Literature, Philosophy

Derrida lives on

jacket imageThis month marks four years since the death of a philospher who then-French president Jacques Chirac remembered as “one of the major figures in the intellectual life of our time.” Jacques Derrida died in Paris on October 8, 2004, but his legacy lives on in many fields of the humanities, as well as many volumes of books published by the University of Chicago Press. The most recent is the newly-published Islam and the West: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida by Mustapha Chérif.
In the spring of 2003, Derrida sat down for a public debate in Paris with Algerian intellectual Chérif. The eminent philosopher arrived at the event directly from the hospital where he had just been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, the illness that would take his life just over a year later. That he still participated in the exchange testifies to the magnitude of the subject at hand: the increasingly distressed relationship between Islam and the West, and the questions of freedom, justice, and democracy that surround it.
For more on Derrida, check out Chicago’s extensive list of his publications and our website memorial in honor of the great philosopher.