Search results for ""Author Michael Naas""

The question of life, Michael Naas argues, though rarely foregrounded by Plato, runs through and structures his thought. By characterizing being in terms of life, Plato in many of his later dialogues, including the Statesman, begins to discover—or, better, to invent—a notion of true or real life that would be opposed to all merely biological or animal life, a form of life that would be more valuable than everything we call life and every life that can actually be lived. This emphasis on life in the Platonic dialogues illuminates the structural relationship between many of Plato’s most time-honored distinctions, such as being and becoming, soul and body. At the same time, it helps to explain the enormous power and authority that Plato’s thought has exercised, for good or ill, over our entire philosophical and religious tradition. Lucid yet sophisticated, Naas’s account offers a fundamental rereading of what the concept of life entails, one that inflects a range of contemporary conversations, from biopolitics, to the new materialisms, to the place of the human within the living world.

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Class Acts examines two often neglected aspects of Jacques Derrida’s work as a philosopher, his public presentations at lectures and conferences and his teaching, along with the question of the “speech act” that links them. What, Michael Naas asks, is one doing when one speaks in public in these ways? The book follows Derrida’s itinerary with regard to speech act theory across three public lectures, from 1971 to 1997, all given, for reasons the book seeks to explain, in Montreal. In these lectures, Derrida elaborated his critique of J. L. Austin and his own subsequent redefinition of speech act theory. The book then gives an overview of Derrida’s teaching career and his famous “seminar” presentations, along with his own explicit reflections on pedagogy and educational institutions beginning in the mid-1970s. Naas then shows through a reading of three recently published seminars—on life death, theory and practice, and forgiveness—just how Derrida the teacher interrogated and deployed speech act theory in his seminars. Whether in a conference hall or a classroom, Naas demonstrates, Derrida was always interested in the way spoken or written words might do more than simply communicate some meaning or intent but might give rise to something like an event. Class Acts bears witness to the possibility of such events in Derrida’s work as a pedagogue and a public intellectual.

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Taking on the Tradition focuses on how the work of Jacques Derrida has helped us rethink and rework the themes of tradition, legacy, and inheritance in the Western philosophical tradition. It concentrates not only on such themes in the work of Derrida but also on his own gestures with regard to these themes—that is, on the performativity of Derrida's texts. The book thus uses Derrida's understanding of speech act theory to reread his own work. The book consists in a series of close readings of Derrida's texts to demonstrate that the claims he makes in his work cannot be fully understood without considering the way he makes those claims. The book considers Derrida's relation to the Greek philosophical tradition and to his immediate predecessors in the French philosophical tradition, as well as his own legacy within the contemporary scene. Part I examines Derrida's analyses of Plato and Aristotle on the themes of writing and metaphor. Part II looks at themes of donation, inheritance, pedagogy, and influence in relation to Derrida's readings of the works of Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and Jean-Pierre Vernant. Part III considers the promises and legacies of Derrida's work on autobiography, friendship, and hospitality, themes Derrida has recently taken up in his readings of Martin Heidegger, Maurice Blanchot, and Emmanuel Levinas. In the Conclusion, the author analyzes what Derrida has recently called a "messianicity without messianism" and shows how Derrida develops two different notions of the future and of legacy: one that always determines a horizon for the donation and reception of any legacy or tradition, and one that leaves open a radically unknown and unknowable future for that legacy and tradition.

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The End of the World and Other Teachable Moments follows the remarkable itinerary of Jacques Derrida’s final seminar, “The Beast and the Sovereign” (2001–3), as the explicit themes of the seminar—namely, sovereignty and the question of the animal—come to be supplemented and interrupted by questions of death, mourning, survival, the archive, and, especially, the end of the world. The book begins with Derrida’s analyses, in the first year of the seminar, of the question of the animal in the context of his other published works on the same subject. It then follows Derrida through the second year of the seminar, presented in Paris from December 2002 to March 2003, as a very different tone begins to make itself heard, one that wavers between melancholy and an extraordinary lucidity with regard to the end. Focusing the entire year on just two works, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Martin Heidegger’s seminar of 1929–30, “The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics,” the seminar comes to be dominated by questions of the end of the world and of an originary violence that at once gives rise to and effaces all things. The End of the World and Other Teachable Moments follows Derrida as he responds from week to week to these emerging questions, as well as to important events unfolding around him, both world events—the aftermath of 9/11, the American invasion of Iraq—and more personal ones, from the death of Maurice Blanchot to intimations of his own death less than two years away. All this, the book concludes, makes this final seminar an absolutely unique work in Derrida’s corpus, one that both speaks of death as the end of the world and itself now testifies to that end—just one, though hardly the least, of its many teachable moments.

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Threshold Phenomena reexamines Jacques Derrida's thinking of hospitality, from his well-known writings of the 1990s to his recently-published seminars on the same topic. The book follows Derrida's rereading of several central figures and texts on hospitality (Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus, Kant's Perpetual Peace, Levinas's Totality and Infinity) and his attempt to rethink questions surrounding not only private but also public hospitality in the form of immigration law, the contemporary treatment of migrants or stateless peoples, and the establishment of cities of asylum.Naas develops many of the central themes of Derrida's seminarthe relationship between hospitality and teletechnology (telephone, internet, cyberspace, etc.), the role of fatherlands and mother tongues in hospitality, questions of purity, immunity, and xenophobia, and the possibility of extending hospitality beyond the humanto animals, plants, gods, and clones. Reframing Derrida's app

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Threshold Phenomena reexamines Jacques Derrida's thinking of hospitality, from his well-known writings of the 1990s to his recently-published seminars on the same topic. The book follows Derrida's rereading of several central figures and texts on hospitality (Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus, Kant's Perpetual Peace, Levinas's Totality and Infinity) and his attempt to rethink questions surrounding not only private but also public hospitality in the form of immigration law, the contemporary treatment of migrants or stateless peoples, and the establishment of cities of asylum.Naas develops many of the central themes of Derrida's seminarthe relationship between hospitality and teletechnology (telephone, internet, cyberspace, etc.), the role of fatherlands and mother tongues in hospitality, questions of purity, immunity, and xenophobia, and the possibility of extending hospitality beyond the humanto animals, plants, gods, and clones. Reframing Derrida's app

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Class Acts examines two often neglected aspects of Jacques Derrida’s work as a philosopher, his public presentations at lectures and conferences and his teaching, along with the question of the “speech act” that links them. What, Michael Naas asks, is one doing when one speaks in public in these ways? The book follows Derrida’s itinerary with regard to speech act theory across three public lectures, from 1971 to 1997, all given, for reasons the book seeks to explain, in Montreal. In these lectures, Derrida elaborated his critique of J. L. Austin and his own subsequent redefinition of speech act theory. The book then gives an overview of Derrida’s teaching career and his famous “seminar” presentations, along with his own explicit reflections on pedagogy and educational institutions beginning in the mid-1970s. Naas then shows through a reading of three recently published seminars—on life death, theory and practice, and forgiveness—just how Derrida the teacher interrogated and deployed speech act theory in his seminars. Whether in a conference hall or a classroom, Naas demonstrates, Derrida was always interested in the way spoken or written words might do more than simply communicate some meaning or intent but might give rise to something like an event. Class Acts bears witness to the possibility of such events in Derrida’s work as a pedagogue and a public intellectual.

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The question of life, Michael Naas argues, though rarely foregrounded by Plato, runs through and structures his thought. By characterizing being in terms of life, Plato in many of his later dialogues, including the Statesman, begins to discover—or, better, to invent—a notion of true or real life that would be opposed to all merely biological or animal life, a form of life that would be more valuable than everything we call life and every life that can actually be lived. This emphasis on life in the Platonic dialogues illuminates the structural relationship between many of Plato’s most time-honored distinctions, such as being and becoming, soul and body. At the same time, it helps to explain the enormous power and authority that Plato’s thought has exercised, for good or ill, over our entire philosophical and religious tradition. Lucid yet sophisticated, Naas’s account offers a fundamental rereading of what the concept of life entails, one that inflects a range of contemporary conversations, from biopolitics, to the new materialisms, to the place of the human within the living world.

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Miracle and Machine is a sort of “reader’s guide” to Jacques Derrida’s 1994–95 essay “faith and knowledge,” his most important work on the nature of religion in general and on the unprecedented forms it is taking today through science and the media. It provides essential background for understanding Derrida’s essay, commentary on its unique style and its central figures (e.g., Kant, Hegel, Bergson, and Heidegger), and assessment of its principal philosophical claims about the fundamental duplicity of religion and the ineluctably autoimmune relationship among religion, science, and the media. Along the way it offers in-depth analysis of Derrida’s treatment of everything from the nature of religious revelation, faith, prayer, sacrifice, testimony, messianicity, fundamentalism, and secularism to the way religion is today being transformed by globalization, technoscience, and worldwide telecommunications networks. But Miracle and Machine is much more than a commentary on a single Derrida text. Through references to scores of other works by Derrida, both early and late, it also provides a unique introduction to Derrida’s work in general. It demonstrates that one of the very best ways to understand the terms, themes, claims, strategies, and motivations of Derridean deconstruction from the early 1960s through 2004 is to read critically and patiently, in its spirit and in its letter, an exemplary text such as “Faith and Knowledge.” Finally, Miracle and Machine attempts to put Derrida’s ideas about religion to the test by reading alongside “Faith and Knowledge” an already classic work of American fiction that is more or less contemporaneous with it, Don DeLillo’s 1997 Underworld, a novel that explores the same relationship between faith and knowledge, religion and science, religious revelation and the World Wide Web, messianicity, and weapons of mass destruction—in a word, in two words, miracles and machines.

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Plato's Animals examines the crucial role played by animal images, metaphors, allusions, and analogies in Plato's Dialogues. These fourteen lively essays demonstrate that the gadflies, snakes, stingrays, swans, dogs, horses, and other animals that populate Plato's work are not just rhetorical embellishments. Animals are central to Plato's understanding of the hierarchy between animals, humans, and gods and are crucial to his ideas about education, sexuality, politics, aesthetics, the afterlife, the nature of the soul, and philosophy itself. The volume includes a comprehensive annotated index to Plato's bestiary in both Greek and English.

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Plato's Animals examines the crucial role played by animal images, metaphors, allusions, and analogies in Plato's Dialogues. These fourteen lively essays demonstrate that the gadflies, snakes, stingrays, swans, dogs, horses, and other animals that populate Plato's work are not just rhetorical embellishments. Animals are central to Plato's understanding of the hierarchy between animals, humans, and gods and are crucial to his ideas about education, sexuality, politics, aesthetics, the afterlife, the nature of the soul, and philosophy itself. The volume includes a comprehensive annotated index to Plato's bestiary in both Greek and English.

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For Strasbourg consists of a series of essays and interviews about the city of Strasbourg and the philosophical friendships Jacques Derrida developed there over a period of some forty years. Written just months before his death, the opening essay, “The Place Name(s): Strasbourg,” recounts in detail, and in very moving terms, Derrida’s deep attachment to this French city on the border between France and Germany. More than just a personal narrative, however, the essay is a profound interrogation of the relationship between philosophy and place, philosophy and language, and philosophy and friendship. As such, it raises a series of philosophical, political, and ethical questions that might all be placed under the aegis of what Derrida once called “philosophical nationalities and nationalism.” The other three texts included in the book are long interviews/conversations between Derrida and his two principal interlocutors in Strasbourg, Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. These interviews are significant both for the themes they focus on (language, politics, friendship, death, life after death, and so on) and for what they reveal about Derrida’s relationships to Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe. Filled with sharp insights into one anothers’ work and peppered with personal anecdotes and humor, the interviews bear witness to the decades-long intellectual friendships of these three important contemporary thinkers. This collection thus stands as a reminder of and testimony to Derrida’s unique relationship to Strasbourg and to the two thinkers most closely associated with that city.

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Rogues, published in France under the title Voyous, comprises two major lectures that Derrida delivered in 2002 investigating the foundations of the sovereignty of the nation-state. The term "État voyou" is the French equivalent of "rogue state," and it is this outlaw designation of certain countries by the leading global powers that Derrida rigorously and exhaustively examines. Derrida examines the history of the concept of sovereignty, engaging with the work of Bodin, Hobbes, Rousseau, Schmitt, and others. Against this background, he delineates his understanding of "democracy to come," which he distinguishes clearly from any kind of regulating ideal or teleological horizon. The idea that democracy will always remain in the future is not a temporal notion. Rather, the phrase would name the coming of the unforeseeable other, the structure of an event beyond calculation and program. Derrida thus aligns this understanding of democracy with the logic he has worked out elsewhere. But it is not just political philosophy that is brought under deconstructive scrutiny here: Derrida provides unflinching and hard-hitting assessments of current political realities, and these essays are highly engaged with events of the post-9/11 world.

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Jacques Derrida is, in the words of the New York Times, "perhaps the world's most famous philosopher if not the only famous philosopher." He often provokes controversy as soon as his name is mentioned. But he also inspires the respect that comes from an illustrious career, and, among many who were his colleagues and peers, he inspired friendship. The Work of Mourning is a collection that honors those friendships in the wake of passing. Gathered here are texts letters of condolence, memorial essays, eulogies, funeral orations written after the deaths of well-known figures: Roland Barthes, Paul de Man, Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Edmond Jab\u00e8s, Louis Marin, Sarah Kofman, Gilles Deleuze, Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Fran\u00e7ois Lyotard, Max Loreau, Jean-Marie Benoist, Joseph Riddel, and Michel Servi\u00e8re. With his words, Derrida bears witness to the singularity of a friendship and to the absolute uniqueness of each relationship. In each case, he is acutely aware of the questions of tact, taste, and ethical responsibility involved in speaking of the dead the risks of using the occasion for one's own purposes, political calculation, personal vendetta, and the expiation of guilt. More than a collection of memorial addresses, this volume sheds light not only on Derrida's relation to some of the most prominent French thinkers of the past quarter century but also on some of the most important themes of Derrida's entire oeuvre-mourning, the "gift of death," time, memory, and friendship itself. "In his rapt attention to his subjects' work and their influence upon him, the book also offers a hesitant and tangential retelling of Derrida's own life in French philosophical history. There are illuminating and playful anecdotes how Lyotard led Derrida to begin using a word-processor; how Paul de Man talked knowledgeably of jazz with Derrida's son. Anyone who still thinks that Derrida is a facetious punster will find such resentful prejudice unable to survive a reading of this beautiful work." Steven Poole, Guardian "Strikingly simpa meditations on friendship, on shared vocations and avocations and on philosophy and history." Publishers Weekly

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Athens, Still Remains is an extended commentary on a series of photographs of contemporary Athens by the French photographer Jean-François Bonhomme. But in Derrida’s hands commentary always has a way of unfolding or, better, developing in several unexpected and mutually illuminating directions. First published in French and Greek in 1996, Athens, Still Remains is Derrida’s most sustained analysis of the photographic medium in relationship to the history of philosophy and his most personal reflection on that medium. At once photographic analysis, philosophical essay, and autobiographical narrative, Athens, Still Remains presents an original theory of photography and throws a fascinating light on Derrida’s life and work. The book begins with a sort of verbal snapshot or aphorism that haunts the entire book: “we owe ourselves to death.” Reading this phrase through Bonhomme’s photographs of both the ruins of ancient Athens and contemporary scenes of a still-living Athens that is also on its way to ruin and death, Derrida interrogates a philosophical tradition that runs from Socrates to Heidegger in which the human—and especially the philosopher—is thought to owe himself to death, to a certain thought of death or comportment with regard to death. Combining philosophical speculations on mourning and death, event and repetition, and time and difference with incisive commentary on Bonhomme’s photographs and a narrative of Derrida’s 1995 trip to Greece, Athens, Still Remains is one of Derrida’s most accessible, personal, and moving works without being, for all that, any less philosophical. As Derrida reminds us, the word photography—an eminently Greek word—means “the writing of light,” and it brings together today into a single frame contemporary questions about the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction and much older questions about the relationship between light, revelation, and truth—in other words, an entire philosophical tradition that first came to light in the shadow of the Acropolis.

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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. For both thinkers, the word adieu names a fundamental characteristic of human being: the salutation or benediction prior to all constative language (in certain circumstances, one can say adieu at the moment of meeting) and that given at the moment of separation, sometimes forever, as at the moment of death, it is also the a-dieu, for God or to God before and in any relation to the other. In this book, Derrida extends his work on Levinas in previously unexplored directions via a radical rereading of Totality and Infinity and other texts, including the lesser-known talmudic readings. He argues that Levinas, especially in Totality and Infinity, bequeaths to us an "immense treatise of hospitality," a meditation on the welcome offered to the other. The conjunction of an ethics of pure prescription with the idea of an infinite and absolute hospitality confronts us with the most pressing political, juridical, and institutional concerns of our time. What, then, is an ethics and what is a politics of hospitality? And what, if it ever is, would be a hospitality surpassing any ethics and any politics we know? As always, Derrida raises these questions in the most explicit of terms, moving back and forth between philosophical argument and the political discussion of immigration laws, peace, the state of Israel, xenophobia—reminding us with every move that thinking is not a matter of neutralizing abstraction, but a gesture of hospitality for what happens and still may happen.

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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. For both thinkers, the word adieu names a fundamental characteristic of human being: the salutation or benediction prior to all constative language (in certain circumstances, one can say adieu at the moment of meeting) and that given at the moment of separation, sometimes forever, as at the moment of death, it is also the a-dieu, for God or to God before and in any relation to the other. In this book, Derrida extends his work on Levinas in previously unexplored directions via a radical rereading of Totality and Infinity and other texts, including the lesser-known talmudic readings. He argues that Levinas, especially in Totality and Infinity, bequeaths to us an "immense treatise of hospitality," a meditation on the welcome offered to the other. The conjunction of an ethics of pure prescription with the idea of an infinite and absolute hospitality confronts us with the most pressing political, juridical, and institutional concerns of our time. What, then, is an ethics and what is a politics of hospitality? And what, if it ever is, would be a hospitality surpassing any ethics and any politics we know? As always, Derrida raises these questions in the most explicit of terms, moving back and forth between philosophical argument and the political discussion of immigration laws, peace, the state of Israel, xenophobia—reminding us with every move that thinking is not a matter of neutralizing abstraction, but a gesture of hospitality for what happens and still may happen.

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The initial provocation for The Truth of Democracy was the fortieth anniversary of May ’68 and the recent criticism (some by French President Nicolas Sarkozy himself) leveled against the ideals and actors at the center of this important but still misunderstood moment in French history. Nancy here defends what he calls simply “68” without apology or equivocation, calling it an essential stage in the search for the “truth of democracy.” Less a period within time than a critical moment or interruption of time, 68 needs to be understood, Nancy argues, as an “event” that provided a glimpse into the very “spirit of democracy,” a spirit that is linked not to some common vision, idea, or desire (such as the nation, the republic, the people, or humanity) but to an incommensurability (the infinity of man or man’s exceeding of himself ) at the origin of democracy. Written in a direct and accessible, almost manifesto-like style, The Truth of Democracy presents a forceful plea that we rethink democracy not as one political regime or form among others but as that which opens up the very experience of being in common. By rearticulating many of the themes and terms he has developed elsewhere (from community and being in common to the singular plural) in relationship to an original analysis of what was and still is at stake in May ’68, The Truth of Democracy is at once an eloquent summary of much of Nancy’s work and a significant development of it. It is as if, forty years after being first scrawled across university walls and storefronts in France, one of the most famous slogans of May ’68 has received in The Truth of Democracy its most eloquent and poignant theoretical elaboration: “Be realistic, demand the impossible!”

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For Strasbourg consists of a series of essays and interviews about the city of Strasbourg and the philosophical friendships Jacques Derrida developed there over a period of some forty years. Written just months before his death, the opening essay, “The Place Name(s): Strasbourg,” recounts in detail, and in very moving terms, Derrida’s deep attachment to this French city on the border between France and Germany. More than just a personal narrative, however, the essay is a profound interrogation of the relationship between philosophy and place, philosophy and language, and philosophy and friendship. As such, it raises a series of philosophical, political, and ethical questions that might all be placed under the aegis of what Derrida once called “philosophical nationalities and nationalism.” The other three texts included in the book are long interviews/conversations between Derrida and his two principal interlocutors in Strasbourg, Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. These interviews are significant both for the themes they focus on (language, politics, friendship, death, life after death, and so on) and for what they reveal about Derrida’s relationships to Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe. Filled with sharp insights into one anothers’ work and peppered with personal anecdotes and humor, the interviews bear witness to the decades-long intellectual friendships of these three important contemporary thinkers. This collection thus stands as a reminder of and testimony to Derrida’s unique relationship to Strasbourg and to the two thinkers most closely associated with that city.

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