First published in French as Donner la mort, The Gift of Death is one of Derrida’s most influential late works.

Taking Søren Kierkegaard’s reading of Abraham and Isaac as a starting point, Derrida examines responsibility, secrecy, sacrifice, and ethical decision-making—asking what it means to be answerable to one other while remaining unjustifiable to all others.

The companion text, Literature in Secret, extends these questions into literary space, exploring authorship, anonymity, and the ethical stakes of writing itself. Together, the two essays form a dense but central statement of Derrida’s thinking on ethics, faith, and the limits of public accountability.

Second edition paperback, translated by David Wills.