Title:  Kierkegaard Through Derrida: Toward a Postmetaphysical Ethics Author:  Laura Llevadot Series: Contemporary European Cultural Studies Imprint:  The Davies Group, Publishers soft cover 218 pp. USD 24.00 ISBN 978-1934542323 February, 2013 What could a postmetaphysical ethics be? And why think it from the vantage point of the work of Kierkegaard and Derrida? These two questions guide this work and emerge from this initial position: a postmetaphysical ethics would move away from Heidegger’s criticism of the ethical as a practical domain separated from theoretical intellection. Heidegger sought to demonstrate that the ethical—as a specific practical domain that attempts to propose norms and rules of action and is different from the theoretical—is in itself metaphysical. Metaphysics is the distinction between the theoretical and the practical. That the divergence between the theoretical and the practical, the ideal and the real, the ontological and the ethical, ceases to be decisive signifies, above all, the toppling of the classical opposition between faith and knowledge, believing and knowing, that is, the toppling of the consequences that arose from the border that divided reason and “unreason,” philosophy and religion. In determining the extent to which the question of belief can be examined in relation to postmetaphysical ethical thought, the author argues that a postmetaphysical ethics would be one for which belief, and in particular the belief in the other, is no longer irrational waste but the Archimedean point of the emergence of the postmetaphysical ethics itself. Kierkegaard and Derrida can teach us to think the configuration of an ethics whose center is inhabited by no other duty than the impossible, aporetic, and undecidable duty to believe. Contents Foreword/Forward by Michael Marder Acknowledgments Introduction Abbreviations of Kierkegaard’s Works 1. Believing the Impossible: Kierkegaard and Derrida I  Belief and the End of Metaphysics 2. God: Kierkegaard and the Death of God 3. Love Believes All Things: Kierkegaard, Deconstruction, and the End of Metaphysics 4. Silence and Justice: Why Cannot Abraham Speak? II  Death 5. One’s Own Death: Kierkegaard and Heidegger 6. The Death of the Other: Kierkegaard, Levinas, Derrida III  The Self and the Other 7. You: Kierkegaard’s “Second Ethics” Beyond Buber and Levinas 8. Making Truth: The “I” of Confession in Kierkegaard and Derrida Appendix:  The Suspension of the Ethical in Breaking the Waves: Kierkegaard and Lars von Trier Notes Reviews “ Kierkegaard   through   Derrida    is   an   original   work   that   addresses   some   of   the   key   issues   in   modern   philosophical   thinking.   Most   previous   studies   on   Kierkegaard   and   Derrida   have focused   primarily   on   the   notion   of   a   deconstructive   theology;   Llevadot’s   study   breaks   new   ground   by   applying   some   of   the   results   of   these   previous   studies   to   the   question   of ethics.   The   work   is   divided   into   three   main   sections,   which   treat   in   turn   the   status   of   belief   in   the   context   of   the   end   of   metaphysics,   the   modern   understanding   of   death   in   the existentialist   and   postmodernist   traditions,   and   the   possibility   of   postmetaphysical   ethics.   This   highly   readable   work   will   be   of   great   interest   to   anyone   interested   in   Continental philosophy.” — Jon Stewart Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre, University of Copenhagen “The   challenge   of   philosophy   today   is   to   allow   this   silence   to   speak   without   breaking   it,   without   inscribing   it   in   the   logic   of   the   voice,   without   merely   thematizing   or   making   explicit something   that   has   been   hitherto   hidden.   In   Kierkegaard   through   Derrida ,   Llevadot   takes   up   the   challenge   in   her   own   style,   by   formulating   postmetaphysical   ethics   and   philosophy without formalizing them. And she does so in a singular manner, with recourse to a singular dialogue between two philosophical singularities.” — Michael Marder Ikerbasque Research Professor of Philosophy, University of the Basque Country The Author Laura   Llevadot   (Ph.   D.   in   Philosophy,   University   of   Barcelona,   2006)   is   Professor   of   Contemporary   Philosophy   at   the   University   of   Barcelona,   where   she   teaches   courses   on   Post- structuralism   and   Deconstruction.   She   is   a   member   of   the   Laboratoire   d’Études   des   Logiques   Contemporaines   (Paris).   Among   her   many   publications   are   La   philosophie   seconde   de Kierkegaard  (L’Harmattan, 2012), Philosophy in the forth-coming University  with Manuel Cruz (2013), and Postmetaphysics Philosophy. 20 years of French Philosophy  with Jordi Riba (2012).