Theory and Practice

Theory and Practice is the translation of a seminar Derrida held at the École Normale Supérieure during the 1976–77 academic year. … the particular interest of this series is at least twofold. First, the seminar begins from Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach,” particularly the 11th Thesis, and develops a discussion of the Marxist understanding of practice in the context of philosophical interpretations elaborated, especially by Derrida’s colleague Louis Althusser, during the preceding decade. Those interpretations were still very much common currency in 1976–77, and part of a very politically charged atmosphere in the period following 1968 … Theory and Practice can therefore be said to fill, to some extent, the long hiatus widely thought to exist in Derrida’s treating of Marx between his call for a deconstructive reading in Positions (1972) and the later Specters of Marx (1993).
The second striking interest of Theory and Practice is in the way Derrida moves from practice, through praxis, to techne¯, which allows him to recast the topic in the light of Heidegger’s “Question Concerning Technology,” and to provide the only serious sustained analysis of that essay known to exist in his writings …