Book of Addresses

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by Peggy Kamuf

Stanford University Press

Due/Published March 2005, 384 pages, paper

ISBN 0804750599

This book consists of a series of essays that all turn around questions of the address of speech or writing. They argue and demonstrate that meaning is not just a matter of the active intention of a subject (for example, speaker, writer, or other signatory of a meaningful act) but also of its reception at another's address. The book's main concern is therefore with a theory of meaning and of action that is not centered on the intentional, self-conscious subject. The fifteen chapters explore this problematic within three broad areas: love, jealousy, and sexual difference; fiction or literature; and political or public discourse. The book engages principally with contemporary French thought and includes important new readings of work by Jacques Derrida, Helene Cixous, Maurice Blanchot, and Jean-Luc Nancy.

Series: Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Disavowals (A Forward)

HOME ADDRESS UNKNOWN
(ON LOVE, JEALOUSY, SEXUAL DIFFERENCE)
1. Deconstruction and Love
2. Deconstruction and Feminism: A Repetition
3. Jealousy Wants Proof
4. The Other Sexual Difference
5. The Sacrifice of Sarah
6. To Give Place: Semi-Approaches to Hélène Cixous

FICTIONS OF ADDRESS
7. "Fiction" and the Experience of the Other
8. The Experience of Deconstruction
9. Deconstruction Reading Politics: Democracy's Fiction (Everything, Anything, and Nothing at All)
10. The Other Fiction
11. Syringe (at the point)

PUBLIC ADDRESS SYSTEMS
12. The Ghosts of Critique and Deconstruction
13. The Haunts of Scholarship
14. Derrida on Television, or "Applied Derrida"
15. Singular Sense, Second Hand

Afterward: On Leaving No Address, by Branka Arsic

Notes
Index