The notion of the Anthropocene is founded on the premise that traces of human activity on the earth will remain legible in the geological strata for millions of years to come, showing evidence of an anthropogenic ‘signature’ inscribed in the rock by the human species. Spectrality and Survivance shows how embedded in this understanding of the Anthropocene is a speculative and specular gesture that transforms the notion of the future into an anthropocentric reflection of the present, prohibiting any true engagement with the possibility of a non-anthropocentric and post-anthropocenic world. In this volume, Marija Grech develops an alternative conceptual paradigm from which to think the Anthropocene beyond any limited notion of human language, human thought, human systems of meaning, or even a human world. Grech considers how the geological trace of the Anthropocene might be said to ‘survive’ outside of the possibility of any human readership, and how the very survival of the human in and beyond the Anthropocene might necessitate such thought.

Situated at the intersection of film and media studies, literary theory, and continental philosophy, The Traces of Jacques Derrida's Cinema provides a trenchant account of the role of cinema in the oeuvre of one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century, Jacques Derrida (1930-2004). The book is animated by Derrida's self-confessed passion for the movies, his reluctance to write about film despite the range of his corpus, and the generative encounters arising between his legacy and the field of film and media studies as a result. Given the expanse of its references, interdisciplinarity, and consideration of Derrida's approach to the experience of both spectatorship and the act of being filmed, The Traces of Jacques Derrida's Cinema contributes to the ongoing close analyses of the philosopher's work while also providing a rigorous introduction to deconstruction. Author Timothy Holland interweaves historical and speculative modes of research and writing to articulate the peripheral-yet surprisingly crucial-place of the cinematic medium for Derrida and his philosophical enterprise. The outcome is a meticulously detailed survey of the centers and margins of Derrida's oeuvre that include forays into such terrain as: his notable appearances in films; an unrealized project on cinema and belief that Derrida proposed in a 2001 interview; the correspondences between the strategies of deconstruction and the traditions, homecomings, and wordplay of David Lynch's cinematic media; and the questions wedded to the future of film studies amid the vicissitudes of the modern, virtual university. Ultimately, Holland pursues the thinking activated by the flickering of Derrida's cinema-not only the absence and presence of film in Derrida's professional and personal life, but also the rigor of academic discourse and the pleasures of the movies, ghosts and technology, religious faith and scientific knowledge, and ruination and survival-as a critical chance for reflection.

Jacques Derrida remains a leading voice of philosophy, his works still resonating today—and for more than three decades, one of the main sites of Derridean deconstruction has been the arts. Collecting nineteen texts spanning from 1979 to 2004, Thinking out of Sight brings to light Derrida’s most inventive ideas about the making of visual artworks. The book is divided into three sections. The first demonstrates Derrida’s preoccupation with visibility, image, and space. The second contains interviews and collaborations with artists on topics ranging from the politics of color to the components of painting. Finally, the book delves into Derrida’s writings on photography, video, cinema, and theater, ending with a text published just before his death about his complex relationship to his own image. With many texts appearing for the first time in English, Thinking out of Sight helps us better understand the critique of representation and visibility throughout Derrida’s work, and, most importantly, to assess the significance of his insights about art and its commentary.

In this highly original book David Wills rethinks not only our nature before all technology but also what we understand to be technology. Rather than considering the human being as something natural that then develops technology, Wills argues, we should instead imagine an originary imbrication of nature and machine that begins with a dorsal turn-a turn that takes place behind our back, outside our field of vision. With subtle and insightful readings, Wills pursues this sense of what lies behind our idea of the human by rescuing Heidegger’s thinking from a reductionist dismissal of technology, examining different angles on Lvinas’s face-to-face relation, and tracing a politics of friendship and sexuality in Derrida and Sade. He also analyzes versions of exile in Joyce’s rewriting of Homer and Broch’s rewriting of Virgil and discusses how Freud and Rimbaud exemplify the rhetoric of soil and blood that underlies every attempt to draw lines between nations and discriminate between peoples. In closing, Wills demonstrates the political force of rhetoric in a sophisticated analysis of Nietzsche’s oft-quoted declaration that “God is dead.” Forward motion, Wills ultimately reveals, is an ideology through which we have favored the front-what can be seen-over the aspects of the human and technology that lie behind the back and in the spine-what can be sensed otherwise-and shows that this preference has had profound environmental, political, sexual, and ethical consequences. David Wills is professor of French and English at the University of Albany (SUNY). He is the author of Prosthesis and Matchbook: Essays in Deconstruction as well as the translator of works by Jacques Derrida, including The Gift of Death.

"Best known for his 1947 memoir L'Espece humaine, Robert Antelme (1917-1990) is a central figure in the history of the European response to the Nazi concentration camps. In this first study in any language to be devoted to Antelme's work, Martin Crowley reveals the author's vital yet insufficiently recognized influence on recent thought in France and elsewhere about such questions as the nature of community and the indivisibility of humanity. He explores the conclusions Antelme drew from his deportation and his involvement with the post-war French left, and provides the first detailed textual criticism of L'Espece humaine. Examining the responses to the author's writing by such figures as Blanchot, Perec, Agamben, Nancy and Derrida, Crowley demonstrates Antelme's key contribution to the development of modern European thought."

Spectral Shakespeares is an illuminating exploration of recent, experimental adaptations of Shakespeare on film, TV, and the web. Drawing on adaptation studies and media theory as well as Jacques Derrida's work, this book argues that these adaptations foreground a cluster of self-reflexive "themes" - from incorporation to reiteration, from migration to addiction, from silence to survival - that contribute to the redefinition of adaptation, and Shakespearean adaptation in particular, as an unfinished and interminable process. The "Shakespeare" that emerges from these adaptations is a fragmentary, mediatized, and heterogeneous presence, a spectral Shakespeare that leaves a mark on our contemporary mediascape.

This book offers the first philosophical treatment of biocultural sustainability and eco-deconstruction, presenting the most developed treatment of the notions of survival and life death in Derrida to date.