The Philosophy of Derrida.

For more than forty years Jacques Derrida unsettled and challenged the presumptions underlying our most fundamental philosophical, political, and ethical conventions. In The Philosophy of Derrida, Mark Dooley and Liam Kavanagh provide a succinct overview of his core philosophical ideas and a balanced appraisal of their lasting impact.

The authors' analysis of Derrida's writings, especially the objectives of deconstruction, make his work clearly accessible. Dooley and Kavanagh also situate Derrida within historicist, hermeneutic, and linguistic thought. From his early work on Husserl, Hegel, and de Saussure to his final writings on justice, hospitality, and cosmopolitanism, Derrida is shown to have been grappling with the question of national, cultural, and personal identity and the notion of whether a "pure" identity has any real efficacy. Rather than an iconoclast for whom deconstruction equalled destruction, the Derrida that emerges in this study sheds light on our historical constructions to reveal that there is much about ourselves that we do not know.
The Philosophy of Derrida
Mark Dooley and Liam Kavanagh

Table of Contents


Preface vii
Abbreviations x
1. The catastrophe of memory: identity and mourning 1
2. Death and differance: philosophy and language 21
3. Repetition and post cards: psychoanalysis and phenomenology 67
4. The risks of negotiation: ethics and politics 107
Afterword 149
Notes 153
Suggestions for further reading 157
References 159
Index 161