Books
The Death Penalty
– The Death Penalty, Volume I, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).In this newest installment in Chicago’s series of Jacques Derrida’s seminars, the renowned philosopher attempts one of his most ambitious goals: the first truly philosophical argument against the death penalty. While much has been written against the… More
The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume II
– The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume II, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).Following on from The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume I, this book extends Jacques Derrida’s exploration of the connections between animality and sovereignty. In this second year of the seminar, originally presented in 2002–2003 as the last course he… More
The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume I
– The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume I, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).When he died in 2004, Jacques Derrida left behind a vast legacy of unpublished material, much of it in the form of written lectures.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 inaugurates an ambitious series, edited by… More
Learning to Live Finally
– Learning to Live Finally, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, (Hoboken, NJ: Melville House Publishing, 2007).…[The] Derrida found in this book is open and engaging, reflecting on a long career challenging important tenets of European philosophy from Plato to Marx. The contemporary meaning of Derrida’s work is also examined, including a discussion of his many… More
The Gift of Death and Literature in Secret
– The Gift of Death and Literature in Secret, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).The Gift of Death, Jacques Derrida’s most sustained consideration of religion, explores questions first introduced in his book Given Time about the limits of the rational and responsible that one reaches in granting or accepting death, whether by sacrifice,… More
Rogues: Two Essays on Reason
– Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005).Rogues, published in France under the title Voyous, comprises two major lectures that Derrida delivered in 2002 investigating the foundations of the sovereignty of the nation-state. The term “État voyou” is the French equivalent of “rogue… More
Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues With Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida
– Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues With Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, ed. Giovanna Borradori (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003)The idea for Philosophy in a Time of Terror was born hours after the attacks on 9/11 and was realized just weeks later when Giovanna Borradori sat down with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida in New York City, in separate interviews, to evaluate the… More
Acts of Religion
– Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (London: Routledge, 2002).This collection of Derrida’s essays is entitled Acts of Religion, not “thoughts,” “essays,” or “writings” on religion. It is an appropriate title. These works, selected from Derrida’s oeuvre from 1980 to 2001 by Gil Anidjar of Columbia… More
Who’s Afraid of Philosophy?: Right to Philosophy I
– Who’s Afraid of Philosophy?: Right to Philosophy I trans. Jan Plug (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002).This volume reflects Jacques Derrida’s engagement in the late 1970s with French political debates on the teaching of philosophy and the reform of the French university system… While addressing specific contemporary political issues on occasion, thus… More
Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression
– Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).In Archive Fever, Jacques Derrida deftly guides us through an extended meditation on remembrance, religion, time, and technology — fruitfully occasioned by a deconstructive analysis of the notion of archiving. Intrigued by the evocative relationship between… More
Politics of Friendship
– Politics of Friendship trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 1997).“O, my friends, there is no friend.” The most influential of contemporary philosophers explores the idea of friendship and its political consequences, past and future… The future of the political, for Derrida, becomes the future of friends, the… More
Points: Interviews 1974-1994
– Points: Interviews 1974-1994 ed. Elisabeth Weber (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995).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… More
On the Name
– On the Name, trans. David Wood (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995).“The name: What does one call thus? What does one understand under the name of name? And what occurs when one gives a name? What does one give then? One does not offer a thing, one delivers nothing, and still something comes to be, which comes down to… More
Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International
– Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge, 1994).In 1993, a conference was organized around the question, ‘Whither Marxism?’, and Derrida was invited to open the proceedings. His plenary address, ‘Specters of Marx’, delivered in two parts, forms the basis of this book. Hotly debated when… More
Jacques Derrida (with Geoffrey Bennington)
– (with Geoffrey Bennington) Jacques Derrida trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).Geoffrey Bennington sets out here to write a systematic account of the thought of Jacques Derrida. Responding to Bennington’s text at every turn are Derrida’s own excerpts from his life and thought that, appearing at the bottom of each page,… More
The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe
– The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe, trans. Pascale-Ann Brault and Michael B. Naas (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1991).Prompted by the unification of Europe in 1992 and by recent events in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, Jacques Derrida begins this compelling essay on contemporary world politics with the issue of European identity. What, he asks, is Europe? How… More
Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question
– Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).“Derrida’s ruminations should intrigue anyone interested in Post-Structuralism… This study of Heidegger is a fine example of how Derrida can make readers of philosophical texts notice difficult problems in almost imperceptible details of… More
Limited Inc.
– Limited Inc., trans. Jeffrey Mehlman and Samuel Weber (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988).The book’s two essays, “Limited Inc.” and “Signature Event Context” constitute key statements of the Derridean theory of deconstruction. They are perhaps the clearest exposition to be found of Derrida’s most controversial… More
The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond
– The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987).“With The Post Card, as with Glas, Derrida appears more as writer than as philosopher. Or we could say that here, in what is in part a mock epistolary novel (the long section is called “Envois,” roughly, “dispatches” ), he stages… More
Glas
– Glas, trans. John P. Leavey Jr. and Richard Rand (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986).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… More
Margins of Philosophy
– Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).“In this densely imbricated volume Derrida pursues his devoted, relentless dismantling of the philosophical tradition, the tradition of Plato, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger — each dealt with in one or more of the essays. There are essays… More
Positions
– Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).Positions is a collection of three interviews with Jacques Derrida that illuminate and make more accessible the complex concepts and terms treated extensively in such works as Writing and Difference and Dissemination. Derrida takes positions on his… More
Dissemination
– Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).“The English version of Dissemination [is] an able translation by Barbara Johnson . . . . Derrida’s central contention is that language is haunted by dispersal, absence, loss, the risk of unmeaning, a risk which is starkly embodied in all writing.… More
Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles/Eperons: Les styles de Nietsche
– Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles/Eperons: Les styles de Nietzsche, trans. Barbara Harlow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979).Nietzsche has recently enjoyed much scrutiny from the nouveaux critiques. Jacques Derrida, the leader of that movement, here combines in his strikingly original and incisive fashion questions of sexuality, politics, writing, judgment, procreation, death, and… More
Writing and Difference
– Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).First published in 1967, Writing and Difference, a collection of Jacques Derrida’s essays written between 1959 and 1966, has become a landmark of contemporary French thought. In it we find Derrida at work on his systematic deconstruction of Western… More
Of Grammatology
– Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, MD and London, UK: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976).Jacques Derrida’s revolutionary theories about deconstruction, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and structuralism, first voiced in the 1960s, forever changed the face of European and American criticism. The ideas in De la grammatologie sparked lively… More
Speech and Phenomena
– Speech and Phenomena, and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973).In Speech and Phenomena, Jacques Derrida situates the philosophy of language in relation to logic and rhetoric, which have often been seen as irreconcilable criteria for the use and interpretations of signs. His critique of Husserl attacks the position that… More