Derrida, Literature and War: Absence and the Chance of Meeting

Description

Derrida, Literature and War argues for the importance of the relation between absence and chance in Derrida's work in thinking today about war and literature. Sean Gaston starts by marking Derrida's attempts to resist the philosophical tradition of calculating on absence as an assured resource, while insisting on the (mis)chances of the chance encounter. Gaston re-examines the relation between the concept of war and the chances of literature by focusing on narratives of conflict set during the Napoleonic wars. These chance encounters or duels can help us think again about the sovereign attempt to leave the enemy nameless or to name what cannot be named in the midst of wars without end. His study includes new readings of a range of writers, including Aristotle, Hume, Rousseau, Schiller, Clausewitz, Thackeray, Tolstoy, Conrad, Freud, Heidegger, Blanchot, Foucault, Deleuze and Agamben. Offering an authoritative reading of Derrida's oeuvre and new insights into a range of writers in philosophy and literature, this is a timely and ambitious study of philosophy, literature, politics and ethics.

Sean Gaston is Reader in English at Brunel University, UK.

"This is a truly illuminating work. Taking as his touchstone Derrida's insistence that we don't foreclose the chances of the chance encounter, Gaston develops a powerful argument that recasts conventional understandings of the tangled relations between war and anonymity, war and peace, the concept of war and the chances of literature. It hardly needs to be said how important such matters are and in the present moment how urgent." - Peter Otto, University of Melbourne, Australia Offers at once an engagement with Derrida's work that provides routes into his myriad writings, and illuminating new dimensons to a series of literary (and other, in the case of Freud and Clausewitz's) works. -- Culture Machine Reviewed in The Year's Work in English Studies, Volume 90