Who Was Jacques Derrida?: An Intellectual Biography

sympathy for the Israelites and angry withdrawal from them. Experiencing God’s periodic revoking of his favor gives Ju- daism th ...

for everything is in it,” Rabbi ben Bag Bag says of the Torah in the magnificent wisdom tract Pirke Avot,a major source for Jabè ...

philosophy. At seventy pages, the chapter on Lévinas is the most substantial one in Writing and Difference,and it shows the grea ...

Infinity,a wide-ranging, mythopoeic critique of the premises of Western philosophy, particularly its devotion to solitary though ...

in light of the importance Lévinas places on the stranger, the other. For Lévinas, Husserl provides the culmination of phi- loso ...

that cannot be explained away by any amount of metaphysical footwork. Elaborate theories of morality, calculations based on prud ...

suggested by Mosaic law meets its opponent in the philosoph- ical tradition, which has often undermined such religious de- mands ...

Derrida writes that empirical Jewish ethics, Lévinas’s ethics, “contests the resolution and coherence of the logos (philosophy) ...

next two decades, Derrida continues on his basic course as a skeptical unraveler of logocentrism, relatively unconcerned with Lé ...

of his talk, Derrida casts a reflective eye on the revolt of May ’ 68 , as well as on the wider scene of global politics. Derrid ...

cult of spontaneity, a fusionist, anti-unionist euphoria, in the face of the enthusiasm of a finally ‘freed’ speech, of restored ...

technology of “disciplinary formations,” visible in madhouses, prisons, hospitals, and similar institutions, determines our poor ...

the revolutionary territory that Foucault had marked out. De- spite his diffidence about expressing outright enthusiasm for the ...

deeply and thoroughly, deconstruct them: then the antilogo- centric kingdom will be unveiled. (There is, however, no hope for po ...

ger speaks of man as the shepherd of Being. He invokes the house of Being, as well as the revelation of Being, its coming to lig ...

larly change[s] transgressions into ‘false exits’” ( 135 ). Derrida here follows Foucault in his suspicion of the liberationist, ...

vorite thinkers. But by the end of the sixties, Derrida’s concern with tradition was beginning to appear old-fashioned. In the m ...

III Plato, Austin, Nietzsche, Freud n the sixties Derrida became aware of the futility of play- ing the skeptic, as he had done ...

of the flux of the world, neither good nor bad in its essence. Its function, for Derrida, is to underline the randomness of our ...

Plato’s commitment to absolutes, his need to define con- cepts in a rigorous and universally applicable way, makes him, in Derri ...