Radical Atheism

"A commanding and refreshing interpretation of Derrida which promises to be a crucial intervention in critical disagreements over Derrida's legacy.Radical Atheism is an important and prescient volume.It re-assesses Derrida's work and its philosophical futures with care, vision, and scholarly rigour, serving to regenerate interest in Derrida for a generation of philosophers for whom his name has fallen out of fashion." -- Danielle Sands * <I>Parrhesia</I> * "Martin Hagglund's Radical Atheism is a tour de force . . . It lives up to [its] bold claim, offering a remarkable tour of Jacques Derrida's diverse and demanding oeuvre via lucid arguments and clear prose. Hagglund demonstrates an impressive command of Derrida's corpus, marshaling these materials skillfully and effectively in rigorous, firmly grounded textual analyses . . . [It is] certainly worthy of the attention it continues to receive, both for its own merits and because any discussion of Derrida and religion will now have to attend to and contend with Hagglund's powerful text." -- William Robert * <I>Sophia</I> * "With exceptional care and insight, Hagglund construes the vital implications and enduring positions of Derrida's work." -- Avital Ronell * New York University * "Martin Hagglund has produced an exceptional work. It is peerless and groundbreaking in its originality and contributes the most consistent, compelling and complete articulation of Derrida's work. In summation Radical Atheism is daring and persuasive in opening up materialist and atheistic vistas for future deconstructive analysis. Derrida is portrayed as a philosopher concerned with the thick of life in its vicissitudes. It offers a forceful account of how Derrida meditates on questions of life and death, good and evil, politics and the meaning of mortality. It will prove attractive to all readers of Derrida, professional and student alike and undoubtedly will become a definitive starting point for understanding deconstruction." -- Patrick O'Connor * <I>Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology</I> * "Radical Atheism is the most accurate, insightful, and complete account anyone has produced so far of Derrida's thought. Hagglund refutes a whole panoply of influential misreadings of Derrida, and he does so with a flair and clarity rarely attained by writers on deconstruction." -- Henry Staten * <I>The New Centennial Review</I> * "Like the best of philosophers measured by Nietzschean standards, Hagglund could be characterized as marvelously 'untimely'. [A] superlative conceptual-theoretical analysis." -- Adrian Johnston * <I>The New Centennial Review</I> * "In the very insightful and intelligent book by Martin Hagglund. his analysis reaches what we could call the zero degree of deconstruction, the point at which deconstructive logics show their internal potential and cannot be assimilated to any of the various discourses-ethicist, religious, and so forth-which have tried to hegemonize it." -- Ernesto Laclau * <I>Diacritics</I> * "In his important and hard-hitting new book, Martin Hagglund lucidly delineates the argument by means of which Derrida problematises the desire for plenitude in its various guises, and on the strength of this clarity of insight offers trenchant critiques of a number of interpretations of Derridean thought that simplify or distort it. Hagglund goes on to show in a sharper light even than Derrida elected to do how [time] provides the basis for the latter's treatment of the most far-reaching topics, starting with life itself. Hagglund has shown superbly how Derrida's account of time underlies his explorations of these ethical topics, and how unlike traditional ethical postures the results are." -- Derek Attridge * <I>Derrida Today</I> * "What distinguishes Hagglund's book is the philosophical acumen with whic

Martin Hagglund is a Charlotte W. Newcombe Fellow in Comparative Literature at Cornell University. He is the author of Chronophobia: Essays on Time and Finitude, which was published in Swedish in 2002. In Spring 2009, CR: The New Centennial Review will publish a special issue devoted to his work.Visit Martin Hagglund's website: www.martinhagglund.se

@fmct:Contents @toc4:Acknowledgments iii @toc2:Introduction 0 1 Autoimmunity of Time: Derrida and Kant 00 2 Arche-Writing: Derrida and Husserl 00 3 Arche-Violence: Derrida and Levinas 000 4 Autoimmunity of Life: Derrida's Radical Atheism 000 5 Autoimmunity of Democracy: Derrida and Laclau 000 @toc4:Notes 000 Works Cited 000 Index 000