Theory and practice /

For 40-odd years, Derrida, the premier deconstructionist philosopher, gave qualifying exam students seminars on a variety of institutionally determined topics. Theory and Practice is the sixth installment in "The Seminars of Jacques Derrida"--a project to bring these educational texts to English readers. When Marx wrote that philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways, but the point is to change it, was he advocating that communist practice is a new advance in philosophy or that philosophy is finished and superseded? Some 16 years prior to his Specters of Marx (1993), Derrida here sides with Althusser's defense of the former, that there is no theory without action and vice versa. Derrida further investigates the theory/praxis dynamic in Kant's discussion of hope, provides a significant discussion of Aristotle's causality, considers Heidegger's investigations of thinking and technique, and offers an all-too-brief look at Freudian analysis. Wills's nuanced, word-play-sensitive translation includes foreign terms for those with ears to hear the etymological associations so important to Derrida's arguments and presents a crisp, clear, elegant statement of the author's text. Though the book includes a names index, indexes of subjects and of non-English terms would have made the text more useful. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. --Steve A. Young, McHenry County College