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93HandshakeDerrida Today 1 (2): 167-184. 2008.How might Derrida be said to greet Jean-Luc Nancy in Le Toucher? What kind of handshake does he offer? Derrida explicitly mentions the handshake at the very centre of his book, in the tangent devoted to Merleau-Ponty. A reading of this moment reveals an exemplary case of what happens when Derrida reads apparently ‘fraternal’ texts, and opens up further levels of difference. What then if we consider Nancy's response to Derrida, when the recipient of the handshake shakes back? By examining Nancy's…Read more
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84The Fall of SovereigntyEpoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy 10 (2): 395-406. 2006.Reflecting on the fall or failure of sovereignty, this essay considers Derrida’s recent work under the heading of auto-immunity, and develops some consequences of that work, first of all in the political sphere (especially around democracy), but also some more general consequences around conceptuality itself.
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79Interrupting DerridaRoutledge. 2000.One of the most significant contemporary thinkers in continental philosophy, Jacques Derrida’s work continues to attract heated commentary among philosophers, literary critics, social and cultural theorists, architects and artists. This major new work by world renowned Derrida scholar and translator, Geoffrey Bennington, presents incisive new readings of both Derrida and interpretations of his work. Part one sets out Derrida’s work as a whole and examines its relevance to, and ‘interruption’ of,…Read more
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70Jacques Derrida: Geoffrey Bennington y Jacques Derrida (edited book)University of Chicago Press. 1993.This extraordinary book offers a clear and compelling biography of Jacques Derrida along with one of Derrida's strangest and most unexpected texts. Geoffrey Bennington's account of Derrida leads the reader through the philosopher's familiar yet widely misunderstood work on language and writing to the less familiar themes of signature, sexual difference, law, and affirmation. In an unusual and unprecedented "dialogue," Derrida responds to Bennington's text by interweaving Bennington's text with s…Read more
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69Beastly SovereigntyEnvironmental Philosophy 16 (1): 13-33. 2019.This article examines three textual moments that might plausibly have found their way into Derrida’s late Beast and Sovereign seminars, but that Derrida appears to avoid or overlook. Aristotle’s discussion in the Politics of the “One Best Man” scenario is placed in the context of his earlier characterizations of the naturally apolitical man as akin either to a beast or to a god; Bataille’s late descriptions of sovereignty as a kind of self-perverting hyperbolic structure are juxtaposed with some…Read more
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68Post-structuralism and the question of history (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 1987.Recent developments in literary theory, such as structuralism and deconstruction, have come under attack for neglecting history, while historically-based approaches have been criticized for failing to take account of the problems inherent in their methodological foundations. This collection of essays is unique in that it focuses on the relation between post-structuralism and historical (especially Marxist) literary theory and criticism. The volume includes a deconstructive reading of Marx, essay…Read more
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68For Better and for Worse (There Again...)Diacritics 38 (1): 92-103. 2008.This article maps, across a wide range of works, the coordinates of Derrida's thinking of democracy and its relevance to a series of crucial concepts, from difference to autoimmunity. Distinguishing Derrida's idea of a “democracy to come” from the Kantian ideal, Bennington links it to Aristotle's insistence upon multiplicity and to a thinking of deviance and perversion, an appropriately deconstructive logic for thinking an absence of telos in democracy to come
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61Rigor; or, stupid uselessnessSouthern Journal of Philosophy 50 (s1): 20-38. 2012.In his seminars on the death penalty, Derrida consistently describes Kant's arguments in favor of capital punishment as “rigorous” and explicitly relates that rigor to the mechanisms of execution and the subsequent rigor mortis of the corpse. ‘Rigor’ has also often been a contested term in descriptions of deconstruction: different commentators have either deplored or celebrated the presence or the absence of rigor in Derrida's work. Derrida himself uses the term a good deal throughout his career…Read more
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52Derrida and politicsIn Tom Cohen (ed.), Jacques Derrida and the Humanities: A Critical Reader, Cambridge University Press. pp. 193--212. 2001.
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47Rephrasing the Freudian Unconscious: Lyotard's Affect-Phrase"Emma."Heidegger and "The Jews."The InhumanLectures D'Enfance (review)Diacritics 24 (1): 42. 1994.
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41Rethinking the Linguistic Turn: Current Anxieties in Intellectual HistoryRethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language.History and Criticism.Modern European Intellectual History: Reappraisals and New Perspectives.Post-Structuralism and the Question of History (review)Journal of the History of Ideas 49 (3): 519. 1988.
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33A Review of A ReviewRethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, LanguageHistory and CriticismModern European Intellectual History: Reappraisals and New PerspectivePost-Structuralism and the Question of HistoryThe Content of Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Respresentation (review)Journal of the History of Ideas 49 (4): 677. 1988.
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32Kant’s Open SecretTheory, Culture and Society 28 (7-8): 26-40. 2011.It is argued that Kant’s claimed reconciliation of politics and ethics in the Appendix to ‘Perpetual Peace’ founders on an irreducible element of secrecy that no amount of ‘publicity’ could ever dissipate. This shows up figuratively in images of veiling, and more especially in the paradoxical ‘very transparent veil’ associated with British politics in a footnote to ‘The Contest of Faculties’. This figure suggests that the structure of the ‘public’ itself involves a kind of transcendental secrecy…Read more
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31Geschlecht pollachos legetaiPhilosophy Today 64 (2): 423-439. 2020.At an important moment in his reading of Heidegger in Geschlecht III, Derrida wields a pair of semi-technical terms from his own earlier work, and uses them to identify a classical, indeed Aristotelian, vein in Heidegger’s reading of Trakl. This gesture is complex, both in that, in spite of appearances, the Mehrdeutigkeit Heidegger identifies in Trakl is not essentially to do with the term Geschlecht, and in that Derrida’s presentation of Aristotle’s views about polysemia is perhaps over-simplif…Read more
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30Circumcising Confession: Derrida, Autobiography, Judaism"Circumfession" (review)Diacritics 25 (4): 20. 1995.
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29Not YetThe Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic ActDiacritics 12 (3): 23. 1982.
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28TeleanalysisParagraph 36 (2): 270-285. 2013.The telephone is taken as a privileged figure for discussing the relationship between Cixous and Derrida, particularly as it figures in some of Cixous's late work, and especially Hyperdream. It is suggested that the telephonic relation essentially involves interruption as well connection, and that this structure leads to reformulations of issues such as possibility and impossibility, life and death.
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27Legislations: the politics of deconstructionVerso. 1994.Introduction Someone comes and says something. Without really needing to think, I understand what is said, refer it without difficulty to familiar codes, ...
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26Editorial NoteOxford Literary Review 43 (1). 2021.Oxford Literary Review, Volume 43, Issue 1, Page v-v, July, 2021.
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22Peut-être une politique.Cahiers Philosophiques 117 (1): 46-61. 2009.Le dernier Lyotard se détournerait de toute apparence du politique vers l’enfance et l’écriture. Et pourtant, nous essayons de montrer qu’à force d’approfondir la question du différend, du « différend même », de la phrase-affect et d’élaborer le rapport entre phonè et logos, Lyotard se retrouve encore et toujours à la racine du politique (chez Aristote, chez Hobbes), là où zoon politikon et zoon echon logon nous posent encore des questions, là où se trouve l’origine du langage, au plus près de c…Read more
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21Metaphor and Analogy in DerridaIn Zeynep Direk & Leonard Lawlor (eds.), A Companion to Derrida, Wiley-blackwell. 2014.Derrida's earlier work has a good deal to say about the question of metaphor. Very strikingly in view of Derrida's later thematic interest in the question of animality, metaphor is also presented in a piece on Edmond Jabès as an “animality of the letter,” as “the primary and infinite equivocality of the signifier as Life”. “White Mythology” argues for a certain irreducibility of “metaphor in the text of philosophy”. The trajectory of Derrida's thought here is especially difficult to capture, but…Read more
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Emory UniversityRegular Faculty
Druid Hills, Georgia, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
History of Western Philosophy |
Arts and Humanities |