David Wills specializes in modernist literature as well as film theory and comparative literature.

His most recent book is a re-edition, in the University of Minnesota Press Posthumanities Series, of his 1995 work, Prosthesis, which became the first in a series of three books that examine the technology of the human: in Prosthesis, he traces the human attachment to external objects back to a necessity within the body itself; in Dorsality (Minnesota, 2008), he explores how technology is understood to function behind or before the human; in Inanimation (Minnesota, 2016), he proceeds by taking literally the idea of inorganic forms of life, and, starting from a seemingly naïve question about what it means to say that texts "live on," to propose a new theory of the inanimate, discovering life-forms in such disparate "places" as the act of thinking, the death drive, poetic blank space, recorded bird songs, the technology of warfare, and the heart stopped by love.

In 2019, he published Killing Times: the Temporal Technology of the Death Penalty (Fordham, 2019), which examined the complex ways in which capital punishment interrupts "mortal time" by assigning a moment of death: from the refinement of the instant in attempts to render the death penalty something other than "cruel and unusual," to assassination by drone, to the collapsing of crime and punishment in terrorist acts such as suicide bombing.

Wills's first work was in Surrealist poetry, and his subsequent research has maintained links with modernist literature while expanding into areas of literary theory and philosophy, as well as film theory and comparative literature. Other published work includes co-authored volumes on Thomas Pynchon (Writing Pynchon, with Alec McHoul, 1990), and on Derrida and film theory (Screen/Play, with Peter Brunette, 1989), a co-edited book entitled Deconstruction and the Visual Arts (with Peter Brunette, 1994), and an edited volume on Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le fou (2000). He has published some 80 book chapters and journal articles.

Wills is also known as a major translator and interpreter of the work of French philosopher Jacques Derrida. He has published a volume of essays on Derrida entitled Matchbook: Essays in Deconstruction (Stanford, 2005), and translated The Gift of Death, Right of Inspection, Counterpath, The Animal That Therefore I Am, and Theory and Practice. His new co-translation (with Geoffrey Bennington) of Clang (Glas), appeared with the University of Minnesota Press in 2020. His translation of the second volume of Derrida's 1997-99 seminars on Perjury and Pardon will appear with the University of Chicago Press in June 2023. Wills is a member of the Editorial Board of the Bibliothèque Derrida at Éditions du Seuil, and is a founding member of the Derrida Seminars Translation Project.

Current projects:

I have 2 current projects.

Saturated Slate is a reflection on the "experience" of the Rothko Chapel in Houston: how a type of quiet and emptiness functions in conjunction with the visual force of Rothko’s canvasses. I interpret the experience as “reading” the space in a way that is inseparable from “writing” it. The Chapel offers a neutral, sensorily muted atmosphere, one that will favor silent meditation. But whether one closes one’s eyes, or stares at the dark hues of the canvases, one will always be “reading” the space, for as words disappear in favor of images, and as the images themselves reduce toward monochromatic murals, one is increasingly called upon to write what one reads: reading at that minimal level emerges as a proto-writing.

I am also researching toward a book on the "Ecology of the Technical Object." Working from the writings of Gilbert Simondon, it will address the priority given to nature in writing on ecology. Although the forces of the natural world must obviously be the focus of any response to climate change, the "environment" of the human (and the animal) also concerns, in very immediate ways, our interactions with so-called inanimate objects, from what constitutes our home or oikos, to what we do with our trash.

BOOKS

1. Single Authored

• Prosthesis (25th anniversary edition, with a new preface). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021, 350 + xvii pp.
• Killing Times: The Temporal Technology of the Death Penalty. New York: Fordham University Press, 2019, 251pp.
• Inanimation: Theories of Inorganic Life. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016, 318pp.
• Dorsality: Thinking Back through Technology and Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008, 270pp.
• Matchbook: Essays in Deconstruction. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005, 221pp.
• Prothèse (translated by the author with the collaboration of Catherine Malabou).  Vol.1.  Éditions Galilée, 1997, 199pp.; Vol.2, 1998, 261pp.
• Prosthesis. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995, 350pp. (Serbo-Croatian translation: Proteza [trans. Vesna Bogojević et al.] Belgrade Circle, Belgrade 2001, 527 pp.)
• Self De(con)struct: Writing and the Surrealist Text. Townsville: James Cook University Press, 1985, 183pp.

2. Co-authored

• Writing Pynchon: Strategies in Fictional Analysis (co-author Alec McHoul).  London: Macmillan Press / Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990, 239pp.
• Screen Play: Derrida and Film Theory (co-author Peter Brunette).  Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989, 210pp.

3.  Edited/co-edited

• Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot le fou.  New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000, 191pp.
• Deconstruction and the Visual Arts: Art, Media, Architecture (co-editor Peter Brunette).  New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994, 314pp.

4. Translated

• Jacques Derrida, Perjury and Pardon (Le parjure et le pardon), Vols. I & II (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022, 2023).
• Jacques Derrida, Clang (Glas), co-translator Geoffrey Bennington. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021, 291 pp.
• Jacques Derrida, Theory and Practice (Théorie et pratique). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019, 127pp.
• Jean-Luc Nancy, On the Commerce of Thinking: of Books and Bookstores (Sur le commerce des pensées). New York: Fordham University Press, 2009, 59pp.
• Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am (L’Animal que donc je suis). New York: Fordham University Press, 2008, 176pp.
• Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death (Second Edition) & Literature in Secret (Donner la mort). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008, 158pp.
• Catherine Malabou and Jacques Derrida, Counterpath (La Contre-allée).  Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004, 330pp.
• Jacques Derrida and Marie-Françoise Plissart, Right of Inspection (Droit de regards). New York: Monacelli Press, 1999.