Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor's Preface
- Dedication
- Introduction
- Auto-
- Jacques Derrida: … A life
- Foundations
- In the event
- That's life, death
- Handshake
- The limits of my language
- Derrida's ‘eighteenth century’
- Half-life
- Write, he wrote
- Beginnings and ends
- Salut à Jacques
- Jacques Derrida in America
- Foreign language (Jacques Derrida and me)
- Wormwords
- Index
Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editor's Preface
- Dedication
- Introduction
- Auto-
- Jacques Derrida: … A life
- Foundations
- In the event
- That's life, death
- Handshake
- The limits of my language
- Derrida's ‘eighteenth century’
- Half-life
- Write, he wrote
- Beginnings and ends
- Salut à Jacques
- Jacques Derrida in America
- Foreign language (Jacques Derrida and me)
- Wormwords
- Index
Summary
I speak of mourning as the attempt, always doomed to failure – a constitutive failure, precisely – to incorporate, interiorize, introject, subjectivize the other in me. Even before the death of the other, the inscription of that other's mortality constitutes me. I am in mourning therefore I am – dead with the other's death, my relation to myself is primarily one of mourning, a mourning that is moreover impossible. This is also what I call ex-appropriation, appropriation caught in a double bind: I must and must not take the other into me; mourning is an unfaithful fidelity if it succeeds in interiorizing the other ideally in me, i.e. if it fails to respect the other's infinite exteriority.
This volume gathers a number of pieces about Jacques Derrida which, with the exception of the first, were all written since his death in October 2004. Some of them explicitly attempt to address that death and its impact (at least its impact on the author), but all, in spite of their differences of occasion and audience, of tone and style, whether directed to a more or less ‘professional’ deconstructive audience (‘That's Life, Death’ or ‘Handshake’) or one presumed to be less familiar with Derrida's work (‘Foundations’ or ‘The Limits of My Language’) are profoundly marked by Derrida's death, and are often struggling to go on thinking in its wake.
Information
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- Not Half No EndMilitantly Melancholic Essays in Memory of Jacques Derrida, pp. xi - xivPublisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2010
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