Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics Series

Matchbook consists of nine essays written around, or in response to, work published by Jacques Derrida since 1980. The focal point of the essays is the "Envois," which forms part of Derrida's Post Card. Particular attention is paid to how that text articulates with the ethical and political emphases of Derrida's more recent work, but also to its autobiographical conceit.

The "incendiary" reference of the book's title underscores deconstruction's engagement with questions of reading: relations between (slow) reading and the speed of technology, and the political effects of an internationalized deconstruction in a globalized culture. It is in terms of what deconstruction can have us think about the speed of technology and technologies of reading that Derrida's work has made one of its most important contributions to philosophy and literary and cultural studies. The book concentrates on that as proof of the continued relevance of such work.

Prosthesis

by David Wills

Published 31 August 1995

Prosthesis is an experiment in critical writing that both analyses and performs certain questions about the body as an "artificial" construction. The book deals with the mechanical (e.g., a mechanical prosthesis like an artificial leg) in that most humanistic of discourses, the artistic - in order to demonstrate how far a supposedly natural creation relies on artificial devices of various kinds. Cutting across the terrains occupied traditionally by the history of medicine, film studies, art history, philosophy, psychoanalysis, literary theory, and fiction, its impeccable scholarship demonstrates the permeability of the frontiers that define academic regions and delimit a scholarship determined to ascertain, to describe and prescribe, to hold in check and dominate as fields of knowledge what are in fact fields of practice, intervention, and invention.