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Class Acts looks at two often neglected aspects of Jacques Derrida’s work as a philosopher, namely, his public presentations and his teaching, along with the question of the “speech act” that links them, that is, the question of what one is doing when one speaks in public in these ways. The work is divided into two parts, each of which follows Derrida’s itinerary with regard to speech act theory from the 1970s through the 1990s. Part I, titled “Derrida in Montreal,” analyzes Derrida’s critique of John Austin and his own subsequent redefinition of speech act theory over the course of three public lectures or events (in 1971, 1979, and 1997), all three, for reasons I try to identify and explain, in Montreal. Part II. “The Open Seminar,” begins with 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. It then turns to the way Derrida interrogated and himself redeployed speech act theory in three recently published seminars (on life-death, theory and practice, and forgiveness). We ultimately come to see through this juxtaposition that, whether he was in a conference hall or a classroom, Derrida was always interested in the way in which spoken or written words might not just communicate some meaning or intent but give rise to something like an event. This is a book about the possibility of such events in Derrida’s work as a pedagogue and public intellectual.

Since Greek tragedy and philosophy, ethics has—more or less successfully—served as a bulwark against contingency; or at least to provide guidance in cases were decisions had to be taken in the face of the undecidable. The essays collected here tackle this problem against the background of an Enlightenment that has made the overcoming of contingency its raison d’être. However, contingency’s hardnosed existence subverts this success story. And it seems that Hegel’s dialectics—whose main goal it is to eliminate it—forms something like a last line of defence against it. Ranging from topics like community, environmental ethics, and agency to the goals of critical philosophy, the renowned scholars assembled in this volume show that it might be time to leave Hegel’s cosmological concept of reason behind.