Description: "In these seminar sessions, philosopher Jacques Derrida deconstructs perhaps the oldest dichotomy of all-life and death-giving him the opportunity to delve into a broad range of topics, from the work of French geneticist FrancáI§ois Jacob and epistemologist Georges Canguilhem to Freudian psychoanalysis and modern German philosophy, especially Nietzsche and Heidegger. Throughout, Derrida's attention is, as ever, on language, especially when it comes to discourses (such as scientific ones) that he understands to be suppressing the inherent instability of linguistic signs and the ambiguities behind even the most innocuous of terms. Appearing for the first time in English in a masterful translation by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, these seminars from 1975-1976 represent a turning point in Derrida's thought, one that helps us better understand the influential work he would go on to produce in the decades to come"--
Brief description: Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) was director of studies at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris, and professor of humanities at the University of California, Irvine. Several of his books have been published in their English translation by the University of Chicago Press.
Review Quotes: "Derrida's 1975-76 seminar, Life Death, is surely one of his greatest achievements. It begins with a deconstructive reading of François Jacob's Logic of the Living, advancing to a critique of scientific 'models' in general. It then takes up Nietzsche's notions of life and the living in terms of both biography and biology. Finally, it reads Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle in an exciting and challenging way. The translation by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas is reliable and eminently readable."--David Farrell Krell, author of The Sea: A Philosophical Encounter