cover image The Work of Mourning

The Work of Mourning

Jacques Derrida. University of Chicago Press, $32.5 (262pp) ISBN 978-0-226-14316-3

A combination elegy, introductory text and act of appropriation, Jacques Derrida's The Work of Mourning finds the French ber-philosophe writing about the lives and works of departed contemporaries Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Paul De Man and 10 others in biographically based chapters. What emerges are strikingly sympa meditations on friendship (which Derrida has already written about eloquently and at length), on shared vocations and avocations and on philosophy and history. ( Sept.)