Wow! eBook
Re-reading Derrida: Perspectives on Mourning and Its Hospitalities
Author(s): Tony Thwaites (Editor), Judith Seaboyer
- Publisher: Lexington Books (UK)
- Publication Date: 8 Mar. 2013
- Language: English
- Print length: 188 pages
- ISBN-10: 0739177257
- ISBN-13: 9780739177259
Book Description
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.
Editorial Reviews
Review
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.
About the Author
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.
