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Miracle and Machine is a sort of "reader's guide" to Jacques Derrida's 1994–95 essay "faith and knowledge," his most important work on the nature of religion in general and on the unprecedented forms it is taking today through science and the media. It provides essential background for understanding Derrida's essay, commentary on its unique style and its central figures (e.g., Kant, Hegel, Bergson, and Heidegger), and assessment of its principal philosophical claims about the fundamental duplicity of religion and the ineluctably autoimmune relationship among religion, science, and the media. Along the way it offers in-depth analysis of Derrida's treatment of everything from the nature of religious revelation, faith, prayer, sacrifice, testimony, messianicity, fundamentalism, and secularism to the way religion is today being transformed by globalization, technoscience, and worldwide telecommunications networks. But Miracle and Machine is much more than a commentary on a single Derrida text. Through references to scores of other works by Derrida, both early and late, it also provides a unique introduction to Derrida's work in general. It demonstrates that one of the very best ways to understand the terms, themes, claims, strategies, and motivations of Derridean deconstruction from the early 1960s through 2004 is to read critically and patiently, in its spirit and in its letter, an exemplary text such as "Faith and Knowledge." Finally, Miracle and Machine attempts to put Derrida's ideas about religion to the test by reading alongside "Faith and Knowledge" an already classic work of American fiction that is more or less contemporaneous with it, Don DeLillo's 1997 Underworld, a novel that explores the same relationship between faith and knowledge, religion and science, religious revelation and the World Wide Web, messianicity, and weapons of mass destruction—in a word, in two words, miracles and machines

"Class Acts examines two often neglected aspects of Jacques Derrida's work as a philosopher, his public presentations at lectures and conferences and his teaching, along with the question of the "speech act" that links them. What, Michael Naas asks, is one doing when one speaks in public in these ways? The book follows Derrida's itinerary with regard to speech act theory across three public lectures, from 1971 to 1997, all given, for reasons the book seeks to explain, in Montreal. In these lectures, Derrida elaborated his critique of J. L. Austin and his own subsequent redefinition of speech act theory. The book then gives an overview of Derrida's teaching career and his famous "seminar" presentations, along with his own explicit reflections on pedagogy and educational institutions beginning in the mid-1970s. Naas then shows through a reading of three recently published seminars-on life death, theory and practice, and forgiveness-just how Derrida the teacher interrogated and deployed speech act theory in his seminars. Whether in a conference hall or a classroom, Naas demonstrates, Derrida was always interested in the way spoken or written words might do more than simply communicate some meaning or intent but might give rise to something like an event. Class Acts bears witness to the possibility of such events in Derrida's work as a pedagogue and a public intellectual"--

Th e End of the World and Other Teachable Moments -- Contents -- Abbreviations of Works by Jacques Derrida -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Derrida's Other Corpus -- Derrida's Flair (For the Animals to Follow . . . ) -- "If you could take just two books . . ." -- To Die a Living Death -- Reinventing the Wheel -- Pray Tell -- Derrida's Preoccupation with the Archive -- "World, Finitude, Solitude" -- Conclusion: -- Notes -- Index -- Perspectives in Continental Philosophy.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Abbreviations of Works by Jacques Derrida -- Introduction. Bénédictions—''traces in the history of the French language'' -- 1. Alors, qui êtes-vous? -- 2. Analogy and Anagram -- 3. Derrida's Laïcité -- 4. A Last Call for ''Europe'' -- 5. Derrida's America -- 6. Derrida at the Wheel -- 7. ''One Nation . . . Indivisible'' -- 8. Autonomy, Autoimmunity, and the Stretch Limo -- 9. History's Remains -- 10. Comme si, comme ça -- 11. Lifelines -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Index

In 'Reading and Its Discontents', Anne Emmanuelle Berger makes a plea for the specificity of reading literature. Unlike other kinds of reading, the reading of literature has the unique ability to 'keep the wound open'. As such, it can never be reduced, as some have recently tried, to just another form of culture production or to some politically motivated pedagogical therapeutics. It is also a type of reading, this essay will argue, that cannot be reduced to the kind of silent reading that, as Derrida demonstrated in 'Plato's Pharmacy', has been the model and telos of reading since Plato. After a brief look at the controversy surrounding the history of silent reading, this essay looks at the question of reading in Plato and, especially, at the surprising number of references in the dialogues to Socrates as a reader. It then turns to Derrida's reading of Plato in 'Plato's Pharmacy', first to Derrida's critique of the Platonic model of reading and writing in the dialogues and then to the deployment of a new kind of philosophical reading and writing in Derrida's own work, a reading that, as Berger herself suggests, is always also a writing, a reading that is itself then always double, at once silent and aloud.

This essay addresses Matthias Fritsch's argument in Taking Turns with the Earth that in order to respond properly and responsibly to today's climate crisis one must begin with a rethinking of ethics in terms of intergenerational responsibility. After affirming Fritsch's argument that ethics must indeed be reconceived through an analysis of our fundamental intergenerationality and our obligation to "take turns with the earth" alongside other generations, the essay retraces Fritsch's use of the work of Derrida on time, ethics, mourning, and the turn-taking of democracy to make this case. Finally, the essay proposes Homer's Iliad as a friendly supplement to Fritsch's plea to take turns with the earth insofar as ethical responsibility is there understood in terms of the way successive generations—like plants, or like leaves that grow, wither, and die—take their turn not only with the earth but under the sun.