Derrida's Voice and Phenomenon (Edinburgh Philosophical Guides) - Softcover

Cisney, Vernon W.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0748644202 ISBN 13: 9780748644209

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press, 2014

Synopsis

Published in 1967, Voice and Phenomenon marked a crucial turning point in Derrida's thinking: the culmination of a 15-year-long engagement with the phenomenological tradition. It also introduced the concepts and themes that would become deconstruction.

Voice and Phenomenon is a short book, but it can be an overwhelming text, particularly for inexperienced readers of Derrida's work. This is the first guide to clearly explain the structure of his argument, step by step.

About this title

About the Author:

Vernon W. Cisney is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Gettysburg College. He is the author of Biopower and Biopolitics: A Genealogical Landscape of the Present (SUNY, forthcoming). He is co-editor of Biopower: Foucault and Beyond (Northwestern University Press, forthcoming), The Way of Nature and the Way of Grace: Philosophical Footholds on the Way of Life (Northwestern University Press). He is co-translating Monnaie Vivante by Pierre Klossowski for Bloomsbury Academic.

Review:

"A masterful guide... Nothing about VP [Voice and Phenomenon] is 'easy' reading, but with Cisney's help it at least becomes manageable for the first-time reader... As a scholar in the field, I found the book helpful and at times even enlightening. But more importantly, while I can't say that my students found the book (or VP) easy, I can confidently say that, after reading Cisney, they understood the general argument of VP, something I do not think they would have been able to do without his guidance."--Neal De Roo, Dordt College, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

"Cisney responds well to the challenge of making a very difficult and controversial thinker accessible to beginners, and of offering them the means to follow Derrida's own advice to the neophyte to 'always, always "venture beyond the beginning"' (Derrida 2000, 108). Perhaps most importantly, by avoiding both the adulation and the scorn with which Derrida's thought has been received in the Anglo-American world, Cisney also opposes the caricature of deconstruction that both extremes seem to legitimate in treating it as a series of interpretive 'techniques' that are voluntarily applied ad hoc to written texts in order to make them mean anything whatsoever. By taking Derridean deconstruction seriously as a philosophical position, Cisney's commentary on Voice and Phenomenon presents a refreshing alternative to this image of Derrida's thought."

About this edition

• Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0748644202
• ISBN 13: 9780748644209
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 264