Not Half No End: Militantly Melancholic Essays in Memory of Jacques Derrida

Geoffrey Bennington

Feb 2010 · Edinburgh University Press

About this ebook

Gathers Bennington's essays since the death of his friend Jacques Derrida in 2004. These 16 continue the work of elucidating Derrida's difficult and complex thought, often with reference to his persistent interrogation of the concepts of life and death, mourning and melancholia, and what he sometimes calls 'half-mourning'. Bennington relates these to the core concepts in Derrida's work: deconstruction and differance. Derrida's suspension of the end - in differance, in death - has wide-ranging consequences for our thinking and how we attempt to categorise that thinking, whether as epistemological, ethical, political, aesthetic.Not Half No End moves through Derrida's rich and varied corpus in a weave of styles, from the expository and analytical to the autobiographical and confessional, in the ongoing process of deconstruction.

About the author

Geoffrey Bennington is Asa G Candler Professor of Modern French Thought at Emory University. He is the author and translator of numerous books and articles on literary and philosophical issues, and translator of many texts by Jacques Derrida and other French thinkers. His books include Late Lyotard (2005), Deconstruction is Not What You Think...(2005), Interrupting Derrida (2000) and, with Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida (1991).