Writing and Difference

Derrida, Jacques

ISBN 10: 0226143287 / ISBN 13: 9780226143286

Published by University of Chicago Press, 1978

About this Item

University of Chicago Press: 1978. Octavo. Hardcover with a dust jacket. First printing. Some discoloration to the very slightly bowed boards. Previous owner's bookplate and signature to the first free end paper. A few pages within the text block have been dog-eared. Pages 85 to 100 have some underlining, and there is marginalia on page 292. Unclipped jacket is a little rubbed and edge worn. Book is good, jacket is very good.

Seller Inventory # 004954

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Writing and Difference
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication Date: 1978
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0226143287
• ISBN 13: 9780226143286
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Printing: 1st Printing
• Condition: Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good

About this title

Synopsis

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 thoughtâ 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 LĂvi-Strauss have served as introductions to Derrida's notions of writing and diffĂrenceâ the untranslatable formulation of a nonmetaphysical "concept" that does not exclude writingâ 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,â 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 thinkersâ challenging because Derrida questions thought as we know it.

About the Author

Jacques Derrida is a professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris and the author of numerous books. Among them, Of Spirit, The Truth in Painting, The Post Card, and Writing and Difference are publsihed by the University of Chicago Press.

Alan Bass received his Ph. D. from the John Hopkins University and then went on to psychoanalytic training in New York City, where he is now a practicing analyst. He has published and lectured on both deconstruction and psychoanalytic theory and practice. He is the translator of The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, Positions, and Margins of Philosophy.