Introduction

We begin this issue with a symposium of tributes to Jacques Derrida with Simon Critchley’s homage. Other essays by some of the most influential commentators on his work are by: Richard Beardsworth, Geoffrey Bennington, Penelope Deutscher, Marc Goldschmit and Michael Naas. All focus on his contribution to philosophy, with particular reference to his impact on political thought. Together, these essays constitute a comprehensive and in some cases moving tribute to Derrida’s impact upon political, ethical and feminist theory. In some cases, notably Beardsworth and Deutscher, they open up significant issues that will figure prominently in the debate to come over the uses and limitations of deconstructive thought in the political domain. In others, notably Naas and Goldschmit, they focus on Derrida’s last published essays (Rogues, translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, Stanford 2005).

An article already accepted for publication before this symposium was conceived, by Sam Haddad, adds a further dimension to the emerging discussion of Derrida’s final political essays. Haddad undertakes a careful commentary on Derrida’s aporetic analysis of inheritance and its application to the concept of democracy, with a view to teasing out the implications of democracy to come.

The other essays in this issue review critically and expand on the work of various thinkers. Manisha Basu focuses on William Spanos’s book, The Errant Art of Moby Dick: the Canon, the Cold War and the Struggle for American Studies and turns to the homologies between the necropolitics of the Melville text and that of the cold war; Stuart Elden, does a critical commentary on Judith Butler’s, Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death and offer’s a neo-Heideggerian treatment of the concept of the polis, which requires a rethinking of the problematic of ‘the political’; Andrew Norris explores the political implications of Stanley Cavell’s “claim to community” within the context of Cavell’s skeptical epistemology; and Mark Young offers a critical review of Robert Kagan’s Of Paradise and Power, contesting the canonical theory frame within which the U.S. - Europe polarity in the international arena can be understood.

In the Reviews section:

Martin Coward reviews two books dealing with contemporary imperialism: David Harvey’s The New Imperialism and Michael Mann’s Incoherent Empire.

Joanne Faulkner reviews Alenka Zupancic’s The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two

Sankaran Krishna reviews Urvashi Butalia’s The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India

Antonio Y. Vazquez-Arroyo reviews Giorgio Agamben’s Means Without End: Notes on Politics and Jacques Derrida’s Of Hospitality.