“This splendid translation of Derrida’s last 10 seminars brings to completion the 23 seminars he devoted to “The Beast and the Sovereign”….Derrida’s argument proceeds through a juxtaposition of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Heidegger’s The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, wherein the shipwrecked sailor on the “Island of Despair,” haunted by phantasms of death and being buried alive, becomes a fellow traveler of the German phenomenologist who, over two centuries later, is no less beset by the thought of that which overwhelms thinking….Derrida shows how these disparate writers and texts engage an enigmatic otherness that captivates and rules over them.”

Choice

“The second volume of The Beast and the Sovereign, a meticulously edited transcript of the seminar’s second year (2002–03), shows us a different though complementary and perhaps more essential Derrida, a forensically close reader. . . . What Derrida seeks to highlight in both Defoe’s and Heidegger’s texts is the precariousness and fragility of the purportedly stable borders demarcating the human from the animal. The fantasy of sovereign solitude is always secretly feeding off the bestial other it wants to banish.”

Josh Cohen | Times Literary Supplement