Originally published in 1990, Virginia Woolf and the Madness of Language explores the relationship between madness and the disruption of linguistic and structural norms in Virginia Woolf's modernist novels, opening new ground in Woolfian studies, as well as in psychoanalytic criticism. Focusing on Mrs Dalloway, The Waves, To the Lighthouse and Between the Acts, it investigates narrative strategies, showing that Woolf's writings question their own origins and connection with madness and suicide. By combining textual analysis with an original use of autobiographical material, the books cause us to reconsider the full complexity of the articulation between an author's life and work.

Originally published in 1990, Virginia Woolf and the Madness of Language explores the relationship between madness and the disruption of linguistic and structural norms in Virginia Woolf's modernist novels, opening new ground in Woolfian studies, as well as in psychoanalytic criticism. Focusing on Mrs Dalloway, The Waves, To the Lighthouse and Between the Acts, it investigates narrative strategies, showing that Woolf's writings question their own origins and connection with madness and suicide. By combining textual analysis with an original use of autobiographical material, the books cause us to reconsider the full complexity of the articulation between an author's life and work.

Now in paperback, nine lectures from Jacques Derrida that challenge the influential Marxist distinction between thinking and acting. Theory and Practice is a series of nine lectures that Jacques Derrida delivered at the École Normale Supérieure in 1976 and 1977. The topic of “theory and practice� was associated above all with Marxist discourse and particularly the influential interpretation of Marx by Louis Althusser. Derrida’s many questions to Althusser and other thinkers aim at unsettling the distinction between thinking and acting.   Derrida’s investigations set out from Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach,� in particular the eleventh thesis, which has often been taken as a mantra for the “end of philosophy,� to be brought about by Marxist practice. Derrida argues, however, that Althusser has no such end in view and that his discourse remains resolutely philosophical, even as it promotes the theory/practice pair as primary values. This seminar also draws fascinating connections between Marxist thought and Heidegger and features Derrida’s signature reconsideration of the dichotomy between doing and thinking. This text, available for the first time in English, shows that Derrida was doing important work on Marx long before Specters of Marx. As with the other volumes in this series, it gives readers an unparalleled glimpse into Derrida’s thinking at its best—spontaneous, unpredictable, and groundbreaking.

This book deconstructs the whole lineage of political philosophy, showing the ways democracy abuts and regularly undermines the sovereignist tradition across a range of texts from the Iliad to contemporary philosophy. Politics is an object of perennial difficulty for philosophy-as recalcitrant to philosophical mastery as is philosophy's traditional adversary, poetry. That difficulty makes it an attractive topic for any deconstructive approach to the tradition from which we inherit our language and our concepts. Scatter 2 pursues that deconstruction, often starting with, and sometimes departing from, the work of Jacques Derrida by attending to the concepts of sovereignty on the one hand and democracy on the other. The book begins by following the fate of a line from Homer's Iliad, where Odysseus asserts that "the rule of many is no good thing, let there be one ruler, one king." The line, Bennington shows, is quoted, misquoted, and progressively Christianized by Aristotle, Philo Judaeus, Suetonius, the early Church Fathers, Aquinas, Dante, Ockham, Marsilius of Padua, Jean Bodin, Etienne de la Boetie, up to Carl Schmitt and Erik Peterson, and even one of the defendants at the Nuremberg trials, before being discussed by Derrida himself. In the book's second half, Bennington begins again with Plato and Aristotle and tracks the concept of democracy as it regularly abuts and undermines that sovereignist tradition. In detailed readings of Hobbes and Rousseau, Bennington develops a notion of "proto-democracy" as a possible name for the scatter that underlies and drives the political as such and that will always prevent politics from achieving its aim of bringing itself to an end.

A new translation of Derrida’s groundbreaking juxtaposition of Hegel and Genet, forcing two incompatible discourses into dialogue with each other Jacques Derrida’s famously challenging book Glas puts the practice of philosophy and the very acts of writing and reading to the test. Formatted with parallel texts, its left column discusses G. W. F. Hegel and its right column engages Jean Genet, with numerous notes and interpolations in the margins. The resulting work, published for the first time in French in 1974, is a collage that practices theoretical thinking as a form of grafting. Presented here in an entirely new translation as Clang—its title resonating like the sound of an alarm or death knell—this book brilliantly juxtaposes Hegel’s totalizing, hierarchical system of thought with Genet’s autobiographical, carceral erotics. It innovatively forces two incompatible discourses into dialogue with each other: philosophical and literary, familial and perverse, logical and sensory. In both content and structure, Clang heightens the significance of all encounters across ruptures of thought or experience and vibrates with the impact of discordant languages colliding.  

Series Information:
Warwick Studies in European Philosophy

This book deconstructs the whole lineage of political philosophy, showing the ways democracy abuts and regularly undermines the sovereignist tradition across a range of texts from the Iliad to contemporary philosophy. Politics is an object of perennial difficulty for philosophy-as recalcitrant to philosophical mastery as is philosophy's traditional adversary, poetry. That difficulty makes it an attractive topic for any deconstructive approach to the tradition from which we inherit our language and our concepts. Scatter 2 pursues that deconstruction, often starting with, and sometimes departing from, the work of Jacques Derrida by attending to the concepts of sovereignty on the one hand and democracy on the other. The book begins by following the fate of a line from Homer's Iliad, where Odysseus asserts that "the rule of many is no good thing, let there be one ruler, one king." The line, Bennington shows, is quoted, misquoted, and progressively Christianized by Aristotle, Philo Judaeus, Suetonius, the early Church Fathers, Aquinas, Dante, Ockham, Marsilius of Padua, Jean Bodin, Etienne de la Boetie, up to Carl Schmitt and Erik Peterson, and even one of the defendants at the Nuremberg trials, before being discussed by Derrida himself. In the book's second half, Bennington begins again with Plato and Aristotle and tracks the concept of democracy as it regularly abuts and undermines that sovereignist tradition. In detailed readings of Hobbes and Rousseau, Bennington develops a notion of "proto-democracy" as a possible name for the scatter that underlies and drives the political as such and that will always prevent politics from achieving its aim of bringing itself to an end.

This extraordinary book offers a clear and compelling biography of Jacques Derrida along with one of Derrida's strangest and most unexpected texts. Geoffrey Bennington's account of Derrida leads the reader through the philosopher's familiar yet widely misunderstood work on language and writing to the less familiar themes of signature, sexual difference, law, and affirmation. In an unusual and unprecedented "dialogue," Derrida responds to Bennington's text by interweaving Bennington's text with surprising and disruptive "periphrases." Truly original, this dual and dueling text opens new dimensions in Derrida's thought and work.
"Bennington is a shrewd and well-informed commentator whose book should do something to convince the skeptics . . . that Jacques Derrida's work merits serious attention."--Christopher Norris, "New Statesman & Society"
"Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida have presented a fascinating example of what might be called post-structuralist autobiography."--Laurie Volpe, "French Review"
"Bennington's account of what Derrida is up to is better in almost all respects--more intelligent, more plausible, more readable, and less pretentious--than any other I have read."--Richard Rorty, "Contemporary Literature"

Few philosophers held greater fascination for Jacques Derrida than Martin Heidegger, and in this book we get an extended look at Derrida's first real encounters with him. Delivered over nine sessions in 1964 and 1965 at the cole Normale Sup rieure, these lectures offer a glimpse of the young Derrida first coming to terms with the German philosopher and his magnum opus, Being and Time. They provide not only crucial insight into the gestation of some of Derrida's primary conceptual concerns--indeed, it is here that he first uses, with some hesitation, the word "deconstruction"--but an analysis of Being and Time that is of extraordinary value to readers of Heidegger or anyone interested in modern philosophy. Derrida performs an almost surgical reading of the notoriously difficult text, marrying pedagogical clarity with patient rigor and acting as a lucid guide through the thickets of Heidegger's prose. At this time in intellectual history, Heidegger was still somewhat unfamiliar to French readers, and Being and Time had only been partially translated into French. Here Derrida mostly uses his own translations, giving his own reading of Heidegger that directly challenges the French existential reception initiated earlier by Sartre. He focuses especially on Heidegger's Destruktion (which Derrida would translate both into "solicitation" and "deconstruction") of the history of ontology, and indeed of ontology as such, concentrating on passages that call for a rethinking of the place of history in the question of being, and developing a radical account of the place of metaphoricity in Heidegger's thinking. This is a rare window onto Derrida's formative years, and in it we can already see the philosopher we've come to recognize--one characterized by a bravura of exegesis and an inventiveness of thought that are particularly and singularly his.

The Marrano Specter pursues the reciprocal influence between Jacques Derrida and Hispanism. On the one hand, Derrida's work has engendered a robust conversation among philosophers and critics in Spain and Latin America, where his work circulates in excellent translation, and where many of the terms and problems he addresses take on a distinctive meaning: nationalism and cosmopolitanism; spectrality and hauntology; the relation of subjectivity and truth; the university; disciplinarity; institutionality. Perhaps more remarkably, the influence is in a profound sense reciprocal: across his writings, Derrida grapples with the theme of marranismo, the phenomenon of Sephardic crypto-Judaism. Derrida's marranismo is a means of taking apart traditional accounts of identity; a way for Derrida to reflect on the status of the secret; a philosophical nexus where language, nationalism, and truth-telling meet and clash in productive ways; and a way of elaborating a critique of modern biopolitics. It is much more than a simple marker of his work's Hispanic identity, but it is also, and irreducibly, that. The essays collected in The Marrano Specter cut across the grain of traditional Hispanism, but also of the humanistic disciplines broadly conceived. Their vantage point-the theoretical, philosophically inflected critique of disciplinary practices-poses uncomfortable, often unfamiliar questions for both hispanophone studies and the broader theoretical humanities.

A significant event in Derrida scholarship, this book marks the first publication of his long-lost philosophical text known only as "Geschlecht III." The third, and arguably the most significant, piece in his four-part Geschlecht series, it fills a gap that has perplexed Derrida scholars. The series centers on Martin Heidegger and the enigmatic German word Geschlecht, which has several meanings pointing to race, sex, and lineage. Throughout the series, Derrida engages with Heidegger's controversial oeuvre to tease out topics of sexual difference, nationalism, race, and humanity. In Geschlecht III, he calls attention to Heidegger's problematic nationalism, his work's political and sexual themes, and his promise of salvation through the coming of the "One Geschlecht," a sentiment that Derrida found concerningly close to the racial ideology of the Nazi party. Amid new revelations about Heidegger's anti-Semitism and the contemporary context of nationalist resurgence, this third piece of the Geschlecht series is timelier and more necessary than ever. Meticulously edited and expertly translated, this volume brings Derrida's mysterious and much awaited text to light.

Frontier: the border between two countries; the limits of civilization; the bounds of established knowledge; a new field of activity. At a time when all borders, boundaries, margins, and limits are being—often violently—challenged, erased, or reinforced, we must rethink the concept of frontier itself. But is there even such a concept? Through an original and imaginative reading of Kant, Geoffrey Bennington casts doubt upon the conceptual coherence of borders. The frontier is the very element of Kant’s thought yet the permanent frustration of his conceptuality. Bennington brings out the frontier’s complex, abyssal, fractal structure that leaves a residue of violence in every frontier and complicates Kant’s most rational arguments in the direction of cosmopolitanism and perpetual peace. Neither a critique of Kant nor a return to Kant, this book proposes a new reflection on philosophical reading, for which thinking the frontier is both essential and a recurrent, fruitful, interruption.

A kind of sequel to my earlier monograph Lyotard: Writing the Event. That book attempted a general presentation of Lyotard's thought up to, and a little beyond, his 'book of philosophy' Le differend (1983), in a context where the English-speaking reception of Lyotard was dominated by discussion of 'post-modernism'. Since 1988, many more translations have appeared, but more importantly, Lyotard continued to produce a good deal of work up to his death in 1998. This work was in many ways surprising enough to make me reconsider some of the positions taken in Writing the Event, and the essays gathered here are all in different ways attempts to register that surprise and to record that reconsideration.

The four essays in this volume constitute Derrida's most explicit and sustained reflection on the art work as pictorial artifact, a reflection partly by way of philosophical aesthetics (Kant, Heidegger), partly by way of a commentary on art works and art scholarship (Van Gogh, Adami, Titus-Carmel). The illustrations are excellent, and the translators, who clearly see their work as both a rendering and a transformation, add yet another dimension to this richly layered composition. Indispensable to collections emphasizing art criticism and aesthetics. Alexander Gelley, Library Journal

Frontier: the border between two countries; the limits of civilization; the bounds of established knowledge; a new field of activity. At a time when all borders, boundaries, margins, and limits are being-often violently-challenged, erased, or reinforced, we must rethink the concept of frontier itself. But is there even such a concept? Through an original and imaginative reading of Kant, Geoffrey Bennington casts doubt upon the conceptual coherence of borders. The frontier is the very element of Kant's thought yet the permanent frustration of his conceptuality. Bennington brings out the frontier's complex, abyssal, fractal structure that leaves a residue of violence in every frontier and complicates Kant's most rational arguments in the direction of cosmopolitanism and perpetual peace. Neither a critique of Kant nor a return to Kant, this book proposes a new reflection on philosophical reading, for which thinking the frontier is both essential and a recurrent, fruitful, interruption.

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, Derrida focuses on two markedly different texts: Heidegger's 1929 1930 course The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, and Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. As he moves back and forth between the two works, Derrida pursuesthe relations between solitude, insularity, world, violence, boredom and death as they supposedly affect humans and animals in different ways. Hitherto unnoticed or underappreciated aspects of Robinson Crusoe are brought out in strikingly original readings of questions such as Crusoe's belief in ghosts, his learning to pray, his parrot Poll, and his reinvention of the wheel. Crusoe's terror of being buried alive or swallowed alive by beasts or cannibals gives rise to a rich and provocative reflection on death, burial, and cremation, in part provoked by a meditation on the death of Derrida's friend Maurice Blanchot. Throughout, these readings are juxtaposed with interpretations of Heidegger's concepts of world and finitude to produce a distinctively Derridean account that will continue to surprise his readers.

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 1," the University of Chicago Press inaugurates an ambitious series, edited by Geoffrey Bennington and Peggy Kamuf, translating these important works into English.

"The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume 1" launches the series with Derrida's exploration of the persistent association of bestiality or animality with sovereignty. In this seminar from 2001-2002, Derrida continues his deconstruction of the traditional determinations of the human. The beast and the sovereign are connected, he contends, because neither animals nor kings are subject to the law--the sovereign stands above it, while the beast falls outside the law from below. He then traces this association through an astonishing array of texts, including La Fontaine's fable "The Wolf and the Lamb," Hobbes's biblical sea monster in "Leviathan," D. H. Lawrence's poem "Snake," Machiavelli's "Prince" with its elaborate comparison of princes and foxes, a historical account of Louis XIV attending an elephant autopsy, and Rousseau's evocation of werewolves in "The Social Contract."

Deleuze, Lacan, and Agamben also come into critical play as Derrida focuses in on questions of force, right, justice, and philosophical interpretations of the limits between man and animal.

The 26 extant sessions of the 'Frontiers' seminar held at the University of Sussex, 1989-92

A conviction underlying all these 16 essays is that philosophy defines itself in part by a repression (or at least an avoidance) of the issue of reading. Reading, in the sense these pieces elaborate more or less obliquely, is an event that philosophy as such cannot quite register. Contrary to widespread misconceptions, this does not mean that these essays engage in a 'literary' approach to philosophical texts. They all in fact endeavour to present arguments, often of a recognisably philosophical kind, in favour of an essentially non-philosophical understanding of reading. Reading, in the sense I am concerned to elaborate, must be taking place before philosophy: the point would be to develop an understanding of that 'taking place' that would not be simply pre-philosophical.

A collection of occasional pieces and interviews, in English and French, on philosophy, literature, art, architecture and politics.

Lyotard has been associated primarily in the English-speaking world with the 'postmodern debate', but his work is of a breadth and importance beyond what this would suggest. This book, the first general introduction to Lyotard's work to appear in any language, presents the arguments which mark the crucial moments of a complex career, taking as its guiding thread Lyotard's preoccupation with the event (perhaps the major concern of recent French thought) through his reflections on desire, production, justice and language. Lyotard's fundamental drive to account for the event takes his work through phenomenology, psychoanalysis, politics and art to a general and ambitious 'philosophy of sentences' which bears comparision with the work of Jacques Derrida. The more obviously 'political' aspects of Lyotard's writing are discussed and situated as integral to Lyotard's view of philosophy as such.

A theoretical and deconstructive analysis of the function of maxims, generalizations and other law-like statements in eighteenth-century French writing.

The 15 essays gathered in this volume attempt to ask questions about reading, and more especially about the minimal preliminary gesture of opening a book in order to read. What makes reading possible and impossible, and how are that possibility and impossibility figured in the texts we read? The concern here is not with 'how to read', nor with the 'fate of reading', but with a much more modest, but perhaps also more nagging, question: what does reading demand if it is to be reading? What is reading, reading itself? One constant thread here is this: reading entails the unreadable. The unreadable, rather than the merely readable, is the 'object' of reading. And once what is read is the unreadable, then the supposed unit of the book must be opened, certainly, but must also remain open beyond any normal calculation of reading time or interpretative outcomes. The open book is just what cannot be read like an open book, is not entirely open, cannot ever quite be read.

Written by Jacques Derrida's leading English-language translator and collaborator, this invigorating and intelligent volume displays the continuing power and versatility of deconstruction, presenting it as the most important intellectual movement of our time. Geoffrey Bennington develops a devastating critique of many attempts to clarify or criticize deconstructive thought, and elaborates its potential through original readings of, amongst others, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Freud, De Man and Lyotard. While he is principally concerned with a defence of deconstruction in fields where it has long since demonstrated its critical prowess, Bennington also emphasizes its political dimension. Deconstruction is a political thinking, he argues, because it entails an irreducible opening to alterity (if only in the form of reading); and this opening, where the other always might arrive as an event on the frontier of my experience, is a place for legislation.

A new translation of Derrida’s groundbreaking juxtaposition of Hegel and Genet, forcing two incompatible discourses into dialogue with each other Jacques Derrida’s famously challenging book Glas puts the practice of philosophy and the very acts of writing and reading to the test. Formatted with parallel texts, its left column discusses G. W. F. Hegel and its right column engages Jean Genet, with numerous notes and interpolations in the margins. The resulting work, published for the first time in French in 1974, is a collage that practices theoretical thinking as a form of grafting. Presented here in an entirely new translation as Clang—its title resonating like the sound of an alarm or death knell—this book brilliantly juxtaposes Hegel’s totalizing, hierarchical system of thought with Genet’s autobiographical, carceral erotics. It innovatively forces two incompatible discourses into dialogue with each other: philosophical and literary, familial and perverse, logical and sensory. In both content and structure, Clang heightens the significance of all encounters across ruptures of thought or experience and vibrates with the impact of discordant languages colliding.