Deconstruction Books

The Animal That Therefore I Am (Perspectives in Continental Philosophy)

Jacques Derrida

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The Animal That Therefore I Am is the long-awaited translation of the complete text of Jacques Derrida’s ten-hour address to the 1997 Cérisy conference entitled “The Autobiographical Animal,” the third of four such colloquia on his work. The book was assembled posthumously on the basis of two published sections, one written and recorded session, and one informal recorded session.The book is at once an affectionate look back over the multiple roles played by animals in Derrida’s work and a profound philosophical investigation and critique of the relegation of animal life that takes place as a result of the distinction—dating from Descartes—between man as thinking animal and every other living species. That starts with the very fact of the line of separation drawn between the human and the millions of other species that are reduced to a single “the animal.” Derrida finds that distinction, or versions of it, surfacing in thinkers as far apart as Descartes, Kant, Heidegger, Lacan, and Levinas, and he dedicates extended analyses tothe question in the work of each of them.The book’s autobiographical theme intersects with its philosophical analysis through the figures of looking and nakedness, staged in terms of Derrida’s experience when his cat follows him into the bathroom in the morning. In a classic deconstructive reversal, Derrida asks what this animal sees and thinks when it sees this naked man. Yet the experiences of nakedness and shame also lead all the way back into the mythologies of “man’s dominion over the beasts” and trace a history of how man has systematically displaced onto the animal his own failings or bêtises. The Animal That Therefore I Am is at times a militant plea and indictment regarding, especially, the modern industrialized treatment of animals. However, Derrida cannot subscribe to a simplistic version of animal rights that fails to follow through, in all its implications, the questions and definitions of “life” to which he returned in much of his later work.

Difference and Repetition

Gilles Deleuze

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Total reviews: 8 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Deleuze wasn't messing around here, seriously. 5 out of 5 stars.
42 of 47 people found this review helpful.

Many people consider this to be the cornerstone of Deleuze's body of work, and in many ways it is. In many ways it is also invaluable, and perhaps the most significant piece of philosophy to emerge in the last half-century (though I don't think so, but I also don't think we're ready for this book yet, so I await Deleuze's Kojeve eagerly). Difference and Repetition is a front to back masterpiece, and on every page Deleuze's colossal creative genius is on full display. But, that doesn't mean you'll like it--in fact, I bet you (in your heart of hearts) won't. And I'm not challenging anyone--I don't even like it. Even stronger: I can't really fathom how it is POSSIBLE to like it. Let me tell you why, if you haven't already tried the beast a few times (in which case you know already).
D&R runs at a pace and a level of sophistication that perhaps no one in the world besides Deleuze himself could completely follow. It is assumed that not only are you familiar with the ins and outs of some of the most obscure aspects of people like Kant, Leibniz, and Bergson--but that you also be familiar with Deleuze's take on those aspects (which I just dont see how you could grasp in any way but superficially from this book). It's also assumed that you have experience in differential calculus and its theoretical underpinnings (granted mostly from Leibniz and Structuralism, but come on, who can really explain what a "singular point" is without it?). And to top all of that off, it is, very apparently (I won't say really) unwieldy and circulates between all of the above mentioned and more and much more in the snap of a finger. No doubt part of the book's affect and greatness, but, no doubt, more than part of the reason why no one can (under)stand it.
I'm not kidding when I say this: D&R is indisputably the most difficult piece of philosophy I've ever read. It will run off 15-20 dense pages at a time that are not just prolix and turgid, but sometimes senselessly so. Yeah, you wrestle with it about three or four times, you have your moments of lucidity, little chunks here and there that are admittedly shining examples of what sort of a writer Deleuze was and would become. But I repeat: you think Kant, Heidegger, Whitehead, Derrida, Jameson, and Hegel are difficult? I swear before everything holy and unholy this book that you might buy today is infinitely more difficult than anything any of them ever wrote.
But don't take my word for it. Try it, and be honest with yourself. Don't just get it so you can say "oh, come on, it's not that bad." Try and explain it, try and give accounts for your explanations, try and tie it all together, or not. Until I see a lucid exposition of this book (like Holland's for AO), I refuse to believe that anyone really likes it or understands its SPIRIT (not of course the letter, which anyone can get, and parrot). Yet--undoubtedly worth every minute of your time. Such is the enigma of Deleuze...

Editorial Review:

This brilliant exposition of the critique of identity is a classic in contemporary philosophy and one of Deleuze's most important works. Of fundamental importance to literary critics and philosophers,Difference and Repetition develops two central concepts--pure difference and complex repetition--and shows how the two concepts are related. While difference implies divergence and decentering, repetition is associated with displacement and disguising. Central in initiating the shift in French thought away from Hegel and Marx toward Nietzsche and Freud, Difference and Repetition moves deftly to establish a fundamental critique of Western metaphysics.

The Field of Cultural Production

Pierre Bourdieu

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Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Important 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 2 people found this review helpful.

Bourdieu's analyses of class, taste and culture are seminal and serve as a framework for deeper examination of the embeddedness of class structure in the choices of individuals.

Editorial Review:

Elaborating on a theory of the cultural field, this book situates artistic works within the social conditions of their production, circulation, and consumption.

Of Grammatology

Jacques Derrida

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Total reviews: 26 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

read poetry - it's better for you 1 out of 5 stars.
22 of 72 people found this review helpful.

While it's certainly true that there will always be a gulf between reality and words, communication between reader and writer is nonetheless very real and potentially profound, thanks in no small part to empathy and the imagination. Deconstructionism, by denying presence and instead proposing unlimited differences between signs, dismisses any connection between readers and writers and turns language into a hermetic system separated from the outside world which is, of course, inhabited by people who read and people who write. This is exactly what makes deconstructionism so empty and hypocritical: It rejects traditional metaphysics while adopting a pseudo-mystical position which regards language as some unstable and solipsistic alien creature independent of everything and everyone.

Editorial Review:

"One of the major works in the development of contemporary criticism and philosophy." -- J. Hillis Miller, Yale University

Jacques Derrida's revolutionary theories about deconstruction, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and structuralism, first voiced in the 1960s, forever changed the face of European and American criticism. The ideas in De la grammatologie sparked lively debates in intellectual circles that included students of literature, philosophy, and the humanities, inspiring these students to ask questions of their disciplines that had previously been considered improper. Thirty years later, the immense influence of Derrida's work is still igniting controversy, thanks in part to Gayatri Spivak's translation, which captures the richness and complexity of the original. This corrected edition adds a new index of the critics and philosophers cited in the text and makes one of contemporary criticism's most indispensable works even more accessible and usable.

Corpus (Perspectives in Continental Philosophy) (Perspectives in Continental Philosophy)

Jean-Luc Nancy

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Editorial Review:

How have we thought "the body"? How can we think it anew? The body of mortal creatures, the body politic, the body of letters and of laws, the "mystical body of Christ"-all these (and others) are incorporated in the word Corpus, the title and topic of Jean-Luc Nancy's masterwork. Corpus is a work of literary force at once phenomenogical, sociological, theological and philosophical in its multiple orientations and approaches. In his thirty-six brief chapters, Nancy offers us at once an encyclopedia and a polemical program--reviewing classical takes on the "corpus", from Plato and Saint Paul, to Descartes, Hegel, Husserl, and Freud, while demonstrating that the mutations (technological, biological, and political) of our own culture have given rise to the need for a new understanding of the body. not only tells the story of this cultural change, but also explores the promise and responsibilities that such a new understanding entails.Following up on the title essay are five closely related and recent pieces-including a commentary by Antonia Birnbaum-- dedicated in large part to the legacy of the "mind-body problem" formulated by Descartes, and the challenge it poses to re-thinking the ancient problems of the Corpus. Taken as a whole, the book serves as the opening move in Nancy's larger project called "The deconstruction of Christianity".

Philosophy in Turbulent Times: Canguilhem, Sartre, Foucault, Althusser, Deleuze, Derrida

Elisabeth Roudinesco

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For Elisabeth Roudinesco, a historian of psychoanalysis and one of France's leading intellectuals, Canguilhem, Sartre, Foucault, Althusser, Deleuze, and Derrida represent a "great generation" of French philosophers who accomplished remarkable work and lived incredible lives. These troubled and innovative thinkers endured World War II and the cultural and political revolution of the 1960s, and their cultural horizon was dominated by Marxism and psychoanalysis, though they were by no means strict adherents to the doctrines of Marx and Freud. Roudinesco knew many of these intellectuals personally, and she weaves an account of their thought through lived experience and reminiscences. Canguilhem, for example, was a distinguished philosopher of science who had a great influence on Foucault's exploration of sanity and madness-themes Althusser lived in a notorious personal drama. And in dramatizing the life of Freud for the screen, Sartre fundamentally altered his own philosophical approach to psychoanalysis.Roudinesco launches a passionate defense of Canguilhem, Sartre, Foucault, Althusser, Deleuze, and Derrida against the "new philosophers" of the late 1970s and 1980s, who denounced the work-and sometimes the private lives-of this great generation. Roudinesco refutes attempts to tar them, as well as the Marxist and left-wing tradition in general, with the brush of Soviet-style communism. In Freudian theory and the philosophy of radical commitment, she sees a bulwark against the kind of manipulative, pill-prescribing, and normalizing psychology that aims to turn individuals into mindless consumers. Intense, clever, and persuasive, Philosophy in Turbulent Times captivates with the dynamism of French thought in the twentieth century.

Listening

Jean-Luc Nancy

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Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

In this lyrical meditation on listening, Jean-Luc Nancy examines sound in relation to the human body. How is listening different from hearing? What does listening entail? How does what is heard differ from what is seen? Can philosophy even address listening, écouter, as opposed to entendre, which means both hearing and understanding?Unlike the visual arts, sound produces effects that persist long after it has stopped. The body, Nancy says, is itself like an echo chamber, responding to music by inner vibrations as well as outer attentiveness. Since “the ear has no eyelid” (Quignard), sound cannot be blocked out or ignored: our whole being is involved in listening, just as it is involved in interpreting what it hears.The mystery of music and of its effects on the listener is subtly examined. Nancy’s skill as a philosopher is to bring the reader companionably along with him as he examines these fresh and vital questions; by the end of the book the reader feels as if listening very carefully to a person talking quietly, close to the ear.

Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx (Radical Thinkers)

Jacques Derrida, Terry Eagleton, Frederic Jameson, Antonio Negri

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Major theorists discuss Derrida's most political work and Derrida responds.

Fredric Jameson, Antonio Negri, Terry Eagleton, Pierre Macherey and others engage in a debate on Marx with Jacques Derrida With the publication of Specters of Marx in 1993, Jacques Derrida redeemed a longstanding pledge to confront Marx's texts directly and in detail. His characteristically bravura presentation provided a provocative re-reading of the classics in the Western tradition and posed a series of challenges to Marxism. In a timely intervention in one of today's most vital theoretical debates, the contributors to Ghostly Demarcations respond to the distinctive program projected by Specters of Marx. The volume features sympathetic meditations on the relationship between Marxism and deconstruction by Fredric Jameson, Werner Hamacher, Antonio Negri, Warren Montag, and Rastko Mcnik, brief polemical reviews by Terry Eagleton and Pierre Macherey, and sustained political critiques by Tom Lewis and Aijaz Ahmad. The volume concludes with Derrida's reply to his critics in which he sharpens his views about the vexed relationship between Marxism and deconstruction.

"Verso's beautifully designed Radical Thinkers series, which brings together seminal works by leading left-wing intellectuals, is a sophisticated blend of theory and thought. The authors whose writings are included in the series have worked tirelessly to expose the mechanisms by which culture and knowledge are manufactured, managed and controlled."—Ziauddin Sardar, New Statesman

Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida

Matthew Calarco

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Zoographies challenges the anthropocentrism of the Continental philosophical tradition and advances the position that, while some distinctions are valid, humans and animals are best viewed as part of an ontological whole. Matthew Calarco draws on ethological and evolutionary evidence and the work of Heidegger, who called for a radicalized responsibility toward all forms of life. He also turns to Levinas, who raised questions about the nature and scope of ethics; Agamben, who held the "anthropological machine" responsible for the horrors of the twentieth century; and Derrida, who initiated a nonanthropocentric ethics. Calarco concludes with a call for the abolition of classical versions of the human-animal distinction and asks that we devise new ways of thinking about and living with animals.

The Logic of Sense

Gilles Deleuze

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Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Post structuralist, post linguistic, post semiotic... 4 out of 5 stars.
14 of 15 people found this review helpful.

Logic of sense is a very difficult book to get in toto. I'm not sure that it's even meant to be read that way. The book is arranged in a series of paradoxes that each take on a concept or problematic through which Deleuze undoes the hermeneutics of "meaning" in order to replace it with one built around "sense." What makes this book rewarding is its importance to an understanding of expression and imagination in Anti-Oedipus, and various images and signs in his two cinema books. But it almost takes having read his books on Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Bergson first to get the most out of Deleuze's strange and non-subjective ideas of sense and event. I will agree with the reviewer above that the book leans hard on the Stoics, but to stop there would be to miss Deleuze's project here. He wants to create a logic that establishes sense neither in speech nor in language, neither in sign systems nor in structures. He wants to place the production of sense in a philosophy that has restored its grasp of movement and becoming, has shaken its dogmatic belief in concepts and abstractions, and that creates and affirms through virtual qualities and events that, while communicating in fact and through the repetition of the familiar (order), still relate to and express pure qualities. This is really the companion piece to the cinema books but on literature. I don't know that his theory of sense carries well to performance and social convention. Which is frustrating, because we need a some good theories of social convention and language that can take us past linguistics and speech act theories. This is a fantastic book and one of his most inventive.

Editorial Review:

-- Choice