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.

This book explores several canonical works of philosophy, psychoanalysis, and literature. The surprising juxtaposition of Kant's moral philosophy, Freud's reflections on obsessional neurosis, and Flaubert's peculiar late novel Bouvard et Pecuchet forms the basis of a compelling argument linking each of these central works around the problem of moral thought as it fundamentally determines the modern subject in relation to time. The book engages an area of emerging importance in contemporary critical thought, the problem of ethics or "otherness" as a crucial factor at play in speculative and literary works. The readings in this book provide insight into the ways in which three fundamental philosophical, psychoanalytic, and literary texts can be reread in light of their confrontation with a seemingly inhuman force at the heart of the foundation of the human subject.

This collection of essays and interviews, some previously unpublished and almost all of which appear in English for the first time, encompasses the political and ethical thinking of Jacques Derrida over thirty years. Passionate, rigorous, beautifully argued, wide-ranging, the texts shed an entirely new light on his work and will be welcomed by scholars in many disciplines--politics, philosophy, history, cultural studies, literature, and a range of interdisciplinary programs.
Derrida's arguments vary in their responsiveness to given political questions--sometimes they are vivid polemics on behalf of a position or figure, sometimes they are reflective analyses of a philosophical problem. They are united by the recurrent question of political decision or responsibility and the insistence that the apparent simplicity or programmatic character of political decision is in fact a profound avoidance of the political. This volume testifies to the possibility and the necessity of a philosophical politics.
"Negotiations" assembles some of the most telling examples of the intrinsic relationship, so often affirmed by Derrida in more abstract philosophical terms, between deconstructive reading practices and what is called the "political"--more precisely, politics in an almost down-to-earth, pragmatic, and commonsense use of the word. Among the many subjects covered in the book are: the death penalty in the United States, the civil war in Algeria, globalization and cosmopolitanism, the American Declaration of Independence, Jean-Paul Sartre, the value of objectivity, politics and friendship, and the relationship between deconstruction and actuality.

Philosophical aesthetics has seen an amazing revival over the past decade, as a radical questioning of the very grounds of Western epistemology has revealed that some antinomies of aesthetic experience-and in particular of the limits of the aesthetical-can be viewed as a general, yet necessarily open model for human understanding. In this revival, no text in the classical corpus of Western philosophy has been more frequently discussed than the complex paragraphs modestly inserted into Kant's Critique of Judgment as sections 23-29: the Analytic of the Sublime.This book is a rigorous explication de texte, a close reading of these sections. First, Lyotard reconstitutes, following the letter of Kant's analysis, the philosophical context of his critical writings and of the European Enlightenment. Second, because the analytic of the sublime reveals the inability of aesthetic experience to bridge the separate realms of theoretical and practical reason, Lyotard can connect his reconstitution of Kant's critical project with today's debates about the very conditions-and limits-of presentation in general.Lyotard enables us to see the sublime as a model for reflexive thinking generally via his concept of the "differend," which emphasizes the inevitability of conflicts and incompatibilities between different notions and "phrases." The Analytic of the Sublime, he points out, tries to argue that human thought is always constituted through a similar incompatibility between different intellectual and affective faculties. These lessons thus highlight the analysis of a "differend of feeling" in Kant's text, which is also the analysis of a "feeling of differend," and connect this feeling with the transport that leads all thought (critical thought included) to its limits.

Philosophical aesthetics has seen an amazing revival over the past decade, as a radical questioning of the very grounds of Western epistemology has revealed that some antinomies of aesthetic experience-and in particular of the limits of the aesthetical-can be viewed as a general, yet necessarily open model for human understanding. In this revival, no text in the classical corpus of Western philosophy has been more frequently discussed than the complex paragraphs modestly inserted into Kant's Critique of Judgment as sections 23-29: the Analytic of the Sublime. This book is a rigorous explication de texte, a close reading of these sections. First, Lyotard reconstitutes, following the letter of Kant's analysis, the philosophical context of his critical writings and of the European Enlightenment. Second, because the analytic of the sublime reveals the inability of aesthetic experience to bridge the separate realms of theoretical and practical reason, Lyotard can connect his reconstitution of Kant's critical project with today's debates about the very conditions-and limits-of presentation in general. Lyotard enables us to see the sublime as a model for reflexive thinking generally via his concept of the "differend," which emphasizes the inevitability of conflicts and incompatibilities between different notions and "phrases." The Analytic of the Sublime, he points out, tries to argue that human thought is always constituted through a similar incompatibility between different intellectual and affective faculties. These lessons thus highlight the analysis of a "differend of feeling" in Kant's text, which is also the analysis of a "feeling of differend," and connect this feeling with the transport that leads all thought (critical thought included) to its limits.

For the Love of Psychoanalysis is a book about what exceeds or resists calculation-in life and in death. Rottenberg examines what emerges from the difference between psychoanalysis and philosophy. Part I, "Freuderrida," announces a non-traditional Freud: a Freud associated not with sexuality, repression, unconsciousness, and symbolization, but with accidents and chance. Looking at accidents both in and of Freud's writing, Rottenberg elaborates the unexpected insights that both produce and disrupt our received ideas of psychoanalytic theory. Whether this disruption is figured as a foreign body, as traumatic temporality, as spatial unlocatability, or as the death drive, it points to something that is neither simply inside nor simply outside the psyche, neither psychically nor materially determined. Whereas the close reading of Freud leaves us open to the accidents of psychoanalytic writing, Part II, "Freuderrida," addresses itself to what transports us back and limits the openness of our horizon. Here the example par excellence is the death penalty and the cruelty of its calculating decision. If "Freuderrida" insists on the death penalty, if it returns to it compulsively, it is not only because its calculating drive is inseparable from the history of reason as philosophical reason; it is also because the death penalty provides us with one of the most spectacular and spectacularly obscene expressions of Freud's death drive. Written with rigor, elegance, and wit, this book will be essential reading for anyone interested in Freud, Derrida, and the many critical debates to which their thought gives rise.

For the past half century, Maurice Blanchot has been an extraordinarily influential figure on the French literary and cultural scene. He is arguably the key figure after Sartre in exploring the relation between literature and philosophy.
This collection of 29 critical essays and reviews on art, politics, literature, and philosophy documents the wide range of Blanchot's interests, from the enigmatic paintings in the Lascaux caves to the atomic era. Essays are devoted to works of fiction (Louis-Rene des Forets, Pierre Klossowski, Roger Laporte, Marguerite Duras), to autobiographies or testimonies (Michel Leiris, Robert Antelme, Andre Gorz, Franz Kafka), or to authors who are more than ever contemporary (Jean Paulhan, Albert Camus).
Several essays focus on questions of Judaism, as expressed in the works of Edmond Jabes, Emmanuel Levinas, and Martin Buber. Among the other topics covered are Andre Malraux's "imaginary museum," the Pleiade Encyclopedia project of Raymond Queneau, paperback publishing, the work of Claude Levi-Strauss, Benjamin's "Task of the Translator," Marx and communism, writings on the Holocaust, and the difference between art and writing. The book concludes with an eloquent invocation to friendship on the occasion of the death of Georges Bataille.

This book explores several canonical works of philosophy, psychoanalysis, and literature. The surprising juxtaposition of Kant's moral philosophy, Freud's reflections on obsessional neurosis, and Flaubert's peculiar late novel Bouvard et Pecuchet forms the basis of a compelling argument linking each of these central works around the problem of moral thought as it fundamentally determines the modern subject in relation to time. The book engages an area of emerging importance in contemporary critical thought, the problem of ethics or "otherness" as a crucial factor at play in speculative and literary works. The readings in this book provide insight into the ways in which three fundamental philosophical, psychoanalytic, and literary texts can be reread in light of their confrontation with a seemingly inhuman force at the heart of the foundation of the human subject.

This collection of essays and interviews, some previously unpublished and almost all of which appear in English for the first time, encompasses the political and ethical thinking of Jacques Derrida over thirty years. Passionate, rigorous, beautifully argued, wide-ranging, the texts shed an entirely new light on his work and will be welcomed by scholars in many disciplines--politics, philosophy, history, cultural studies, literature, and a range of interdisciplinary programs.
Derrida's arguments vary in their responsiveness to given political questions--sometimes they are vivid polemics on behalf of a position or figure, sometimes they are reflective analyses of a philosophical problem. They are united by the recurrent question of political decision or responsibility and the insistence that the apparent simplicity or programmatic character of political decision is in fact a profound avoidance of the political. This volume testifies to the possibility and the necessity of a philosophical politics.
"Negotiations" assembles some of the most telling examples of the intrinsic relationship, so often affirmed by Derrida in more abstract philosophical terms, between deconstructive reading practices and what is called the "political"--more precisely, politics in an almost down-to-earth, pragmatic, and commonsense use of the word. Among the many subjects covered in the book are: the death penalty in the United States, the civil war in Algeria, globalization and cosmopolitanism, the American Declaration of Independence, Jean-Paul Sartre, the value of objectivity, politics and friendship, and the relationship between deconstruction and actuality.

For the Love of Psychoanalysis is a book about what exceeds or resists calculation-in life and in death. Rottenberg examines what emerges from the difference between psychoanalysis and philosophy. Part I, "Freuderrida," announces a non-traditional Freud: a Freud associated not with sexuality, repression, unconsciousness, and symbolization, but with accidents and chance. Looking at accidents both in and of Freud's writing, Rottenberg elaborates the unexpected insights that both produce and disrupt our received ideas of psychoanalytic theory. Whether this disruption is figured as a foreign body, as traumatic temporality, as spatial unlocatability, or as the death drive, it points to something that is neither simply inside nor simply outside the psyche, neither psychically nor materially determined. Whereas the close reading of Freud leaves us open to the accidents of psychoanalytic writing, Part II, "Freuderrida," addresses itself to what transports us back and limits the openness of our horizon. Here the example par excellence is the death penalty and the cruelty of its calculating decision. If "Freuderrida" insists on the death penalty, if it returns to it compulsively, it is not only because its calculating drive is inseparable from the history of reason as philosophical reason; it is also because the death penalty provides us with one of the most spectacular and spectacularly obscene expressions of Freud's death drive. Written with rigor, elegance, and wit, this book will be essential reading for anyone interested in Freud, Derrida, and the many critical debates to which their thought gives rise.

In the first volume of his extraordinary analysis of the death penalty, Jacques Derrida began a journey toward an ambitious end: the first truly philosophical argument against the death penalty. Exploring an impressive breadth of thought, he traced a deeply entrenched logic throughout the whole of Western philosophy that has justified the state's right to take a life. He also marked literature as a crucial place where this logic has been most effectively challenged. In this second and final volume, Derrida builds on these analyses toward a definitive argument against capital punishment. Of central importance in this second volume is Kant's explicit justification of the death penalty in the Metaphysics of Morals. Thoroughly deconstructing Kant's position which holds the death penalty as exemplary of the eye-for-an-eye Talionic law Derrida exposes numerous damning contradictions and exceptions. Keeping the current death penalty in the United States in view, he further explores the "anesthesial logic" he analyzed in volume one, addressing the themes of cruelty and pain through texts by Robespierre and Freud, reading Heidegger, and in a fascinating, improvised final session the nineteenth-century Spanish Catholic thinker Donoso Cortes. Ultimately, Derrida shows that the rationality of the death penalty as represented by Kant involves an imposition of knowledge and calculability on a fundamental condition of non-knowledge that we don't otherwise know what or when our deaths will be. In this way, the death penalty acts out a phantasm of mastery over one's own death. Derrida's thoughts arrive at a particular moment in history: when the death penalty in the United States is the closest it has ever been to abolition, and yet when the arguments on all sides are as confused as ever. His powerful analysis will prove to be a paramount contribution to this debate as well as a lasting entry in his celebrated oeuvre.