Of Grammatology
Language: English
Pages: 560
ISBN: 1421419955
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Jacques Derrida’s revolutionary approach to phenomenology, psychoanalysis, structuralism, linguistics, and indeed the entire European tradition of philosophy―called deconstruction―changed the face of criticism. It provoked a questioning of philosophy, literature, and the human sciences that these disciplines would have previously considered improper. Forty years after Of Grammatology first appeared in English, Derrida still ignites controversy, thanks in part to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s careful translation, which attempted to capture the richness and complexity of the original. This fortieth anniversary edition, where a mature Spivak retranslates with greater awareness of Derrida’s legacy, also includes a new afterword by her which supplements her influential original preface. Judith Butler has added an introduction. All references in the work have been updated. One of contemporary criticism’s most indispensable works, Of Grammatology is made even more accessible and usable by this new release.
Philosophy Today, Volume 54, Number 3 (Fall 2010)
Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book
This is Not Sufficient: An Essay on Animality and Human Nature in Derrida
What is this thing called Knowledge?
view of a philosophical demonstration of the relationships between nature and society, ideal society and real society, that is to say most often between the other society and our society. What is the first pointer? The battle of proper names follows the arrival of the foreigner and one will not be surprised by it. It is born in the presence and even from the presence of the anthropologist who comes to disturb order and natural peace, the complicity which peacefully binds the good society to
beyond our power of satisfaction, the origin of that surplus and of that difference is named imagination. This permits us to determine a function of the concept of nature or of primitivity: it is the equilibrium between reserve and desire. Impossible equilibrium, for desire cannot awaken and move out of its reserve except by the imagination, which also breaks the equilibrium. This impossible thing—another name for nature—therefore remains a limit. Ethics according to Rousseau, “human wisdom,”
not sustained war. Derrida suggests that pity is there in animals as well. The extent of Derrida’s engagement with the animal that we are/follow is in this sentence in Of Grammatology: “The imagination inscribes the animal in human society” (203), where most would go the other way.20 And when he comes to method in part II, embracing Rousseau, his prescription is “empiricism” without anchor. Seems to fit the popular denunciation of “deconstruction,” an otherwise supportive colleague’s published
the sound itself was at all different from the air, shaken by these vibrations” [pp. 343–44]. 37. Cf., for example, The Confessions, p. 334 [pp. 343–44]. 38. “When we reflect, that of all the people of the earth, who all have a music and an air, the Europeans are the only ones who have a harmony and concords, and who find this mixture agreeable; when we reflect, that the world has continued so many centuries, without, amongst the cultivation of the beaux arts throughout mankind in general, any
the propositions risked in Part I. They demand that reading should escape, at least in its axis, from the classical categories of history: of the history of ideas, to be sure, and the history of literature but, perhaps above all, of the history of philosophy. Around that axis, as it goes without saying, we have had to respect classical norms, or at least attempted to do so. Although the word “age” or “epoch” is not fully covered by these determinations, we have dealt with a structural figure as
