Late Derrida: The Politics of Sovereignty

1. Derrida’s Last Decade During the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, JacquesDerrida publishednumerous books, approximately two dozen in French, virtually all translated into English, but in the 1990s and thereafter up to 2004, the year of his death and the year in which I am writing, he brought out roughly three dozen more books in France, not including the revised editions of earlier works, coauthored works, and introductions to books. In this period, which I here label late Derrida, about two dozen books by Derrida appeared in English translation, without counting three substantial Derrida readers. Not surprisingly, recent introductions toDerridahave found it especially challenging to systematize this sprawling corpus. The preferred approach is to foreground key Derridean concepts (so-called undecidables or quasitranscendentals) such as the early standbys—differance, iterability,margin, supplement, text—and later ones like gift, hospitability, forgiveness, democracy to come, justice, messianic, responsibility, spectrality. This, for example, is how Geoffrey Bennington organized his well-known “Derridabase” in Jacques Derrida, coauthored with Derrida and published in French in 1991, in English in 1993, and revised in 1999 with an updated, supplemented bibliography. A second popular approach is the exegesis of controversies such as Derrida versus structuralism (Saussure and Levi-Strauss), phenomenology (Husserl and Gadamer), psychoanalysis (Freud and Lacan), speech-act