scope of the project see the Foreword and General Introduction; details regarding American editions are available at http://www.derridaseminars.org, website of the Derrida Seminars Translation Project (in which, I should disclose, I am a participant). One could approach from various angles the gambit, and gamut, of Derrida's project in The Beast and the Sovereign. The question of sovereignty is an explicit concern of Politics of Friendship (1997) and Rogues (2004), and in the index of the seminars it can be traced back as far as 1984. From Rogues, especially, we know that sovereignty is for Derrida part of the larger question he calls "ipseity," the possibility of selfhood, which, for the ten-year period 1991-2001, was posed under the heading "Questions of Responsibility." A formal or textual origin for that question is identified in Benveniste's etymology, which relates the ipse to the exercise of power: "The sovereign, in the broadest sense of the term, is he who has the right and strength to be and be recognized as himself, the same, properly the same as himself" (66). The explicit focus of the 2001-2003 classes, as reinforced by the posthumous publication of The Animal That Therefore I Am (2008), which dates from the 1997 Cerisy conference and one of whose chapters (on Lacan) is inserted into Session 4, is the animal. But, I would hasten to add, Derrida's treatment of the topic exceeds the perspectives generally represented by movements for or toward animal rights or animal studies, and develops a more radical critique of speciesism involving the status of what lives [le vivant]. Thus the work exposed in The Beast and the Sovereign can also be related back to the seminars on "La Vie la Mort [Life/Death]" of the 1974-75 academic year, which Derrida footnoted on more than one occasion, and which he seemed to have been wanting to rework for some time. The book's self-presentation is formulated on a number of occasions throughout the seminars, so that the broad-reaching nature of Derrida's problematic is clear: "The choice of the title for this seminar . . . was designed in the first place to keep bringing us back . . . to the immense question of the living" (176), where "the living" is a matter not of "those who live" but literally "that which lives [le vivant]." Or, in another formulation:

As those who have been following this seminar for a few years know well, through what we have tried to think together under the title of forgiveness, pardon, the death penalty, and sovereignty, what we were attached to was always . . . to try to think the living in life (219).

For example, that goes as far as asking -- especially given the regularity with which mechanical animals are brought on stage whenever thinkers or writers evoke distinctions between the human and other species -- what the living in life of a marionette is; as far as assuming the consequences of the fact that "one must . . . inscribe death in the concept of life" (110). Another angle from which to approach the analyses Derrida undertakes here, also made explicit more than once, is that of the systematic -- call it "classical" -- deconstructive critique of false oppositions that we associate with his work from its beginnings. The distinctions on the basis of which the human species is separated from other animal species, properties that the human is supposed to possess whereas animals don't, are all called into question by Derrida. . . . Read the whole review here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=19307.

Kaufmann, David. "A Skeptic's Skeptic." TABLET January 20, 2010.

Mikics, David. Who Was Jacques Derrida? An Intellectual Biography. New Haven: Yale UP, 2010. In Who Was Jacques Derrida?, David Mikics provides a lucid, polemical intellectual biography of the French philosopher. He is also settling accounts. In the 1970s and 1980s, Derrida, who died six years ago at 73, was the most important and most polarizing figure in the humanities in America. His brand of thought, deconstruction, dominated classrooms, conferences, articles, and books. Derridian deconstruction was a heady brew of high philosophical discussion and counterintuitive assertion, all spiced up by Derrida’s trademark labyrinthine style, which was easy to parody but hard to surpass. Mikics was in the thick of it. Now a professor of English at the University of Houston, he earned his doctorate at Yale when it was the mother ship of literary theory in America. In the mid-’80s he was a follower of Derrida, drawn in by the Frenchman’s bracing skepticism. In many ways, Who Was Jacques Derrida? serves as an explanation of Mikics’s own rejection of skepticism, of his disillusionment with disillusion itself. Philosophical skepticism aims to demonstrate that our attempts to make unequivocally valid claims about the world are ultimately misguided. To put it simply, Derrida’s writings from the 1960s to the 1980s sought to show that the history of Western thought tried and failed to nail down the essences of things because things do not have essences to speak of. A subtle dialectician, he argued that there was nothing as unstable as the notion of a stable identity and nothing less knowable than what appears directly before us. For those who hated him, Derrida was a mountebank, a sloppy thinker and even sloppier writer whose antics did nothing but muddle what should be clear. To those who loved him—and his defenders were as ferocious as his detractors—he offered a whole new way of thinking. According to Mikics, both sides were wrong. . . . Read the whole review here: http://www.tabletmag.com/arts-and-culture/books/23952/.

Reynolds, Jack. Review of Michael Marder, THE EVENT OF THE THING. NDPR (February 2010).

Marder, Michael. The Event of the Thing: Derrida’s Post-Deconstructive Realism. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2009. It has become a pervasive prejudice, in some philosophical circles, that deconstruction is nothing more than some kind of textual or linguistic idealism. After liberating itself from the oppressive hegemony of the 'real' world, the text can surrender itself to the infinity of free-play and ignore all questions of faithful representation. Hilary Putnam notes in Renewing Philosophy, for example, that "deconstructionists think that the whole idea of representing reality . . . needs to be deconstructed" (p. 108). We think that this is incorrect, at least insofar as it purports to represent Derrida's own views, but, of course, this kind of comment does not come from nowhere. First, we must recognise that Derrida is consistently concerned with the way in which metaphysical realism seems to entail that the world is divided into objects and properties that are represented for metaphysical realism (cf. 'Sendings -- On Representation'), although this is something that also worries the later Putnam. Second, this idealist interpretation that is sometimes championed by the enthusiastic avowals of over-zealous acolytes, is also at least partly based on statements made by Derrida that prima facie give it credence, e.g., "there is nothing outside the text." It is hence perhaps fair to say that Derrida, like much of contemporary continental philosophy, has a complicated relationship to realism, often attempting to steer a middle-way between idealism and realism, and certainly being wary of epistemic realism (and the correspondence theory of truth), as well as the metaphysical suppositions of naïve realism, but not necessarily anti-realist for all that. Let us simply note here against the charge of linguistic idealism that Derrida has always been interested in that which is other than language, that which is undecontructable, and that his subsequent commentaries on his infamous remark, Il n'y a pas de hors-texte, clearly defuse it of an idealist interpretation (see 'Afterword' in Limited Inc.). In this respect, there has been a concerted effort by some to counter idealist views of deconstruction by presenting a more nuanced understanding and a closer reading of Derrida's texts. Michael Marder's The Event of the Thing: Derrida's Post-Deconstructive Realism is such a book and is therefore a valuable contribution to contemporary Derridian scholarship. In it, Marder argues that Derrida is in fact committed to a form of realism that is unequivocally opposed to the idealism with which he is often charged. He collects a conglomeration of quotes from Derrida to support this reading, and in some ways makes things more difficult for himself by focusing upon the thing, which Marder accepts at one point is "one of the most inconspicuous terms in Derridian philosophy" (p. xv). Although we are sympathetic to Marder's overall thesis, as well as to the very interesting trajectory on which it takes us (through Derrida's reflections on death, literature, art, commodity fetishism, Heidegger, etc.), there are some points of contention that we feel obliged to note, especially as they pertain to the contrast between traditional realism and the deconstructive/post-deconstructive realism that the book hinges upon. Read the rest her: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=18867.

"Derrida and Religion," Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, Harvard University, March 26-27, 2010.

Programme Friday Evening, 26th March: Keynote Opening Address, 6:00 p.m. : Hent de Vries (Humanities Center, Johns Hopkins University), “'et iterum de Deo': Jacques Derrida and the Tradition of Divine Names" Saturday, 27th March: General Introductory Remarks, 9:00 a.m.: Peter Gordon (History, Harvard University) Morning Session I: Derrida and Judaism, 9:15 - 11:00 a.m.

• Joseph Cohen (Philosophy, University College, Dublin), “Abraham - alterity, sacrifice, place”
• Sarah Hammerschlag (Religion, Williams College), "Poetics of the broken tablet: On the role of the rabbi in Derrida's readings of Edmond Jabès and Paul Celan," Moderator: Ethan Kleinberg (History, Wesleyan University)

Coffee break Morning Session II: Derrida and Christianity, 11:15 a.m. – 1:00 p.m.

• Richard Kearney (Philosophy, Boston College), "Derrida's Messianic Atheism"
• Edward Baring (Ph.D. History (Harvard), Lecturer, Princeton University), “Derrida and Christian Existentialism” Moderator: Judith Surkis (History, Harvard University)

Lunch, 1:00 – 2:30 p.m. Afternoon Session I: Derrida and the Death of God, 2:30 – 4:15 p.m.

• John Caputo (Religion, Syracuse University), "Unconditional without Sovereignty: the Weak Force of the Event and the Weakness of God in Derrida”
• Martin Hägglund (Comparative Literature, Harvard University Society of Fellows), "Derrida's Radical Atheism" Moderator: Sean Kelly (Philosophy, Harvard University)

Coffee break Afternoon Session II: Roundtable, Derrida and Religion, 4:30 – 6:30 p.m.

• Introduction: Peter Gordon
• Opening Presentation: Amy Hollywood (Religion, Harvard University)
• Opening Response: Sean Kelly
• Roundtable: Hent de Vries, Richard Kearney, Sean Kelly, John Caputo, and Amy Hollywood

Co-sponsored by:

• The Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies
• The Humanities Center,
• The Committee on the Study of Religion
• The Department of Philosophy
• The Department of Romance Languages and Literatures

Contact: Jason Beerman, beerman@fas.harvard.edu A Conference Organized by the Harvard Colloquium for Intellectual and Cultural History. For more information on Intellectual History at Harvard see: http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~inthist/.