Herman Rapaport provides a masterful introduction to the later Derrida by focusing on one unpublished seminar that he annotates systematically, investigating the loaded links between national languages and philosophy, gender, sexuality, and identity, and the struggle between democracy and totalitarianism. Can we use Heidegger against himself in order to deconstruct racism, identity politics and nationalism?

Jean-Michel Rabaté, Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania

This book is a close analysis of Jacques Derrida's late work, namely his (still largely unpublished) lectures on race, gender, and nationality-a study of Derrida as a social and political thinker who addresses our responsibilities toward the other, especially during periods of national conflict and social unrest. Rapaport has given us not only a new understanding of Derrida but also a beautifully written tract for our times.

Gerald Bruns, William P. & Hazel B. White Professor Emeritus of English, University of Notre Dame, USA

In Derrida on Exile and the Nation, Herman Rapaport extends his pathbreaking, singular commentary on Derrida with characteristic rigor, erudition and imagination. Rapaport illuminates and augments Derrida's lessons on the dangerously concrete irreality of origin and the brutal histories that accompany the sexualization, racialization, nationalization and conceptualization of the human. Does cosmopolitanism challenge or secure that brutality? Is exile a flight from that also tends to bear a turn toward brutality's seductions? In his lectures on the “Fantom of the Other,” Derrida addresses these questions, enacting a deepening swerve in his work that Rapaport carefully attends. The kind of thinking this book both practices and studies has never been more urgently needed.

Fred Moten, Professor, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, USA