This is a comprehensive investigation into the theme of time in the work of Jacques Derrida, showing how temporality is one of the hallmarks of his thought. Joanna Hodge compares and contrasts Derrida's arguments concerning time with those of Kant, Husserl, Augustine, Heidegger, Levinas, Freud, and Blanchot.

An intellectual event, Derrida and the Time of the Political marks the first time since Jacques Derrida’s death in 2004 that leading scholars have come together to critically assess the philosopher’s political and ethical writings. Skepticism about the import of deconstruction for political thought has been widespread among American critics since Derrida’s work became widely available in English in the late 1970s. While Derrida expounded political and ethical themes from the late 1980s on, there has been relatively little Anglo-American analysis of that later work or its relation to the philosopher’s entire corpus. Filling a critical gap, this volume provides multiple perspectives on the political turn in Derrida’s work, showing how deconstruction bears on political theory and real-world politics. The contributors include distinguished scholars of deconstruction whose thinking developed in close proximity to Derrida’s, as well as leading political theorists and philosophers who engage Derrida’s thought from further afield. The volume opens with a substantial introduction in which Pheng Cheah and Suzanne Guerlac survey Derrida’s entire corpus and position his later work in relation to it. The remaining essays address the concerns that arise out of Derrida’s analysis of politics and the conditions of the political, such as the meaning and scope of democracy, the limits of sovereignty, the relationship between the ethical and the political, the nature of responsibility, the possibility for committed political action, the implications of deconstructive thought for non-Western politics, and the future of nationalism in an era of globalization and declining state sovereignty. The collection is framed by original contributions from Hélène Cixous and Judith Butler. Contributors. Étienne Balibar, Geoffrey Bennington, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, Pheng Cheah, Hélène Cixous, Rodolphe Gasché, Suzanne Guerlac, Marcel Hénaff, Martin Jay, Anne Norton, Jacques Rancière, Soraya Tlatli, Satoshi Ukai

Front Cover -- Jacques derrida -- Copyright Page -- Contents -- Acknowledgements -- List of abbreviations -- Introduction -- 1. Histories and transcendentals -- Writing and difference -- Sketching out the foreground: 'writing' 'difference' and 'deconstruction' -- A detour round 'writing' -- 'Deconstruction' as an articulation of philosophy and history of philosophy -- Deconstruction and empiricism -- Empiricism and transcendentality -- Writing and universal conditions -- Universal conditions and historicism -- The 'syntax': transcendentals and historicity -- The infinites -- The two infinites -- Husserl's kantian Ideas and historicity -- Infinity of and in Idea -- The aporias of the infinite -- History and absolute infinity -- 2. Replications -- Roots and the a priori -- Writing and the 'fold' -- Doubles -- Reflexivity as mise-en-abyme -- Reflexivity and subjectivity -- Quotation -- The doubling of irony -- Indirect speech -- Parody of/and philosophy -- The modality of quotation -- Reiterated modalities -- 3. Strange attractors: singularities -- Circuits of argument -- A detour about language -- Phantasms and fetishes -- Time constructs -- Singularities -- The negotiation of the singular reference -- Singulars and proper names -- Other -- Singularity and the Law -- 4. Negatives and steps: 'pas sans pas' -- Negation and the infinite: two forms of relation -- Différance and Hegelian negation -- The double bind and stricture -- Stricture: connecting and constituting -- The postal principle and the 'pas sans pas' -- Sending -- Tangled hierarchies -- Return calls and histories -- The unknown and the neuter -- 5. Contacts -- The random and connection -- 'Assembling' in language or in a particular language -- Nominalization and metaphor -- 'A non-classical dissociation of thought and language' -- 'A subjectless transcendental field'? -- Prelogic.

In Derrida and the Legacy of Psychoanalysis, Paul Earlie offers a detailed account of the importance of psychoanalysis in Derrida's thought. Based on close readings of texts from the whole of his career, including less well-known and previously unpublished material, the title sheds new light on the crucial role of psychoanalysis in shaping Derrida's response to a number of key questions. These questions range from the psyche's relationship to technology to the role of fiction and metaphor in scientific discourse, and from the relationship between memory and the archive to the status of the political in deconstruction. Focusing on Freud but proposing new readings of texts by Lacan, Torok and Abraham, Laplanche and Pontalis, amongst other seminal figures in contemporary French thought, Earlie argues that Derrida's writings on psychoanalysis can also provide an important bridge between deconstruction and the recent materialist turn in the humanities. Challenging a still prevalent 'textualist' reading of Derrida's work, he explores the ongoing contribution of deconstruction and psychoanalysis to pressing issues in critical thought today, from the localizing models of the neurosciences and the omnipresence of digital technology to the politics of affect in an age of terror.

This book offer a series of lucid and incisive readings of Derrida's work, as well as an elegiac tribute in more personal terms.

The Prayer and Tears of Jacques Derrida takes its point of departure from Derrida's more recent, sometimes autobiographical writings and closely examines the religious motifs that have emerged in his later works. John D. Caputo's provocative interpretation of Derrida's thinking also makes an original contribution to the question of the relevance of deconstruction for religion. Caputo's Derrida is a man of faith who bridges Jewish and Christian traditions. The deep messianic, apocalyptic, and prophetic tones in Derrida's writings, Caputo argues, bespeak his broken covenant with Judaism. Through its startling exploration of Derrida's impossible religion, the book sheds light on the implications of deconstruction for an understanding of religion and faith today--from back cover.

Explores Jacques Derrida's distinctive approach to ShakespeareOffers the first comprehensive and accessible account and discussion of Derrida's engagement with ShakespeareChallenges the way we have traditionally come to think about the interdisciplinary relationship between literature and philosophy, as well as literary geniusContextualises Derrida's readings of Shakespeare within his wider philosophical project and discusses in how far they relate to - or are distinct from - his engagement with other dramatic or literary worksThis book brings to light Derrida's rich and thought-provoking discussions of Shakespearean drama. Contextualising Derrida's readings of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice and King Lear within his wider philosophical project, Alfano explores what draws Derrida to Shakespeare and what makes him particularly suitable for philosophical thought. The author also makes the case for Derrida's singular understanding of the relationship between philosophy and Shakespeare and his radical idea of what literary genius is.

This special issue of SAQ commemorates and interrogates--with varying measures of appreciation and critique--the late work of the philosopher Jacques Derrida. Resisting simple memorialization of Derrida since his death in 2004, this collection contends that the late work of this prolific theorist remains to be better understood. The contributors explore the peculiar intensity--a combined sense of both patience and urgency--that characterizes Derrida's late writing, suggestive, among other things, of his preoccupation with mortality, of time running out, and of so many pressing things to be done. The essays address a wide array of Derrida's concerns: human rights, justice, religion, the performative, "the gift of death," mourning, and sovereignty. They often put Derrida's texts in conjunction with the works of others--Wordsworth, Agamben, Schelling, and Benjamin, to name a few--that resonate with and on occasion resist Derrida's own thinking and writing. One essay offers a reading of Wordsworth's elegy "Distressful gift!" as a dialogue with questions posed by Derrida, using as its frame the kind of nonnormative mourning that Derrida advocated, together with a haunting analysis of the character of survival. Other essays look at Derrida's theory of performativity as advanced in his late works, continuing his emphasis on the power of language, and in general they emulate his vigilance in attending to force and violence everywhere. Contributors. Ian Balfour, David L. Clark, Mary Jacobus, David E. Johnson, David Lloyd, J. Hillis Miller, Marc Redfield, Rei Terada, Elisabeth Weber

A critical anthology that re-examines Jacques Derrida’s thought by way of theory and praxis, this volume reflects on his striking legacy and the future of theory. Among contemporary thinkers, Derrida challenges not only our ways of thinking but also hitherto methods of inquiry. This book captures how Derrida renovates and re-energises philosophy by questioning the fundamental assumptions of Western philosophical thought. By doing so, he exposes the intricate lie behind binaries, such as speech/writing, nature/culture, male/female, black/white, literature/criticism, etc., which have continued to shape our worldview, where a hegemonic centre is always already in place dominating or marginalising the ‘other’. A significant contribution to literary theory, this book explores not only the status of Derrida’s contribution as a critical thinker but also the status of critical theory as such in the contemporary milieu. The central question that it asks is whether we should dismiss Derrida as a thinker who espoused an extreme form of relativism, bordering on nihilism, or has he something fundamental to contribute to the future of theory. Could it be that deconstruction is not destruction but a possibility that casts doubts on whether the present can have faith in future? This second edition includes a new Postscript and addresses some important concerns of our times, such as religious practice, art and aesthetics, translation, sociology of philosophy, and democracy. Scholars and researchers of English literature, philosophy, sociology and cultural studies will find this work particularly interesting.

Derrida: Profanations presents a re-appraisal of Jacques Derrida's deconstruction. If philosophy articulates what it means to be human, then deconstruction, which Patrick O'Connor argues consigns all existence to a mortal, profane and worldly life remains radically philosophical. The assertion demands an analysis of Derrida's radicalisation of the key philosophers who influenced him, as well as a rebuttal of theological accounts of deconstruction. This book closely examines how the phenomenological lineage is received in deconstruction, especially the relation between deconstruction and Derrida's radical readings of Hegel, Husserl, Levinas and Heidegger. This book presents a theorisation of deconstruction as profane, atheistic and egalitarian. It reveals how deconstruction holds the resources to think ontology as a multiplicity of worlds through demonstrates the ways in which Derrida expresses a 'phenomenology' which disjoints humans' orientation to the world. Deconstruction is characterized as radically hubristic. For deconstruction, nothing is sacred. If nothing sustains itself as separate, exclusive or sacrosanct, then nothing can sustain the implementation of its own hierarchy.