Who Was Jacques Derrida?: An Intellectual Biography

neighbor. Derrida approvingly cites Lévinas’s notion of “Jew- ish humanism” (so different from the humanism endorsed by metaphys ...

utopian counterterm, justice. The messiah has not yet arrived ( 257 ). Speaking to an audience of law students and professors, D ...

“interrupts” and “shames” the ego, “disrupt[s] that free, au- tonomous self that through its reasoning and consciousness thinks ...

minded students, who were less likely to use him for the ad- vancement of their own careers. Derrida “was always the Jewish Alge ...

authors announced, had made a career out of using “tricks and gimmicks similar to those of the Dadaists and the concrete poets.” ...

of American studies and Renaissance literature. More than ever, professors of literature were “getting political,” bent on findi ...

trump card. He found one in the one thinker who, before all others, represents the conjunction of philosophy and politics: Karl ...

‘Marx’ as a quasi-synonym of ‘justice.’”^4 Derrida was, it seemed, still avoiding history. Derrida, in Specters of Marx,jettison ...

technology, panoptical surveillance via satellite, nuclear threat, and so forth). Let us accelerate things. Beyond these two typ ...

ters of Marx,Derrida’s spectacular flights of doom-mongering crowd out any possibility of actual political discussion. He prefer ...

“Hospitality is the deconstruction of the at-home; de- construction is hospitality to the other, to the other than one- self,” D ...

by one’s guest, diverts him from a more realistic study of how we are actually bound together in social life. As psyches, and as ...

nese universities and, as a frequent visitor to China, was en- thusiastic about the popularity of deconstruction there.) For Wha ...

erased—and even informs the lovers’ desires” ( 31 ). Derrida’s comment may be offensive to some, but at least he stops short of ...

pant there [in Algeria],” Derrida says to Roudinesco. “This is well known” ( 113 ). “Nothing for me matters as much as my Jewish ...

And they did not shrink from misrepresenting the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict to serve their cause. Derrida in his conve ...

Habermas). Derrida’s commentary on 9 / 11 is frustrating on several accounts. He begins with expansive speculation, dwell- ing e ...

(conscious or unconscious) and symbolic or symptomatic re- actions that might take numerous detours, an incalculable number of t ...

with Roudinesco and Borradori,Derrida,released in 2002 , does not devote much time to the themes of politics and jus- tice. Its ...

ing toast, listening to the radio, walking down New York streets trailed by the movie’s leather-jacketed directors, and sitting ...