Re-reading Derrida Perspectives on Mourning and Its Hospitalities
Produktdetaljer
Biografisk notat
Tony Thwaites teaches modernist literature and literary and cultural theory at the University of Queensland. He is the author of Joycean Temporalities: Debts, Promises and Countersignatures (UP Florida, 2011) and Reading Freud: Psychoanalysis as Cultural Theory (SAGE, 2007). He is currently working on a book on Lacanian narrative theory.
Judith Seaboyer teaches Victorian and contemporary literature at the University of Queensland. She has published on British and American contemporary fiction, and is presently working on the turn to pastoral in contemporary literature and on the pedagogy of reading well.
Refusing to mourn, Miller and Attridge engage Derrida's refusing to mourn in a volume of clear-eyed interdisciplinary explorations on hospitality that absolute mourning and posthumous infidelity invite. Seven scholars and the editors answer the invitation with expansive essays that address one another as they give their take on legacies, memorials, crypts, and elegies in Beirut and New Orleans, in Wordsworth and Joyce, in Abraham and Torok, in film and geopolitics, in trauma and community. Each takes up in one nonsynonymy or other the spacing auto-immunity future of that infidelity or absolute.
- John P. Leavey, University of Florida,
Thwaites and Seaboyer have succeeded in assembling a network of fascinating, at times exhilarating, readings of Derrida’s ‘later’ reflections on mourning, death and hospitality. Suggestive insights and curious correspondences abound across a wide range of discussion topics (from Levinas to Lebanon, New Orleans to neoliberalism and beyond) in a book that shows that deconstruction matters, precisely because things other than deconstruction matter. For a careful and creative response to Derrida’s work, look no further than Re-reading Derrida.
- Niall Lucy, Curtin University, author of A DERRIDA DICTIONARY,
Re-reading Derrida: Perspectives on Mourning and its Hospitalities, edited by Tony Thwaites and Judith Seaboyer, is a unique collaborative exploration of the legacies of the late philosopher, Jacques Derrida, across a wide variety of fields.
Anchoring the book are two major essays on mourning by two of the best-known Derridean thinkers today, who were close friends of Derrida: J. Hillis Miller and Derek Attridge. Each of the other essays has been written to respond to these, and—in a novel move—to at least two of the other contributions. As a result, the very form of the book is a way of exploring the thematics of hospitality, and the ways in which disciplines open themselves to one another, extending lines of flight across the archipelagos of knowledge—the politics of the memorial, poetry, trauma, film, neoliberalism, the novel, and psychoanalysis. Throughout the book themes and concerns recur, each time refracted, developed, and questioned under the pressures of new conjunctures.
As the editors’ Introduction argues, what the book seeks to show is not that a certain general body of theoretical work can be applied in all sorts of areas, but something more interesting: that from the outset, theoretical work itself takes on its meaning only in its grappling with the specific, the singular, even the unique. Miller’s and Attridge’s essays have at their heart, after all, the loss of a friend.
About this book
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Mourning’s Number
Tony Thwaites and Judith Seaboyer
I: Mournings
Absolute Mourning: It Is Jacques You Mourn For
J. Hillis Miller
Posthumous Infidelity: Derrida, Levinas, and the Third
Derek Attridge
II: Hospitalities
The Disjointed City: Materializing Mourning and Forgiveness in the Reconstruction of Beirut
Jonathan Hall
The Haunting of (un)Burial: Mourning the “Unknown” in Whitman’s America63
Lindsay Tuggle
Elegizing John Wordsworth: Commemoration and Lyric
J. Mark Smith
City of Ghosts: Mourning and Justice in The Sixth Sense
Warwick Mules
Deconstruction and Democracy in the Neoliberal Turn
Stefan Mattessich
Cryptonymic Secretion: On the Kind-ness of Strangers
Laurie Johnson
Hospitality to Trauma: Ethics after Auschwitz
Shannon Burns
?: Hospitality and its Discontents (as such)
Tony Thwaites
Bibliography
Index
Produktdetaljer
Biografisk notat
Tony Thwaites teaches modernist literature and literary and cultural theory at the University of Queensland. He is the author of Joycean Temporalities: Debts, Promises and Countersignatures (UP Florida, 2011) and Reading Freud: Psychoanalysis as Cultural Theory (SAGE, 2007). He is currently working on a book on Lacanian narrative theory.
Judith Seaboyer teaches Victorian and contemporary literature at the University of Queensland. She has published on British and American contemporary fiction, and is presently working on the turn to pastoral in contemporary literature and on the pedagogy of reading well.