System and Writing in the Philosophy of Jacques Derrida

System and Writing in the Philosophy of Jacques Derrida PDF

Author: Christopher Johnson

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1993-04-15

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 9780521448529

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This is an important new critical analysis of Derrida's theory of writing, based on close readings of key texts. It reveals a dimension of Derrida's thinking that has been neglected in favor of those "deconstructionist" cliches favored by much recent literary criticism. Christopher Johnson highlights the special character of Derrida's philosophy that comes from his contact with contemporary natural science and with systems theory. This study casts new light on an exacting set of intellectual issues facing philosophy and critical theory today.

Writing and Difference

Writing and Difference PDF

Author: Jacques Derrida

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2021-01-27

Total Pages: 363

ISBN-13: 0226816079

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First published in 1967, Writing and Difference, a collection of Jacques Derrida's essays written between 1959 and 1966, has become a landmark of contemporary French thought. In it we find Derrida at work on his systematic deconstruction of Western metaphysics. The book's first half, which includes the celebrated essay on Descartes and Foucault, shows the development of Derrida's method of deconstruction. In these essays, Derrida demonstrates the traditional nature of some purportedly nontraditional currents of modern thought—one of his main targets being the way in which "structuralism" unwittingly repeats metaphysical concepts in its use of linguistic models. The second half of the book contains some of Derrida's most compelling analyses of why and how metaphysical thinking must exclude writing from its conception of language, finally showing metaphysics to be constituted by this exclusion. These essays on Artaud, Freud, Bataille, Hegel, and Lévi-Strauss have served as introductions to Derrida's notions of writing and différence—the untranslatable formulation of a nonmetaphysical "concept" that does not exclude writing—for almost a generation of students of literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. Writing and Difference reveals the unacknowledged program that makes thought itself possible. In analyzing the contradictions inherent in this program, Derrida foes on to develop new ways of thinking, reading, and writing,—new ways based on the most complete and rigorous understanding of the old ways. Scholars and students from all disciplines will find Writing and Difference an excellent introduction to perhaps the most challenging of contemporary French thinkers—challenging because Derrida questions thought as we know it.

Of Grammatology

Of Grammatology PDF

Author: Jacques Derrida

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2013-10-17

Total Pages: 451

ISBN-13: 1421414724

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Jacques Derrida's revolutionary theories about deconstruction, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and structuralism, first voiced in the 1960s, forever changed the face of European and American criticism. The ideas in De la grammatologie sparked lively debates in intellectual circles that included students of literature, philosophy, and the humanities, inspiring these students to ask questions of their disciplines that had previously been considered improper. Thirty years later, the immense influence of Derrida's work is still igniting controversy, thanks in part to Gayatri Spivak's translation, which captures the richness and complexity of the original. This corrected edition adds a new index of the critics and philosophers cited in the text and makes one of contemporary criticism's most indispensable works even more accessible and usable.

The Derrida Reader

The Derrida Reader PDF

Author: Jacques Derrida

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 1998-01-01

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 9780803298071

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In the English-speaking world, Jacques Derrida’s writings have most influenced the discipline of literary studies. Yet what has emerged since the initial phase of Derrida’s influence on the study of English literature, classed under the rubric of deconstruction, has often been disowned by Derrida. What, then, can Derrida teach us about literary language, about the rhetoric of literature, and about questions concerning style, form, and structure? The Derrida Reader draws together a number of Derrida’s most interesting and idiosyncratic essays that treat literary language, the idea of the literary, and questions of poetics and poetry. The essays discuss single tropes or concepts, a figure such as metaphor, the ideas of titles and signatures, proper names, and Derrida’s thinking on such subjects as undecidability or aporia. The editor’s introduction is a demonstration in practice of how Derrida reads and how he adapts the act of reading to the text or figure in question. The introduction also outlines each essay’s main points, its usefulness for reading literary texts, and its particular area of interest. The Derrida Reader thus provides students of literature with a focused, contextualized, and readily understandable volume.

Dissemination

Dissemination PDF

Author: Jacques Derrida

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2021-01-28

Total Pages: 401

ISBN-13: 0226816346

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Interpretations of Plato, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Philippe Sollers’ writings in three essays: “Plato’s Pharmacy,” “The Double Session,” and “Dissemination.” “The English version of Dissemination [is] an able translation by Barbara Johnson . . . Derrida’s central contention is that language is haunted by dispersal, absence, loss, the risk of unmeaning, a risk which is starkly embodied in all writing. The distinction between philosophy and literature therefore becomes of secondary importance. Philosophy vainly attempts to control the irrecoverable dissemination of its own meaning, it strives—against the grain of language—to offer a sober revelation of truth. Literature—on the other hand—flaunts its own meretriciousness, abandons itself to the Dionysiac play of language. In Dissemination—more than any previous work—Derrida joins in the revelry, weaving a complex pattern of puns, verbal echoes and allusions, intended to ‘deconstruct’ both the pretension of criticism to tell the truth about literature, and the pretension of philosophy to the literature of truth.” —Peter Dews, The New Statesman

Acts of Literature

Acts of Literature PDF

Author: Jacques Derrida

Publisher: Psychology Press

Published: 1992

Total Pages: 476

ISBN-13: 9780415900577

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First Published in 1992. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Jacques Derrida and the Institution of French Philosophy

Jacques Derrida and the Institution of French Philosophy PDF

Author: Vivienne Orchard

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-12-02

Total Pages: 400

ISBN-13: 1351194895

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"Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) was unquestionably one of the most celebrated and reviled French thinkers of the last thirty years. Outside France his influence in comparative literature circles, through deconstruction and other ideas, has been so profound that his personal role as a leader of contemporary French philosophy has been almost overlooked. Perhaps because there is no equivalent in English-speaking countries to the timetabling of philosophy in the French education system, writers on Derrida outside France have not fully appreciated the importance of this political and cultural struggle. In this ground-breaking book, Orchard examines a hard-fought debate of great importance not only to Derrida himself, but also to France's idea of what studying 'philosophy' might mean after the student uprisings of 1968."

Signature Derrida

Signature Derrida PDF

Author: Jacques Derrida

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2013-04-11

Total Pages: 468

ISBN-13: 0226924556

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Throughout his long career, Jacques Derrida had a close, collaborative relationship with Critical Inquiry and its editors. He saved some of his most important essays for the journal, and he relished the ensuing arguments and polemics that stemmed from the responses to his writing that Critical Inquiry encouraged. Collecting the best of Derrida’s work that was published in the journal between 1980 and 2002, Signature Derrida provides a remarkable introduction to the philosopher and the evolution of his thought. These essays define three significant “periods” in Derrida’s writing: his early, seemingly revolutionary phase; a middle stage, often autobiographical, that included spirited defense of his work; and his late period, when his persona as a public intellectual was prominent, and he wrote on topics such as animals and religion. The first period is represented by essays like “The Law of Genre,” in which Derrida produces a kind of phenomenological narratology. Another essay, “The Linguistic Circle of Geneva,” embodies the second, presenting deconstructionism at its best: Derrida shows that what was imagined to be an epistemological break in the study of linguistics was actually a repetition of earlier concepts. The final period of Derrida’s writing includes the essays “Of Spirit” and “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow),” and three eulogies to the intellectual legacies of Michel Foucault, Louis Marin, and Emmanuel Lévinas, in which Derrida uses the ideas of each thinker to push forward the implications of their theories. With an introduction by Francoise Meltzer that provides an overview of the oeuvre of this singular philosopher, Signature Derrida is the most wide-ranging, and thus most representative, anthology of Derrida’s work to date.

Derrida

Derrida PDF

Author: Geoffrey Bennington

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 1993-05

Total Pages: 444

ISBN-13: 9780226042619

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Geoffrey Bennington sets out here to write a systematic account of the thought of Jacques Derrida. Responding to Bennington's text at every turn is Derrida's own excerpts from his life and thought that, appearing at the bottom of each page, resist circumscription. Together these texts, as a dialogue and a contest, constitute a remarkably in-depth, critical introduction to one of the leading philosophers of the twentieth century and, at the same time, demonstrate the illusions inherent in such a project. Bennington's account of Derrida, broader in scope than any previously done, leads the reader through the philosopher's familiar yet still widely misunderstood work on language and writing to the less familiar and altogether more mysterious themes of signature, sexual difference, law, and affirmation. Seeking to escape this systematic rendering - in fact, to prove it impossible - Derrida interweaves Bennington's text with surprising and disruptive "periphrases": reflections on his mother's death agony, commentaries on St. Augustine's Confessions, memories of childhood, remarks on Judaism, and references to his collaborator's efforts. This extraordinary book offers, on the one hand, a clear and compelling account of one of the most difficult and important contemporary thinkers and, on the other, one of that thinker's strangest and most unexpected texts. Far from putting an end to the need to discuss Derrida, Bennington's text might have originally intended or pretended, this dual text opens new dimensions in the philosopher's thought and work and extends its challenge.

Glas

Glas PDF

Author: Jacques Derrida

Publisher: Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press

Published: 1986

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13:

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Glas (also translated as Clang) is a 1974 book by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. It combines a reading of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's philosophical works and of Jean Genet's autobiographical writing. "One of Derrida's more inscrutable books," its form and content invite a reflection on the nature of literary genre and of writing.