Delighted to announce that my colleague Dominic Smith and I have just signed a contract with Edinburgh University Press for our book, Teaching in the Ruins. I’ve spent the bulk of the summer writing my half, which draws from Derrida’s unpublished seminars on teaching, especially La Raison universitaire (which is apparently forthcoming with the Bibliothèque Derrida collection in the next few years). Some of the other authors I’m engaging are Roland Barthes, Alain Badiou and Frédéric Neyrat, and of course Heidegger and Blanchot are present throughout as well. Dominic is writing about Benjamin, and we’ll be co-writing the middle part on Derrida’s 1976 Walter Benjamin seminar – contemporaneous with La Chose – through a sort of formal innovation we’re calling ‘plurigraphy.’
Funny, since Dom and I both came up in the punk/hardcore scene, unbeknownst to one another when we met, we’ve ended up doing a split in the form of a book. (splits were when two bands would each share one side of a record; some of my favourites include Agoraphobic Nosebleed/Converge, Burnt by the Sun/Luddite Clone, and Orchid/Pig Destroyer, a more recent one I really like, more collaborative, is Nothing and Full of Hell’s record; I guess our book is somewhere in between).
