The Laws of Reflection: Nelson Mandela in Admiration

Jacques Derrida - Pour Nelson Mandela by Che Brandes-Tuka

Not in the Mood

Adam Shatz, London Review of Books

Derrida: A Biography by Benoît Peeters, translated by Andrew Brown

Polity, 629 pp, £25.00, November, ISBN 978 0 7456 5615 1

‘Anyone reading these notes without knowing me,’ Jacques Derrida wrote in his diary in 1976, ‘without having read and understood everything of what I’ve written elsewhere, would remain blind and deaf to them, while he would finally feel that he was understanding easily.’ If you think you can understand me by reading my diaries, he might have been warning future biographers, think again. Derrida worried that the diaries might one day be privileged over his philosophical writing or, worse, used as a way of ‘finally’ steering through the obstacles he had consciously placed between himself and his readers.

'Apostrophizing Algeria: The Ghost In Derrida'

by Grant Farred 

This essay is a version of the lecture that Grant Farred gave at the Teach-In at Rhodes University in 2010. It is a draft of a chapter of new book to be titled 'Conciliation'.)

. . . this interminable task, the ghost remains that which gives one the most to think about – and to do.

 Specters of Marx. 

Everywhere one turns in Specters of Marx there are, as we well know, ghosts. Revenant King Hamlet, Hamlet, troubled prince of Denmark, and the King as visor effect. Then there is Karl Marx of The Communist Manifesto, Max Stirner and, the opening ghost and the subject of a memorable Jacques Derrida dedication, the slain South African Communist Party leader Chris Hani.