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This book seeks to show that we can conceive and live with a pluralism of standpoints with conflicting standards for truth—with the truth of each being entirely unaffected by the truth of the others. The book argues that Plato's work expresses this kind of pluralism, and that this pluralism is important in its own right, whether or not we agree about what Plato's standpoint is. The longest tradition of Plato scholarship identifies crucial faults in Plato's theory of Ideas. The book argues that Plato deliberately displayed those faults, because he wanted to demonstrate that basic kinds of error or illogic have dimensions that are crucial to the establishing of truth. These dimensions legitimate a paradoxical coordination of logically incompatible conceptions of truth. Connecting this idea with emerging currents of Plato scholarship, the book emphasizes, in addition to the dialogues' arguments, the importance of their nonargumentative features, including drama, myths, fictions, anecdotes, and humor. These unanalyzed nonargumentative features function rigorously, as a lever with which to examine the enterprise of rational argument itself, without presupposing its standards or illegitimately assimilating any position to the standards of another. Today, communities are torn apart by conflicts within and between a host of different pluralist and absolutist commitments. The possibility developed in this book—a coordination of absolute and relative truth that allows an understanding of some relativist and some absolutist positions as being fully legitimate and as capable of existing in a relation to their opposites—may contribute to perspectives for resolving these conflicts.

Written in the wake of Jacques Derrida's death in 2004, this book attempts to do justice to the memory of Derrida and to demonstrate the continuing significance of his work for contemporary philosophy and literary theory. If Derrida's thought is to remain relevant for us today, it must be at once understood in its original context and uprooted and transplanted elsewhere. The author thus begins with an analysis of Derrida's attachment to the French language, to Europe, and to European secular thought, before turning to Derrida's long engagement with the American context and to the ways in which deconstruction allows us to rethink the history, identity, and promise of post-9/11 America. Taking as its point of departure several of Derrida's later works (from “Faith and Knowledge” and The Work of Mourning to Rogues and Learning to Live Finally), the book demonstrates how Derrida's analyses of the phantasms of sovereignty, the essential autoimmunity of democracy or religion, or the impossible mourning of the nation-state can help us to understand what is happening today in American culture, literature, and politics. Though Derrida's thought has always lived on only by being translated elsewhere, his disappearance will have driven home this necessity with a new force and an unprecedented urgency. This book is an effect of this force and an attempt to respond to this urgency.

Derrida and Lacan have long been viewed as proponents of two opposing schools of thought. This book argues, however, that the logical structure underpinning Lacanian psychoanalytic theory is a complex, paradoxical relationality that corresponds to Derrida's “plural logic of the aporia”. It begins by linking this logic to a strand of thinking (in which Freud plays a part) that unsettles philosophy's transcendental tradition. It then shows that Derrida is just as serious and careful a reader of Freud's texts as Lacan. Interweaving the two thinkers, the book argues that the Lacanian Real is another name for Derrida's différance and shows how Derrida's writings on Heidegger and Nietzsche embody an attitude toward sexual difference and feminine sexuality that matches Lacanian insights. Derrida's “plural logic of the aporia”, it argues, can serve as a heuristic for addressing prominent themes in Lacanian psychoanalysis: subjectivity, ethics, and language. Finally, the book takes up Derrida's prejudicial reading of Lacan's Seminar on “The Purloined Letter”, which was instrumental in the antagonism between Derrideans and Lacanians. Although acknowledging the injustice of Derrida's reading, the book brings out the deep theoretical accord between thinkers that both recognize the power of psychoanalysis to address contemporary political and ethical issues.

The Doppelgänger or Double presents literature as the “double” of philosophy. There are historical reasons for this. The genesis of the Doppelgänger is literature's response to the philosophical focus on subjectivity. The Doppelgänger was coined by the German author Jean Paul in 1796 as a critique of Idealism's assertion of subjective autonomy, individuality and human agency. This critique prefigures post-War extrapolations of the subject as decentred. From this perspective, the Doppelgänger has a “family resemblance” to current conceptualizations of subjectivity. It becomes the emblematic subject of modernity. This book studies the Doppelgänger's influence on philosophical thought. The Doppelgänger emerges as a hidden and unexplored element both in conceptions of subjectivity and in philosophy's relation to literature. The book demonstrates this by employing the Doppelgänger to read literature philosophically and to read philosophy as literature. The Doppelgänger then appears instrumental in the self-conception of both literature and philosophy.

Published posthumously in 2011, Ending and Unending Agony is Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s only book entirely devoted to the French writer and essayist Maurice Blanchot (1907–2003). The place of Blanchot in Lacoue-Labarthe’s thought was both discreet and profound, involving difficult, agonizing questions about the status of literature, the implications of which are steeped in political and ethical stakes. Ranking alongside the works of better-known interlocutors for Lacoue-Labarthe’s thinking such as Plato, Hölderlin, Nietzsche, Benjamin, or Heidegger, Blanchot’s writings represent a decisive crossroads of almost all of Lacoue-Labarthe’s central concerns. The latter converge here on the question of literature and, in particular, of literature as the question of myth–in this instance, the myth of the writer born of the autobiographical experience of death, a myth with which Lacoue-Labarthe himself had to contend, namely through his experience of reading–and writing after–Maurice Blanchot. But the issues at stake in this encounter are not merely (auto)biographical; they entail a relentless struggle with processes of figuration and mythicization inherited from the age-old concept of mimesis and to which all Western literature is subject. As this volume demonstrates, the originality of Blanchot’s thought lies in its problematic but obstinate deconstruction of precisely such processes. In addition to offering unique, challenging readings of Blanchot’s writings, setting them among a variety of key texts by writers and thinkers as diverse as Montaigne, Rousseau, Freud, Winnicott, Artaud, Bataille, Lacan, Malraux, Leclaire, or Derrida, this translation further familiarizes English-speaking audiences with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s groundbreaking work and, as such, with contemporary debates in French thought, criticism, and aesthetics.

This book explores different conceptualizations of the responsibilities of the author to the reader. It also engages the question of what styles of authorship allow these responsibilities to be met. The two writers who serve as the main subjects for this work, the German idealist philosopher G. W. F. Hegel and the Danish Christian existentialist Søren Kierkegaard, invite us to confront particularly challenging questions about the ethics of authorship. Each in his own way explores styles of authorship that employ a variety of strategies of seduction in order to entice the reader into his narratives, strategies that at least on the surface appear to be fundamentally manipulative and unethical. Further, both seek to enact their own deaths as authors, effectively disappearing as reliable guides for the reader. That might also seem to be ethically irresponsible—an abandonment of the reader, who has been seduced only to be deserted. The book argues that there is an either/or between Hegel and Kierkegaard, just not the one Kierkegaard proposes as between an author devoid of ethics and one who makes possible a true ethics of authorship. Rather, the either/or is between two competing practices of authorship, one daunting with the cadences of a highly technical style, the other delightful for its elegance and playfulness—but both powerful experiments in the ethics of style.

This book is a major volume of the author's writings on literature, written across three decades but, for the most part, previously unavailable in English. More substantial than literary criticism, these essays collectively negotiate literature's relation to philosophy. The author pursues such questions as literature's claims to truth, the status of narrative, the relation of poetry and prose, and the unity of a book or of a text, and addresses a number of major European writers, including Dante, Sterne, Rousseau, Hölderlin, Proust, Joyce, and Blanchot. The final section offers a number of impressive pieces by the author that completely merge concerns for philosophy and literature and philosophy-as-literature. These include a lengthy parody of Valéry's “La Jeune Parque,” several original poems by the author, and a beautiful prose-poetic discourse on an installation by Italian artist Claudio Parmiggiani that incorporates the Faust theme. The book constitutes the most substantial statement to date by one of today's leading philosophers on a discipline that has been central to his work across his career.

This book asks the question: How should we interpret Jacques Derrida's work now after so much commentary has been devoted to his thought, and his own astonishing productivity has come to an end? This book argues that we must begin from a different frame than Derrida himself provides, by inserting his work into already existing fields, by “fielding Derrida.” Is Derrida a skeptic? Does he subscribe to a death of meaning (and the “I”) at the hands of a sign? Is his thought at all proximate to contemporary Marxian/post-Marxist thinking? Thanks to placing Derrida's texts in broader fields (such as with Husserlian phenomenology and analytic philosophy of language) and subsequently nuancing what such comparisons yield, this book captures Derrida's stances on these and other questions with a new concreteness and scope, forging links to vital debates across the humanities.

This book—the culmination of forty years of friendship between the author and Jacques Derrida, during which the author also closely followed all Derrida's writings and seminars—is “for Derrida” in two senses. It is “for him,” dedicated to his memory. The chapters also speak, in acts of reading, as advocates for Derrida's work. They focus especially on Derrida's late work, including passages from the last, as yet unpublished, seminars. The chapters are “partial to Derrida,” on his side, taking his part, gratefully submitting themselves to the demand made by Derrida's writings to be read—slowly, carefully, faithfully, with close attention to semantic detail. The chapters do not progress forward to tell a sequential story. They are, rather, a series of perspectives on the heterogeneity of Derrida's work, or forays into that heterogeneity. The chief goal has been, to borrow a phrase from Wallace Stevens, “plainly to propound” what Derrida says. The book aims, above all, to render Derrida's writings justice. It should be remembered, however, that, according to Derrida himself, every rendering of justice is also a transformative interpretation. A book like this one is not a substitute for reading Derrida for oneself. It is to be hoped that it will encourage readers to do just that.

For Strasbourg: Conversations of Friendship and Philosophy consists of four essays and interviews by French philosopher and literary theorist Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) about the city of Strasbourg and the philosophical friendships he developed there over a forty year period. Written just months before his death, the opening essay of the collection, “The place name(s): Strasbourg,” recounts in great detail, and often 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, it 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 here 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 another's work and peppered with personal anecdotes and humor, they bear witness to the decades-long intellectual friendships of these three important contemporary thinkers. This collection stands as a reminder of and testimony to Derrida's relationship to Strasbourg and to the two thinkers most closely associated with that city.

Martin Heidegger's interpretations of the poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin are central to his later philosophy and have determined the mainstream reception of the latter's poetry. This book argues that Heidegger has overlooked central elements in Hölderlin's poetics, such as a Kantian understanding of aesthetic subjectivity and a commitment to Enlightenment ideals. These elements, the book argues, resist the more politically distressing aspects of Heidegger's interpretations, including his nationalist valorization of the German language and sense of nationhood. In the context of Hölderlin's poetics of alienation, exile, and wandering, the book draws a different model of poetic subjectivity, which engages Heidegger's later philosophy of Gelassenheit, calmness, or letting be. In so doing, it is able to pose a phenomenologically sensitive theory of poetic language and a “new poetics of Dasein”, or being there.

This book is an extended inquiry into the dimension of exteriority constructed by philosophical systems and literary works. Literature has, since its inception, depended on a rogue's gallery of outsiders—the more outlandish the better, with human attributes optional—as the impetus to its events and the motive for its developments. Philosophers have also vacillated between safeguarding the purity and consistency of their systematic projects and embracing contamination by alien and intransigent elements. The unsettling encounter between interiority and exteriority is a philosophical and literary sideshow not nearly as frivolous as it might seem. Building upon Nietzsche's fatal confrontation The Wanderer and His Shadow and Jacques Derrida's initiation of the current era in critical theory with the formulation “The outside is the inside,” the author pursues the vicissitudes of the dimensional frontier in a wide range of artifacts and authors. Among these are James Joyce, Walter Benjamin, James Baldwin, and William Faulkner. A welcome is further extended to the peculiar sublime introduced in the Zohar and in the texts of Georg Büchner, Franz Kafka, Bruno Schulz, and Paul Celan.

The “place” in the title of this book is the intersection of language with building, the marking, for future reference, of material constructions in the world. The “referent” the book describes is not something first found in nature and then named but a thing whose own origin joins language with materiality, a thing marked as it is made to begin with. The book develops a theory of the “referent” that is thus also a theory of the possibility of historical knowledge, one that undermines the conventional opposition of language to the real by theories of nominalism and materialism alike, no less than it confronts the mystical conflation of language with matter, whether under the aegis of the infinite reproducibility of the image or the identification of language with “Being.” Challenging these equally naïve views of language—as essentially immaterial or the only essential matter—the book investigates the interaction of language with the material that literature represents. For literature, it argues, seeks no refuge from its own inherently iterable, discursive medium in dreams of a technologically-induced freedom from history or an ontological history of language-being. Instead it tells the complex story of historical referents constructed and forgotten, things built into the earth upon which history “takes place” and of which, in the course of history, all visible trace is temporarily effaced. Literature represents the making of history, the building and burial of the referent, the present world of its oblivion, and the future of its unearthing.

This book examines the possibility of writing the other, explores whether an ethical writing that preserves the other as such is possible, and discusses what the implications are for an ethically inflected criticism. It focuses on the works of Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Blanchot, and Martin Heidegger and examines how the question of the other engages the very limits of philosophy, rationality, and power. The book's horizon is ethics in the Levinasian sense: the question of the other, which, on the hither side of language understood as a system of signs and of representation, must be welcomed by language and preserved in its alterity. Martin Heidegger's elucidation of a more essential understanding of Being entails a deconstruction of onto-theology, of the sign and the grammatical and logical determinations of language, all decisive starting points for Levinas and Blanchot. At stake for both Levinas and Blanchot is how to mark a nondiscursive excess within discourse without erasing or reducing it. How should one read and write the other in the same without reducing the other to the same? Critics in recent years have discussed an “ethical moment or turn” characterized by the other's irruption into the order of discourse. The other becomes a true crossroads of disciplines, since it affects several aspects of discourse: the constitution of the subject, the status of knowledge, the nature of representation, and what that representation represses. Yet there has been a tendency to graft the other onto paradigms whose main purpose is to reassess questions of identity, fundamentally in terms of representation; the other thus loses some of its most crucial features.

This book studies the doctrines of productivity and interest in Romanticism and classical political economy. The book argues that the widespread contemporary embrace of cultural historicism and the rejection of nineteenth-century conceptions of agency have hindered our study of aesthetics and politics. Focusing on the difficulty of coordinating paradigms of intellectual and material labor, this book shows that the relationship between the imagination and practical reason is crucial to debates about language and ideology. From the Romantics to Poe and Kafka, writers who explore Kant's claim that poetry “sets the imagination free” discover that the representational and performative powers of language cannot be explained as the products of a self-governing dynamic, whether formal or material. A discourse that neither reflects nor prescribes the values of its society, literature proves to be a uniquely autonomous praxis because it undermines our reliance on the concept of interest as the foundation of self-expression or self-determination. Far from compromising its political significance, this turns literature into the condition of possibility of freedom. For Smith, Bentham, and Marx, the limits of self-rule as a model of agency prompt a similar rethinking of the relationship between language and politics. Their conception of a linguistic labor that informs material praxis is incompatible with the liberal ideal of individualism. In the final analysis, their work invites us to think about social conflicts not as clashes between competing interests, but as a struggle to distinguish human from linguistic imperatives.

This book weaves together three themes at the intersection of Jacques Lacan and the philosophical tradition. The first is the question of time and memory. How do these problems call for a revision of Lacan's purported “ahistoricism,” and how does the temporality of the subject in Lacan intersect with the questions of temporality initiated by Heidegger and then developed by contemporary French philosophy? The second question concerns the status of the body in Lacanian theory, especially in connection with emotion and affect, which Lacanian theory is commonly thought to ignore, but which the concept of jouissance was developed to address. Finally, the chapter aims to explore, beyond the strict limits of Lacanian theory, possible points of intersection between psychoanalysis and other domains, including questions of race, biology, and evolutionary theory. Exploring the anthropological category of “race” within a broadly evolutionary perspective, it shows how Lacan's elaboration of the “imaginary” and the “symbolic” might allow us to explain human physiological diversity without reducing it to a cultural or linguistic construction or allowing “race” to remain as a traditional biological category. Here again the questions of history and temporality are paramount, and open the possibility for a genuine dialogue between psychoanalysis and biology. Finally, the book engages literary texts. Antigone, Ovid's Metamorphoses, Hamlet, and even Wordsworth become the muses who oblige psychoanalysis and philosophy to listen once again to the provocations of poetry, which always disrupts our familiar notions of time and memory, of history and bodily or affective experience, and of subjectivity itself.

This book's analysis of the fate of art following its alleged end, of ethical imperatives “after Auschwitz”, of the negative dialectic of myth and freedom from superstition, of the manipulation of consciousness by the unequal siblings of fascism and the culture industry, and of the narrowly conceived concept of reason that has given rise to an unprecedented exploitation of nature and needless human suffering, speaks to central concerns of our time. The essays collected here analyze the full range of implications emanating from the author's demand that the task of critical thinking be to imagine a mode of being in the world that occurs in and through a language that has liberated itself from the spell of an alleged historical and political inevitability, what he once tellingly called a “language without soil”. The author's intellectual gestures sponsor politically conscious modes of theoretical speculation in a late modernity that may still have a future because its language and aspirations are without soil. Also included is an annotated translation of a seminal interview the author gave in 1969 concerning the relationship of Critical Theory to political activism. In it, the dialectical interplay between thought and action forcefully emerges.

The work of a master critic writing at the peak of his powers, this book draws on speech act theory, as it originated with J. L. Austin and was further developed by Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida, to investigate the many dimensions of doing things with words in James's fiction. Three modes of speech act occur in James's novels. First, James's writing of his fictions is performative. He puts on paper words that have the power to raise in the reader the phantoms of imaginary persons. Second, James's writing does things with words that do other things in their turn, including conferring on the reader responsibility for further judgment and action: for example, teaching James's novels or writing about them. Finally, the narrators and characters in James's fictions utter speech acts that are forms of doing things with words—promises, declarations, excuses, denials, acts of bearing witness, lies, decisions publicly attested, and the like. The action of each work by James is brought about by its own idiosyncratic repertoire of speech acts. In careful readings of six major examples, The Aspern Papers, The Portrait of a Lady, The Awkward Age, The Wings of the Dove, The Golden Bowl, and The Sense of the Past, this book demonstrates the value of speech act theory for reading literature.

The impact of Derrida’s work in the U.S. and continental Europe—principally in the disciplines of philosophy, English, French, Comparative Literature, gender and queer studies and postcolonial studies—has been studied at length, but the significance of his writing for Hispanism has been, until now, overlooked. And yet Derrida developes a terminology and addresses sets of problems in ways that have a direct and distinctive effect on philosophers and literary critics in Spain and Latin America, where his work circulates widely in excellent translation. Problems and themes that resonate distinctively in one way in the European or North American context echo quite differently in Latin America and in Spain: the trace; nationalism and cosmopolitanism; spectrality and hauntology; the relation of subjectivity and truth; the university; disciplinarity; and institutionality. Remarkably, the influence is in a profound sense reciprocal: over the course of his career, Derrida takes up and makes central to his thought the theme of marranismo, the phenomenon of Sephardic crypto-Judaism. Derrida’s marranismo is a means of taking apart traditional accounts of identity; a way for Derrida to reflect on the status of the secret; a philosophical nexus where language, nationalism and truth-telling meet and clash in productive ways; a way of elaborating a critique of modern biopolitics. It is far from being simply and only a marker of his work’s Hispanic identity, but it is also, and irreducibly, that.

This book revises the concept of the public sphere by examining opinion as a foundational concept of modernity. Indispensable to ideas like “public opinion” and “freedom of opinion,” opinion, though sometimes held in dubious repute, here assumes a central position in modern philosophy, literature, sociology, and political theory, while being the object of extremely contradictory valuations. The book focuses on interpretative shifts begun in the Enlightenment and cemented by the French Revolution to restore the concept of “opinion” to a central role in our understanding of the political public sphere. Locke's “law of opinion,” underwritten by the ancient conceptions of nomos and fama, proved to be inconsistent with the modern ideal of a rational political order. The contemporary dynamics of this problem have been worked out by Jürgen Habermas and Reinhart Koselleck: for Habermas the private law of opinion can be brought under the rational control of public discourse and procedural form, whereas Koselleck views modernity as the period in which irrational potentials were unleashed by a political-conceptual language that only intensified and accelerated the upheavals of history. Modernity risked making opinions into the idols of collective representations, sacrificing opinion to ideology and individualism to totalitarianism. Drawing on an intriguing range of thinkers, some not widely known today, the book argues that this transformation, though irreversible, is resisted by literary language, which opposes the rigid formalism that compels individuals to identify with their opinions. Rather than forcing thought to bind itself to stable opinions, modern literary forms seek to suspend this moment of closure and representation, so that held opinions do not bring all deliberative processes to a standstill.