Since the late 1960s, when he introduced Theodor Adorno’s work on literature and cultural critique to an English-speaking public, Samuel Weber has stimulated the discovery of new and unexpected links within a broad spectrum of humanistic disciplines, including critical theory and psychoanalysis, media studies and literary analysis, continental philosophy and theater studies. The international group of scholars who contribute to Points of Departure demonstrate the persistent fecundity of Weber’s work. Centered around his essay on the Ghost of Hamlet, as reflected in the writings of Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt, the volume is broadly divided into explorations of the nature of spectrality, on the one hand, and the dynamics of reading, on the other. Each of the twelve essays thus takes its point of departure from “Weber’s singular path between languages, cultures, and traditions”—to quote Jacques Derrida, whose fictive “interview with a passing journalist” is published here for the first time.

PETER FENVES is Joan and Sarepta Harrison Professor of Literature at Northwestern University. 

 

KEVIN McLAUGHLIN is George Hazard Crooker University Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and German at Brown University.  

 

MARC REDFIELD is a professor of English and comparative literature at Brown University.

“This collection stages its intellectual debt to its titular figure as a provocation to thought, through a series of suggestive essays that highlight and extend a number of points of interest (or departure) that characterize Samuel Weber’s distinguished career.  Weber has been a major figure in our intellectual landscape for some time, and deserves the statement this collection makes about his importance to the history of critical thought for close to half a century.” —Orrin N. C. Wang, author of Romantic Sobriety: Sensation, Revolution, Commodification, History