Product Description

In the 1960s a radical concept emerged from the great French thinker Jacques Derrida. Read the book that changed the way we think; read Writing and Difference, the classic introduction.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #20006 in Books
• Published on: 2001-05-18
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 480 pages

Review
'Perhaps the world's most famous philosopher.' - New York Times

From the Back Cover

‘Perhaps the world’s most famous philosopher’ – The New York Times

In the 1960s a radical concept emerged from the great French thinker Jacques Derrida. He called the new process ‘deconstruction’. Rewriting the ways in which we use language and literature, deconstruction affected every form of intellectual thought, from literary criticism to popular culture. It also criticized the entire tradition of Western philosophy, from Plato to Bataille. The academic community was rocked on a scale hitherto unknown, with Writing and Difference attracting both accolades and derision. Whatever the response, deconstruction is here to stay. First published in English: 1978.

Customer Reviews

Dense, difficult, and fantastically rewarding
Do not approach this book as you would, say, a reader or an anthology of Derrida's work. This is a dense collection of essays, and at a glance you are liable to be overwhelmed, as I was, by his references, his language and his style. Alan Bass has done a tremendous job of translating Derrida's notoriously playful text, rendering it as clear as possible without undermining the complexity and intertextuality that is so necessary to its flow. This does not mean, however, that it is by any means easy to read. Be prepared to grapple with it and to be frustrated, to re-read a paragraph or sentence several times and still be confused. This is deliberate, although Derrida is not as sadistically obtuse as many critics have damned him as being. Instead, this difficult prose style is intended to make the reader examine the interplay between himself and what he reads, to question the authority of the text, to realise how much we take for granted when we engage in the act of reading.
If you have already come across Derrida's essay 'Structure, Sign and Play' and are intrigued, then this book offers the next logical step, but be prepared. Unless you are superhumanly familiar with the works of Husserl, Edmond Jabes and Foucault, then many of the references here will leave you running to catch up. Get past this, however, and you will find your conceptions about the world challenged in a way that they never have before.

Take it or leave it
Reviewing Derrida is trying to put value on something that goes beyond the categories of "like" or dislike". Derrida is as opaque, cryptic, oblique and impossible to follow as you can imagine, but if one has the courage and pertinacity to follow through (as much as it can be followed), it discovers a spirit of extraordinary brilliance and originality. In any case, Derrida is already part of 20th century history, so no educated Westerner can afford to overlook him. As for the book itself ( I guess that is the point of this review), it comes in a cheap package, so I presume it targets a wide readership. If this is so, one could use a minimal commentary or an introduction, and, definitely, a concise glossary.

Don't be fooled
Derrida was a master of bulls**t who piled empty verbiage onto a few scrawny ideas. I recommend Ellis's "Against Deconstruction" as a damning critique of Derrida's central "philosophical" legacy. Reviewers always say that you have to fight through a lot of opacity to get to the good stuff, but whenever this is said (Heidegger...Sartre...Lacan) one ought to be wary. Is it not natural that if a thinker had some really brilliant, earth-shattering ideas, he'd want to explain them as clearly as he possibly could to a waiting world? I think that when a reviewer says that a writer like Derrida is "worth the struggle", they are really loath to admit to themselves that they have put in all that work for nothing. Save yourself the bother.