Until relatively recently, Jacques Derrida was seen by many as nothing more than the high priest of Deconstruction, by turns stimulating and fascinating, yet always somewhat disengaged from the central political questions of our time. Or so it seemed. Derrida's "political turn," marked especially by the appearance of Specters of Marx, has surprised some and delighted others. In The Politics of Friendship Derrida renews and enriches this orientation through an examination of the political history of the idea of friendship pursued down the ages. Derrida's thoughts are haunted throughout the book by the strange and provocative address attributed to Aristotle, "my friends, there is no friend" and its inversions by later philosophers such as Montaigne, Kant, Nietzsche, Schmitt and Blanchot. The exploration allows Derrida to recall and restage the ways in which all the oppositional couples of Western philosophy and political thought--friendship and enmity, private and public life--have become madly and dangerously unstable. At the same time he dissects genealogy itself, the familiar and male-centered notion of fraternity and the virile virtue whose authority has gone unquestioned in our culture of friendship and our models of democracy. The future of the political, for Derrida, becomes the future of friends, the invention of a radically new friendship, of a deeper and more inclusive democracy. This remarkable book, his most profoundly important for many years, offers a challenging and inspiring vision of that future

"Between 1978 and 1979, Jacques Derrida delivered a seminar on the themes of "the gift" and "time" titled "Donner-le temps." The first part of that seminar was published in 1991. Given Time II is an archival discovery of the second installment that was promised but never came to fruition during Derrida's lifetime. The eight seminar sessions collected here represent Derrida's most advanced work on the problematic of the gift in Heidegger's thought, with deep dives into some of the richest and most difficult texts in the Heideggerian corpus, such as the essays "The Origin of the Work of Art," "The Thing," and "On Time and Being." Beyond Heidegger, Derrida skillfully engages Claude Lévi-Strauss, Marcel Mauss, Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Lacan, and others on the topic of the gift. The themes discussed include the act of giving and receiving gifts, the necessary link between time and the gift, being as some "thing" given that exceeds things and beings as such, the sacrificial gift, and others. Through these analyses, Derrida begins to identify the paradox of gift giving: For the gift to be received as a gift, it must not appear as such, since its mere appearance as gift puts it in the cycle of repayment and debt. Given Time II is a remarkable and uniquely Derridean treatment of an important subject in the work of Heidegger and beyond"-- Provided by publisher.

Edmund Husserl's Origin of Geometry": An Introduction (1962) is Jacques Derrida's earliest published work. In this commentary-interpretation of the famous appendix to Husserl's The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, Derrida relates writing to such key concepts as differing, consciousness, presence, and historicity. Starting from Husserl's method of historical investigation, Derrida gradually unravels a deconstructive critique of phenomenology itself, which forms the foundation for his later criticism of Western metaphysics as a metaphysics of presence. The complete text of Husserl's Origin of Geometry is included.

-- Journal of Aesthetics and Art