Product Description

"One of the major works in the development of contemporary criticism and philosophy." -- J. Hillis Miller, Yale University

Jacques Derrida's revolutionary theories about deconstruction, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and structuralism, first voiced in the 1960s, forever changed the face of European and American criticism. The ideas in De la grammatologie sparked lively debates in intellectual circles that included students of literature, philosophy, and the humanities, inspiring these students to ask questions of their disciplines that had previously been considered improper. Thirty years later, the immense influence of Derrida's work is still igniting controversy, thanks in part to Gayatri Spivak's translation, which captures the richness and complexity of the original. This corrected edition adds a new index of the critics and philosophers cited in the text and makes one of contemporary criticism's most indispensable works even more accessible and usable.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #54445 in Books
• Published on: 1998-01-08
• Original language: French
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 456 pages

Review

"The translation is a noble job, and we should be grateful to have this distinguished book in our hands... [Spivak's] situating of Derrida among his precursors -- Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, Husserl -- and contemporaries -- Lacan, Foucault, and the elusive animal known as structuralism -- is very lucid and extremely useful." -- Michael Wood, New York Review of Books

"The tool-kit for anyone who wants to empty the 'presence' out of any text he has taken a dislike to. A handy arsenal of deconstructive tools are to be found in its pages, and the technique, once learnt, is as simple, and as destructive, as leaving a bomb in a brown paper bag outside (or inside) a pub." -- Roger Poole, Notes and Queries

"There is cause for rejoicing in the translation of De la grammatologie... Just as Derrida discloses in Rousseau a writer who distrusts writing and longs for the proximity of the self to its voice, so Spivak approaches Derrida through the structure of his diction; no ideas but in the words themselves." -- Denis Donoghue, New Republic

"Reading Derrida was the shock of a decentering, the critical shift into a world of the interminable movement of difference, the crisis of any closure. Of Grammatology was and remains the most tightly worked... and exemplary... demonstration of the science of this shift and crisis." -- Canto

About the Author

Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) taught at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University.

Customer Reviews

Heidegger goes pop
Words and things. Easy. Now read this. The words we use have a history. And Derrida uses this historicity to subvert the traditional primacy of speech("metaphysics of presence") over commentary by showing that words are more slippery than we suppose. Derrida forensically reads a text to show that language is the pre-condition of thought and not a vehicle for pre-formed ideas.

For those baffled by the ambiguities in the seemingly simple argument of Rousseau's Le Contrat Social, Derrida demonstrates how Rousseau's text eludes his authorship and becames an exemplar of differance - the endlessly promised, but always already mediated and deferred, articulation of word and thing.

Derrida's Marxism - his emphasis upon the materiality of the signifier vis-a-vis the signified- has been only recently acknowledged by the author ( "Spectors of Marx") yet the underlying political sub-text of this book is Liberalism and tolerance: let the reader bring his own ideolect to the text.

This book is as fresh and vibrant as a manifesto: if the 30's had Language, Truth and Logic then Derrida doesn't as much sit on Ayer's shoulders as show that the head on it was taking a rest.

difficult but satisfying (use a beginners guide if possible)
OK, its heavy reading- but boy is it rewarding. For me, Derrida's deconstruction of Saussure, Levis-Strauss, and Rousseau leaves us with an uncanny realisation of the unsuitability of language for philosophy. For me the basic idea was that philosophy like Saussure's conception of identity through difference, relies upon binary opposition favouring a positive pole over a negative one- for Derrida a metaphysical precept emanating from Logocentrism (the idea that speach is an origin and writing a mere supplement).

Saussure's linguistic project of identity through difference which so influenced the French social sciences seems failed as Derrida delights us with moments of Saussurean binary opposition caving in itself through . At times I felt presented with almost Godellean moments. How Derrida does it, I do not know- I have tried myself to conflate 'opposites' the way he does without much success.

Be warned that this is heavy going and in my opinion requires (at least)a rudimentary prior knowledge of various thinkers (Heidegger, Freud, Nietzche, Saussure [and the Post-/Structuralist projects generally- especially Lacan and Levi-Strauss]). What helped me through this book was the 'Routledge Critical Thinkers: Jacques Derrida' by Nicholas Royle (London:2003)and the illustrated Introducing Derrida by Jeff Collins and Bill Mayblin (Icon Books, 2000). Referring to the excellent Spivak 'introduction' as a safety-net may also be of some help. Good Luck! (you'll need it).

Ironically, reading this was a religious experience for me.
Derrida has that notorious ability to mirror his subject matter in his writing style (style vs content is just another false dichotomy after all), and this technique is exemplified in Of Grammatology. Its structure is a denial of meaning existing outside of the play of the constant chain of signification: as he rolls his paint brush over the same spots again and again, a clearer, more coherent picture builds up, through letting the words roll around each other, play off of each other, interact with their history through perhaps the most deft and intelligent use of quotations EVER, and through never resorting to the more analytic-philosophy-native desire to mercilessly define one's terms before employing them. This continues, until into the second half of the book you feel like you have had something of a wonderful, soul defining (though such a statement may imply logocentric spontaneity - oooh!) experience.

I would be betraying Derrida's ethic if I attempted to summarize the book's point in a brief comment. I wouldn't want to construct a 'Derridology' that claimed full, spontaneous self presence through its relationship with the logos and the transcendental signified. But I will say that this book extends very, VERY far beyond what it's advertised intention is: though he is analyzing the hierarchy of Speech>Writing, Derrida consistently, through word usage, implication, and quotation, connects the problems and complexities of this structure with other Western dichotomies, such as Soul>Body, Reason>Passion, West>East, and so on and so on, until, before you know it, he has criticized (and, more importantly, MADE FUN OF) the entire history of Greco-European thought.

This is a landmark work, and operates simultaneously in several dimensions of thought. For me, it challenged the idea of Origin, of Meaning with a capital M, of the chain of discourse ever having an absolute beginning (and hence a potential concrete end), and hence helped me to recast fundamental ideas about God, Language, the Soul, Time and Temporality, and the oh-so intimate relationships that moral values have with their shadowy counterparts. It may do something similar or very different for yourself.

This is an example of the sort of stuff that effects the way you perceive the universe. In a day to day way. I highly, highly recommend it.