Who Was Jacques Derrida?: An Intellectual Biography

Notes

Introduction

1. The writings of Stanley Cavell are an essential guide to skepticism
   in this sense: see, in particular,The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism,
   Morality, and Tragedy(New York: Oxford University Press, 1979 ). Cavell dis-
   cusses Derrida in his Philosophical Passages(Philosophical).


2. On this point, see Stanley Rosen,Hermeneutics as Politics(New
   Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003 ). As Rosen states regarding the Phae-
   drus(and in objection to Derrida’s reading of it), “There is no other ‘relation
   with oneself ’ but the mythical” ( 85 ).


3. See Koethe,Poetry, 48 – 49.


4. Among the studies of deconstruction that I have found useful, in
   addition to those cited later in the main text, are Jonathan Culler,On De-
   construction(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982 ); John Ellis,Against
   Deconstruction(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989 ); Michael
   Fischer,Stanley Cavell and Literary Skepticism(Chicago: University of Chi-
   cago Press, 1989 ); Eugene Goodheart,The Reign of Ideology(New York: Co-
   lumbia University Press, 1997 ); Barbara Johnson,The Critical Difference
   (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981 ); Christopher Norris,Der-
   rida(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988 ); and Raymond Tallis,
   Not Saussure, 2 nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1995 ). Also significant is the
   study by Michèle Lamont, “How to Become a Dominant French Philoso-
   pher: The Case of Jacques Derrida,”American Journal of Sociology 93 : 3 (Nov.
   1987 ): 584 – 622. More generally, several works on recent criticism have been