An exile to France from Algeria, where he was born in 1930, Jacques Derrida studied at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, then went on to teach philosophy there before becoming Director of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. Over the years, he held teaching posts in both France and the United States, lectured in universities around the world, authored and co-authored some seventy books, and published numerous essays and interviews. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential thinkers of the Twentieth Century, and not the least for the ways in which his work shaped and continues to challenge the academic study of religion. This book introduces readers to Derrida's life and work. The volume offers an overview of Derrida's writing from the 1960s to his death in 2004, considering prominent terms, some of the central issues of his work, and the philosophical and religious figures his writing engages. Included in the volume is a discussion of Derrida's significance for contemporary academic work and for the study of religion in particular. A reading list and review of the secondary literature on Derrida is also provided.

During the 1975–76 academic year, Jacques Derrida delivered a seminar, La vie la mort (Life Death), at the École normale supérieure, in Paris. Based on archival translations of this untapped but soon-to-be-published seminar, The Reproduction of Life Death offers an unprecedented study of Derrida’s engagement with molecular biology and genetics, particularly the work of the biologist François Jacob. Structured as an itinerary of “three rings,” each departing from and coming back to Nietzsche, Derrida’s seminar ties Jacob’s logocentric account of reproduction to the reproductive program of teaching that characterizes the academic institution, challenging this mode of teaching as auto-reproduction along with the concept of “academic freedom” on which it is based. McCance also brings Derrida’s critique of Jacob’s theory of auto-reproduction together with his reading of reproductivity, the tendency to repeat-reproduce, that is theorized and enacted in Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The book further shows how Derrida’s account of life death relates to his writings on autobiography and the signature and to such later concerns as the question of the animal. McCance brings extensive archival research together with a deep knowledge of Derrida’s work a background in genetics to offer a fascinating new account of an encounter between philosophy and the hard sciences that will be of interest to theorists in a wide range of disciplines concerned with the question of life.

An exile to France from Algeria, where he was born in 1930, Jacques Derrida studied at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, then went on to teach philosophy there before becoming Director of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. Over the years, he held teaching posts in both France and the United States, lectured in universities around the world, authored and co-authored some seventy books, and published numerous essays and interviews. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential thinkers of the Twentieth Century, and not the least for the ways in which his work shaped and continues to challenge the academic study of religion. This book introduces readers to Derrida's life and work. The volume offers an overview of Derrida's writing from the 1960s to his death in 2004, considering prominent terms, some of the central issues of his work, and the philosophical and religious figures his writing engages. Included in the volume is a discussion of Derrida's significance for contemporary academic work and for the study of religion in particular. A reading list and review of the secondary literature on Derrida is also provided.

During the 1975-76 academic year, Jacques Derrida delivered a seminar, La vie la mort (Life Death), at the Ecole normale superieure, in Paris. Based on archival translations of this untapped but soon-to-be-published seminar, The Reproduction of Life Death offers an unprecedented study of Derrida's engagement with molecular biology and genetics, particularly the work of the biologist Francois Jacob. Structured as an itinerary of "three rings," each departing from and coming back to Nietzsche, Derrida's seminar ties Jacob's logocentric account of reproduction to the reproductive program of teaching that characterizes the academic institution, challenging this mode of teaching as auto-reproduction along with the concept of "academic freedom" on which it is based. McCance also brings Derrida's critique of Jacob's theory of auto-reproduction together with his reading of reproductivity, the tendency to repeat-reproduce, that is theorized and enacted in Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The book further shows how Derrida's account of life death relates to his writings on autobiography and the signature and to such later concerns as the question of the animal. McCance brings extensive archival research together with a deep knowledge of Derrida's work a background in genetics to offer a fascinating new account of an encounter between philosophy and the hard sciences that will be of interest to theorists in a wide range of disciplines concerned with the question of life.

Having roots as a specialized philosophical movement at Oxford University in the early 1970s, critical animal studies is now taking shape as a wide-open, multidisciplinary endeavor through which scholars across the humanities, sciences, and social sciences, and others ranging from creative writers to architects, are joining together to address issues related to today s unprecedented subjection of animals. Introducing this emerging field, Dawne McCance describes the wide range of analysis and approaches represented, looking at much-debated practices such as industrialized or factory farming of animals, handling and slaughter, animal experimentation, wildlife management, animal captivity, global genomics, meat-eating, and animal sacrifice. McCance equally focuses on many of the theoretical and ethical problems that recur across the field, raising critical questions about prevailing approaches to animal ethics, and inviting new ways of thinking about and responding to animals."

In traditional mythology and iconography, Medusa's killing powers are attributed to visual means: the monster is slain for her looks and her effect is to kill men for looking at her. Challenging the familiar account of the modern era as ocularcentric, this book reads the Medusa-effect on the philosophy of the modern research university as rooted in an audiocentric fantasy. Author Dawne McCance links phonocentrism to an aural imaginary by tracking the trope--and terror--of the deaf ear and mute mouth in the discourse on the university that was inaugurated by Kant and that extends through Hegel and Heidegger to the present. She shows how, repeatedly, in founding texts on the modern research university, the philosopher's fearful recoil from an animal-female figure that he defines as deaf and dumb has the effect--the Medusa-effect--of cutting off his own, and therefore the institution's, ear and tongue. McCance also considers some recent efforts to shake the modern institution out of its Medusa-effect petrification.