Encountering Derrida: Legacies and Futures of Deconstruction

Description

Encountering Derrida explores the points of engagement between Jacques Derrida and a host of other European thinkers, past and present, in order to counter recent claims that the era of deconstruction is finally drawing to a close. The book rereads Derrida in order to renew deconstruction's various conceptions of language, poetry, philosophy, institutions, difference and the future. This impressive collection of essays from the world's leading Derrida scholars re-evaluates Derrida's legacy and looks forward to the possible futures of deconstruction by confronting various challenges to Derrida's thought. Collectively, the essays argue that Derrida must be read alongside others, an approach that produces some surprising new accounts of this challenging critical thinker.

Simon Wortham is Professor of English and co-director of the London Graduate School at Kingston University London, UK. Allison Weiner has a PhD in Comparative Literature from Yale University.

'These articulate, often distinguished essays focus on the way Derrida creates a more reflective language, one that includes hesitation, play, and indeterminacy, and opens up to literature and testimony.' Geoffrey Hartman, Sterling Professor Emeritus English & Comparative Literature, Yale University, USA. "Well-written throughout, Encountering Derrida incorporates a rich intersection of the fields and discourses that Derrida's writings decisively reconfigured." - Henry Sussman, Julian Park Professor of Comparative Literature, University at Buffalo, SUNY, USA "If the contributors to this volume all seek to rethink and transform the contre relation to (and of) deconstruction, this volume can only be considered a success. The complex and challenging issues raised at the cutting edge of Derrida studies can only attest to the continuing significance Derrida and deconstruction have today, 'and, for that matter, tomorrow'(1)." -Sally Hart, Philosophy in Review, 2008