The Trace of God

Derrida’s writings on the question of religion have played a crucial role in the transformation of scholarly debate across the globe. The Trace of God provides a compact introduction to this debate. It considers Derrida’s fraught relationship to Judaism and his Jewish identity, broaches the question of Derrida's relation to the Western Christian tradition, and examines both the points of contact and the silences in Derrida's treatment of Islam.

Edward Baring (Author)
Edward Baring is Assistant Professor in Modern Europe an Intellectual and Cultural History at Drew University. He is the author of The Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 1945– 1968 (Cambridge University Press, 2011), which won the Morris D. Forkosch Prize from the Journal of the History of Ideas for Best Book in Intellectual History. He has written articles on Derrida and Sartre, which have appeared in Critical Inquiry, Modern Intellectual History, and elsewhere. He is currently working on a Europe- wide history of phenomenology in the period before 1950.

Peter E. Gordon (Author)
Peter E. Gordon is Amabel B. James Professor of History and Harvard College Professor at Harvard University, where he teaches modern Europe an intellectual history from the late eighteenth to the late twentieth century, focusing chiefly on themes in continental philosophy and social thought in Germany and France since the 1920s. His books include: Rosenzweig and Heidegger: Between Judaism and German Philosophy (University of California Press, 2003), which received three separate awards: the Salo W. Baron Prize from the Academy for Jewish Research, the Goldstein- Goren Prize for Best Book in Jewish Philosophy, and the Morris D. Forkosch Prize from the Journal of the History of Ideas for Best Book in Intellectual History. He has coedited several scholarly volumes, including The Modernist Imagination: Essays in Intellectual History and Critical Theory in Honor of Martin Jay (Berghahn, 2008); The Cambridge Companion to Modern Jewish Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2007); and Weimar Thought: A Contested Legacy (Princeton University Press, 2013). His most recent book was Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos (Harvard University Press, 2010), which received the Jacques Barzun Prize from the American Philosophical Society. Gordon is founder and co- chair of the Harvard Colloquium for Intellectual History.