Beyond Critique: Reading After the Hermeneutics of Suspicion

Early warning of the next PAL symposium: On Friday September 10, 2010 PAL will host a symposium in the Rare Book Room at Duke’s Perkins Library on ways of reading after the hermeneutics of suspicion.  The participants will be Rita Felski (English, University of Virginia), Sharon Marcus (English, Columbia University), Stephen Best (University of California at Berkeley), and Kate Hayles (Literature Program, Duke University). Respondent: Toril Moi. There will be a reception after the event.

New Essay Published in New Literary History

My new essay called: ‘”They practice their trades in different worlds”: Concepts in Poststructuralism and Ordinary Language Philosophy’ is now available in the latest issue of New Literary History 40.4 (Autumn 2009), pp. 801-824. By focusing on their different views of concepts, the essay shows that Derrida and Wittgenstein have radically different ideas about what the purpose of philosophy is. The essay is an attempt to show why it is so difficult to have a meaningful dialogue between the two intellectual traditions. A pdf file is now available under “Essays”.

The New Translation of The Second Sex

I have uploaded my London Review of Books review of the new translation of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex under “Other Writing”. The pdf file contains all the letters to the editor as well. My own reply to the translators is included in the file, somewhere in the middle of the letters. You will also find my essay on the old translation of The Second Sex there, for comparison.