One Thousand Preliminary Words on “Big Old Theory”

Abstract

“Big Old Theory” was never exactly “theory” in the first place.

Keywords:

• High Theory
• Derrida
• Lyotard
• Vincennes
• anti-historicism

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Geoffrey Bennington

Geoffrey Bennington is Asa G. Candler Professor of Modern French Thought at Emory University and Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School. He is the author of seventeen books in English and French, and some one hundred thirty articles and chapters on philosophical and literary-theoretical topics. His most recent books are Scatter I: The Politics of Politics in Foucault, Heidegger, and Derrida (Fordham UP, 2016) and Kant on the Frontier: Philosophy, Politics, and the Ends of the Earth (Fordham UP, 2017). He is General Editor, with Peggy Kamuf, of the English language edition of The Seminars of Jacques Derrida at the University of Chicago Press, and has translated several volumes by Derrida, including (with David Wills) a new translation of Glas (forthcoming from Minnesota). He has just completed Scatter II, which includes deconstructive readings of texts across the tradition of political philosophy, and is working on The Angel and the Beast: The Truth in Translation, on Martin Heidegger and Paul Friedländer.