Using the philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy as an anchoring point, Jacques Derrida in this book conducts a profound review of the philosophy of the sense of touch, from Plato and Aristotle to Jean-Luc Nancy, whose ground-breaking book "Corpus" he discusses in detail. Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Edmund Husserl, Didier Franck, Martin Heidegger, Francoise Dastur, and Jean-Louis Chretien are discussed, as are Rene Descartes, Diderot, Maine de Biran, Felix Ravaisson, Immanuel Kant, Sigmund Freud, and others. The scope of Derrida's deliberations makes this book a virtual encyclopedia of the philosophy of touch (and the body). Derrida gives special consideration to the thinking of touch in Christianity and, in discussing Jean-Luc Nancy's essay "Deconstruction of Christianity," devotes a section of the book to the sense of touch in the Gospels. Another section concentrates on "the flesh," as treated by Merleau-Ponty and others in his wake. Derrida's critique of intuitionism, notably in the phenomenological tradition, is one of the guiding threads of the book. "On Touching" includes a wealth of notes that provide an extremely useful bibliographical resource. Personal and detached all at once, this book, one of the first published in English translation after Jacques Derrida's death, serves as a useful and poignant retrospective on the work of the philosopher. A tribute by Jean-Luc Nancy, written a day after Jacques Derrida's death, is an added feature.

With death looming, Jacques Derrida, the world's most famous philosopher-known as the father of "deconstruction"-sat down with journalist Jean Birnbaum of the French daily Le Monde. They revisited his life's work and his impending death in a long, surprisingly accessible, and moving final interview.
Sometimes called "obscure" and branded "abstruse" by his critics, the Derrida found in this book is open and engaging, reflecting on a long career challenging important tenets of European philosophy from Plato to Marx.
The contemporary meaning of Derrida's work is also examined, including a discussion of his many political activities. But, as Derrida says, "To philosophize is to learn to die"; as such, this philosophical discussion turns to the realities of his imminent death-including life with a fatal cancer. In the end, this interview remains a touching final look at a long and distinguished career.

L’Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique fut, il y a trente ans, un événement considérable. De quelque façon qu’on le relise aujourd’hui, ce livre fait date. Les débats auxquels il a aussitôt donné lieu sont régulièrement ranimés par des historiens, des philosophes, des politologues, des psychiatres et des psychanalystes. La richesse du matériau historique, l’audace des hypothèses mises en œuvre, le chemin frayé, et d’abord dans la pensée de Michel Foucault lui-même, tout cela justifie qu’on tente maintenant non pas de clore, de faire un bilan ou de célébrer, ni seulement de prendre acte de ce que ce livre aura pu signifier, mais d’analyser en chemin ce qu’il nous donne encore à penser : de la folie, aujourd’hui et demain, dans diverses institutions ou disciplines mais aussi au-delà d’elles. Car les clôtures institutionnelles et disciplinaires furent aussi les thèmes de l’Histoire de la folie.
Tel fut l’esprit dans lequel se tint le 23 novembre 1991, au Grand Amphithéâtre de Sainte-Anne, le IXe Colloque de la Société internationale d’histoire de la psychiatrie et de la psychanalyse. Sous le titre Histoire de la folie trente après, ce colloque fut ouvert par Georges Canguilhem et réunit, pour des discussions parfois vives, des psychanalystes, des psychiatres, des historiens et des philosophes.
SOMMAIRE

Completing the translation of Derrida's monumental work "Right to Philosophy" (the first part of which has already appeared under the title of "Who's Afraid of Philosophy?"), "Eyes of the University" brings together many of the philosopher's most important texts on the university and, more broadly, on the languages and institutions of philosophy. In addition to considerations of the implications for literature and philosophy of French becoming a state language, of Descartes' writing of the "Discourse on Method" in French, and of Kant's and Schelling's philosophies of the university, the volume reflects on the current state of research and teaching in philosophy and on the question of what Derrida calls a "university responsibility." Examining the political and institutional conditions of philosophy, the essays collected here question the growing tendency to orient research and teaching towards a programmable and profitable end. The volume is therefore invaluable for the light it throws upon an underappreciated aspect of Derrida's own engagement, both philosophical and political, in struggles against the stifling of philosophical research and teaching. As a founding member of the Research Group on the Teaching of Philosophy and as one of the conveners of the Estates General of Philosophy, Derrida was at the forefront of the struggle to preserve and extend the teaching of philosophy as a distinct discipline, in secondary education and beyond, in the face of conservative government education reforms in France. As one of the founders of the College International de Philosophie, he worked to provide a space for research in and around philosophy that was not accepted or legitimated in other institutions. Documenting and reflecting upon these engagements, "Eyes of the University" brings together some of the most important and incisive of Derrida's works.

Ce texte est un long commentaire, détaillé mot à mot, de la lettre que Gershom Scholem a écrite en 1926, en hommage à Franz Rosenzweig pour son quarantième anniversaire. Scholem y exprime son inquiétude devant la sécularisation de la langue hébraïque. Les mots de la langue sacrée, transformée en langue populaire, ne risquent-ils pas de faire retour? Et ce retour ne risque-t-il de plonger les nouvelles générations dans une catastrophe, une apocalypse? Pour expliquer cette angoisse de Scholem, Derrida rapproche la langue sacrée de ce qu'il nomme un fantasme de langue maternelle : une langue unique, insubstituable, faite de mots qui garderaient le pouvoir de nommer. Une telle langue, dont la productivité serait illimitée, pourrait rendre fou. Et si la langue de la déconstruction, laisse-t-il entendre, était porteuse du même excès?

This book questions the book itself, archivization, machines for writing, and the mechanicity inherent in language, the media, and intellectuals. Derrida questions what takes place between the paper and the machine inscribing it. He examines what becomes of the archive when the world of paper is subsumed in new machines for virtualization, and whether there can be a virtual event or a virtual archive. Derrida continues his long-standing investigation of these issues, and ties them into the new themes that governed his teaching and thinking in the past few years: the secret, pardon, perjury, state sovereignty, hospitality, the university, animal rights, capital punishment, the question of what sort of mediatized world is replacing the print epoch, and the question of the "wholly other." Derrida is remarkable at making seemingly occasional pieces into part of a complexly interconnected trajectory of thought.