In the Name of Friendship: Deguy, Derrida and "Salut" explores the friendship between poetry and philosophy in the works of Michel Deguy and Jacques Derrida, and the cultural, political and religious implications of the name understood as a secular form of sacredness.

The most influential of contemporary philosophers, Jacques Derrida, explores the idea of friendship—and its political consequences, past and future—through writings by Aristotle, Nietzsche, Cicero, and more. 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.

The eminent philosopher pays homage to his beloved French city and the philosophical friendships he had there—“an illuminating addition to his legacy” (The Times Literary Supplement). A towering figure in twentieth-century philosophy, Jacques Derrida was born in Algeria, but spent four decades living in the French city of Strasbourg, located on the border between France and Germany. This moving collection of writings and interviews about his life there opens with “The Place Name(s): Strasbourg,” an essay written just a month before his death which recounts his deep attachment to his adoptive home. More than just a personal narrative, however, the essay is a profound interrogation of the relationship between philosophy and place, philosophy and language, and philosophy and friendship. As such, it raises a series of philosophical, political, and ethical questions that might all be placed under the aegis of what Derrida once called “philosophical nationalities and nationalism.” Also included are transcribed conversations between Derrida and his two principal interlocutors in Strasbourg, Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. These interviews are significant for the themes they focus on—from language and politics to friendship and life after death—and for what they reveal about Derrida’s relationships to Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe. Filled with sharp insights into one another’s work and peppered with personal anecdotes and humor, the interviews bear witness to the long intellectual friendships of these three important thinkers.

In this book, Kas Saghafi argues that the notion of "the end the world" in Derrida's late work is not a theological or cosmological matter, but a meditation on mourning and the death of the other. He examines this and several other tightly knit motifs in Derrida's work: mourning, survival, the phantasm, the event, and most significantly, the term salut, which in French means at once greeting and salvation. An underlying concern of The World after the End of the World is whether a discourse on salut (saving, being saved, and salvation) can be dissociated from discourse on religion. Saghafi compares Derrida's thought along these lines with similar concerns of Jean-Luc Nancy's. Combining analysis of these themes with reflections on personal loss, this book maintains that, for Derrida, salutation, greeting, and welcoming is resistant to the economy of salvation. This resistance calls for what Derrida refers to as a "spectro-poetics" devoted to and assigned to the other's singularity.

Forgetting is a brief but searing sojourn inside the mind of Alma as she navigates the complexity of the past and future within her identity. On her nighttime wanderings through a Paris saturated with cultural and historical meaning, she begins the slow work of grieving for her grandfather, a Holocaust survivor, and begins to unravel the ways that his experience continues to reverberate across generations. The journey, both inward and outward, simple and infinitely varied, brings Alma to reconsider her whole life and the circumstances that led to her very birth. In Forgetting, Finkelstein sheds new light on the oldest dilemmas, asking: "What to do with the brief time that is given to us?"

Using a broad, comparative approach, this study shows how the figure of the gift structures poetic discourse and does so from the age of Homer up through twenty-first century conceptual poetics. Beginning from a new interpretation of Derrida’s writings on the gift, Adam R. Rosenthal argues that this ambivalent figure names at one and the same time poetry’s most extreme aneconomic privilege and the point of its closest contact with the interested exchange of the market. In this way, the gift conducts material relays of patronage and theories of poetic origination, in genius, inspiration, and imagination. Poetics and the Gift capitalizes on this double function in order to read material historical accounts of poetry alongside philosophical and poetic ones. By way of his original reading of Derrida’s work in Given Time and ‘Economimesis’, Rosenthal offers a novel account of ‘gift poetics’ and a new understanding of what makes poetry ‘poetry’.

In A Man of Little Faith the French poet and philosopher Michel Deguy reflects on the loss of religious faith both personally and culturally. Disenchanted not only with the oversimplifications of radical atheism but also with what he sees as an insipid sacralization of art as the influence of religion has waned, Deguy refuses to focus on loss or impossibility. Instead he actively suspends belief, producing a poetic deconstruction that, though resolutely a-theistic, makes a plea for an earthly piety and for the preservation of the relics of religion for the world to come. Two essays by Jean-Luc Nancy and a recent interview with Deguy are included, which reveal the impact and implications of Deguy's ongoing reflection and its significance within his generation of French thought.