The End of the World and Other Teachable Moments

Michael Naas is Professor of Philosophy at DePaul University in Chicago. His books include The End of the World and Other Teachable Moments: Jacques Derrida's Final Seminar and Miracle and Machine: Jacques Derrida and the Two Sources of Religion, Science, and the Media (both Fordham).

—J. Hillis Miller:
“Michael Naas is one of the most authoritative interpreters anywhere of Jacques Derrida’s work. Naas’s writing about Derrida is characterized by a remarkable intellectual generosity. The End of the World and Other Teachable Moments is a brilliant reading of Derrida’s last seminar, The Beast and the Sovereign (2001-2003). Naas provides an exegesis of that seminar both in itself and in the light of an amazing in-depth knowledge of all Derrida’s previous work, back to its beginning in the 1960’s. This distinguished book is an essential guide for all those who are perplexed in one way or another by Derrida’s writings.”

—Kelly Oliver:
“The End of the World and Other Teachable Moments is a striking tribute to the end of the world that was Derrida, and it lives up to the responsibility of carrying forward what remains.”

—Peggy Kamuf:
“With his luminous and generous intelligence, Michael Naas makes the task of reading Derrida look easy. But that’s only because, like the finest of teachers, he takes us patiently through the difficulties and countenances bravely the disconcerting turns taken by this final seminar, what he calls its teachable moments. Naas’s clarity of thought, the acuteness of his ear, and the deftness of his writing are gifts that readers appreciate on every page. This book will be indispensable reading from now on for whoever attends to Derrida’s seminars."