Overview

Providing crucial scholarship on Derrida’s first series of lectures from the Nationality and Philosophical Nationalism cycle, Herman Rapaport brings all 13 parts of the Fantom of the Other series (1984-85) to our critical attention. The series, Rapaport argues, was seminal in laying the foundations for the courses given, and ideas explored, by Derrida over the next twenty years. It is in this vein that the full explication of Derrida’s lectures is done, breathing life into the foundational lecture series which has not yet been published in its entirety in English. Derrida’s examination of a master signifier of the social relation, Geschlecht, acts as the critical entry point of the series into wide-ranging meditations on the social construction and deconstruction of all possible relations denoted by the core concept, including race, gender, sex, and family. The lecture series’ vast engagement with a range of major thinkers, including philosophers and poets alike – Arendt, Adorno, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Trakl, and Adonis – tackles core themes and debates about philosophical nationalism. Presenting Derrida’s lectures on the implications of key 20th century philosopher’s understandings of nationalism as they relate to concerns over idiomatic language, notions of race, exile, return, and social relations, adds richly to the literature on Derrida and reveals the potential for further application of his work to current polarising debates between universalism and tribalism.

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9781350233294

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Herman Rapaport provides a masterful introduction to the later Derrida by focusing on one unpublished seminar that he annotates systematically, investigating the loaded links between national languages and philosophy, gender, sexuality, and identity, and the struggle between democracy and totalitarianism. Can we use Heidegger against himself in order to deconstruct racism, identity politics and nationalism? * Jean-Michel Rabate, Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania * This book is a close analysis of Jacques Derrida's late work, namely his (still largely unpublished) lectures on race, gender, and nationality-a study of Derrida as a social and political thinker who addresses our responsibilities toward the other, especially during periods of national conflict and social unrest. Rapaport has given us not only a new understanding of Derrida but also a beautifully written tract for our times. * Gerald Bruns, William P. & Hazel B. White Professor Emeritus of English, University of Notre Dame, USA * In Derrida on Exile and the Nation, Herman Rapaport extends his pathbreaking, singular commentary on Derrida with characteristic rigor, erudition and imagination. Rapaport illuminates and augments Derrida's lessons on the dangerously concrete irreality of origin and the brutal histories that accompany the sexualization, racialization, nationalization and conceptualization of the human. Does cosmopolitanism challenge or secure that brutality? Is exile a flight from that also tends to bear a turn toward brutality's seductions? In his lectures on the Fantom of the Other, Derrida addresses these questions, enacting a deepening swerve in his work that Rapaport carefully attends. The kind of thinking this book both practices and studies has never been more urgently needed. * Fred Moten, Professor, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, USA *

Author Information

Herman Rapaport is Reynolds Professor of English at Wake Forest University, USA. He has previously held a chair in modernism at University of Southampton, UK and before that at Wayne State University, USA and the University of Iowa, USA, where he taught Comparative Literature for 10 years. His published works include Later Derrida (2004), The Theory Mess (2001), and Heidegger and Derrida (1989).

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