Jacques Derrida Books

Advances the author's reflections on many issues, such as sexual difference, architecture, negative theology, politics, war, nationalism, and religion.

Following on from The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume I, this book extends Jacques Derrida’s exploration of the connections between animality and sovereignty. In this second year of the seminar, originally presented in 2002–2003 as the last course he would give before his death, Derrida focuses on two markedly different texts: Heidegger’s 1929–1930 course The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. As he moves back and forth between the two works, Derrida pursuesthe relations between solitude, insularity, world, violence, boredom and death as they supposedly affect humans and animals in different ways. Hitherto unnoticed or underappreciated aspects of Robinson Crusoe are brought out in strikingly original readings of questions such as Crusoe’s belief in ghosts, his learning to pray, his parrot Poll, and his reinvention of the wheel. Crusoe’s terror of being buried alive or swallowed alive by beasts or cannibals gives rise to a rich and provocative reflection on death, burial, and cremation, in part provoked by a meditation on the death of Derrida’s friend Maurice Blanchot. Throughout, these readings are juxtaposed with interpretations of Heidegger's concepts of world and finitude to produce a distinctively Derridean account that will continue to surprise his readers.

Psyche: Inventions of the Other is the first publication in English of the twenty-eight essay collection Jacques Derrida published in two volumes in 1998 and 2003. In Volume I, Derrida advances his reflection on many topics: psychoanalysis, theater, translation, literature, representation, racism, and nuclear war, among others. The essays in this volume also carry on Derrida's engagement with a number of key thinkers and writers: Barthes, Benjamin, de Man, Flaubert, Freud, Heidegger, Lacoue-Labarthe, Levinas, and Ponge. Included in this volume are new or revised translations of seminal essays (for example, "Psyche: Invention of the Other," "The Retrait of Metaphor," "At This Very Moment in This Work Here I Am," "Tours de Babel" and "Racism's Last Word"), as well as three essays that appear here in English for the first time.

While much has been written against the death penalty, the author contends that Western philosophy is massively, if not always obviously, complicit with a logic in which a sovereign state has the right to take a life.

The second volume of Jacques Derrida's exploration of the death penalty delves into Kant's justification of capital punishment, deconstructing his arguments and revealing significant contradictions. Derrida critiques the "anesthesial logic" surrounding the death penalty, intertwining themes of cruelty and pain through various philosophical texts. He argues that the rationality behind the death penalty reflects an illusory control over mortality. Set against the backdrop of a pivotal moment in U.S. history regarding capital punishment, this analysis aims to contribute meaningfully to ongoing debates.

A tribute to one of the fathers of deconstruction as well as an extended essay on memory, death, and friendship.

This book, written out of Derrida's long-standing friendship with Jean-Luc Nancy, examines the central place accorded to the sense of touch in the Western philosophical tradition.

One of Derrida's most extraordinarily deep and and virtuosic texts and one of the best ever written about Artaud. Denis Hollier, New York University