The World after the End of the World: A Spectro-Poetics

by Kas Saghafi

Overview

In this book, Kas Saghafi argues that the notion of "the end the world" in Derrida's late work is not a theological or cosmological matter, but a meditation on mourning and the death of the other. He examines this and several other tightly knit motifs in Derrida's work: mourning, survival, the phantasm, the event, and most significantly, the term salut, which in French means at once greeting and salvation. An underlying concern of The World after the End of the World is whether a discourse on salut (saving, being saved, and salvation) can be dissociated from discourse on religion. Saghafi compares Derrida's thought along these lines with similar concerns of Jean-Luc Nancy's. Combining analysis of these themes with reflections on personal loss, this book maintains that, for Derrida, salutation, greeting, and welcoming is resistant to the economy of salvation. This resistance calls for what Derrida refers to as a "spectro-poetics" devoted to and assigned to the other's singularity.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781438478227
Publisher:	State University of New York Press
Publication date:	04/01/2020
Series:	SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	210
File size:	539 KB

About the Author

Kas Saghafi is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Memphis. He is the author of Apparitions―Of Derrida's Other.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Abbreviations

Prologue: Salut—A Spectro-Poetics

The End of the World

1. The World after the End of the World

Intact

2. Safe, Intact: Derrida, Nancy, and the "Deconstruction of Christianity"
The Unscathed
Tact and Touch
Do Not Wish to Touch Me
Intact
There's Deconstruction, and then, There's Deconstruction

Death

3. Derrida Is the Death of Death
Death
The Proper Is Stronger than Life and Death
Aporias
Marranos
Side

Resurrection

4. Nancy's Resurrection
Resurrection
Eternal Life
Nancy's Eternal Life

Survivance

5. The Desire for Survival?
Desire
Finitude
Immortality
Dead—Immortal
The Impossibility of Dying
The Desire for Survival?

6. For a Time: The Time of Survival

7. Dying Alive: The Phantasmatics of Living-Death
The Phantasm
The Phantasm of Dying Alive
Thinking Death
The Intemporality of the Unconscious
The Phantasm and the Event
Survivance
The Weave
Ground
Perhaps an Other Time, Place, and Logic: Affect, the Phantasm, and the "As If "

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

"The prologue and opening and closing chapters are satisfyingly clarifying and surprisingly moving … the end of the world of each person leaves traces, Derrida believed, and Saghafi's book serves Derrida's traces as well readers." — CHOICE

"Saghafi's book makes a remarkable contribution as a coming-to-terms with interminable mourning." — Peggy Kamuf, author of To Follow: The Wake of Jacques Derrida

From the Publisher