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.

This volume is a collection of twenty-three interviews given over the last two decades. It illustrates the extraordinary breadth of Derrida's 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 interviews on Heidegger, on drugs, or on the nature of poetry, these interviews offer something available nowhere else in his work. The informality (...) of the interview process frequently leads to the most succinct and lucid explications of many of the most important and influential aspects of Derrida's thought. Sixteen of the interviews appear in English for the first time, including an interview conducted especially for this volume, concerning the recent exchange of letters in the New York Review of Books. (shrink)

I have recently completed a work entitled The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific.1 In it I present an alternative view of the events leading to the apotheosis of James Cook by the Hawaiians in 1779 when he first landed there, in effect making the case that the supposed deification of the white civilizer is a Western myth model foisted on the Hawaiians and having a long run in European culture and consciousness. As a result of reading (...) the extensive logs and journals of Cook’s voyages, I have become interested in the manner in which “cannibalism” got defined in these voyages. My reading of these texts suggests that statements about cannibalism reveal more about the relations between Europeans and Savages during early and late contact than, as ethnographic statements, about the nature of Savage anthropophagy.1. See Gananath Obeyesekere, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific . Gananath Obeyesekere teaches anthropology at Princeton University. He is the author of The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific. (shrink)