Description: In two volumes, Geoffrey Bennington and Kas Saghafi present the majority of Jacques Derrida's untranslated, and previously uncollected, essays and interviews. Dating mostly from 1992 to 2004, these writings offer a fuller picture of Derrida's biography, theoretical engagements and the stakes of his social and political investments. In the interviews in Essays, Interviews, and Interventions by Jacques Derrida: Thinking What Comes, Volume 1, Derrida proposes the foundation of a new European political culture, discusses the strengths of Nelson Mandela, and reflects on the archive. He also considers his experience of political life, his relationship to institutions (particularly the Collège international de philosophie), and his views on 'intellectualism'. Whether writing about public health, Palestine, or the notion of the promise, Derrida is razor-sharp and impassioned. These volumes allow significant insight into his mature thought.
Brief description: Kas Saghafi is Professor of Philosophy at University of Memphis. He researches and teaches in contemporary French thought. He is the author of two books, The World after the End of the World (2020) and Apparitions--Of Derrida's Other (2010) and numerous articles. He is co-editor, with Geoffrey Bennington, of a two-volume collection of Derrida's writings entitled Thinking What Comes (2024). He has also co-translated, with Pleshette DeArmitt, four essays by Jacques Derrida.
Review Quotes:
This is a very welcome and timely addition to Derrida's work in English. Bennington, Saghafi and their team of translators have made accessible these hard-to-find texts in which the philosopher clearly expounds his thinking on issues that have lost none of their urgency: hospitality and immigration, the future of Europe, the rights of Palestinians, censorship of the archive, and deconstruction as a 'thinking of what comes'.
--Peggy Kamuf, University of Southern California