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. Institutions, Inventions, and Inscriptions by Jacques Derrida: Thinking What Comes, Volume 2 collects Derrida's writings on friends including Emmanuel Levinas, Alain David, Louis Marin, Marie-Louise Mallet, Safaa Fathy, Mathieu Bénézet and Jos Joliet. It also features interviews that illuminate his experience at school, his writing habits, the relation he saw between philosophical discourse to the 'poetic', and his views on the singularity of literature and fiction. Whether writing about racism and anti-Semitism, filiation and fidelity, or hospitality and responsibility, Derrida is razor-sharp and impassioned. These volumes allow significant insight into his mature thought.
Brief description: Geoffrey Bennington is Asa G Candler Professor of Modern French Thought at Emory University. He is the author and translator of numerous books and articles on literary and philosophical issues, and translator of many texts by Jacques Derrida and other French thinkers. His books include Late Lyotard (2005), Deconstruction is Not What You Think...(2005), Interrupting Derrida (2000) and, with Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida (1991).
Review Quotes:
This superb collection contains some of Derrida's most compelling interviews and essays on literature, theater, music, sexual difference, and racism, as well as some of his most personal reflections on friendship, his early childhood and education in Algeria, his fraught relation to academic institutions, his unique philosophical itinerary, and his inimitable practice of writing.
--Michael Naas, DePaul University