This book offers a careful and measured response to Noam Chomsky's criticism against deconstructive theories of language. The author reveals the connections between Chomsky's linguistic theories and politics by demonstrating their shared philosophical basis.

This book offers a careful and measured response to Noam Chomsky's criticism against deconstructive theories of language. The author reveals the connections between Chomsky's linguistic theories and politics by demonstrating their shared philosophical basis.

The world's foremost critic of U.S. foreign policy exposes the hollow promises of democracy in American actions abroad—and at home The United States has repeatedly asserted its right to intervene against "failed states" around the globe. In this much anticipated sequel to his international bestseller Hegemony or Survival, Noam Chomsky turns the tables, charging the United States with being a "failed state," and thus a danger to its own people and the world. "Failed states" Chomsky writes, are those "that do not protect their citizens from violence and perhaps even destruction, that regard themselves as beyond the reach of domestic or international law, and that suffer from a ‘democratic deficit,' having democratic forms but with limited substance." Exploring recent U.S. foreign and domestic policies, Chomsky assesses Washington's escalation of the nuclear risk; the dangerous consequences of the occupation of Iraq; and America's self-exemption from international law. He also examines an American electoral system that frustrates genuine political alternatives, thus impeding any meaningful democracy. Forceful, lucid, and meticulously documented, Failed States offers a comprehensive analysis of a global superpower that has long claimed the right to reshape other nations while its own democratic institutions are in severe crisis, and its policies and practices have recklessly placed the world on the brink of disaster. Systematically dismantling America's claim to being the world's arbiter of democracy, Failed States is Chomsky's most focused—and urgent—critique to date.

"Wolfgang B. Sperlich explores Chomsky's formative years and his main intellectual influences, and charts his strained relationship with mainstream American academia. He also offers an informed overview of Chomsky's landmark linguistics contributions as an introduction to his work, and he explains the latest developments in Chomskyan linguistics and how they influence research in fields as varied as neuroscience, biology and evolution. Sperlich is equally attentive to Chomsky's political activism - from the pacifist-anarchist lectures and writings of the 1950s and '60s to his recent book Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance, a chilling interpretation of an American foreign policy that is determined to achieve 'unilateral world domination through absolute military superiority'. Sperlich's Noam Chomsky is the perfect introduction to one of the most profound thinkers of our time."--BOOK JACKET.

A fresh and fascinating look at the philosophies, politics, and intellectual legacy of one of the twentieth century's most influential and controversial minds Occupying a pivotal position in postwar thought, Noam Chomsky is both the founder of modern linguistics and the world's most prominent political dissident. Chris Knight adopts an anthropologist's perspective on the twin output of this intellectual giant, acclaimed as much for his denunciations of US foreign policy as for his theories about language and mind. Knight explores the social and institutional context of Chomsky's thinking, showing how the tension between military funding and his role as linchpin of the political left pressured him to establish a disconnect between science on the one hand and politics on the other, deepening a split between mind and body characteristic of Western philosophy since the Enlightenment. Provocative, fearless, and engaging, this remarkable study explains the enigma of one of the greatest intellectuals of our time.

A brilliant indictment of US imperial power.

Jacques Derrida continues to be the world's single most influential philosophical and literary theorist. He is also one of the most controversial and most complex. His own works and critical studies of his work proliferate, but where can a student, utterly new to the work of Derrida, start? Understanding Derrida is written as an introduction to the full range of Derrida's key ideas and influences. It brings together the world's leading authorities on Derrida, each writing a short, accessible essay on one central aspect of his work. Framed by a clear introduction and a complete bibliography of Derrida's publications in English, the essays systematically analyze one aspect of Derrida's work, each essay including a quick summary of Derrida's books which have addressed this theme, guiding the student towards a direct engagement with Derrida's texts. The essays cover language, metaphysics, the subject, politics, ethics, the decision, translation, religion, psychoanalysis, literature, art, and Derrida's seminal relationship to other philosophers, namely Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas, Hegel and Nietzsche.

From the New Criticism to Deconstruction traces the transitions in American critical theory and practice from the 1950s to the 1980s. It focuses on the influence of French structuralism and post-structuralism on American deconstruction within a wide-ranging context that includes literary criticism, philosophy, psychology, technology, and politics.

Deconstructing Hegemony is mainly informed by the deconstructionist approach, as it unravels literature, theory, and history writing, in addition to ideology, lexicon, media, and politics. The readings are also informed by, among others, Michel Foucault, Edward Said, Abdelwahab Elmessiri, and Noam Chomsky. Deconstruction, or questioning oppositions, as the recurrent approach, pairs with contrapuntalism or counterpoint; epistemology or theory of knowledge; hermeneutics or interpretation; ecocriticism or literature and nature; geopolitics; cartography or map-drawing; demography or population; marginalization or minority studies; as well as normalizing discourse or stigmatizing difference or any deviation from 'set' standards. In Part I of this book, El-Meligi analyses case studies in deconstructive literature by comparing works of Eastern and Western authors such as David Grossman, Mourid Barghouti, and Louise Erdrich. Part II probes deconstructive theory, philosophy, historiography, and lexicon that pertain to the geopolitical term, the Middle East. Among the writers analysed are Chomsky, Papp�, and Finkelstein.

"The focus of any genuinely new piece of criticism or interpretation must be on the creative act of finding the new, but deconstruction puts the matter the other way around: its emphasis is on debunking the old. But aside from the fact that this program is inherently uninteresting, it is, in fact, not at all clear that it is possible. . . . [T]he naïvetê of the crowd is deconstruction's very starting point, and its subsequent move is as much an emotional as an intellectual leap to a position that feels different as much in the one way as the other. . . ." --From the book