Books by Michael Naas

Class Acts looks at two often neglected aspects of Derrida's work as a philosopher, his public lectures and his teaching, along with the question of the "speech act" that links them, that is, the question of what one is doing when one speaks in public in these ways.

Beginning with a reading of Plato's Statesman, this work interrogates the relationship between life and being in Plato's thought. It argues that in his later dialogues Plato discovers-or invents-a form of true or real life that transcends all merely biological life and everything that is commonly called life.

A Derrida scholar traces the evolution of the philosopher's final seminar in Paris as he contemplates the state of the world and his own mortality. For decades, philosopher Jacques Derrida held weekly seminars in Paris, spending years at a time on a single, complex theme. From 2001 to 2003, he delivered the final work in this series, entitled ';The Beast and the Sovereign.' As this final seminar progressed, its central theme was diverted by questions of death, mourning, memory, and, especially, the end of the world. Now philosopher and Derrida scholar Michael Naas takes readers through the remarkable itinerary of Derrida's final seminar in The End of the World and Other Teachable Moments. The book begins with Derrida's analyses of the question of the animal in the context of his other published works on that subject. It then follows Derrida as a very different tone begins to emerge, one that wavers between melancholy and extraordinary lucidity with regard to the end of life. Focusing the entire second year on Daniel Defoe's novel Robinson Crusoe and Martin Heidegger's seminar ';The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics,' Derrida explores questions of the end of the world and of an originary violence that is both creative and destructive. The End of the World and Other Teachable Moments follows Derrida from week to week as he responds to these emerging questions, as well as to important events unfolding around him, both world eventsthe aftermath of 9/11, the American invasion of Iraqand more personal ones, from the death of Maurice Blanchot to intimations of his own death less than two years away.

Written in the wake of Jacques Derrida's death in 2004, this title attempts both to do justice to the memory of Derrida and to demonstrate the significance of his work for contemporary philosophy and literary theory. It presents an analysis of Derrida's attachment to the French language, to Europe, and to European secular thought.

Taking on the Tradition focuses on how the work of Jacques Derrida has helped us rethink and rework the themes of tradition, legacy, and inheritance in the Western philosophical tradition.

Miracle & Machine is an introduction to the work of Jacques Derrida by means of a detailed reading of his 1994-5 essay "Faith and Knowledge," Derrida's most important work on the nature of religion in general and on the unprecedented forms it is taking today through science and the media.