Author: Jacques Derrida
Translator(s): Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Publisher: Motilal Banarsidass
Year: 2002
Language: English
Pages: 354
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8120811879
Description
Influential enough to have affected the entire French critical scene, Jacques Derrida has been hailed as the most important philosopher in France today. His ideas of reading and writing, his notion of de-construction, his reinterpretations of phenomenology, of psychoanalysis, and of structuralism have profoundly influenced the vanguard of European and American criticism and have occasioned lively controversy.
Without a knowledge of Of Grammatology the American scholar has a simply inaccurate view of the French critical advance-guard, Spivak writes. For in the final analysis, Derrida, even as he questions the notion of correction, corrects the common assumption of the two mutually opposed French critical tendencies-phenomenology and structuralism. He argues that both spring from the view of time fostered by the necessarily unscientific metaphysics of presence.
This role of exposing the common assumption shared by combatants in a controversy raises Derrida's importance above merely the French scene. Derrida finds his place in the most clear-sighted European intellectual a tradition of the critique in the Kantian sense. As his work progresses, Derrida elaborates the risk that even his own work would be questioned by the most radical elements of his thought.
REVIEW
Gayatri Spivak’s authoritative translation of Jacques Derrida’s De la Grammatologie is an event of great importance for humanistic studies in the English reading world. One of the major works in the development of contemporary criticism and philosophy is available at last in English.
-J Hillis Miller, Yale University
GAYATRI CHAKRAVORTY SPIVAK is professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Texas at Austin.
Contents
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE
PREFACE
PART I -WRITING BEFORE THE LETTER
EXERGUE
The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing
Linguistics and Grammatology
Of Grammatology as a Positive Science
PART II-NATURE, CULTURE, WRITING
Introduction to the Age of Rousseau
The Violence of the Letter-From Levi Strauss to Rousseau
That Dangerous Supplement
Genesis and Structure of the Essays on the Origin of Languages
From / Of the Supplement to the Source-The Theory of Writing
NOTES