Jaques Derrida: Writing and Difference

Running Head : Jacques

Jacques Derrida : Writing and Difference

p Jacques Derrida : Writing and Difference

Introduction

Derrida is a contemporary French philosopher , and he is the `founder and head ' of school of deconstruction . Derrida can safely be called the leading philosopher in France today , and together with Jacques Lacan and Michael Foucault , the most important intellectual presence ' according to Geoffrey Hartman , Karl Young Professor of English and Comparative Literature , Yale University . Writing and Difference was first published in 1967 , and it contains collection of essays written by this author from

1959 to 1966 . This book has molded the contemporary French thought and hailed as the landmark as for the issues it deals with Deconstructionism is the strategy of analysis , most importantly applied to literature , philosophy and linguistics . The book was translated in English and published in USA in the year 1970

Sections of the book and what they contain

This is no ordinary writing . The common man would not be able to grasp the import of the contents of this book . Even for the intellectuals , it is a tough reading exercise . The first half of the book contains the famed essay on Descartes and Foucault . It focuses on the development of Derrida 's method of deconstruction . Derrida carefully elucidates the traditional nature of some nontraditional currents of modern thought The second half contains Derrida 's intelligent analysis showing how and why metaphysical thinking must exclude writing from its conception of language . These essays are on Artaud , Freud ,Hegel , Bataille and Leve-Straus - sort of Derrida 's rejoinder to their arguments . This is the untranslatable formulation of a metaphysical `concept ' which does not exclude writing

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

His new ways of thinking , reading and writing are based on the understanding of the old ways , in their pure and unadulterated form . The chapter-wise contents of the book are

1 . Force and Signification , 2 . Cogito and the History of Madness , 3 Edmond Jabis and the Question of the Book ,4 . Violence and Metaphysics An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas , 5 "Genesis and Structure and Phenomenology , 6 . La parole souffly , 7 . Freud and the Scene of Writing , 8 . The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation ,9 From Restricted to General Economy : A Hegelianism without Reserve 10 Structure , Sign , and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences , and 11 . Ellipsis

Jacques Derrida was born to Sephardic Jewish parents in Algeria in 1930 He did military service in France . He began his studies in philosophy at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris in 1952 . Derrida attended Harvard on scholarship in 1956-57

What the author...