Derrida, Literature and War: Absence and the Chance of Meeting
This is a fascinating examination of the relation between absence and chance in Derrida's work and through that a re-examination of the relation between war and literature. "Derrida, Literature and War" argues for the importance of the relation between absence and chance in Derrida's work in thinking today about war and literature. Sean Gaston starts by marking Derrida's attempts to resist the philosophical tradition of calculating on absence as an assured resource, while insisting on the (mis)chances of the chance encounter. Gaston re-examines the relation between the concept of war and the chances of literature by focusing on narratives of conflict set during the Napoleonic wars.
Who's Afraid of Philosophy?: Right to Philosophy 1This book is of extraordinary importance. It collects one of the most important and underappreciated aspects of Derrida’s work - his investigations into the institutions of philosophical research and teaching - in a definitive and comprehensive volume. These essays are crucial to an understanding of Derrida, and their publication in English is a milestone.
Derrida has had a profound influence on the way texts are read. Deconstruction has become a Sphinx-like feature of the modern critical landscape. The contributors to this volume have endeavoured to take a critical view of Derrida's oeuvre. The contributors include: Jean-Luc Nancy, Manfred Frank, John Sallis, Robert Bernasconi, Irene Harvey, Michael Haar, Christopher Norris, Geoff Bennington, John Llewelyn. David Wood has provided the introduction.
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.
Jacques Derrida is probably the most famous European philosopher alive today. The University of Nebraska Press makes available for the first English translation of his most important work to date, Glas. Its appearance will assist Derrida's readers pro and con in coming to terms with a complex and controversial book. Glas extensively reworks the problems of reading and writing in philosophy and literature; questions the possibility of linear reading and its consequent notions of theme, author, narrative, and discursive demonstration; and ingeniously disrupts the positions of reader and writer in the text. Glas is extraordinary in many ways, most obviously in its typography.
