Samir Haddad - Derrida and the Inheritance of Democracy

T HIS BOOK WAS written over a number of years, and I have many people to thank for the inspiration, conversations, and help that were essential to its production.

First, thanks to David Michael Kleinberg-Levin, who, from the very beginning, provided excellent guidance and support, giving extensive feedback on everything he read. I owe an enormous amount to Penelope Deutscher, an inspiring philosopher whose influence on me is hard to measure. I'm very lucky to have first encountered European philosophy in Penny's lecture hall, and to have received her help ever since, not in the least across the whole process of the writing of this book. I am also grateful to Bonnie Honig and Sam Weber for their expertise and advice during the project's early stages. Their input was key in shaping the core argument.

I am privileged to have had Martin Hgglund as a friend and interlocutor over the past decade. I thank him for countless hours of conversation and argument, as well as for his feedback on the manuscript as a whole. Geoffrey Bennington and Johanna Oksala also read a draft of the manuscript, and their suggestions for improvement were invaluable. I thank Michael Naas for his generosity and insight the many times we talkedhis clarity and knowledge never failed to illuminate the more difficult ideas that I sought to understand. And thanks also to Ann Murphy and Jeffrey Flynn, exemplary colleagues and friends with whom I've discussed so much that is in these pages.

I've benefited from a strong community of scholars who helped me work through the ideas in this book at various stages in discussion and correspondence. Thanks to Joshua Andresen, Pleshette DeArmitt, Matthias Fritsch, Allan Hazlett, Leonard Lawlor, Paul Patton, Gayle Salamon, Alan Schrift, Daniel Smith, Jill Stauffer, Nicholas Tampio, and Patrick Weil for their time and input.

At Fordham University I owe much to two of my senior colleagues, John Drummond and Merold Westphal, for their support in the early stages of my career. I also received valuable financial support from Fordham in the form of a Faculty Research Grant in 2009, a Summer Faculty Research Grant in 2011, and a Faculty Fellowship in 2011, which aided in the writing of this book.

At Indiana University Press, Dee Mortensen, Sarah Jacobi, and Tim Roberts were an excellent editorial team, providing expert knowledge and advice that went a long way to improving the book. I also thank Paolo Pecchi for the permission to use his wonderful painting for the cover.

Finally, I thank my parents for all they have done to support me across a lifetime of learning. And thank you to Luisa, my light, for everything.

Earlier versions of some of the arguments in this book appeared in the following publications: Derrida and Democracy at Risk, Contretemps 4 (2004): 2944; Inheriting Democracy to Come, Theory & Event 8, no. 1 (2005); Reading Derrida Reading Derrida: Deconstruction as Self-Inheritance, International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 14, no. 4 (2006): 50520; A Genealogy of Violence, from Light to the Autoimmune, Diacritics 38, no. 12 (2008): 12142; Language Remains, CR: The New Centennial Review 9, no. 1 (2009): 12746; Jacques derrida, in History of Continental Philosophy, vol. 6: Poststructuralism and Critical Theory's Second Generation, edited by Alan D. Schrift (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 11132; and Citizenship and the Ambivalence of Birth, Derrida Today 4, no. 2 (2011): 17393. In all cases the arguments have been modified.

SAMIR HADDAD is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University.