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Psyche: Inventions of the Other, Volume I (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics)

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Psyche: Inventions of the Other Volume 1 is the first English-language publication of the essay collection that Professor of Humanities Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) originally published in two volumes in 1998 and 2003. The assembly of essays present Derrida's thinking on a wide assortment of topics including psychoanalysis, theater, translation, literature, representation, racism, and nuclear war. Also present are Derrida's engagement with the ideas of well-known thinkers and writers such as Barthes, Benjamin, de Man, Flaubert, Freud, Heidegger, Lacoue-Labarthe, Levinas, and Ponge. "Deliberate self-limitation gives psychoanalysis its only chance as a science. It isolates a context into which external randomness no longer penetrates. Biogenetics is not devoid of randomness and neither is the psyche, but the orders or the random sequences must not communicate or cross over within the same set, at least if one wants to distinguish between orders of calculable necessity. There must be no bastardizing or hybridization, no accidental grafts between these two generalities, genres, or genealogies. But one might ask the author of 'Leonardo,' how is one to eliminate the dice throws of bastardy? Is not the concept of sublimation, like that of the drive, precisely the concept of bastardy?" A highly analytical and thoughtful compendium of meticulous reasoning, and a welcome addition to philosophy shelves and college libraries.