Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii
1. Introduction: Derrida and the Time of the Political / Pheng Cheah and Suzanne Guerlac 1
Part I. Openings
Jacques Derrida: Co-Responding Voix You / Helene Cixous 41
Part II. The a-venir: Undoing Sovereignty and Teleology
Eschatology versus Teleology: The Suspended Dialogue between Derrida and Althusser / Etienne Balibar 57
The Untimely Secret of Democracy / Pheng Cheah 74
Sovereign Stupidity and Autoimmunity / Geoffrey Bennington 97
Sovereign Hesitations / Wendy Brown 114
Part III. Responsibilities within and without Europe
European Memories: Jan Patocka and Jacques Derrida on Responsibility / Rodolphe Gasche 135
"Call Me Ishmael" / Anne Norton 158
Algeria as an Archive / Soraya Tlatli 177
Fine Risks, or, The Spirit of a Pacifism and Its Destiny / Satoshi Ukai 196
Part IV. Between Ethics and Politics
The Aporia of Pure Giving and the Aim of Reciprocity: On Derrida's Given Time / Marcel Henaff 215
Pseudology: Derrida on Arendt and Lying in Politics / Martin Jay 235
The Fragility of the Pardon (Derrida and Ricouer) / Suzanne Guerlac 255
Should Democracy Come? Ethics and Politics in Derrida / Jacques Ranciere 274
Part V. Afterword
Finishing, Starting / Judith Butler 291
Bibliography 307
Contributors 323
Index 327

Promotional Information

Assesses the implications of Derrida's thought for contemporary political theory and politics

About the Author

Pheng Cheah is Professor of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Inhuman Conditions: On Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights and Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation and co-editor of Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation.

Suzanne Guerlac is Professor of French at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Thinking in Time: An Introduction to Henri Bergson and Literary Polemics: Bataille, Sartre, ValÉry, Breton, co-winner of the Modern Language Association’s Scaglione Prize.

Reviews

"Derrida and the Time of the Political undoes once and for all the unproductive opposition between deconstruction and politics that has dominated the United States academy. This is a stellar collection, the pieces are diversified, not a commemorative gesture but a critical engagement. Careful theoretical parsing combines with detailed political awareness to make this book an authoritative document for understanding not only the later Derrida and political deconstruction but the problems and engagements of our time."--Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, University Professor and Director of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, Columbia University