Book of Addresses [Paperback]

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, H?l?ne Cixous, Maurice Blanchot, and Jean-Luc Nancy.Peggy Kamuf is the Marion Frances Chevalier Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California.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. What pleasure, what serious and playful pleasures I had reading this magnificent, substantial book. It is thoroughly knowledgeable, concerned both to guide the reader who is uncertain and to satisfy the one who is informed. Those of us uprooted by the force of Derrida's writing are fortunate to have Kamuf's book to guide us.