Who Was Jacques Derrida?: An Intellectual Biography

II Writing and Differenceand Of Grammatology n this chapter I devote extensive attention to two books that Derrida published in ...

is that he recognizes the shortcomings of a merely negative, demystifying skepticism. Derrida needs an outside of philosophy, a ...

theoretical journals Tel QuelandCritiquebetween 1963 and 1966. The commitment of Emmanuel Lévinas to the face-to- face encounter ...

Derrida’s most significant encounters in the sixties, then, are with Freud, Nietzsche, and Lévinas. With all three figures, Derr ...

term in the sixties, since it implies the psychological element that he tries to exile from philosophy. Instead, he chooses writ ...

describes himself as a disciple with an “unhappy conscious- ness.” When he starts to write against his “master” Foucault, he not ...

is the age-old underside to reason: an antagonistic aspect that reason relies on to define itself, but that also challenges rea- ...

But Derrida’s most telling choice in the sixties is his approval of an empiricism of a different kind, which he endorses in prop ...

ally read very little of Marx’s work. Already in the sixties Althusser was suffering from severe manic depression, and he often ...

of his best-known work,Of Grammatology.He later recalled his visit to Venice that summer with his wife, Marguerite. Der- rida re ...

In his GrammatologyDerrida forecasts “the death of the civilization of the book.” This impending demise “mani- fests itself part ...

being, of voice and the meaning of being, of voice and the ide- ality of meaning” ( 12 ). All the philosophers agree, Derrida as ...

tense way possible. This dream of an instant, direct line from thinking to immediate expression is, for the deconstructionist, m ...

objections by redefining the word writingto include speaking as well. He suggests that speech is a kind of writing. “Language is ...

voice that hears itself speak may be the wished-for model, but in fact our talk is full of mistakes, wrong directions, and half- ...

demic cadence, that tends to put offthe mandarins. In this de- bate, Derrida is on the side of the mandarins, intent on prov- in ...

coming of being”? If Derrida were right about this, one would expect generations of thinkers following Socrates, adhering to con ...

that the sound “cat” is different from “cot” or “cut” and must be audibly distinct from both in order to mean what it does. More ...

In the nineteenth century, philologists built fortresses of dusty, antique books, immuring themselves in the library. Saussure p ...

other. Derrida approves, and in fact regards as crucial, Saus- sure’s emphasis on the differential character of the signifier. B ...