Germs of Death

Reviews / Votes

"...a compact and ambitious reading of a significant portion of Jacques Derrida's philosophical work ... what makes Senatore's book so valuable is its insistence on Derrida's thinking of a general or minimal structure of genesis." - Phenomenological Reviews

"Senatore here demonstrates with stunning insight, clarity, and economy that Derrida's work of the 1960s and '70s needs to be understood as a radical critique or deconstruction of both the philosophical concept of life (from Plato to Hegel) and the prevailing biological model of heredity as a 'genetic program.' It will be impossible henceforth to read Derrida on questions of the trace, dissemination, life, and so on, without coming to terms with 'the germs of death.'" - Michael Naas, author of The End of the World and Other Teachable Moments: Jacques Derrida's Final Seminar

"The book represents a major contribution to the field of Derrida studies and phenomenology, particularly its attention to the concept of genesis that formed the basis of Derrida's earliest study of Husserl and the origin of his concept of writing. The unique contribution is the inclusion of the works from the periods of the mid-1970s, which have been neglected in the mainstream scholarship on Derrida." - Gregg Lambert, author of Philosophy after Friendship: Deleuze's Conceptual Personae