A kaleidoscopic portrait of Derrida's life and works through the prism of his Jewish heritage, by a leading feminist thinker and close personal friend. From the circumcision act to family relationships, through Derrida's works to those of Celan, Rousseau, and Beaumarchais, Cixous effortlessly merges biography and textual commentary in this playful portrait of the man, his works, and being (or not being) Jewish.

This book is an account of, and commentary on, a collection of dreams by the novelist, playwright and theorist Helene Cixous. As such the book presents a rich poetic experience and is a key document in understanding Cixous' writing practice. Jacques Derrida's commentary on Dream I Tell You is published in 'The Frontiers of Theory' series as Geneses, Genealogies, Genres and Genius.Key Features* Importance of Helene Cixous to contemporary literary and French feminist theory.* The poetic, autobiographical quality of the writing.* Significance of the book to the Cixous oeuvre.

This book offer a series of lucid and incisive readings of Derrida's work, as well as an elegiac tribute in more personal terms.

Money facilitates the rites and rituals we perform in everyday life. More than a mere medium of exchange or a measure of value, it is the primary means by which we manifest a faith unique to our secular age. But what happens when individual belief (credo, ‘I’ believe) and the systems into which it is bound (credit, ‘it’ believes) enter into crisis? Where did the sacredness of money come from, and does it have a future? Why do we talk about debt and repayment in overtly moral terms? How should a theological critique of capitalism proceed today? With the effects of the 2008 economic crises continuing to be felt across the world, this volume brings together some of the most important contemporary voices in philosophy, literature, theology, and critical and cultural theory together in one volume to assert the need to interrogate and broaden the terms of the theological critique of capitalism.

This book dialogues with deconstruction’s “religion without religion” and its implications for theology. In the view of many, deconstruction is a purely nihilistic force bent on the wanton destruction of long-held philosophical, religious, and moral traditions. However, this perspective ignores the fact that deconstruction—in the hands of its standard bearers like Jacques Derrida, John Caputo, and others—has all along been a religious exercise in demythologization. Furnishing a Christian rejoinder to deconstruction’s claims about and objections to orthodox religion (and particularly to Christianity), the book addresses the following questions: How can deconstruction open a space for an affirmative faith to occur and be professed? Can deconstruction ever be hospitable toward Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah for which it waits?

Nationality Between Poststructuralism and Postcolonial Theory: A New Cosmopolitanism examines and interrogates recent work on nationality in literal, critical and cultural theory. Focusing on the work of Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari, Kristeva, Spivak, and Bhabha, it explores how, for these theorists, the concepts of community, the new International, nomadism, deterritorialization, cosmopolitanism, hospitality, the native informant, hybridity and postcolonial agency can provoke a different understanding of national identity.

This volume makes a significant contribution to both the study of Derrida and of modernist studies. The contributors argue, first, that deconstruction is not “modern”; neither is it “postmodern” nor simply “modernist.” They also posit that deconstruction is intimately connected with literature, not because deconstruction would be a literary way of doing philosophy, but because literature stands out as a “modern” notion. The contributors investigate the nature and depth of Derrida's affinities with writers such as Joyce, Kafka, Antonin Artaud, Georges Bataille, Paul Celan, Maurice Blanchot, Theodor Adorno, Samuel Beckett, and Walter Benjamin, among others. With its strong connection between philosophy and literary modernism, this highly original volume advances modernist literary study and the relationship of literature and philosophy.

In this first ever monograph on Jacques Derrida's 'Toledo confession' – where he portrayed himself as 'sort of a Marrano of the French Catholic culture' – Agata Bielik-Robson shows Derrida's marranismo to be a literary experiment of auto-fiction. She looks at all possible aspects of Derrida's Marrano identification in order to demonstrate that it ultimately constitutes a trope of non-identitarian evasion that permeates all his works: just as Marranos cannot be characterized as either Jewish or Christian, so is Derrida's 'universal Marranism' an invitation to think philosophically, politically and – last but not least – metaphysically without rigid categories of identity and belonging. By concentrating on Derrida's deliberate choice of marranismo, Bielik-Robson shows that it penetrates deep into the very core of his late thinking, constantly drawing on the literary works of Kafka, Celan, Joyce, Cixous and Valéry, and throws a new light on his early works, most of all: Of Grammatology, Dissemination and 'Différance'. She also offers a completely new interpretation of many of Derrida's works only seemingly non-related to the Marrano issue, like Glas, Given Time: Counterfeit Money, Death Penalty Seminar, and Specters of Marx. In these new readings, this book demonstrates that the Marrano Derrida is not a marginal auto-biographical figure overshadowed by Derrida the Philosopher: it is one and the same thinker who discovered marranismo as a literary trope of openness, offering up a new genre of philosophical story-telling which centers around Derrida's Marrano 'auto-fable'.

Invited to answer questions about his relationship to Judaism, Jacques Derrida spoke through Franz Kafka: As for myself, I could imagine another Abraham.He explores the movement between growing up Jewish, becoming Jewish,and Jewish beingor existence. In his essay The Other Abraham,which appears here in English for the first time, he imagines other Abrahams in light of the proclaimed universalism of philosophy and its recent fragmentation into philosophemes.Thus we no longer confront Judaismbut Judeity,multiple Judaisms and Jewish existences, manifold ways of being and writing as a Jew--in Derrida's case, as a French-speaking Algerian deprived of, then restored to French nationality in the 1940s.Contributions contrast Derrida's thought with philosophical predecessors such as Rosenzweig, Levinas, Celan, and Scholem, and trace confluences between deconstruction and Kabbalah. Derrida's relationship to the universalist aspirations in contemporary theology is also discussed, and an evaluation is offered of his late autobiographical writings.

This biography of Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) tells the story of a Jewish boy from Algiers, excluded from school at the age of twelve, who went on to become the most widely translated French philosopher in the world – a vulnerable, tormented man who, throughout his life, continued to see himself as unwelcome in the French university system. We are plunged into the different worlds in which Derrida lived and worked: pre-independence Algeria, the microcosm of the École Normale Supérieure, the cluster of structuralist thinkers, and the turbulent events of 1968 and after. We meet the remarkable series of leading writers and philosophers with whom Derrida struck up a friendship: Louis Althusser, Emmanuel Levinas, Jean Genet, and Hélène Cixous, among others. We also witness an equally long series of often brutal polemics fought over crucial issues with thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, John R. Searle, and Jürgen Habermas, as well as several controversies that went far beyond academia, the best known of which concerned Heidegger and Paul de Man. We follow a series of courageous political commitments in support of Nelson Mandela, illegal immigrants, and gay marriage. And we watch as a concept – deconstruction – takes wing and exerts an extraordinary influence way beyond the philosophical world, on literary studies, architecture, law, theology, feminism, queer theory, and postcolonial studies. In writing this compelling and authoritative biography, Benoît Peeters talked to over a hundred individuals who knew and worked with Derrida. He is also the first person to make use of the huge personal archive built up by Derrida throughout his life and of his extensive correspondence. Peeters’ book gives us a new and deeper understanding of the man who will perhaps be seen as the major philosopher of the second half of the twentieth century.