Nostalgia today is seen as essentially benign, a wistful longing for the past. This wasn't always the case, however: from the late seventeenth century through the end of the nineteenth, nostalgia denoted a form of homesickness so extreme that it coul...

In "Archive Fever", Jacques Derrida deftly guides us through an extended meditation on remembrance, religion, time, and technology – fruitfully occasioned by a deconstructive analysis of the notion of archiving. Intrigued by the evocative relationshi...

For more than 250 years, Charles de Brosses's term "fetishism" has exerted great influence over our most ambitious thinkers. Used as an alternative to "magic" but nonetheless expressing the material force of magical thought, de Brosses's term has pro...

In the first volume of his extraordinary analysis of the death penalty, Jacques Derrida began a journey toward an ambitious end: the first truly philosophical argument against the death penalty. Exploring an impressive breadth of thought, he traced a...

Is giving possible? Is it possible to give without immediately entering into a circle of exchange that turns the gift into a debt to be returned? This question leads Jacques Derrida to make out an irresolvable paradox at what seems the most fundament...

"I shall speak of ghost, of flame, and of ashes". These are the first words of Jacques Derrida's lecture on Heidegger. It is again a question of Nazism – of what remains to be thought through of Nazism in general and of Heidegger's Nazism in particul...

Nietzsche has recently enjoyed much scrutiny from the nouveaux critiques. Jacques Derrida, the leader of that movement, here combines in his strikingly original and incisive fashion questions of sexuality, politics, writing, judgment, procreation, de...

The four essays in this volume constitute Derrida's most explicit and sustained reflection on the art work as pictorial artifact, a reflection partly by way of philosophical aesthetics (Kant, Heidegger), partly by way of a commentary on art works and...

Jacques Derrida is, in the words of the New York Times, "perhaps the world's most famous philosopher – if not the only famous philosopher". He often provokes controversy as soon as his name is mentioned. But he also inspires the respect that comes fr...