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, best known as an expert on deconstruction and the works of Jacques Derrida and Jean-François Lyotard. He has translated many of Derrida's works into English.

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 co-wrote the book Jacques Derrida with Derrida. Bennington's contribution, "Derridabase", is an attempt to provide a comprehensive explication of Derrida's work. "Derridabase" appears on the upper two-thirds of the book's pages, while Derrida's contribution, "Circumfession", is written on the lower third of each page. Derrida's "Circumfession" is, among other things, intended to show how Derrida's work exceeds Bennington's explication. Many of Bennington's essays on Derrida have criticized explanations of Derrida's work attempted by other scholars. Bennington has also written a monograph-length study of Lyotard's work, Writing the Event.

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

• Late Lyotard, 2005
• Deconstruction is Not What You Think..., 2005
• 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, reprinted as ebook, 2005
• Sententiousness and the Novel: Laying Down the Law in Eighteenth-Century French Fiction, (ISBN 0521302463) 1985, reprinted as ebook, 2005
• 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

20th century philosophers | Deconstruction | Literary critics