Not Half No End: Militantly Melancholic Essays in Memory of Jacques Derrida

TWO ENDORSEMENTS TO FOLLOWNot Half No End: Militantly Melancholic Essays in Memory of Jacques DerridaGeoffrey BenningtonThis book gathers essays written by Geoffrey Bennington since the death of his friend Jacques Derrida in 2004. All continue the ongoing work of elucidating difficult and complex thought, often enough with reference to Derrida's persistent interrogation of the concepts of life and death, mourning and melancholia, and what he sometimes calls 'half-mourning'.Not Half No End relates this 'ethical' interruption of mourning to the persistent but still ill-understood motif of interrupted teleology, which, it is argued here, is definitive of deconstruction in general. This suspension or interruption of the end (which is none other than differance 'itself') has all manner of consequences for our thinking, and for how we attempt to categorize that thinking (as epistemological, ethical, political or aesthetic, for example). Not Half No End moves through all these domains, and the whole of Derrida's rich and varied corpus, in a weave of styles - from the expository and analytic to the autobiographical and confessional - in the ongoing process of deconstruction.Geoffrey Bennington is Asa G Candler Professor of Modern French Thought at Emory University. He is the author and translator of numerous books and articles on literary and philosophical issues, and translator of many texts by Jacques Derrida and other French thinkers.