Radical Atheism

"Martin Hgglund has produced an exceptional work. It is peerless and groundbreaking in its originality and contributes the most consistent, compelling and complete articulation of Derrida's work. In summation Radical Atheism is daring and persuasive in opening up materialist and atheistic vistas for future deconstructive analysis. Derrida is portrayed as a philosopher concerned with the thick of life in its vicissitudes. It offers a forceful account of how Derrida meditates on questions of life and death, good and evil, politics and the meaning of mortality. It will prove attractive to all readers of Derrida, professional and student alike and undoubtedly will become a definitive starting point for understanding deconstruction." -- Patrick O'Connor * <I>Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology</I> * "In the very insightful and intelligent book by Martin Hgglund. his analysis reaches what we could call the zero degree of deconstruction, the point at which deconstructive logics show their internal potential and cannot be assimilated to any of the various discoursesethicist, religious, and so forthwhich have tried to hegemonize it." -- Ernesto Laclau * <I>Diacritics</I> * "In his important and hard-hitting new book, Martin Hgglund lucidly delineates the argument by means of which Derrida problematises the desire for plenitude in its various guises, and on the strength of this clarity of insight offers trenchant critiques of a number of interpretations of Derridean thought that simplify or distort it. Hgglund goes on to show in a sharper light even than Derrida elected to do how [time] provides the basis for the latter's treatment of the most far-reaching topics, starting with life itself. Hgglund has shown superbly how Derrida's account of time underlies his explorations of these ethical topics, and how unlike traditional ethical postures the results are." -- Derek Attridge * <I>Derrida Today</I> * "Hgglund writes so well, argues so persuasively, and clears the interpretative field in such a confident and strident manner that if one is willing to engage this work it is hard not to be swept up by it and won over to its side. Indeed it is difficult not to think that Hgglund has figured out Derrida's logic like no one else really has, that he has not so much put Derrida's thought in a nutshell as completely cracked the nut, and that no one will be able to understand Derrida's work adequately without coming to terms with the arguments Hgglund makes in this work. Arguing by means of both a judicious use of Derrida's own works and a relentless critique of many well-known commentators on Derrida, Hgglund shows the deficiencies of all other interpretations of Derrida that fail to take into account the full implications of the trace and radical finitude." -- Michael Naas * <I>The New Centennial Review</I> * "Radical Atheism is the most accurate, insightful, and complete account anyone has produced so far of Derrida's thought. Hgglund refutes a whole panoply of influential misreadings of Derrida, and he does so with a flair and clarity rarely attained by writers on deconstruction." -- Henry Staten * <I>The New Centennial Review</I> * "Like the best of philosophers measured by Nietzschean standards, Hgglund could be characterized as marvelously 'untimely'. [A] superlative conceptual-theoretical analysis." -- Adrian Johnston * <I>The New Centennial Review</I> * "What distinguishes Hgglund's book is the philosophical acumen with which he delineates its consequences and the rigour with which he deploys them against the faux amis of deconstruction. Whether or not one finds the philosophy that Hgglund expounds compelling, the rare virtue of his book is that it forces us to assess that philosophy correctly."

Martin Hgglund is a Charlotte W. Newcombe Fellow in Comparative Literature at Cornell University. He is the author of Chronophobia: Essays on Time and Finitude, which was published in Swedish in 2002. In Spring 2009, CR: The New Centennial Review will publish a special issue devoted to his work. Visit Martin Hagglund's website: www.martinhagglund.se

@fmct:Contents @toc4:Acknowledgments iii @toc2:Introduction 0 1 Autoimmunity of Time: Derrida and Kant 00 2 Arche-Writing: Derrida and Husserl 00 3 Arche-Violence: Derrida and Levinas 000 4 Autoimmunity of Life: Derrida's Radical Atheism 000 5 Autoimmunity of Democracy: Derrida and Laclau 000 @toc4:Notes 000 Works Cited 000 Index 000