Geoffrey Bennington Livres

Key themes in this collection of essays explore the complexities of Jacques Derrida's philosophy, challenging established interpretations from both philosophical and literary perspectives. Geoffrey Bennington argues that Derrida's work disrupts traditional metaphysics by emphasizing its inherent indefiniteness rather than redefining it. By suggesting that Derrida can be "interrupted," Bennington provides an innovative reading that opens pathways for future dialogues with Derrida's ideas, making this work a significant contribution to contemporary philosophical discourse.

Geoffrey Bennington holds the position of Asa G. Candler Professor of Modern French Thought at Emory University, where he specializes in contemporary French philosophy. His work engages deeply with theoretical frameworks and philosophical discourse, contributing to the understanding of modern thought.

The book explores the concept of the frontier as depicted in Kant's political writings and critiques, analyzing how it reflects both physical borders and the edges of civilization. It introduces the idea of interrupted teleology, offering a nuanced response to rationalism through the lens of teleological judgment. This examination highlights the interplay between reason and non-rationalistic thought in Kant's philosophy, providing insights into his views on boundaries and the nature of human understanding.

"This book deconstructs the whole lineage of political philosophy, showing the ways democracy abuts and regularly undermines the sovereignist tradition across a range of texts from the Iliad to contemporary philosophy. Politics is an object of perennial difficulty for philosophy-as recalcitrant to philosophical mastery as is philosophy's traditional adversary, poetry. That difficulty makes it an attractive topic for any deconstructive approach to the tradition from which we inherit our language and our concepts. Scatter 2 pursues that deconstruction, often starting with, and sometimes departing from, the work of Jacques Derrida by attending to the concepts of sovereignty on the one hand and democracy on the other. The book begins by following the fate of a line from Homer's Iliad, where Odysseus asserts that "the rule of many is no good thing, let there be one ruler, one king." The line, Bennington shows, is quoted, misquoted, and progressively Christianized by Aristotle, Philo Judaeus, Suetonius, the early Church Fathers, Aquinas, Dante, Ockham, Marsilius of Padua, Jean Bodin, Etienne de la Boétie, up to Carl Schmitt and Erik Peterson, and even one of the defendants at the Nuremberg trials, before being discussed by Derrida himself. In the book's second half, Bennington begins again with Plato and Aristotle and tracks the concept of democracy as it regularly abuts and undermines that sovereignist tradition. In detailed readings of Hobbes and Rousseau, Bennington develops a notion of "proto-democracy" as a possible name for the scatter that underlies and drives the political as such and that will always prevent politics from achieving its aim of bringing itself to an end"-- Provided by publisher

What if political rhetoric is unavoidable, an irreducible part of politics itself? In contrast to the familiar denunciations of political horse-trading, grandstanding, and corporate manipulation from those lamenting the crisis in liberal democracy, this book argues that the "politics of politics," usually associated with rhetoric and sophistry, is, like it or not, part of politics from the start. Denunciations of the sorry state of current politics draw on a dogmatism and moralism that share an essentially metaphysical and Platonic ground. Failure to deconstruct that ground generates a philosophically and politically debilitating selfrighteousness that this book attempts to understand and undermine. After a detailed analysis of Foucault's influential late concept of parrhesia, which is shown to be both philosophically and politically insufficient, close readings of Heidegger, Kierkegaard, and Derrida trace complex relations between sophistry, rhetoric, and philosophy; truth and untruth; decision; madness and stupidity in an exploration of the possibility of developing an affirmative thinking of politics that is not mortgaged to the metaphysics of presence. It is suggested that Heidegger's complex accounts of truth and decision must indeed be read in close conjunction with his notorious Nazi commitments but nevertheless contain essential insights that many strident responses to those commitments ignore or repress. Those insights are here developed--via an ambitious account of Derrida's often misunderstood interruption of teleology--into a deconstructive retrieval of the concept of dignity. This lucid and often witty account of a crucial set of developments in twentieth-century thought prepares the way for a more general re-reading of the possibilities of political philosophy that will be undertaken in Volume 2 of this work, under the sign of an essential scatter that defines the political as such

This book examines the figure of the frontier (both bilateral border and open edge of civilization) both literally in Kant's political writings, and figuratively in Critiques, developing via a reading of teleological judgment the concept of interrupted teleology as a reasoned but non-rationalistic response to rationalism.

Jacques Derrida wurde am 15. Juli 1930 in El-Biar, Algerien, als Sohn jüdischer Eltern geboren und starb am 8. Oktober 2004 in Paris. Während seiner Schulzeit erlebte er antisemitische Repressionen. Ab 1949 lebte er in Frankreich und besuchte das Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris. Von 1952 bis 1954 studierte er an der École Normale Supérieure, wo er Vorlesungen von Louis Althusser und Michel Foucault hörte und Pierre Bourdieu kennenlernte. 1956 erhielt er ein Stipendium für Harvard. Während seines Militärdienstes von 1957 bis 1959 unterrichtete er Englisch und Französisch in Algerien. Von 1960 bis 1964 war er wissenschaftlicher Assistent an der Sorbonne und ab 1965 Professor für Geschichte der Philosophie an der École Normale Supérieure. 1967 veröffentlichte er drei bedeutende Werke, was seinen Durchbruch markierte. Auf Vortragsreisen in den USA traf er Paul de Man und Jacques Lacan. 1981 gründete er die Gesellschaft Jan Hus zur Unterstützung verfolgter tschechischer Intellektueller und wurde in Prag verhaftet, bevor er durch Intervention der französischen Regierung freigelassen wurde. 1983 gründete er das Collège international de philosophie und wurde Forschungsdirektor an der EHESS in Paris.