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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 L#65533;vi-Strauss have served as introductions to Derrida's notions of writing and diff#65533;rence--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.… (more)
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Because there's truth to a lot of the criticism--of course he's using the tools of the old thinking to attack it, no matter how cute he tried to be about it, and no matter how ridiculous and dogmatic a "deconstruction as process or treatment" approach it opened up for certain of his acolytes. His approach is as binary as anything, and his pet binary is the opposition between "binary opposition" and opposition to binaries. And sure, there's atower-of-skulls quality to that,where we're looking for fecundity and laterality. The great problem is that he's trying to attack the thinking of the past with the tools of the future, which don't exist yet, and certainly didn't in his time, and as such is seeing through the proverbial glass darkly.
But what makes this moral philosophy is that he doesn't let that dissuade him from making his critique. And if there's a fundamental structuralism in his poststructuralism, a lack-that-wrongfoots to his method, a lark's-tongues-in-aspic approximate or inappropriate quality to his chain of difference-deferral that makes you crave a fuller, less language-bound, warmer and opener and more interactive model with more positive and less negative potential: well, iconoclasts can't be expected to be visionaries.
Iconoclasts aren't visionaries. And they're not, need it be said, nihilistic in their assault on prevailing ways of meaning. Derrida, in fact, is radically optimistic. He's less shouting fire in a crowded theatre than setting fire to a fallow field, and the attention that draws is like the skeptical fascination of the early agricultural humans who have seen the great lushness that grow up after the forest fire but still can't conceive doing that violence to their carefully tended terraces and granges; it's like the consternation and loyalty engendered by crotchety old Socrates, unsettling the ancient pieties and clearing the way, clearing the way, clearing the way for radical Platonic creation of critical vocabulary. And in that regard, Derrida's real children are guys who have been conceived as parallel or even antagonistic to him, like Baudrillard with his hyperreal that is hypersignification but also a veil of unknowing, or, more than anyone, the Deleuze and Guattari of 1000 Plateaus, who take over Derrida's fallow field and fill it with rhizomatic verdure--his workmanlike theory with greenery covering all the hinges and cogs.