Re-reading Derrida

Tony Thwaites teaches modernist literature and literary and cultural theory at the University of Queensland. He is the author of Joycean Temporalities: Debts, Promises and Countersignatures (UP Florida, 2011) and Reading Freud: Psychoanalysis as Cultural Theory (SAGE, 2007). He is currently working on a book on Lacanian narrative theory. Judith Seaboyer teaches Victorian and contemporary literature at the University of Queensland. She has published on British and American contemporary fiction, and is presently working on the turn to pastoral in contemporary literature and on the pedagogy of reading well.

• About this bookAcknowledgementsIntroduction: Mourning’s NumberTony Thwaites and Judith SeaboyerI: MourningsAbsolute Mourning: It Is Jacques You Mourn ForJ. Hillis Miller Posthumous Infidelity: Derrida, Levinas, and the ThirdDerek AttridgeII: HospitalitiesThe Disjointed City: Materializing Mourning and Forgiveness in the Reconstruction of BeirutJonathan HallThe Haunting of (un)Burial: Mourning the “Unknown” in Whitman’s America63Lindsay TuggleElegizing John Wordsworth: Commemoration and LyricJ. Mark SmithCity of Ghosts: Mourning and Justice in The Sixth SenseWarwick MulesDeconstruction and Democracy in the Neoliberal TurnStefan MattessichCryptonymic Secretion: On the Kind-ness of StrangersLaurie JohnsonHospitality to Trauma: Ethics after AuschwitzShannon Burns?: Hospitality and its Discontents (as such)Tony ThwaitesBibliographyIndex

Refusing to mourn, Miller and Attridge engage Derrida's refusing to mourn in a volume of clear-eyed interdisciplinary explorations on hospitality that absolute mourning and posthumous infidelity invite. Seven scholars and the editors answer the invitation with expansive essays that address one another as they give their take on legacies, memorials, crypts, and elegies in Beirut and New Orleans, in Wordsworth and Joyce, in Abraham and Torok, in film and geopolitics, in trauma and community. Each takes up in one nonsynonymy or other the spacing auto-immunity future of that infidelity or absolute.