This brings together five pieces written by Jacques Derrida as extended lectures. The most important theme is Derrida's redefinition of speech acts and the 'event' as a particular kind of performative. The effects of globalization and mechanization, along with arising issues, provide a second constellation of themes. The first four essays involve a specific act of speech: the lie, the excuse, perjury and profession. The last two essays continue Derrida's powerful series of meditations on professional and institutional questions. The final (...) essay, 'Psychoanalysis Searches the States of Its Soul', confronts the task facing psychoanalysis today: coming to terms in new ways with worldwide cruelty and accommodating itself to the modern juridical concepts of crime against humanity. The phrase 'without alibi' (alibi, of course, being another speech act) is used throughout the essay as a leitmotif indicating that the responsibility psychoanalysis has to respond to globalization cannot be evaded. (shrink)

"When he died in 2004, Jacques Derrida left behind a vast legacy of unpublished material, much of it in the form of written lectures. With The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume I, the University of Chicago Press launches an ambitious series of English translations of these important works based upon the meticulously established original French editions." "In this seminar from 2001 and 2002, Derrida explores the persistent association of bestiality or animality with sovereignty and continues his deconstruction of the traditional (...) determinations of the human. The beast and the sovereign are connected, he contends, because neither animals nor kings are subject to the law - the sovereign stands above it, while the beast falls outside the law from below. He then traces this association through an astonishing array of texts, including La Fontaine's fable "The Wolf and the Lamb," Hobbes's biblical sea monster in Leviathan, D. H. Lawrence's poem "Snake," Machiavelli's Prince with its elaborate comparison of princes and foxes, a historical account of Louis XIV attending an elephant autopsy, and Rousseau's evocation of werewolves in The Social Contract." "Deleuze, Lacan, and Agamben also come into critical play as Derrida focuses in on questions of force, right, justice, and philosophical interpretations of the limits between man and animal." --Book Jacket. (shrink)

This essay explores Derrida's work on repetition in psychoanalysis and what Freud, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, called the ‘compulsion to repeat’. Revising the model of the psyche that had to that point dominated his theory, Freud began in 1920 to ascribe greater significance to experiences of trauma and unpleasure, and to their recurrence in the analytic treatment. This type of repeated repetition ultimately suggested to Freud the existence of a ‘death drive’ antithetical to life. I examine here how Derrida (...) re-reads Beyond in The Post Card, analysing the way uncontrollable effects of repetition repeatedly undo Freud's efforts to make any progress on what lies beyond the pleasure principle. Another ‘logic’ of repetition, other than the one Freud invokes, inhabits Freud's text, threatening the fundamental opposition between the life drives and the death drive. But in reading Freud in this way, Derrida himself cannot quite ‘do justice to’ Freud, to the ambivalence at work in Freud's text. At certain key moments in his reading of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, I show, Derrida seems to restrict an ambiguity in Freud's thinking around the relation between life and death. What Derrida's reading makes legible in part, then, is Derrida's resistance to psychoanalysis, the tension inhabiting Derrida's dealings with Freud in The Post Card and beyond. (shrink)

Taking as its point of departure several of Derrida's later works (from "Faith and Knowledge" and The Work of Mourning to Rogues and Learning to Live Finally), ...

However widely--and differently--Jacques Derrida may be viewed as a "foundational" French thinker, the most basic questions concerning his work still remain unanswered: Is Derrida a friend of reason, or philosophy, or rather the most radical of skeptics? Are language-related themes--writing, semiosis--his central concern, or does he really write about something else? And does his thought form a system of its own, or does it primarily consist of commentaries on individual texts? This book seeks to address these questions by returning to (...) what it claims is essential history: the development of Derrida's core thought through his engagement with Husserlian phenomenology. Joshua Kates recasts what has come to be known as the Derrida/Husserl debate, by approaching Derrida's thought historically, through its development. Based on this developmental work, Essential History culminates by offering discrete interpretations of Derrida's two book-length 1967 texts, interpretations that elucidate the until now largely opaque relation of Derrida's interest in language to his focus on philosophical concerns. A fundamental reinterpretation of Derrida's project and the works for which he is best known, Kates's study fashions a new manner of working with the French thinker that respects the radical singularity of his thought as well as the often different aims of those he reads. Such a view is in fact "essential" if Derrida studies are to remain a vital field of scholarly inquiry, and if the humanities, more generally, are to have access to a replenishing source of living theoretical concerns. (shrink)