"The essays in this volume chart Derrida's dialogue with the ancient world in the context of the central concerns of his work."--Introduction, p. 12.

The present work is the fourth volume of the twenty projected volumes of our Seminars of Jacques Derrida Series edited by Geoffrey Bennington and Peggy Kamuf. The work derives from an early phase of Derrida's teaching at the Ecole Normale Superieur at Ulm from 1964-5. In this course Derrida presents an almost surgically precise reading of Heidegger's Being and Time based on the original German text most of which had not yet been translated into French. The course thus marks the very beginning of the study of Heidegger's work in French higher education. It also heralds the analyses of Heidegger's work that Derrida would go on to propose, not only in the years immediately following, but also others that come much later. He frequently returned in subsequent published works to one particular paragraph of Sein und Zeit, (§72 on "thrownness"), so central to this 1964-5 course, and to another sustained exchange with Heidegger, whose central theme of inauthenticity is clearly broached here. One can also observe here how Derrida's thinking is settling into place and is elaborating its major operative concepts: "writing," "text," and "graft." On the other hand, the very term "deconstruction," explicitly proposed as a translation of Destruktion, is several times put aside here in favor of other translations such as "solicitation" and "shaking up," which will, with a few exceptions, not be retained in Derrida's thinking. It is only much later that Derrida will lay claim to the word "deconstruction" and develop it in numerous ways. The work is thus essential for scholars of Heidegger, French philosophy, and Derrida himself.

This important new book argues that Jacques Derrida’s work can be treated as the basis for a distinctive historiography. The possibility of seeing Derrida not as a philosopher of language but as a philosopher of history has become more apparent with the recent publication of Derrida’s 1964-1965 seminar Heidegger: The Question of Being and History. We now know that the problem of history was at the heart of Derrida’s writing in the mid-1960s, prior to the publication of his best-known work, Of Grammatology (1967). Arguing that Derrida's scholarship in the 1960s and early 1970s on historicism, historicity and the problem of history can be treated as the basis for a philosophy of history, Sean Gaston focuses on Derrida's work from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s and his relentless questioning of context, memory and narrative as the delineation of a deconstructive historiography. The book raises a challenge for historians to think about both deconstruction and historiography, arguing that contemporary philosophy can provide a basis for thinking about history in the name of a deconstructive historiography that is not incompatible with rigorous historical scholarship.

However widely—and differently—Jacques Derrida may be viewed as a "foundational" French thinker, the most basic questions concerning his work still remain unanswered: Is Derrida a friend of reason, or philosophy, or rather the most radical of skeptics? Are language-related themes--writing, semiosis--his central concern, or does he really write about something else? And does his thought form a system of its own, or does it primarily consist of commentaries on individual texts? This book seeks to address these questions by returning to what it claims is essential history: the development of Derrida's core thought through his engagement with Husserlian phenomenology. Joshua Kates recasts what has come to be known as the Derrida/Husserl debate, by approaching Derrida's thought historically, through its development. Based on this developmental work, Essential History culminates by offering discrete interpretations of Derrida's two book-length 1967 texts, interpretations that elucidate the until now largely opaque relation of Derrida's interest in language to his focus on philosophical concerns. A fundamental reinterpretation of Derrida's project and the works for which he is best known, Kates's study fashions a new manner of working with the French thinker that respects the radical singularity of his thought as well as the often different aims of those he reads. Such a view is in fact "essential" if Derrida studies are to remain a vital field of scholarly inquiry, and if the humanities, more generally, are to have access to a replenishing source of living theoretical concerns.

Celebrated by some, abused by others, Derrida is the most discussed philosopher at the end of this century.

Taken from papers presented at the 2015 International Social Theory Consortium (ISTC), this volume focusses on “Reconstruction”, dedicated to taking account of and interrogating the possibility of picking up the pieces.

In this volume the author focuses on how the work of Derrida has helped rework the themes of tradition, legacy and inheritance in Western philosophy. It includes readings of Derrida's texts that demonstrate the claims he makes cannot be understood without considering the way in which he makes those claims.