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Populism in politics and policy orientations in law have thrown the jurisdiction of the academy and the disciplines of interpretation into disarray. Critique flounders in abstraction and negativity, law loses itself in particularity. Administering Interpretation brings together philosophers, humanists, and jurists from both continental and Anglophone jurisdictions to reassess the status and trajectory of interpretative theory as applied in the art of law. Tracking the thread of philosophical influences upon the community of legal interpretation, the essays move from the translation and wake of Derrida to the work of Agamben, from deconstruction to oikononmia. Sharing roots in the philological excavation of the political theology of modern law, contributors assess the failure of secularism and the continuing theological borrowings of juridical interpretation. The book brings contemporary critique to bear upon the interpretative apparatuses of exclusion, the law of spectacular sovereignty, and the bodies that lie in its wake. Contributors: Giovanna Borradori, Marinos Diamantides, Allen Feldman, Stanley Fish, Pierre Legrand, Bernadette Meyler, Michel Rosenfeld, Bernhard Schlink, Jeanne Schroeder, Laurent de Sutter, Katrin Trüstedt, Marco Wan Shows how principles of legal interpretation and legal practice have been affected by developments in philosophy in the wake of two major thinkers whose influence upon other fields is better known.Features original pieces by an international group of major scholars, including such prominent figures as Stanley Fish and Bernhard Schlink (author of the bestselling novel The Reader, in addition to being a prominent legal scholar).

Alienation After Derrida rearticulates the Hegelian-Marxist theory of alienation in the light of Derrida's deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence. Simon Skempton aims to demonstrate in what way Derridian deconstruction can itself be said to be a critique of alienation. In so doing, he argues that the acceptance of Derrida's deconstructive concepts does not necessarily entail the acceptance of his interpretations of Hegel and Marx. In this way the book proposes radical reinterpretations, not only of Hegel and Marx, but of Derridian deconstruction itself. The critique of the notions of alienation and de-alienation is a key component of Derridian deconstruction that has been largely neglected by scholars to date. This important new study puts forward a unique and original argument that Derridian deconstruction can itself provide the basis for a rethinking of the concept of alienation, a concept that has received little serious philosophically engaged attention for several decades.

Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) was the most original and inspiring writer and philosopher of our time. In a series of distinctive essays that are at once self-contained and intricately linked, Royle explores the legacies of Derrida's thinking in the context of philosophy, language, globalisation, war, terrorism, justice, the democracy to come, poetry, literature, memory, mourning, the gift, friendship and dreams. Lucid, inventive and at times funny, Royle allows us to appreciate how much Derrida's work has altered the ways we read and think. Autobiography, children's literature, the Gothic and modernist fiction, for example, figure together with philosophy, queer studies, speech act theory and psychoanalysis. The writings of Horace Walpole, Herman Melville, E. M. Forster, Elizabeth Bowen, Joe Brainard and David McKee are illuminatingly put in play alongside Shakespeare. Royle's book suggests that one of Derrida's most profound legacies has to do with the combination of responsibility and freedom his work inspires for both reading and writing. In Memory of Jacques Derrida offers an exceptionally clear overview of Derrida's work, while also tracing directions in which it might productively be read in the future.

This essay explores the Tunisian writer-engineer Yamen Manaï’s latest novel Bel Abîme (2021) from a Derridean and biosemiotic lens. Delving into Jacques Derrida’s posthumous ecological thought in addition to the well-established interdiscipline of biosemiotics, this investigation examines the profound inner transformation that occurs when we find ourselves under the biosemiosic gaze of another sentient, semiotic agent. After he sees and is seen by an abandoned puppy that he will soon adopt, the troubled protagonist from Bel Abîme will forge a meaningful bond with another living entity for the first time in his turbulent existence as he discovers the reality of other-thanhuman sentience and friendship. Instead of being a robotic automaton that purely operates according to an internal machinery, as much of Western philosophy theorizes, the narrator realizes that his dog Bella is endowed with a degree of semiosic ability that enables her to communicate in skillful and deliberate ways with members of the canine and human population. Owing to his tight-knight relationship with his other-than-human companion, the protagonist recognizes that “Mark, gramma, trace, and différance refer differentially to all living things, all the relations between living and nonliving” (Derrida, The Animal 104). When their eyes initially lock in a rather fortuitous encounter, the narrator from Bel Abîme cannot turn away from “the gaze called ‘animal’” that represents an ethical summons to live otherwise (Derrida, The Animal 12). Not only will the protagonist realize a genuine state of happiness through the splendor of interspecific communication and friendship because of Bella, but he will also be struck by the biocentric epiphany that the “wholly other” is an ethical agent in its own right that is worthy of moral consideration (Derrida, The Animal 12). The realization that other species live, suffer, and die just like Homo sapiens leads to an ethics of compassion for all of the “fellow” ephemeral beings with whom we share the biosphere in the Anthropocene/Technocene.

Instead of thinking of past, present and future as separate kinds of time, we can see them as reflexive categories of understanding linked together in mysterious ways. [...]we can talk, as Jacques Derrida does, of a 'non-present present, [a] being-there of an absent or departed one [that] no longer belongs to knowledge':2 of the present haunting the past. The concept of memory is used by a wide variety of different disciplines. [...]we find: collective memory,6 cultural memory,7 social memory8 and national memory,9 as well as psychoanalytic and neuroscientific definitions of the term. [...]it destabilises subject positions, reminding us not only that the state of affairs we call 'the now' is radically contingent, but that we could, in the past, have chosen a different future than the one we currently know as the present. [...]it gives the user a general sense of reference and guidance in approaching empirical instances.11 Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International (2006) (Specters)12 is the published version of a plenary address given by Derrida in 1993, at a conference to discuss the future of Marxism in a world of collapsing communist regimes and the capitalist triumphalism of Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man (1992).13 In it, Derrida uses hauntology in a sensitising way to capture an epochal shift with vast ideological consequences but elusive empirical features, as it was still occurring, and destined to impact for decades to come.

In his study, Hogarth’s Blacks: Images of Blacks in Eighteenth Century English Art (1985), British Caribbean writer David Dabydeen draws attention to the multiplicity of black figures in 18th century English paintings. Paintings by, for instance, William Hogarth, Joshua Reynolds, John Hamilton Mortimer, and William Turner, are virtually populated with black figures. Typically, these paintings reduce the black figure to the status of an exotic detail (Eckstein 2005) and turn it into a fashionable commodity, i.e., a resource for gestures of superiority and related claims to ‘the right to look’ by white spectators. The “right to look”, writes Nikolas Mirzoeff in his Counterhistory of Visuality, is a precondition for “claims of autonomy” and recognition in the political sphere (Mirzoeff 2011, 1). Conversely, the denial of said right amounts to a misrecognition of subjectivity and the denial of political participation. In what follows we will first sketch some of the characteristics of the intermedial poetics in novels and then move on to more concrete configurations, namely verbal-visual configurations in postcolonial and transcultural fiction. We argue that many postcolonial and transcultural fictions use intermedial relations to enter into a critical dialogue with established visual archives and their mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion. Following Michel Foucault (2002) and Jacques Derrida (1996), we understand the archive first and foremost in a metaphorical sense, i.e., as an epistemic and normative framework, “a historical a priori”, that determines the registers of sayability and the respective truth value of discursive claims. Yet, we also go beyond this understanding by arguing that the archive is not exclusively discursively structured and can therefore not be reduced to “a system […] of enunciability” (Foucault 146). Rather, as research in the field of the visual turn (cf. Benthien/Weingart 2014) indicates, culturally normative archives are also derived from the range of available images, which establish, despite their heterogeneity, a regime of visibility. This regime of visibility perpetuates specific world-views, which are critical in structuring interpretations of reality and in determining forms of social recognition. Thus understood, the regime of visibility, prefigured by visual archives, is akin to Judith Butler’s concept of frames. Frames, according to Butler, mark “[t]he limits of […] what can appear”; they “circumscribe the domain in which […] certain kinds of subjects appear as viable actors” (2004, xvii). Like archives, frames are always “politically saturated” (2010, 1), thus regulating forms of inclusion and exclusion in the public sphere. We suggest conceiving of the relation between literary visuality and the visual archive as interdependent and mutually transformative: While literary configurations of the visual are connected to and influenced by the archive, they are never fully determined by it. Rather, due to the liberties afforded by fiction, they can also reflect critically on the visual archive and add new perspectives and novel visibilities to it.

Currently, adaptation policy for climate change prioritises economic and technological dimensions of governance and action. Now, Elaine Kelly brings continental theory into the conversation to explore the ethical dilemmas stemming from emerging global political crises of migration, displacement and communal relocation related to climate change.