This volume contains the speech given by Derrida at Emmanuel Levinas’s funeral on December 27, 1995, and his contribution to a colloquium organized to mark the first anniversary of Levinas’s death. In this book, Derrida extends his work on Levinas in previously unexplored directions via a radical rereading of Totality and Infinity and the lesser-known Talmudic writings.
Drawing on the relationship between Derrida and Levinas and on the unresolved tension between their philosophical corpuses, this book aims to offer new possible interpretations on the future of democracy. What philosophical and political ideals can emerge from a parallel reading of these two acclaimed thinkers, and from their ‘philosophical alliance’? This volume attempts to re-imagine and to re-engage the realm of politics, by offering new perspectives on the multiple crises that traverse the contemporary age.
Over a span of thirty years, twentieth-century French philosophers Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida held a conversation across texts. Sharing a Jewish heritage and a background in phenomenology, both came to situate their work at the margins of philosophy, articulating this placement through religion and literature. Chronicling the interactions between these thinkers, Sarah Hammerschlag argues that the stakes in their respective positions were more than philosophical. They were also political. Levinas's investments were born out in his writings on Judaism and ultimately in an evolving conviction that the young state of Israel held the best possibility for achieving such an ideal. For Derrida, the Jewish question was literary. The stakes of Jewish survival could only be approached through reflections on modern literature's religious legacy, a line of thinking that provided him the means to reconceive democracy. Hammerschlag's reexamination of Derrida and Levinas's textual exchange not only produces a new account of this friendship but also has significant ramifications for debates within Continental philosophy, the study of religion, and political theology.
If not simple opposition or simple juxtaposition, what is the relation between the writings to which Derrida and Levinas appose their signatures? What would each endorse in the writings of the other? What is it to sign and endorse? How does one assume responsibility, and how does one avoid assuming it? These are some of the probing questions that the prominent Continental philosopher John Llewelyn takes up in Appositions, which brings together and synthesises fifteen essays written during the past twenty years. Drawing out the metaphor of the Greek letter chi, or "x," Llewelyn apposes the discussions of the two philosophers, applying their thought to one another. In considering the work of Derrida and Levinas from the points of view of philosophy, linguistics, logic, and theology, Llewelyn invokes a diverse array of philosophers, theologians, and literary figures, including Austin, Defoe, Hegel, Heidegger, Jankelevitch, Kant, Mallarme, Plato, Ponge, Ramsey, Rosenzweig, Russell, Saussure, and Valery. This book by a powerfully original thinker and first-rate interpreter is essential reading for all those interested in the writings of Derrida and Levinas and in the ways in which their thinking intersects.
French philosophy since World War II has been preoccupied with the issue of difference. Specifically, it has wanted to promote or to leave room for ways of living and of being that differ from those usually seen in contemporary Western society. Given the experience of the Holocaust, the motivation for such a preoccupation is not difficult to see. For some thinkers, especially Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, and Gilles Deleuze, this preoccupation has led to a mode of philosophizing that privileges difference as a philosophical category. Nancy privileges difference as a mode of conceiving community, Derrida as a mode of conceiving linguistic meaning, Levinas as a mode of conceiving ethics, and Deleuze as a mode of conceiving ontology. Reconsidering Difference has a twofold task, the primary one critical and the secondary one reconstructive. The critical task is to show that these various privilegings are philosophical failures. They wind up, for reasons unique to each position, endorsing positions that are either incoherent or implausible. Todd May considers the incoherencies of each position and offers an alternative approach. His reconstructive task, which he calls "contingent holism," takes the phenomena under investigation—community, language, ethics, and ontology—and sketches a way of reconceiving them that preserves the motivations of the rejected positions without falling into the problems that beset them.
Simon Critchley's first book, 'The Ethics of Deconstruction', was originally published to great acclaim in 1992. It was the first book to argue for the ethical turn in Derrida's work and to show as powerfully as possible how deconstruction has persuasive ethical consequences that are vital to our thinking through of questions of politics and democracy. This new edition contains three new appendixes and a new preface where Critchley reflects upon the origins, motivation and reception of 'The Ethics of Deconstruction'.
In Ethics-Politics-Subjectivity, Simon Critchley takes up three questions at the centre of contemporary theoretical debate: What is ethical experience? What can be said of the subject who has this experience? What, if any, is the relation of ethical experience to politics? Through spirited confrontations with major thinkers, such as Lacan, Nancy, Rorty, and, in particular, Levinas and Derrida, Critchley finds answers in a nuanced "ethics of finitude" and defends the political possibilities of deconstruction. Democracy, economics, friendship, and technology are all considered anew in Critchley's bold excursions on the meaning and value of recent French philosophy.
These essays provoke new responses to the work of the eminent French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas through an analysis of how the problematics of reading, deconstruction, feminism, and psychotherapy complicate and deepen Levinas's account of responsibility. The re-reading presented here continues and expands on the long-standing debate between Levinas and Jacques Derrida. Published in English for the first time are two key texts in this debate: "Wholly Otherwise" by Levinas and "At this very moment in this work here I am" by Derrida.
We live in an age of global capitalism and terror. In a climate of consumption and fear the unknown Other is regarded as a threat to our safety, a client to assist, or a competitor to be overcome in the struggle for scarce resources. And yet, the Christian Scriptures explicitly summon us to welcome strangers, to care for the widow and the orphan, and to build relationships with those distant from us. But how, in this world of hostility and commodification, do we practice hospitality? In The Gift of the Other, Andrew Shepherd engages deeply with the influential thought of French thinkers Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida, and argues that a true vision of hospitality is ultimately found not in postmodern philosophies but in the Christian narrative. The book offers a compelling Trinitarian account of the God of hospitality--a God of communion who "makes room" for otherness, who overcomes the hostility of the world though Jesus' life, death, and resurrection, and who through the work of the Spirit is forming a new community: the Church--a people of welcome.
It is now widely accepted that The Ethics of Deconstruction was the first book to argue for the ethical turn in Derrida's work and to show as powerfully as possible how deconstruction has persuasive ethical consequences that were vital to our thinking through of questions of politics and democracy. Now reissued with three new appendices which restate as well as reflect upon and deepen the book's arguments, The Ethics of Deconstruction is undoubtedly the standard work in the field.
