In this brilliant essay, Jacques Derrida explores issues of vision, blindness, self-representation, and their relation to drawing, while offering detailed readings of an extraordinary collection of images. Selected by Derrida from the prints and drawings department of the Louvre, the works depict blindness--fictional, historical, and biblical. From Old and New Testament scenes to the myth of Perseus and the Gorgon and the blinding of Polyphemus, Derrida uncovers in these images rich, provocative layers of interpretation. For Derrida drawing is itself blind; as an act rooted in memory and anticipation, drawing necessarily replaces one kind of seeing (direct) with another (mediated). Ultimately, he explains, the very lines which compose any drawing are themselves never fully visible to the viewer since they exist only in a tenuous state of multiple identities: as marks on a page, as indicators of a contour. Lacking a "pure" identity, the lines of a drawing summon the supplement of the word, of verbal discourse, and, in doing so, obscure the visual experience. Consequently, Derrida demonstrates, the very act of depicting a blind person undertakes multiple enactments and statements of blindness and sight. "Memoirs of the Blind" is both a sophisticated philosophical argument and a series of detailed readings. Derrida provides compelling insights into famous and lesser known works, interweaving analyses of texts--including Diderot's "Lettres sur les aveugles," the notion of mnemonic art in Baudelaire's "The Painter of Modern Life," and Merleau-Ponty's "The Visible and the Invisible." Along with engaging meditations on the history and philosophy of art, Derrida reveals the waysviewers approach philosophical ideas through art, and the ways art enriches philosophical reflection. An exploration of sight, representation, and art, "Memoirs of the Blind" extends and deepens the meditation on vision and painting presented in "Truth and Painting." Readers of Derrida, both new and familiar, will profit from this powerful contribution to the study of the visual arts.

"I have but one language--yet that language is not mine." This book intertwines theoretical reflection with historical and cultural particularity to enunciate, then analyze this conundrum in terms of the author's own relationship to the French language. The book operates on three levels. At the first level, a theoretical inquiry investigates the relation between individuals and their "own" language. It also explores the structural limits, desires, and interdictions inherent in such "possession," as well as the corporeal aspect of language (its accents, tones, and rhythms) and the question of the "countability" of languages (that is, their discreteness or factual givenness). At the second level, the author testifies to aspects of his acculturation as an Algerian Jew with respect to language acquisition, schooling, citizenship, and the dynamics of cultural-political exclusion and inclusion. At the third level, the book is comparative, drawing on statements from a wide range of figures, from the Moroccan Abdelkebir Khatibi to Franz Rosenzweig, Gershom Scholem, Hannah Arendt, and Emmanuel Levinas. Since one of the book's central themes is the question of linguistic and cultural identity, its argument touches on several issues relevant to the current debates on multiculturalism. These issues include the implementation of colonialism in the schools, the tacit or explicit censorship that excludes other (indigenous) languages from serious critical consideration, the investment in an ideal of linguistic purity, and the problematics of translation. The author also reveals the complex interplay of psychological factors that invests the subject of identity with the desire to recover a "lost" language of origin and with the ambition to master the language of the colonizer.

These two lectures by Jacques Derrida, "Foreigner Question" and "Step of Hospitality/No Hospitality," derive from a series of seminars on "hospitality" conducted by Derrida in Paris, January 1996. His seminars, in France and in America, have become something of an institution over the years, the place where he presents the ongoing evolution of his thought in a remarkable combination of thoroughly mapped-out positions, sketches of new material, and exchanges with students and interlocutors. As has become a pattern in Derrida's recent work, the form of this presentation is a self-conscious enactment of its content. The book consists of two texts on facing pages. "Invitation" by Anne Dufourmantelle appears on the left (an invitation that of course originates in a response), clarifying and inflecting Derrida's "response" on the right. The interaction between them not only enacts the "hospitality" under discussion, but preserves something of the rhythms of teaching. The volume also characteristically combines careful readings of canonical texts and philosophical topics with attention to the most salient events in the contemporary world, using "hospitality" as a means of rethinking a range of political and ethical situations. "Hospitality" is viewed as a question of what arrives at the borders, in the initial surprise of contact with an other, a stranger, a foreigner. For example, Antigone is revisited in light of the question of impossible mourning; "Oedipus at Colonus" is read via concerns that also apply to teletechnology; the trial of Socrates is brought into conjunction with the televised funeral of Francois Mitterrand.

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 that included students of literature, philosophy, and the humanities, inspiring these students to ask questions of their disciplines that had previously been considered improper. Thirty years later, the immense influence of Derrida's work is still igniting controversy, thanks in part to Gayatri Spivak's translation, which captures the richness and complexity of the original. This corrected edition adds a new index of the critics and philosophers cited in the text and makes one of contemporary criticism's most indispensable works even more accessible and usable.

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. The book's first half, which includes the celebrated essay on Descartes and Foucault, shows the development of Derrida's method of deconstruction. In these essays, Derrida demonstrates the traditional nature of some purportely nontraditional currents of modern thought - one of his main targets being the way in which "structuralism" unwittingly repeats metaphysical concepts in its use of linguistic modes.

Is "giving" possible? Is it possible to give without immediately entering into a circle of exchange that turns the gift into a debt to be returned? This question leads Jacques Derrida to make out an irresolvable paradox at what seems the most fundamental level of the gift's meaning: for the gift to be received as a gift, it must not appear as such, since its mere appearance as gift puts it in the cycle of repayment and debt. Derrida reads the relation of time to gift through a number of texts: Heidegger's "Time and Being, " Mauss's "The Gift, " as well as essays by Benveniste and Levi-Strauss that assume Mauss's legacy. It is, however, a short tale by Baudelaire, "Counterfeit Money, " that guides Derrida's analyses throughout. At stake in his reading of the tale, to which the second half of this book is devoted, are the conditions of gift and forgiveness as essentially bound up with the movement of dissemination, a concept that Derrida has been working out for many years. For both readers of Baudelaire and students of literary theory, this work will prove indispensable.

Written in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall and within the context of a critique of a "new world order" that proclaims the death of Marx and Marxism, Jacques Derrida undertakes a reading of Marx's "spectropoetics" -- his obsession with ghosts, specters and spirits. Derrida argues that there is more than one spirit of Marx and that it is the responsibility of his heirs -- we are all heirs of Marx -- to sift through the possible legacies, the possible spirits, reaffirming one and not the other. He leads beyond the deafening disavowal of Marx today, a disavowal he sees as an attempt to exorcise Marx's ghost.
Specters of Marx represents renowned philosopher Jacques Derrida's first major work on Marx and his definitive entry into social and political philosophy.

雅克•德里达被称为“解构主义大师”，于2004年去世，他的离世被法国媒体视为自1980年让•保罗•萨特逝世以来法国学术界最大的损失。本书是他最后一本重要的政治哲学著作。在书中，他论及“9•11”后世界正面临的新的政治前景，以及全球化进程下正在到来的世界未来民主。 本书从评述来自美国政要、哈佛大学著名政治学家、教授和主导媒体对于“无赖国家”一词的话语分析出发，深入探讨了民族国家之外的新主权问题。它既讨论了西方民主的自我期许的失落，其未来政治民主的虚空，也批判了伊斯兰文化政治的局限及其面对正在到来的世界民主时的消极态度。 作者从亚里士多德政治学中的数字平等和比例民主原则出发，展望正在到来的世界民主的前景，把西方、第三世界和作为各种顽固的他者，比如恐怖主义者和美国强权，放进一个非常开阔的政治视野内来透视，这或许是当今最深邃的一种政治哲学眼光。正是这一独特而深刻的角度，使得本书成为了一本不可忽略的政治哲学著作。

This volume records a remarkable encounter in critical and philosophical thinking: a meeting of two of the great pioneers in contemporary thought, Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida, who are also bound together by friendship and a complex relation to their own pasts. More than a literary text with critical commentary, it constitutes an event of central significance for contemporary philosophical, literary, and political concerns.
The book consists of The Instant of My Death, a powerful short prose piece by Blanchot, and an extended essay by Derrida that reads it in the context of questions of literature and of bearing witness. Blanchot’s narrative concerns a moment when a young man is brought before a firing squad during World War II and then suddenly finds himself released from his near death. The incident, written in the third person, is suggestively autobiographical—from the title, several remarks in the text, and a letter Blanchot wrote about a similar incident in his own life—but only insofar as it raises questions for Blanchot about what such an experience might mean. The accident of near death becomes, in the instant the man is released, the accident of a life he no longer possesses. The text raises the question of what it means to write about a (non)experience one cannot claim as one’s own, and as such is a text of testimony or witness.
Derrida’s reading of Blanchot links the problem of testimony to the problem of the secret and to the notion of the instant. It thereby provides the elements of a more expansive reassessment of literature, testimony, and truth. In addressing the complex relation between writing and history, Derrida also implicitly reflects on questions concerning the relation between European intellectuals and World War II.

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 and psychic processes, Derrida offers for the first time a major statement on the pervasive impact of electronic media, particularly e-mail, which threaten to transform the entire public and private space of humanity. Plying this rich material with characteristic virtuosity, Derrida constructs a synergistic reading of archives and archiving, both provocative and compelling.

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, judgement, procreation, death, and even the weather into a far-reaching analysis of the challenges bequeathed to the modern world by Nietzsche.

"The English version of "Dissemination" [is] an able translation by Barbara Johnson...Derrida's central contention is that languge is haunted by dispersal, absence, loss, the risk of unmeaning, a risk which is starkly embodied in all writing. The distinction between philosophy and literature therefore becomes of secondary importance. Philosphy vainly attempts to control the irrecoverable dissemination of its own meaning, it strives - against the grain of language - to offer a sober revelation of truth. Literature - on the other hand - flaunts it own meretriciousness, abandons itself to the Dionysiac play of language. In "Dissemination" - more than in any previous work - Derrida joins in the revelry, weaving a complex pattern of puns, verbal echoes allusions, intended to 'deconstruct' both the pretense of criticsm to tell the truth about literature, and the pretension of philosophy to be the litearature of truth". - Peter Dews, "New Statesman"

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 that Western philosophy is massively, if not always obviously, complicit with a logic in which a sovereign state has the right to take a life. Haunted by this notion, he turns to the key places where such logic has been established - and to the place it has been most effectively challenged: literature. With his signature genius and patient yet dazzling readings of an impressive breadth of texts, Derrida examines everything from the Bible to Plato to Camus to Jean Genet, with special attention to Kant and post-World War II juridical texts, to draw the landscape of death penalty discourses. Keeping clearly in view the death rows and execution chambers of the United States, he shows how arguments surrounding cruel and unusual punishment depend on what he calls an "anaesthesial logic," which has also driven the development of death penalty technology from the French guillotine to lethal injection. Confronting a demand for philosophical rigor, he pursues provocative analyses of the shortcomings of abolitionist discourse. Above all, he argues that the death penalty and its attendant technologies are products of a desire to put an end to one of the most fundamental qualities of our finite existence: the radical uncertainty of when we will die. Arriving at a critical juncture in history - especially in the United States, one of the last Christian-inspired democracies to resist abolition - The Death Penalty is both a timely response to an important ethical debate and a timeless addition to Derrida's esteemed body of work.

Présentation de l'éditeur
Voici le premier ouvrage de Jacques Derrida. Alors étudiant de philosophie à l'Ecole normale supérieure, en 1953-54, il proposa une lecture de l'œuvre de Husserl en y suivant, comme un fil directeur, le thème de la genèse. Il s'agissait alors d'analyser les difficultés et les remaniements provoqués dans la pensée du fondateur de la phénoménologie par la prise en compte du temps, du devenir et de l'histoire, tant dans la constitution du sujet transcendantal que pour la production intentionnelle du sens de ses objets, notamment des objets scientifiques. Le passage de la constitution statique à la constitution génétique de l'ego fut certes programmé et assumé par Husserl : ce n'en était pas moins une nécessité périlleuse pour le projet phénoménologique lui-même.
Cette interprétation systématique ne tente jamais de réduire une tension, voire une certaine hétérogénéité à l'intérieur du discours phénoménologique. Elle permet aussi de reconstituer quelques traits du champ philosophique, voire philosophico-politique français dans lequel Jacques Derrida élabore ses premiers travaux. Tout en donnant un aperçu sur l'état de la pensée phénoménologique à cette époque (Levinas, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Ricœur, Tran-Duc-Thao) et sur les influences qu'elle exerce ou subit alors, cet ouvrage annonce aussi la problématique et le style des questions " déconstructrices " que Derrida développera dans de nombreux ouvrages entre 1962 et 1990.
Deux d'entre eux furent consacrés à Husserl et publiés dans la même collection : Introduction à L'origine de la géométrie, 1962 (3e éd. 1990), et La voix et le phénomène, 1967 (5e éd. 1989). Ils constituent avec ce volume un ensemble indissociable.