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Frontier: the border between two countries; the limits of civilization; the bounds of established knowledge; a new field of activity. At a time when all borders, boundaries, margins, and limits are being-often violently-challenged, erased, or reinforced, we must rethink the concept of frontier itself. But is there even such a concept? Through an original and imaginative reading of Kant, Geoffrey Bennington casts doubt upon the conceptual coherence of borders. The frontier is the very element of Kant's thought yet the permanent frustration of his conceptuality. Bennington brings out the frontier's complex, abyssal, fractal structure that leaves a residue of violence in every frontier and complicates Kant's most rational arguments in the direction of cosmopolitanism and perpetual peace. Neither a critique of Kant nor a return to Kant, this book proposes a new reflection on philosophical reading, for which thinking the frontier is both essential and a recurrent, fruitful, interruption

Cover -- Half-Title -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- List of Abbreviations -- Introduction: The Politics of Politics -- 1. Parrhēsia -- 2. Pseudos -- 3. Kairos -- 4. Mōria -- 5. Diakrisis -- 6. Axioma -- Appendix: Derrida's Notes on Dignity -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y -- Z.

One of the most significant contemporary thinkers in continental philosophy, Jacques Derrida's work continues to attract heated commentary among philosophers, literary critics, social and cultural theorists, architects and artists. This major new work by world renowned Derrida scholar and translator, Geoffrey Bennington, presents incisive new readings of both Derrida and interpretations of his work.Part one sets out Derrida's work as a whole and examines its relevance to, and 'interruption' of, the traditional domains of ethics, politics and literature. The second part of the book presents com

This book gathers essays written by Geoffrey Bennington since the death of his friend Jacques Derrida in 2004. All continue the ongoing work of elucidating difficult and complex thought, often enough with reference to Derrida's persistent interrogation of the concepts of life and death, mourning and melancholia, and what he sometimes calls 'half-mourning'. Not Half No End relates this 'ethical' interruption of mourning to the persistent but still ill-understood motif of interrupted teleology, which, it is argued here, is definitive of deconstruction in general. This suspension or interruption

The 'Happy Few' of Stendhal's dedications are certainly readers, but they do not cohere into a community, and are vigilant and suspicious around the use of the first-person plural pronoun. This already sets them apart from the proponents of 'surface reading', who, moreover, have a historically questionable and conceptually feeble understanding of the intimate relationship between deconstruction and reading-and indeed of what thinking in terms of 'surface' entails.

A recurrent typographical slip makes a democrat of Democritus, Demokratos of Demokritos, in an exemplary instance of the atomists' persistent analogy of atoms and letters. This essay argues that the rhythmic resonances between ancient materialism and democracy can be read in terms of a fundamental scatter that tends to deconstruct the teleologism endemic in the philosophical tradition's thinking about politics (and indeed matter). The curious resistance that scatter opposes to any kind of telos (including that of any absolute scatter) might itself make deconstruction interestingly resonate with the differential vibrations of string theory.

First published in Studies in Social and Political Thought 5, 2001.

First published in Studies in Social and Political Thought 5, 2001.

The principle whereby any bit of deconstruction brings with it all of deconstruction must affect the philosophical understanding of art usually subsumed under the title 'aesthetics'. There can in principle be no deconstructive aesthetics (any more than there could be a deconstructive ethics or a deconstructive epistemology. Aesthetics in general is mortgaged to sensory perception, and from very early Derrida 'perception does not exist'. Whence his interest in blinking, blindness and the trait of drawing. But the trace is not the trait, colour too is differential, and aesthetic judgement in general is thereby marked with a secret 'political' dimension.