Erotics of DeconstructionAuto-Affection After Derrida

Cultivates erotics in the common ground between deconstruction, psychoanalysis and continental feminist philosophy

• Elucidates erotics by the creative demonstration of the love of thinking with texts, rather than through the classical method of frontal (oppositional) argument
• Displaces the idealist tendency in Western thought to privilege language construed to be the sole terrain of the human
• Cultivates an erotics of edges, margins and touch that is always and already in contact with other worlds
• Benefits from Derrida’s seminars published during the last decade, as well as new translations such as Clang, to renew engagement with his work amongst a broader academic audience
• Develops new conversations between Derrida and the continental feminist thought of his contemporaries, with current international feminist scholarship as it is entangled with black, trans and ecocritical theory

Erotics of Deconstruction takes advantage of over a decade of publications from Derrida’s seminars to creatively demonstrate the deep material range of deconstruction and emphasise its under-recognised erotic nature. It activates psychoanalysis without the long-embedded philosophical trajectory that forged the human, psychic life and sexuality as categorically distinct from ‘the animal’ (inherent to dialectics and psychoanalysis). It generates new conversations with Derrida’s feminist contemporaries as they encounter pressing questions in current critical thought.

From the larger frame of ‘life death’ and the broadest auto-affective relation of inside to outside, to the difficult to grasp interface of conceptual and sensible, Erotics of Deconstruction does not retreat to a reparative life force or erotics of the good, but includes the unsettling friction of an originary relation to violence. Parsed by means of case studies from literature, philosophy and visual culture, erotics in this volume lap at every edge.