Thinking What Comes, Volume 2: Institutions, Inventions, and Inscriptions(The Frontiers of Theory)

In two volumes, Geoffrey Bennington and Kas Saghafi present the majority of Jacques Derrida’s untranslated, and previously uncollected, essays and interviews. Dating mostly from 1992 to 2004, these writings offer a fuller picture of Derrida’s biography, theoretical engagements and the stakes of his social and political investments. Institutions, Inventions, and Inscriptions by Jacques Derrida: Thinking What Comes, Volume 2 collects Derrida’s writings on friends including Emmanuel Levinas, Alain David, Louis Marin, Marie-Louise Mallet, Safaa Fathy, Mathieu Bénézet and Jos Joliet. It also features interviews that illuminate his experience at school, his writing habits, the relation he saw between philosophical discourse to the ‘poetic’, and his views on the singularity of literature and fiction. Whether writing about racism and anti-Semitism, filiation and fidelity, or hospitality and responsibility, Derrida is razor-sharp and impassioned. These volumes allow significant insight into his mature thought.

Table of Contents:
Series Editor's Preface Editors’ Introduction Acknowledgments Part I: Scenes of Differences 1. Scenes of Differences: Where Philosophy and Poetics, Indissociably, Make the Event of Writing (2006), Translated by Bradley Ramos 2. Philosophy at the Risk of the Promise (2004), Translated by Ellie Anderson and Philippe Lynes Part II: On School and Writing 3. "School was Hell for Me…" (1989), Translated by David Maruzzella 4. "I don’t write without artificial light" (1982), Translated by Adam Rosenthal 5. Archive and Draft (1998), Translated by Katie Chenoweth 6. Between the Writing Body and Writing (2001), Translated by Katie Chenoweth Part III: "Oh My Friends" 7. With Levinas: Between Him and Me in Affection and Shared Trust (2003), Translated by Philippe Lynes 8. Form and Fashion: (Never again: in the face of all opposition, never again think that "For the Form") (2001), Translated by Philippe Lynes 9. Echoes of Encounters (2003), Translated by Adam Rosenthal 10. This Night in the Night of the Night… (2003), Translated by Humberto González Núnez 11. Her Evil Genius: Preparations for the Infinite (2004), Translated by Humberto González Núnez 12. Prière d’insérer (1991), Translated by Philippe Lynes 13. Eyespot Like no Other (1980), Translated by Ellie Andeson and Philippe Lynes Index

About the Author :
Geoffrey Bennington is Asa G Candler Professor of Modern French Thought at Emory University. He is the author and translator of numerous books and articles on literary and philosophical issues, and translator of many texts by Jacques Derrida and other French thinkers. His books include Late Lyotard (2005), Deconstruction is Not What You Think…(2005), Interrupting Derrida (2000) and, with Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida (1991). Kas Saghafi is Professor of Philosophy at University of Memphis. He researches and teaches in contemporary French thought. He is the author of two books, The World after the End of the World (2020) and Apparitions—Of Derrida's Other (2010) and numerous articles. He is co-editor, with Geoffrey Bennington, of a two-volume collection of Derrida’s writings entitled Thinking What Comes (2024). He has also co-translated, with Pleshette DeArmitt, four essays by Jacques Derrida.

Review :
This superb collection contains some of Derrida’s most compelling interviews and essays on literature, theater, music, sexual difference, and racism, as well as some of his most personal reflections on friendship, his early childhood and education in Algeria, his fraught relation to academic institutions, his unique philosophical itinerary, and his inimitable practice of writing.