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Acknowledgments
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Acknowledgments This work grew out a series of three lectures delivered at the Collegium Phaenomenologicum in Città di Castello, Italy, during the summer of 2008. Invited by my friend and former colleague at DePaul University Paul Davies, now at the University of Sussex, to speak on the subject ‘‘Belief after Reason,’’ I could think of no better way to approach the topic than through a reading of Jacques Derrida’s 1994–95 essay ‘‘Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone.’’ What thus began as an attempt to provide an exegesis of this crucial but difficult text in three ninety-minute sessions quickly developed into something much longer and, as the reader will see, quite a bit different . A graduate seminar at DePaul University devoted to the same topic in the fall of 2008 allowed me to continue these reflections and expand them in other directions. I would like to express my heartfelt thanks, first, to Paul Davies, for his generous invitation, and then to the students and faculty at the Collegium Phaenomenologicum, and particularly Robert Bernasconi, for their many helpful comments and suggestions. An earlier version of part of this work was presented at the Chicago Theological Seminary in December 2008, thanks to an invitation from Ted Jennings and Kunitoshi (Kuni) Sato. I am grateful to them and their colleagues at CTS for their warm hospitality and insightful questions. An early version of Chapter 5 was presented at Missouri State University, at the invitation of Ralph Shain and Andrew Baird, and then again at Columbia College in Chicago, at the invitation of Ann Gunkel. A skeletal ix version of three chapters was presented at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, thanks to a very generous invitation from Michael O’Driscoll. I am indebted to all these friends and their colleagues for the many helpful remarks that went to improving this work. An early version of Chapter 4 was published under the title ‘‘Miracle and Machine: The Two Sources of Religion and Science in Derrida’s ‘Faith and Knowledge’’’ in Research in Phenomenology 39 (2009) 184–203. I would like to thank the journal’s editor, John Sallis, for allowing me to publish a revised version of that chapter here. Once again I wish to thank my students and colleagues at DePaul University for their friendship and for the many hours of conversation that helped refine this work. My thanks in particular to Peg Birmingham, Avery Goldman, Sean Kirkland, David Krell, Rick Lee, Bill Martin, Will McNeill, Mollie Painter-Morland, David Pellauer, Elizabeth Rottenberg, H. Peter Steeves, and Kevin Thompson, as well as to Eileen Daily at Loyola University, Rodolphe Gasché and Henry Sussman at SUNY Buffalo, Martin Hägglund at Harvard University, Elissa Marder at Emory University , Ginette Michaud at the University of Montreal, Jeffrey Nealon at Pennsylvania State University, Nicholas Royle at Sussex University, and Alan Schrift at Grinnell College. All of them will be able to discern here the traces of their comments, questions, and suggestions. This work has also benefited from conversations with fellow members of the ‘‘Derrida Seminar Translation Project,’’ Geoffrey Bennington, Peggy Kamuf, David Wills, Elizabeth Rottenberg, and, once again and first and foremost, Pascale-Anne Brault. I would also like to thank the University Research Council at DePaul University for its generous support of this work, as well as DePaul’s College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences, and especially Dean Chuck Suchar, for a 2009 Summer Research Grant that helped me bring this project to completion. x Acknowledgments ...