Writing and Difference (Routledge Classics)

Derrida, Jacques

ISBN 10: 0415039797 / ISBN 13: 9780415039796

Published by Routledge, London, 1995

About this Item

fourth printing, paperback, 342 pages, a small amount of PENCIL notes and underlining otherwise fine. We are a real bookshop with real books situated in and shipping from the United Kingdom. Shelf 314.

Seller Inventory # 134032

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Writing and Difference (Routledge Classics)
• Publisher: Routledge, London
• Publication Date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0415039797
• ISBN 13: 9780415039796
• Binding: Soft cover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Printing: 4th Printing
• Condition: Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: No Jacket
• Seller catalogs:
  • Science/Technology/Medicine

About this title

Synopsis

The essays collected here provide English-speaking readers with a lucid and accessible introduction to the world of France's leading contemporary philosopher. A classic student textbook.

From the Inside Flap

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 thought—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 Lévi-Strauss have served as introductions to Derrida's notions of writing anddifférence—the untranslatable formulation of a nonmetaphysical "concept" that does not exclude writing—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,—new ways based on the most complete and rigorous understanding of the old ways. Scholars and students from all disciplines will findWriting and Difference an excellent introduction to perhaps the most challenging of contemporary French thinkers—challenging because Derrida questions thought as we know it.