Geoffrey Bennington

Geoffrey Bennington is Asa Griggs Candler Professor of French and Professor of Comparative Literature, Emory University, as well as a member of the International College of Philosophy. He is a literary critic and philosopher, perhaps best known as a scholar of Jacques Derrida and Jean-François Lyotard and general commentator on and participant in deconstruction. He has translated the work of Derrida and Lyotard into English.

Career

Bennington was born in the United Kingdom and received his B.A., M.A., and D.Phil. from Oxford University. He took up a teaching appointment at the University of Sussex at Brighton, where he created an M.A. program in Modern French Thought and twice served as chair of the French department. He wrote the "Derridabase," with Jacques Derrida for the book Jacques Derrida. "Derridabase" is an attempt to provide a comprehensive explication of Derrida's work and program, printed on the upper two-thirds of the pages. Derrida's contribution, "Circumfession," is written in the lower third of the page and attempts to show how Derrida's work exceeds the above explication, which Derrida was able to read in completed form before working on his piece. Derrida referred to Bennington as something of his rabincal explicator, and much of the rest of Bennington's work on Derrida attempts to draw out insufficiencies in the accounts of Derrida's work offered by other scholars. Bennington is also one of the few scholars to provide a monograph-length study of Lyotard's work.

He has at times tried to engage members of the British press hostile to Derrida's work and has also attempted to explicate the relationship between deconstruction and analytic philosophy, which has generally had difficulties receiving work by Derrida and others. Bennington has also attempted to facilitate a reconciliation between adherents of Jürgen Habermas and deconstruction by providing a sketch of deconstruction on terms accessible to them.

Works

• Open Book/Livre Ouvert, 2005
• Other Analyses: Reading Philosophy, 2005
• Frontiers: Kant, Hegel, Frege, Wittgenstein, 2003
• Frontières kantiennes, (ISBN 2718605235) 2000
• Interrupting Derrida, (ISBN 0415224276) 2000
• Legislations: the Politics of Deconstruction, (ISBN 0860916685) 1995
• Dudding: des noms de Rousseau, (ISBN 2718603895) 1991
• Jacques Derrida, (ISBN 0226042626) 1991, w/ Jacques Derrida
• Lyotard: Writing the Event, (ISBN 0521302463) 1988
• Sententiousness and the Novel: Laying Down the Law in Eighteenth-Century French Fiction, (ISBN 0521302463) 1985
• Post-structuralism and the Question of History, (ISBN 0521367808) (ed.), 1983, w/ Derrick Attridge and Robert Young

Translations

• Veils, (ISBN 0804737959) Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous, 2001
• Jacques Derrida, (ISBN 0226042626) Jacques Derrida and Geoffrey Bennington, 1993
• The Inhuman: Talks on Time, (ISBN 0804720088) Jean-François Lyotard, 1991, w/ Rachel Bowlby
• Virginia Woolf and the Madness of Language, (ISBN 041503194X) Daniel Ferrer, 1990, w/ Rachel Bowlby
• Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, (ISBN 0226143198) Jacques Derrida, 1989, w/ Rachel Bowlby
• The Truth in Painting, (ISBN 0226143244) Jacques Derrida, 1987, w/ Ian McLeod
• The Postmodern Condition, (UK ISBN 0719014506) (US ISBN 0816611734) Jean-François Lyotard, 1984, w/ Brian Massumi

External Links

• "A Piece about Baudelaire and Barbara Johnson" (Word doc)
• "A Piece about Jean Nouvel" (Word doc)
• "A Piece about Philosophical Biography" (Word Doc)
• Emory announcement of appointment
• "Ex-Communication," an essay on Habermas (Word doc)
• Home page at Emory
• "Politics and Friendship: a Discussion with Jacques Derrida"
• Professorial Lecture given at Sussex (Word doc)
• Seulemonde interview