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In "Cradling," a chapter of Baudelaire and Freud, Leo Bersani shows how desire rocks the self. Desire always manifests as a movement that draws the self both toward and away from the object that excites it. Rocking simultaneously invokes infantile erotic enjoyment, an adult sexual act, and the way that fantasy images travel in time and create new temporalities. This essay links Bersani's 1977 reading of Baudelaire's poem "Hair" with his later work by showing that when the sexual power of fantasy is denied, it often returns in the form of a fantasy of sexual power.

Despite the enormous changes in feminism, philosophy and literary theory since 1975, the year in which Hélène Cixous first wrote the small manifesto by which she remains best known, 'The Laugh of the Medusa' continues to find generations of new readers who, upon discovering it, often declare their passionate love for it. This essay explores the relation between the enduring love that this text continues to inspire and the deconstruction of love that is inscribed within it. Irreverently and playfully drawing upon psychoanalytic descriptions of laughter as a transgressive release of bound libidinal energies, Cixous's text gives birth to a language of love that inhabits and resists the laws of language from within.

Many of Derrida's formative texts from 1967 about writing, the trace, supplementarity, death, and différance feature striking liminal references to the figure of the mother and are implicitly haunted by the question of birth. In a pivotal passage of De la grammatologie, Derrida links the very futurity of deconstruction to the emergence of 'a reading discipline to be born'. In this essay, I show that through his readings of the 'birth of language' in Lévi-Strauss and Rousseau, Derrida implicitly invites us to relate the inscription of this 'discipline of reading yet to be born' to a deconstructive writing of birth that still remains to be read. Birth, as it emerges through this re-reading of the 1967 texts, can neither be conceived as a fixed moment of past plenitude nor contained by a natural, human figure. Instead, it is an exorbitantly exorbitant supplement that is temporally dislocated, iterative, and fissured with non-being.

This essay explores how Baudelaire's insistence on perverse forms of nonreproductive sexuality (what is here called "bad sex") exposes critical aspects of his poetics and his relation to the question of aesthetics. It takes up two of Baudelaire's most famous poems ("To the Reader" and "Beauty") in light of Walter Benjamin's insight that the significance of Baudelaire's poetry is linked to the way sexuality becomes severed from normal and normative forms of love. Following Benjamin, the essay argues that Baudelaire appeals to beauty to undo the damage done by the so-called natural order, to bear witness to the world that is left out of familiar cycles of production and reproduction, and to remake the world by other means. For Baudelaire, the motif of "bad sex" becomes a kind of gestural language, a poetic medium, and a form of theatricality that conjures up actions, events, and figures that escape other modes of representation. Beauty's work is neither presentation nor representation, but something like an artificial alternative to birth.

Conversion is at work in prayer, promise, psychoanalysis and poetry. This paper begins by turning around Jacques Derrida's discussion of the importance of 'anasemic conversion' (linguistic traces not yet or no longer endowed with meaning) in the work of Nicolas Abraham and turns into a reading of the aneconomic effects of the silvery trail deposited by the eponymous snails in Francis Ponge's prose poem 'Escargots' (Snails). Anasemic conversion wrests language from meaning and returns it to its material, non-mattering, primal matter. Made of slimy spit, the snail's trail is not a product per se, but rather a by-product, an excessive residue, perhaps even a waste product. This silvery wake is a poetic amalgam of all elements pertaining to the snail's vital activities (expression, secretion, affection, excretion) and converts snails' life experiences into a photographic figure of writing, a critique of an anthropocentric aesthetic, and a poetic death sentence.

By juxtaposing readings of selected feminist critics with a reading of Ovid's account of Philomela's rape and silencing, this essay interrogates the rhetorical, political, and epistemological implications of the feminist "we." As a political intervention that comes into being as a response to women's oppression, feminism must posit a collective "we." But this feminist "we" is best understood as an impersonal, performative pronoun whose political force is not derived from a knowable referent.

Cover -- DECONSTRUCTING THE DEATH PENALTY -- Title -- Copyright -- CONTENTS -- Introduction. From Capital Punishment to Abolitionism: Deconstructing the Death Penalty -- PART I READING DERRIDA'S DEATH PENALTY SEMINARS -- 1. Beginning with Literature -- 2. A New Primal Scene: Derrida and the Scene of Execution -- 3. Always the Other Who Decides: On Sovereignty, Psychoanalysis, and the Death Penalty -- 4. The Death Penalty and Its Exceptions -- PART II DERRIDA AND HIS INTERLOCUTERS -- 5. Derrida at Montaigne: A Stay of Execution -- 6. "Bidding Up" on the Question of Sovereignty: Derrida between Kant and Benjamin -- 7. Calculus -- PART III EXTENDING DERRIDA'S ANALYSIS -- 8. A Proper Death: Penalties, Animals, and the Law -- 9. Figures of Interest: The Widow, the Telephone, and the Time of Death -- 10. Opening the Blinds on Botched Executions: Interrupting the Time of the Death Penalty -- PART IV DERRIDA AND CAPITAL PUNISHMENT IN THE UNITED STATES -- 11. Furman and Finitude -- 12. The Heart of the Other? -- 13. An Abolitionism Worthy of the Name: From the Death Penalty to the Prison Industrial Complex -- List of Contributors -- Index