Speech and Phenomena

Derrida, Jacques. Speech and Phenomena, and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs. Translated by David B. Allison. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973. Newer translation: Derrida, Jacques. Voice and Phenomenon: Introduction to the Problem of the Sign in Husserl’s Phenomenology. Translated by Leonard Lawlor. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2010.

In Speech and Phenomena (Allison translation) or Voice and Phenomenon (Lawlor translation), 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… More

Of Grammatology

Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: 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 debates in intellectual circles… More

Writing and Difference

Derrida, Jacques. Writing and Difference. Translated by 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 metaphysics… Scholars and… 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 even the weather into a… 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. The distinction between… 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 detractors, his supporters, and the two… 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 too on linguistics (Saussure,… 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 of reader and writer in the… 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 his writing more overtly than… 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 idea.

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 those texts.” —David Hoy,… 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 has Europe traditionally been… 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, resist circumscription. Together… 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 it was first published, a… 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 giving that which one does not… More

Points: Interviews 1974-1994

Jacques Derrida, Points...: Interviews, 1974–1994, ed. Elisabeth Weber, trans. Peggy Kamuf and others (Stanford, CA: 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 identity, the media, AIDS,… 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 invention of a radically new… 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 technologies of inscription… 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 providing insight into 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 University, constitute an endeavor to… 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 significance of the most destructive… 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 state,” and it is this… 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, murder, execution, or… 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 political activities. But, as… 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 Geoffrey Bennington and Peggy Kamuf,… 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 would give before his death,… More

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 death penalty, Derrida contends… More