Class Acts

“Class Acts is a masterful and highly engaging work that has much to teach readers of Derrida about the philosopher’s relation to speech act theory, his thinking of the event, and many other questions. At once elegant and playful, pedagogical yet attentive to the nuance and subtle turns in Derrida’s work, the book is itself a masterclass in deconstructive reading.”—Katie Chenoweth, Princeton University“Naas brings to this book an encyclopedic knowledge of Derrida’s immense corpus, which he conveys with his signature lucidity and modesty. Class Acts reflects all of these virtues in tracing Derrida’s abiding preoccupation with the nature of the speech act from the early 1970s to his death and linking this persistence to an understanding of Derrida’s pedagogy and the teaching of philosophy on two continents.”—Andrew Parker, Rutgers University

Michael Naas is Professor of Philosophy at DePaul University. His most recent books include The End of the World and Other Teachable Moments: Jacques Derrida’s Final Seminar (2015), Plato and the Invention of Life (2018), and Don DeLillo, American Original: Drugs, Weapons, Erotica, and Other Literary Contraband (2020).