Translation of the Seminars of Jacques Derrida

FAIN: RZ-51068-09

University of Southern California (Los Angeles, CA 90089-0012)
Peggy Kamuf (Project Director: November 2008 to June 2013)

Translation and preparation for publication of four volumes of The Seminars of Jacques Derrida. (36 months)

This is a proposal to translate from French four of the first volumes of The Seminars of Jacques Derrida. Each seminar is a course of teaching lectures that Derrida prepared every year on a chosen theme. The lectures are fully written and almost wholly unpublished. They thus represent an inestimable supplement to Derrida's extant oeuvre. The first volume of the French edition of the seminars appeared in 2008 and the English version, prepared by a member of our team, will be published in 2009. The work proposed here is part of the long-term project to translate, soon after they appear, all of the volumes in the series, of which there will be at least forty. The six members of the team assembled for the project all have extensive experience as translators of Derrida and other contemporary French writers. Given its very long-term nature, the project also includes an annual training workshop for younger scholars and graduate students to be conducted by our team members.

Associated Products

The Seminars of Jacques Derrida: The Beast & the Sovereign, Volume II (Book)
Title: The Seminars of Jacques Derrida: The Beast & the Sovereign, Volume II
Author: Jacques Derrida
Editor: Ginette Michaud
Editor: Geoffrey Bennington
Editor: Peggy Kamuf
Editor: Michel Lisse
Editor: Marie-Louise Mallet
Abstract: Following on from The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume I, this book extends Jacques Derrida’s exploration of the connections between animality and sovereignty. In this second year of the seminar, originally presented in 2002–2003 as the last course he would give before his death, Derrida focuses on two markedly different texts: Heidegger’s 1929–1930 course The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. As he moves back and forth between the two works, Derrida pursues the relations between solitude, insularity, world, violence, boredom and death as they supposedly affect humans and animals in different ways. Aspects of Robinson Crusoe are brought out questions such as Crusoe’s belief in ghosts, his learning to pray, his parrot Poll, and his reinvention of the wheel. Crusoe’s terror of being buried alive or swallowed alive by beasts or cannibals gives rise to reflections on death, burial, and cremation, in part provoked by a meditation on the death of Derrida’s friend Maurice Blanchot. Throughout, these readings are juxtaposed with interpretations of Heidegger's concepts of world and finitude.
Year: 2011
Primary URL: http://www.worldcat.org/title/beast-the-sovereign-vol-ii/oclc/768204314&referer=brief_results
Primary URL Description: WorldCat listing
Secondary URL: http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/B/bo5927735.html
Secondary URL Description: Publisher's listing
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Type: Translation
Type: Scholarly Edition
ISBN: 9780226144306
Translator: Geoffrey Bennington

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