From Violence to Speaking Out

Leonard Lawlor is Edwin Earle Sparks Professor of Philosophy at Pennsylvania State University. He is one of the leading Derrida scholars in the United States today and has written numerous books that deal, either in whole or in part, with the implications of Derrida's philosophy. Most recently, The Implications of Immanence (Fordham, 2006) and This is Not Sufficient: An Essay on Animality and Human Nature in Derrida (Columbia University Press, 2007).

• AcknowledgementsPrefaceIntroduction: From Violence to Speaking OutPart I: On Transcendental Violence1. A New Possibility of Life: The Experience of Powerlessness as the Solution to the Problem of the Worst Violence2. What Happened? What is going to happen? An Essay on the Experience of the Event3. Is it happening? Or the Implications of Immanence4. The Flipside of Violence, or Beyond the Thought of Good enoughPart II: Three Ways of Speaking5. Auto-Affection and Becoming: Following the Rats6. The Origin of Parrēsia in Foucault’s Thinking: Truth and Freedom in The History of Madness7. Speaking out for Others: Philosophy’s Activity in Deleuze and Foucault (and Heidegger)8. 'The Dream of an Unusable Friendship': The Temptation of Evil and the Chance for Love in Derrida’s Politics of Friendship9. Three Ways of Speaking, or 'Let others be Free': On Deleuze’s 'Speaking-in-Tongues'; Foucault’s 'Speaking-Freely'; and Derrida’s 'Speaking-Distantly'Conclusion: Speaking out against ViolenceBibliographyIndex

Lawlor’s reading of Derrida, Foucault, and Deleuze is brilliant. But his master stoke is to appropriate them for his own aim: to embrace the 'fundamental violence' of experience – its undecidability – and thereby for us and him to enter the 'least violence' of an uncertain friendship with one another. His voice must be added to those of the other three.