Derrida: Negotiating the Legacy

by Madeleine Fagan (Editor), Ludovic Glorieux (Editor), Indira Hasimbegovic (Editor)

The death of Jacques Derrida in 2004 represented a major interruption in contemporary intellectual life. This death calls for an engagement with Derrida's work and an attempt to understand his legacy. Such a discussion is fraught with tension between remaining faithful after death and putting Derrida's writing to work in new directions, posing challenges and exposing limitations. In short this legacy is, necessarily, a negotiation. The aim of this book is to grapple with this specific theme and to explore the implications of Derrida's death for the future of critical thought itself.

The authors demonstrate that there is no single way to adopt or inherit Derrida's thought. Rather, through their engagement with contemporary themes within Politics and International Studies, Philosophy, Literary Studies and Postcolonial Studies, each chapter illuminates the degree to which on-going reflection, radical critique, and above all radical self-critique are demanded by deconstruction.

This book provides the key starting point for any serious assessment of what the implications of the work of one of the twentieth century's most influential thinkers might be.

Key Features

The first interdisciplinary text of its kind
Features original work from some of the world's most eminent Derridean scholars including Richard Beardsworth, Christina Howells and Christopher Norris
Includes chapters which explore the relationship between Derrida and key contemporaries such as Sartre, Nancy, Heidegger, Blanchot, Deleuze, Levinas and Habermas

Contents:
Introduction: Inheriting Deconstruction, Surviving Derrida
Ludovic Glorieux and Indira Hasimbegovic
I Future of Deconstruction
1. Analytic Philosophy in Another Key: Derrida on Language, Truth and Logic
Christopher Norris
2. The Future of Critical Philosophy and World Politics
Richard Beardsworth
3. Derrida's Rogues: Islam and the Futures of Deconstruction
Alex Thomson
4. Force [of] Transformation
Michael Dillon
II Interrupting the Same
5. Derrida's Memory, War and the Politics of Ethics
Maja Zehfuss
6. The (International) Politics of Friendship: Exemplar, Exemplarity, Exclusion
Josef Ansorge
7. Ethical Assassination? Negotiating the (Ir)responsible Decision
Dan Bulley
8. Exploiting the Ambivalence of a Crisis: A practitioner reads 'Diversity Training' through Homi Bhabha
April Biccum
III Following/ Breaking
9. Sartre and Derrida: the promises of the subject
Christina Howells
10. What It Is To Be Many: Subjecthood, Responsibility and Sacrifice in Derrida and Nancy
Jenny Edkins
11. 'Derrida's Theatre of Survival: Fragmentation, Death and Legacy'
Daniel Watt
12. Derrida vs. Habermas Revisited
Lasse Thomassen
Conclusions: The Im/Possibility of Closure
Madeleine Fagan and Marie Suetsugu.

256 pages, Hardcover

First published April 18, 2007

About the author

Madeleine Fagan is an Institute of Advanced Studies Global Research Fellow, Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick. She is co-editor of Derrida: Negotiating the Legacy (Edinburgh University Press, 2007)