Late Derrida Special Issue The South Atlantic Quarterly

This special issue of SAQ commemorates and interrogatesâ??with varying measures of appreciation and critiqueâ??the late work of the philosopher Jacques Derrida. Resisting simple memorialization of Derrida since his death in 2004, this collection contends that the late work of this prolific theorist remains to be better understood. The contributors explore the peculiar intensityâ??a combined sense of both patience and urgencyâ??that characterizes Derridaâ??s late writing, suggestive, among other things, of his preoccupation with mortality, of time running out, and of so many pressing things to be done.

The essays address a wide array of Derridaâ??s concerns: human rights, justice, religion, the performative, â??the gift of death,â?? mourning, and sovereignty. They often put Derridaâ??s texts in conjunction with the works of othersâ??Wordsworth, Agamben, Schelling, and Benjamin, to name a fewâ??that resonate with and on occasion resist Derridaâ??s own thinking and writing. One essay offers a reading of Wordsworthâ??s elegy â??Distressful gift!â?? as a dialogue with questions posed by Derrida, using as its frame the kind of nonnormative mourning that Derrida advocated, together with a haunting analysis of the character of survival. Other essays look at Derridaâ??s theory of performativity as advanced in his late works, continuing his emphasis on the power of language, and in general they emulate his vigilance in attending to force and violence everywhere.

Contributors. Ian Balfour, David L. Clark, Mary Jacobus, David E. Johnson, David Lloyd, J. Hillis Miller, Marc Redfield, Rei Terada, Elisabeth Weber