In the late 1980s or early 1990s I was casting around in search of someone foolhardy enough to publish the strangely heterogeneous book that I was then working on. I do not remember how it came about, but I was introduced to Helen Tartar, who convinced me to throw in my lot with the somewhat fledgling series that Werner Hamacher and David E. Wellberry had launched with her at Stanford University Press. So it was that my title (Prosthesis), the artefact of an Antipodean interloper, came to be happily sandwiched in the Meridian Series between Maurice Blanchot, The Work of Fire (copiously cited in Chapter 4 of this book), and Jacques Derrida, On the Name (an author, if not a book, whose inspiration accounts for much of what I have written here). Ten years later I would be fortunate enough to publish a second title that Helen accepted for the same series, but by then she had moved on to her position at Fordham. Out of fidelity to her confidence in my work, I always wanted to submit a manuscript to Fordham, but although my name appeared on the cover of more than one translated work, I was not able to offer her a volume before her untimely death. This book represents, therefore, a meager attempt to repay the immense debt that I owe to Helen Tartar, and to her memory.
Helen Tartar’s legacy at Fordham has been ably continued by Tom Lay. My book owes much to his unshakable support, as well as the assistance of his editorial team, including especially my copyeditor, Gregory McNamee; and to the strong endorsements given by two external reviewers. For all that support I am very grateful.
The work that has culminated in this book began in the context of the Derrida Seminars Translation Project summer workshops over a four-year period from 2010 to 2013. I remain most grateful to my fellow team members—Geoffrey Bennington, Pascale-Anne Brault, Peggy Kamuf, Michael Naas, and Elizabeth Rottenberg; as well Ellen Burt, Katie Chenoweth, and Kir Kuiken; and the students who participated during those years—for their attentive and provocative comments in response to presentations I gave during those workshops.
Subsequently, Killing Times took shape via a series of invited lectures, keynote addresses and conference papers, and the feedback to which those papers gave rise, in a variety of venues. That included lectures at the following institutions: Brown University, University of Sussex, Texas A&M University, University of Auckland, and Rice University; and conferences at De Paul University, the University of California, Irvine, Brown University, the University at Albany-SUNY, the University of California, Santa Barbara, Harvard University, Indiana University, and the University of California, Riverside. For all of those invitations I sincerely thank, beside those already mentioned, Nicole Anderson, Kevin McLaughlin, Nicholas Royle, Adam Rosenthal, Laurence Simmons, Cary Wolfe, Amanda Anderson, Elisabeth Weber, Hall Bjørnstad, Sherryl Vint, and Peter Boxall. Other conference papers were delivered at Derrida Today, Fordham University, at the Society for Science, Literature and the Arts, Houston, and at the 20th/21st Century French and Francophone Studies Conference, Bloomington.
I have profited greatly from discussions formal and informal among a circle of friends and a valued intellectual community that includes Sharon Cameron, Ross Posnock, Timothy Bewes, Obrad Savić, Elissa Marder and Vesna Kuiken, and particularly my dear friend and Brown colleague Thangam Ravindranathan.
Mrdjan Bajić’s rich visual imagination and acute political and historical intelligence has made him one of the most important artists currently working in the countries of the former Yugoslavia. His generous offer of a piece of his work to grace the cover of Killing Times is a gesture that I will never forget. I record here my heartfelt thanks.
Earlier versions of certain chapters in this book were published as follows: “Machinery of Death or Machinic Life,” Derrida Today 7, no. 1 (2014); “Drone Penalty,” Copyright © Board of Regents, University of Wisconsin System, first published in SubStance 43, no. 2 (2014): 174–92. Reprinted with permission by Johns Hopkins University Press; and “The Time of the (Trap) Door,” Belgrade Journal of Media and Communications 4, no. 8 (2015). I am grateful to those journals for permission to reuse that material here.
As always, during the preparation of this volume and beyond, the time of my mortal life will have been immeasurably enhanced by the unfailing presence, love, and support of Branka and Emma.