Overview

Following on from The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume I, this book extends Jacques Derrida’s exploration of the connections between animality and sovereignty.  In this second year of the seminar, originally presented in 2002–2003 as the last course he would give before his death, Derrida focuses on two markedly different texts: Heidegger’s 1929–1930 course The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. As he moves back and forth between the two works, Derrida pursuesthe relations between solitude, insularity, world, violence, boredom and death as they supposedly affect humans and animals in different ways. Hitherto unnoticed or underappreciated aspects of Robinson Crusoe are brought out in strikingly original readings of questions such as Crusoe’s belief in ghosts, his learning to pray, his parrot Poll, and his reinvention of the wheel. Crusoe’s terror of being buried alive or swallowed alive by beasts or cannibals gives rise to a rich and provocative reflection on death, burial, and cremation, in part provoked by a meditation on the death of Derrida’s friend Maurice Blanchot.  Throughout, these readings are juxtaposed with interpretations of Heidegger's concepts of world and finitude to produce a distinctively Derridean account that will continue to surprise his readers.

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The second volume of <i>The Beast and the Sovereign</i>, a meticulously edited transcript of the seminar s second year (2002 03), shows us a different though complementary and perhaps more essential Derrida, a forensically close reader. . . . What Derrida seeks to highlight in both Defoe s and Heidegger s texts is the precariousness and fragility of the purportedly stable borders demarcating the human from the animal. The fantasy of sovereign solitude is always secretly feeding off the bestial other it wants to banish. --Josh Cohen Times Literary Supplement

The second volume of <i>The Beast and the Sovereign</i>, a meticulously edited transcript of the seminar's second year (2002-03), shows us a different though complementary and perhaps more essential Derrida, a forensically close reader. . . . What Derrida seeks to highlight in both Defoe's and Heidegger's texts is the precariousness and fragility of the purportedly stable borders demarcating the human from the animal. The fantasy of sovereign solitude is always secretly feeding off the bestial other it wants to banish. --Josh Cohen Times Literary Supplement

Author Information

Jacques Derrida (1930 2004) was director of studies at the Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales, Paris, and professor of humanities at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of many books published by the University of Chicago Press. Geoffrey Bennington is Asa G. Candler Professor of Modern French Thought at Emory University and the author of numerous works, including Interrupting Derrida.

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