Fordham University Press The End of the World and Other Teachable Moments: Jacques Derrida's Final Seminar (Perspectives in Continental Philosophy)

The End of the World and Other Teachable Moments follows the remarkable itinerary of Jacques Derrida’s final seminar, “The Beast and the Sovereign” (2001–3), as the explicit themes of the seminar―namely, sovereignty and the question of the animal―come to be supplemented and interrupted by questions of death, mourning, survival, the archive, and, especially, the end of the world. The book begins with Derrida’s analyses, in the first year of the seminar, of the question of the animal in the context of his other published works on the same subject. It then follows Derrida through the second year of the seminar, presented in Paris from December 2002 to March 2003, as a very different tone begins to make itself heard, one that wavers between melancholy and an extraordinary lucidity with regard to the end. Focusing the entire year on just two works, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Martin Heidegger’s seminar of 1929–30, “The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics,” the seminar comes to be dominated by questions of the end of the world and of an originary violence that at once gives rise to and effaces all things. The End of the World and Other Teachable Moments follows Derrida as he responds from week to week to these emerging questions, as well as to important events unfolding around him, both world events―the aftermath of 9/11, the American invasion of Iraq―and more personal ones, from the death of Maurice Blanchot to intimations of his own death less than two years away. All this, the book concludes, makes this final seminar an absolutely unique work in Derrida’s corpus, one that both speaks of death as the end of the world and itself now testifies to that end―just one, though hardly the least, of its many teachable moments. Review “With his luminous and generous intelligence, Michael Naas makes the task of reading Derrida look easy. But that’s only because, like the finest of teachers, he takes us patiently through the difficulties and countenances bravely the disconcerting turns taken by this final seminar, what he calls its teachable moments. Naas’s clarity of thought, the acuteness of his ear, and the deftness of his writing are gifts that readers appreciate on every page. This book will be indispensable reading from now on for whoever attends to Derrida’s seminars." Author: ―Peggy Kamuf Source: University of Southern California “The End of the World and Other Teachable Moments is a striking tribute to the end of the world that was Derrida, and it lives up to the responsibility of carrying forward what remains.” Author: ―Kelly Oliver Source: Vanderbilt University “Naas solidifies his singular place as our most brilliant and incisive scholar of Derrida’s work.” Author: ―Jeffrey Nealon Source: Pennsylvania State University “Michael Naas is one of the most authoritative interpreters anywhere of Jacques Derrida’s work. Naas’s writing about Derrida is characterized by a remarkable intellectual generosity. The End of the World and Other Teachable Moments is a brilliant reading of Derrida’s last seminar, The Beast and the Sovereign (2001-2003). Naas provides an exegesis of that seminar both in itself and in the light of an amazing in-depth knowledge of all Derrida’s previous work, back to its beginning in the 1960’s.  This distinguished book is an essential guide for all those who are perplexed in one way or another by Derrida’s writings.” Author: ―J. Hillis Miller Source: UCI Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature and English at the University ofCalifornia, Irvine About the Author Michael Naas is Professor of Philosophy at DePaul University in Chicago. His books include The End of the World and Other Teachable Moments: Jacques Derrida's Final Seminar and Miracle and Machine: Jacques Derrida and the Two Sources of Religion, Science, and the Media (both Fordham).