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Search - List of Books by Jacques Derrida
"I became the stage for the great argument between Nietzsche and Rousseau. I was the extra ready to take on all the roles." -- Jacques Derrida
Jacques Derrida () (15 July 1930 – 8 October 2004) was a French philosopher born in Algeria. He developed the critical technique known as deconstruction, and his work has been associated both with post-structuralism and postmodern philosophy. His prolific output of more than 40 published books, together with essays and public speaking, has had a significant impact upon the humanities, particularly on literary theory and continental philosophy. His best known assertion with regard to his methodology is that "there is no outside-the-text."
Derrida was always uncomfortable with the popularity of the term "deconstruction" and the corresponding tendency to reduce his philosophical work to that particular label. In spite of his reservations, deconstruction has become associated with the attempt to expose and undermine the oppositions and paradoxes on which particular texts, philosophical and otherwise, are founded. He frequently called such paradoxes "binary oppositions." Derrida's strategy involved explicating the historical roots of philosophical ideas, questioning the so-called "metaphysics of presence" that he sees as having dominated philosophy since the ancient Greeks, careful textual analysis, and attempting to undermine and subvert the paradoxes themselves.
Derrida's work has had implications across many fields, including literature, architecture (in the form of deconstructivism), sociology, and cultural studies. Particularly in his later writings, he frequently addressed ethical and political themes, and his work influenced various activist and other political movements. His widespread influence made him a well-known cultural figure, while his approach to philosophy and the purported difficulty of his work also made him a figure of some controversy. His work has been seen as a challenge to the unquestioned assumptions of the Western philosophical tradition and Western culture as a whole.
Derrida was always uncomfortable with the popularity of the term "deconstruction" and the corresponding tendency to reduce his philosophical work to that particular label. In spite of his reservations, deconstruction has become associated with the attempt to expose and undermine the oppositions and paradoxes on which particular texts, philosophical and otherwise, are founded. He frequently called such paradoxes "binary oppositions." Derrida's strategy involved explicating the historical roots of philosophical ideas, questioning the so-called "metaphysics of presence" that he sees as having dominated philosophy since the ancient Greeks, careful textual analysis, and attempting to undermine and subvert the paradoxes themselves.
Derrida's work has had implications across many fields, including literature, architecture (in the form of deconstructivism), sociology, and cultural studies. Particularly in his later writings, he frequently addressed ethical and political themes, and his work influenced various activist and other political movements. His widespread influence made him a well-known cultural figure, while his approach to philosophy and the purported difficulty of his work also made him a figure of some controversy. His work has been seen as a challenge to the unquestioned assumptions of the Western philosophical tradition and Western culture as a whole.
Quotes more less
"As soon as there is language, generality has entered the scen.""Certain readers resented me when they could no longer recognize their territory, their institution.""Every discourse, even a poetic or oracular sentence, carries with it a system of rules for producing analogous things and thus an outline of methodology.""Everything is arranged so that it be this way, this is what is called culture.""I do everything I think possible or acceptable to escape from this trap.""I do not believe in pure idioms. I think there is naturally a desire, for whoever speaks or writes, to sign in an idiomatic, irreplaceable manner.""I have always had school sickness, as others have seasickness. I cried when it was time to go back to school long after I was old enough to be ashamed of such behavior.""I have always had trouble recognizing myself in the features of the intellectual playing his political role according to the screenplay that you are familiar with and whose heritage deserves to be questioned.""I never give in to the temptation to be difficult just for the sake of being difficult. That would be too ridiculous.""I wrote some bad poetry that I published in North African journals, but even as I withdrew into this reading, I also led the life of a kind of young hooligan.""If this work seems so threatening, this is because it isn't simply eccentric or strange, but competent, rigorously argued, and carrying conviction.""In Algeria, I had begun to get into literature and philosophy. I dreamed of writing-and already models were instructing the dream, a certain language governed it.""In philosophy, you have to reckon with the implicit level of an accumulated reserve, and thus with a very great number of relays, with the shared responsibility of these relays.""My most resolute opponents believe that I am too visible, that I am a little too alive, that my name echoes too much in the texts which they nevertheless claim to be inaccessible.""No one gets angry at a mathematician or a physicist whom he or she doesn't understand, or at someone who speaks a foreign language, but rather at someone who tampers with your own language.""Still today, I cannot cross the threshold of a teaching institution without physical symptoms, in my chest and my stomach, of discomfort or anxiety. And yet I have never left school.""The boarding-school experience in Paris was very hard, I didn't put up with it very well. I was sick all the time, or in any case frail, on the edge of a nervous breakdown.""The circle of the return to birth can only remain open, but this is a chance, a sign of life, and a wound.""The first problem of the media is posed by what does not get translated, or even published in the dominant political languages.""These critics organize and practice in my case a sort of obsessive personality cult which philosophers should know how to question and above all, to moderate.""These years of the Ecole Normale were an ordeal. Nothing was handed to me on the first try.""To pretend, I actually do the thing: I have therefore only pretended to pretend.""We are all mediators, translators.""Whatever precautions you take so the photograph will look like this or that, there comes a moment when the photograph surprises you. It is the other's gaze that wins out and decides.""Who ever said that one was born just once?""Why is it the philosopher who is expected to be easier and not some scientist who is even more inaccessible?"
Life more less
Early life and education
Derrida was born on 15 July 1930, in El Biar (Algiers), then French Algeria, into a Sephardic Jewish family that became French in 1870 when the Crémieux Decree granted full French citizenship (Pied-Noir) to the indigenous Jews of French colonial Algeria. He was the third of five children. His parents, Aimé Derrida and Georgette Sultana Esther Safar, named him Jackie, though he would later adopt a more "correct" version of his first name when he moved to Paris. His youth was spent in El-Biar, Algeria.On the first day of the school year in 1942, Derrida was expelled from his lycée by French administrators implementing anti-Semitic quotas set by the Vichy government. He secretly skipped school for a year rather than attend the Jewish lycée formed by displaced teachers and students, and also took part in numerous football competitions (he dreamed of becoming a professional player). In this period as an adolescent he found in literature, of philosophers and writers such as Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Gide, an instrument of revolt against the family and society:
His readings also included Camus and Sartre. He began to think seriously about philosophy around 1948 and 1949. He became a boarding student at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris, which he did not enjoy. Derrida failed his entrance examination twice before finally being admitted to the École Normale Supérieure at the end of the 1951—52 school year.
On his first day at the École Normale Supérieure, Derrida met Louis Althusser, with whom he became friends. After visiting the Husserl Archive in Leuven, Belgium, he completed his philosophy agrégation on Edmund Husserl. Derrida received a grant for studies at Harvard University, and he spent the 1956-7 academic year reading Joyce's Ulysses at the Widener Library. In June 1957 married the psychoanalyst Marguerite Aucouturier in Boston. During the Algerian War of Independence, Derrida asked to teach soldiers' children in lieu of military service, teaching French and English from 1957 to 1959.
Career
Following the war Derrida began a long association with the Tel Quel group of literary and philosophical theorists. At the same time, from 1960 to 1964, Derrida taught philosophy at the Sorbonne, and from 1964 to 1984 at the École Normale Supérieure. His wife Marguerite gave birth to their first child, Pierre, in 1963. Beginning with his 1966 lecture at Johns Hopkins University, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences", his work assumed international prominence. A second son, Jean, was born in 1967. In the same year, Derrida published his first three books...Writing and Difference, Speech and Phenomena, and Of Grammatology...which would make his name.He completed his Thèse d'État in 1980; the work was subsequently published in English translation as "The Time of a Thesis: Punctuations." In 1983 Derrida collaborated with Ken McMullen on the film Ghost Dance. Derrida appears in the film as himself and also contributed to the script.
Derrida travelled widely and held a series of visiting and permanent positions. His visiting positions in the United States were not in Philosophy departments, despite Derrida's efforts to affiliate with Philosophy departments. Derrida was director of studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. With François Châtelet and others he in 1983 co-founded the Collège international de philosophie (CIPH), an institution intended to provide a location for philosophical research which could not be carried out elsewhere in the academy. He was elected as its first president.
In 1986 Derrida became Professor of the Humanities at the University of California, Irvine. UCI and the Derrida family are currently involved in a legal dispute regarding exactly what materials constitute his archive, part of which was informally bequeathed to the university. He was a regular visiting professor at several other major American and European universities, including Johns Hopkins University, Yale University, New York University, Stony Brook University, The New School for Social Research, and European Graduate School.
In 2002, Derrida appeared in a documentary about himself and his work, entitled Derrida.
Recognition and criticism
He was awarded honorary doctorates by Cambridge University, Columbia University, The New School for Social Research, the University of Essex, University of Leuven, Williams College and University of Silesia.Derrida has often been criticized by academics, such as the analytic philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine. In 1992, a number of analytical philosophers from Cambridge University tried to stop the granting of the degree, but were outnumbered when it was put to a vote.Derrida suggested in an interview that part of the reason for the violent attacks on his work, was that it questioned and modified "the rules of the dominant discourse, it tries to politicize and democratize education and the university scene."
Derrida was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Although his membership in Class IV, Section 1 (Philosophy and Religious Studies) was rejected; he was subsequently elected to Class IV, Section 3 (Literary Criticism, including Philology.) He received the 2001 Adorno-Preis from the University of Frankfurt.
Death
In 2003, Derrida was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, which reduced his speaking and travelling engagements. He died in a hospital in Paris on the evening of 8 October 2004.Work more less
Introduction
On multiple occasions, Derrida referred to himself as an historian:Derrida's work centered on challenging unquestioned assumptions of the Western philosophical tradition and also more broadly to Western culture as a whole. By questioning the fundamental norms and premises of the dominant discourses, and trying to modify them, he attempted to democratize the university scene and to politicize it. During the American 1980s culture wars, this would attract the anger of politically conservative and right-wing intellectuals who were trying to defend the status quo.
Derrida called his challenge to the assumptions of Western culture "deconstruction". On some occasions, Derrida referred to deconstruction as a radicalization of a certain spirit of Marxism.
The Phenomenology vs Structuralism debate
In the early 1960s, Derrida began speaking and writing publicly, and also addressed the most topical debates at the time. One of these was the "Phenomenology vs Structuralism" debate. At this time the French intellectual scene was experiencing an increasing rift between what could broadly speaking be called "phenomenological" and "structural" approaches to understanding individual and collective life. For those with a more phenomenological bent, the goal was to understand experience by comprehending and describing its genesis, the process of its emergence from an origin or event. For the structuralists, this was a false problem, and the "depth" of experience could in fact only be an effect of structures which are not themselves experiential.It is in this context that Derrida in 1959 asked the question: Must not structure have a genesis, and must not the origin, the point of genesis, be already structured, in order to be the genesis of something? In other words, every structural or "synchronic" phenomenon has a history, and the structure cannot be understood without understanding its genesis. At the same time, in order that there be movement, or potential, the origin cannot be some pure unity or simplicity, but must already be articulated...complex...such that from it a "diachronic" process can emerge. This originary complexity must not be understood as an original positing, but more like a default of origin, which Derrida refers to as iterability, inscription, or textuality. It is this thought of originary complexity that sets Derrida's work in motion, and from which all of its terms are derived, including "deconstruction".
Derrida's method consisted in demonstrating the forms and varieties of this originary complexity, and their multiple consequences in many fields. He achieved this by conducting thorough, careful, sensitive, and yet transformational readings of philosophical and literary texts, to determine what aspects of those texts run counter to their apparent systematicity (structural unity) or intended sense (authorial genesis). By demonstrating the aporias and ellipses of thought, Derrida hoped to show the infinitely subtle ways in which this originary complexity, which by definition cannot ever be completely known, works its structuring and destructuring effects.
Early works
At the very beginning of his philosophical career Derrida was concerned to elaborate a critique of the limits of phenomenology. His first lengthy academic manuscript, written as a dissertation for his diplôme d'études supérieures and submitted in 1954, concerned the work of Edmund Husserl. In 1962 he published Edmund Husserl's Origin of Geometry: An Introduction, which contained his own translation of Husserl's essay. Many elements of Derrida's thought were already present in this work. In the interviews collected in Positions (1972), Derrida said: "In this essay the problematic of writing was already in place as such, bound to the irreducible structure of 'deferral' in its relationships to consciousness, presence, science, history and the history of science, the disappearance or delay of the origin, etc. [...] this essay can be read as the other side (recto or verso, as you wish) of Speech and Phenomena."Derrida first received major attention outside France with his lecture, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," delivered at Johns Hopkins University in 1966 (and subsequently included in Writing and Difference). The conference at which this paper was delivered was concerned with structuralism, then at the peak of its influence in France, but only beginning to gain attention in the United States. Derrida differed from other participants by his lack of explicit commitment to structuralism, having already been critical of the movement. He praised the accomplishments of structuralism but also maintained reservations about its internal limitations, thus leading to the notion that his thought was a form of post-structuralism. Near the beginning of the essay, Derrida argued:
The effect of Derrida's paper was such that by the time the conference proceedings were published in 1970, the title of the collection had become The Structuralist Controversy. The conference was also where he met Paul de Man, who would be a close friend and source of great controversy, as well as where he first met the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, with whose work Derrida enjoyed a mixed relationship.
1967—1972
Derrida's interests traversed disciplinary boundaries, and his knowledge of a wide array of diverse material was reflected in the three collections of work published in 1967: Speech and Phenomena, Of Grammatology and Writing and Difference. These three books contained readings of the work of many philosophers and authors, including Husserl, linguist Saussure, Heidegger, Rousseau, Lévinas, Hegel, Foucault, Bataille, Descartes, anthropologist Lévi-Strauss, paleontologist Leroi-Gourhan, psychoanalyst Freud, and writers such as Jabès and Artaud. Derrida frequently acknowledged his debt to Husserl and Heidegger, and stated that without them he would have not said a single word. Among the questions asked in these essays are "What is 'meaning', what are its historical relationships to what is purportedly identified under the rubric 'voice' as a value of presence, presence of the object, presence of meaning to consciousness, self-presence in so called living speech and in self-consciousness?" In another essay in Writing and Difference entitled "Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas", the roots of another major theme in Derrida's thought emerges: the Other as opposed to the Same “Deconstructive analysis deprives the present of its prestige and exposes it to something tout autre, "wholly other," beyond what is foreseeable from the present, beyond the horizon of the "same"."This collection of three books published in 1967 elaborated Derrida's theoretical framework. Derrida attempts to approach the very heart of the Western intellectual tradition, characterizing this tradition as "a search for a transcendental being that serves as the origin or guarantor of meaning". The attempt to "ground the meaning relations constitutive of the world in an instance that itself lies outside all relationality" was referred to by Heidegger as logocentrism, and Derrida argues that the philosophical enterprise is essentially logocentric, and that this is a paradigm inherited from Judaism and Hellenism. He in turn describes logocentrism as phallocratic, patriarchal and masculinist.
Derrida contributed to "the understanding of certain deeply hidden philosophical presuppositions and prejudices in Western culture", arguing that the whole philosophical tradition rests on arbitrary dichotomous categories (such as sacred/profane, signifier/signified, mind/body), and that any text contains implicit hierarchies, "by which an order is imposed on reality and by which a subtle repression is exercised, as these hierarchies exclude, subordinate, and hide the various potential meanings." Derrida refers to his procedure for uncovering and unsettling these dichotomies as deconstruction of Western culture.
The next five years of lectures and essay-length work were gathered into two 1972 collections, Dissemination and Margins of Philosophy, and in the same year a collection of interviews, entitled Positions, was also published.
1972—1980
Starting in 1972, Derrida produced on average more than a book per year. Derrida continued to produce important works, such as Glas and The Post-Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond.Derrida received increasing attention in the United States after 1972, where he was a regular visiting professor and lecturer at several major American universities. In the 1980s, during the American culture wars, conservatives started a dispute over Derrida's influence and legacy upon American intellectuals, and claimed that he influenced American literary critics and theorists more than academic philosophers.
Quarrel with John Searle
A sequence of encounters with analytical philosophy is collected in Limited Inc (1988). In 1972, Derrida wrote "Signature Event Context," an essay on J. L. Austin's speech act theory; following an aggressive critique of this text by John Searle in his 1977 essay Reiterating the Differences, Derrida wrote the same year Limited Inc abc ..., a long (and no less aggressive) defense of his earlier argument. In the course of the exchanges, Derrida strongly accused Searle of intentionally misreading and misrepresenting him.In 1983, Searle told to The New York Review of Books a remark on Derrida allegedly made by Michel Foucault in a private conversation with Searle himself; Derrida later despised Searle's gesture as gossip, and also condemned as violent the use of a mass circulation magazine to fight an academic debate. According to Searle's account, which included grammatically incorrect French, Foucault called Derrida's prose style "terrorist obscurantism":
Searle exemplified his view on deconstruction in the New York Review of Books, 2 February 1984; for example:
In 1988, Derrida wrote Afterword: Toward An Ethic of Discussion, to be published with the previous essays in the collection Limited Inc.
Delegitimizations as "not philosophy"
The right-wing, conservative academics, and some analytic philosophers tried, since at least the 1980s, to delegitimize Derrida's work as "not philosophy," arguing as a proof that its influence had not been on philosophy departments but on literature and other humanities disciplines.Later in 1992 the claim was restated and publicized to the mass media with an open letter that analytic philosophers sent to The Times, in the attempt to put media pressure on Cambridge University which was going to grant Derrida an honorary philosophy degree. When the mass media sensation was over, Derrida addressed the claim during an interview, reminding that philosophy best tradition has never confined itself to its own field:
Of Spirit
On 14 March 1987, Derrida presented at the CIPH conference titled "Heidegger: Open Questions" a lecture which was published in October 1987 as Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question. It follows the shifting role of Geist (spirit) through Heidegger's work, noting that, in 1927, "spirit" was one of the philosophical terms that Heidegger set his sights on dismantling. With his Nazi political engagement in 1933, however, Heidegger came out as a champion of the "German Spirit," and only withdrew from an exalting interpretation of the term in 1952. Derrida's book reconnects in a number of respects with his long engagement of Heidegger (such as "The Ends of Man" in Margins of Philosophy and the essays marked under the heading Geschlecht). Derrida reconsiders three other fundamental and recurring elements of Heideggerian philosophy: the distinction between human and animal, technology, and the privilege of questioning as the essence of philosophy.Of Spirit is an important contribution to the long debate on Heidegger's Nazism and appeared at the same time as the French publication of a book by a previously unknown Chilean writer, Victor Farías, who charged that Heidegger's philosophy amounted to a wholehearted endorsement of the Nazi Sturmabteilung (SA) faction. Derrida responded to Farías in an interview, "Heidegger, the Philosopher's Hell" and a subsequent article, "Comment donner raison? How to Concede, with Reasons?" He called Farías a weak reader of Heidegger's thought, adding that much of the evidence Farías and his supporters touted as new had long been known within the philosophical community.
Of Spirit was also one of Derrida's first publications on the relationship between philosophy and nationalism, on which he had been teaching in the mid-1980s. This strand of questions would become increasingly important in his later work.
1990s: political and ethical themes
Some have argued that Derrida's work took a "political turn" in the 1990s. Texts cited as evidence of such a turn include Force of Law (1990), as well as Specters of Marx (1994) and Politics of Friendship (1994). Others, however, including Derrida himself, have argued that much of the philosophical work done in his "political turn" can be dated to earlier essays.Those who argue Derrida engaged in an "ethical turn" refer to works such as The Gift of Death as evidence that he began more directly applying deconstruction to the relationship between ethics and religion. In this work, Derrida interprets passages from the Bible, particularly on Abraham and the Sacrifice of Isaac, and from Søren Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling. Derrida's contemporary readings of Emmanuel Lévinas, Walter Benjamin, Carl Schmitt, Jan Pato?ka, on themes such as law, justice, responsibility, and friendship, had a significant impact on fields beyond philosophy. Derrida delivered a eulogy at Lévinas' funeral, later published as Adieu à Emmanuel Lévinas, an appreciation and exploration of Levinas's moral philosophy.
Derrida continued to produce readings of literature, writing extensively on Maurice Blanchot, Paul Celan, and others.
In 1991 he published The Other Heading, in which he discussed the concept of identity (cultural identity, European identity, national identity, ..), in the name of which in Europe have being unleashed "the worst violences," "the crimes of xenophobia, racism, anti-Semitism, religious or nationalist fanaticism."
Cambridge Honorary Doctorate
Derrida has often received attacks by analytic philosophers, and the ultimate one was in 1992, when a number of analytical philosophers tried to stop Cambridge University from granting Derrida an Honorary Doctorate. This time what was at stakes was worldwide, because of Cambridge status as the most influential European University, that "continues to play a very particular role for the university consciousness in the world," and therefore such recognition contrasted with the hegemony of the Anglo-American Analytic philosophy over most of the philosophy departments of the world.There were protesters from within Cambridge philosophy faculty, but mostly the letter signatoires were from other institutions from the US and UK, a circumstance that some condemned as an attack to the academic freedom of Cambridge scholars. Eighteen protesters from other institutions, including Willard Van Orman Quine, David Armstrong, Ruth Barcan Marcus, and René Thom, sent a letter to Cambridge claiming that Derrida's work "does not meet accepted standards of clarity and rigor" and describing Derrida's philosophy as being composed of "tricks and gimmicks similar to those of the Dadaists." The letter concluded that:
In the end the protesters were outnumbered when Cambridge put the motion on a vote. Derrida suggested in an interview that part of the reason for the violent attacks on his work, was that it questioned and modified "the rules of the dominant discourse, it tries to politicize and democratize education and the university scene."
Interviewed in 1995, Derrida talked about the difficulties of divulgatives tasks under limited space and time, when professors and journalists need to explain something difficult without betrying it; Derrida argument is also a rebuttal of certain charges of obfuscation and obscurantism:
Criticism more less
A broad overview of the history of Derrida's reception, covering the period until the publication of Specters of Marx (1994), is given in The Reception of Derrida: Translation and Transformation (2006). His work is criticized for his alleged misuse of scientific terms and concepts in Higher Superstition: the academic left and its quarrels with science (1998). Christopher Wise in his book Derrida, Africa, and the Middle East (2009) places Derrida's work in the historical context of his North African origins, an argument first briefly made by Robert J.C. Young in White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (1990) and extended in his Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (2001) where Young surveys the writings of numerous theorists and situates the whole framework of Derrida's thinking in relation to the impact of growing up in the colonial conditions of French Algeria.
Two quarrels in particular went out of academic circles and received international mass media coverage. The 1972-88 quarrel with John Searle, and the analytic philosophers' pressures on Cambridge University to not award Derrida an honorary degree.
Emir Rodríguez Monegal alleged that many of Derrida's ideas were recycled from the work of Borges (from essays and tales such as "La fruición literaria" (1928), "Elementos de preceptiva" (1933), "Pierre Menard" (1939), "Tlön" (1940), "Kafka y sus precursores" (1951)), opening his article with:
Critical obituaries of Derrida were published in The New York Times,The Economist and The Independent. Some of these obituaries were criticised by academics supportive of Derrida; other obituaries were less critical. The magazine The Nation responded to the NYT obituary saying that "even though American papers had scorned and trivialized Derrida before, the tone seemed particularly caustic for an obituary of an internationally acclaimed philosopher who had profoundly influenced two generations of American humanities scholars." An example of Derrida's putatively obfuscationist style was a "murky explanation" of his philosophy in a 1993 paper he presented at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, in New York, which began: "Needless to say, one more time, deconstruction, if there is such a thing, takes place as the experience of the impossible."
In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Richard Rorty argues that Derrida (especially in his book, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond) purposefully uses words that cannot be defined (e.g. Différance), and uses previously definable words in contexts diverse enough to make understanding impossible, so that the reader will never be able to contextualize Derrida's literary self. Rorty, however, argues that this intentional obfuscation is philosophically grounded. In garbling his message Derrida is attempting to escape the naiive, positive metaphysical projects of his predecessors.
Derrida, however, felt that deconstruction was enlivening, productive, and affirmative, and that it does not "undermine" norms but rather places them within contexts that reveal their developmental and affective features. Derrida often said that "his interests lie inprovoking not an anti-Enlightenment but a new Enlightenment". To provoke this new Enlightenment he had to question the axioms and certainties of the Enlightenment itself.
Perhaps most persistent among these critics is Richard Wolin, who has argued that Derrida's work, as well as that of Derrida's major inspirations (e.g., Bataille, Blanchot, Lévinas, Heidegger, Nietzsche), leads to a corrosive nihilism. For example, Wolin argues that the "deconstructive gesture of overturning and reinscription ends up by threatening to efface many of the essential differences between Nazism and non-Nazism". When Wolin published a Derrida interview on Heidegger in the first edition of The Heidegger Controversy, Derrida argued that the interview was an intentionally malicious mistranslation, which was "demonstrably execrable" and "weak, simplistic, and compulsively aggressive". As French law requires the consent of an author to translations and this consent was not given, Derrida insisted that the interview not appear in any subsequent editions or reprints. Columbia University Press subsequently refused to offer reprints or new editions. Later editions of The Heidegger Controversy by MIT Press also omitted the Derrida interview. The matter achieved public exposure owing to a friendly review of Wolin's book by Thomas Sheehan that appeared in the New York Review of Books, in which Sheehan characterised Derrida's protests as an imposition of censorship. It was followed by an exchange of letters. Derrida in turn responded, in somewhat acerbic fashion, to Sheehan and Wolin, in "The Work of Intellectuals and the Press (The Bad Example: How the New York Review of Books and Company do Business)," which was published in the book Points... (1995; see the footnote about ISBN 0-226-14314-7, here) (see also the [1992] French Version entretiens (ISBN 0-8047-2488-1) there).
Twenty four academics, who belong from different schools and groups -often in disagreement with each other and with deconstruction- signed a letter addressed to the New York Review of Books, in which they expressed their indignation for the magazine behaviour and the behaviour of Sheenan and Wolin.
Lack of philosophical clarity
Though Derrida addressed the American Philosophical Association on several occasions and was highly regarded by contemporary philosophers Richard Rorty, Alexander Nehamas, and Stanley Cavell, his work has been regarded by other analytic philosophers, such as John Searle and Willard Van Orman Quine, as pseudophilosophy or sophistry.Two quarrels in particular went out of academic circles and received international mass media coverage. The 1972-88 quarrel with John Searle, and the analytic philosophers' pressures on Cambridge University to not award Derrida an honorary degree.
Intentional obfuscation
Noam Chomsky has expressed the view that Derrida uses "pretentious rhetoric" to obscure the simplicity of his ideas. He groups Derrida within a broader category of the Parisian intellectual community which he criticized for, in his view, acting as an élite power structure for the well-educated through "difficult writing" and obscurantism. Chomsky has indicated that he may simply be incapable of understanding Derrida, but that he doubts the possibility.Emir Rodríguez Monegal alleged that many of Derrida's ideas were recycled from the work of Borges (from essays and tales such as "La fruición literaria" (1928), "Elementos de preceptiva" (1933), "Pierre Menard" (1939), "Tlön" (1940), "Kafka y sus precursores" (1951)), opening his article with:
Critical obituaries of Derrida were published in The New York Times,The Economist and The Independent. Some of these obituaries were criticised by academics supportive of Derrida; other obituaries were less critical. The magazine The Nation responded to the NYT obituary saying that "even though American papers had scorned and trivialized Derrida before, the tone seemed particularly caustic for an obituary of an internationally acclaimed philosopher who had profoundly influenced two generations of American humanities scholars." An example of Derrida's putatively obfuscationist style was a "murky explanation" of his philosophy in a 1993 paper he presented at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, in New York, which began: "Needless to say, one more time, deconstruction, if there is such a thing, takes place as the experience of the impossible."
In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Richard Rorty argues that Derrida (especially in his book, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond) purposefully uses words that cannot be defined (e.g. Différance), and uses previously definable words in contexts diverse enough to make understanding impossible, so that the reader will never be able to contextualize Derrida's literary self. Rorty, however, argues that this intentional obfuscation is philosophically grounded. In garbling his message Derrida is attempting to escape the naiive, positive metaphysical projects of his predecessors.
Charges of nihilism
Some critics charge that the deconstructive project is "nihilistic". They claim that Derrida's writing attempts to undermine the ethical and intellectual norms vital to Academe, if not Western civilization itself. Derrida is accused of effectively denying the possibility of knowledge and meaning, creating a blend of extreme skepticism and solipsism, which these critics believe harmful.Derrida, however, felt that deconstruction was enlivening, productive, and affirmative, and that it does not "undermine" norms but rather places them within contexts that reveal their developmental and affective features. Derrida often said that "his interests lie inprovoking not an anti-Enlightenment but a new Enlightenment". To provoke this new Enlightenment he had to question the axioms and certainties of the Enlightenment itself.
Perhaps most persistent among these critics is Richard Wolin, who has argued that Derrida's work, as well as that of Derrida's major inspirations (e.g., Bataille, Blanchot, Lévinas, Heidegger, Nietzsche), leads to a corrosive nihilism. For example, Wolin argues that the "deconstructive gesture of overturning and reinscription ends up by threatening to efface many of the essential differences between Nazism and non-Nazism". When Wolin published a Derrida interview on Heidegger in the first edition of The Heidegger Controversy, Derrida argued that the interview was an intentionally malicious mistranslation, which was "demonstrably execrable" and "weak, simplistic, and compulsively aggressive". As French law requires the consent of an author to translations and this consent was not given, Derrida insisted that the interview not appear in any subsequent editions or reprints. Columbia University Press subsequently refused to offer reprints or new editions. Later editions of The Heidegger Controversy by MIT Press also omitted the Derrida interview. The matter achieved public exposure owing to a friendly review of Wolin's book by Thomas Sheehan that appeared in the New York Review of Books, in which Sheehan characterised Derrida's protests as an imposition of censorship. It was followed by an exchange of letters. Derrida in turn responded, in somewhat acerbic fashion, to Sheehan and Wolin, in "The Work of Intellectuals and the Press (The Bad Example: How the New York Review of Books and Company do Business)," which was published in the book Points... (1995; see the footnote about ISBN 0-226-14314-7, here) (see also the [1992] French Version entretiens (ISBN 0-8047-2488-1) there).
Twenty four academics, who belong from different schools and groups -often in disagreement with each other and with deconstruction- signed a letter addressed to the New York Review of Books, in which they expressed their indignation for the magazine behaviour and the behaviour of Sheenan and Wolin.
Politics more less
Derrida engaged with many political issues, movements, and debates:
- He was initially supportive of Parisian student protesters during the May 1968 protests, but later withdrew.
- He registered his objections to the Vietnam War in delivering "The Ends of Man" in the United States.
- In 1981 Derrida, on the prompting of Roger Scruton and others, founded the French Jan Hus association with structuralist historian Jean-Pierre Vernant. Its purpose was to aid dissident or persecuted Czech intellectuals. Derrida became vice-president.
- In late 1981 he was arrested by the Czechoslovakian government upon leaving a conference in Prague that lacked government authorization, and charged with the "production and trafficking of drugs", which he claimed were planted as he visited Kafka's grave. He was released (or "expelled" as the Czechoslovakian government put it) after the interventions of the Mitterrand government, and the assistance of Michel Foucault, returning to Paris on 1 January 1982.
- He was active in cultural activities against the Apartheid government of South Africa and on behalf of Nelson Mandela beginning in 1983.
- He met with Palestinian intellectuals during a 1988 visit to Jerusalem. He was active in the collective "89 for equality", which campaigned for the right of foreigners to vote in local elections.
- He protested against the death penalty, dedicating his seminar in his last years to the production of a non-utilitarian argument for its abolition, and was active in the campaign to free Mumia Abu-Jamal.
- Derrida was not known to have participated in any conventional electoral political party until 1995, when he joined a committee in support of Lionel Jospin's Socialist candidacy, although he expressed misgivings about such organizations going back to Communist organizational efforts while he was a student at ENS.
- In the 2002 French presidential election he refused to vote in the run-off between far right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen and Jacques Chirac, citing a lack of acceptable choices.
- While supportive of the American government in the wake of the terrorist attacks of 9/11, he opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq (see Rogues and his contribution to Philosophy in a Time of Terror with Giovanna Borradori and Jürgen Habermas).
Influences on Derrida more less
Although Derrida has sometimes been characterized has belonging to a certain Continental philosophy tradition, as opposed to its ancestral antagonist the Analytic philosophy tradition, during the Derrida-Searle dispute he wrote:
Crucial readings in his adulescence were Rousseau's Reveries of a Solitary Walker and Confessions, André Gide's journal, La porte étroite, Les nourritures terrestres and The Immoralist; and the works of Friedrich Nietzsche.
Other influences upon Derrida are Martin Heidegger, Plato, Søren Kierkegaard, Alexandre Kojève, Maurice Blanchot, Antonin Artaud, Roland Barthes, Georges Bataille, Edmund Husserl, Emmanuel Lévinas, Ferdinand de Saussure, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Claude Lévi-Strauss, James Joyce, Stéphane Mallarmé and J.L. Austin.
I sometimes felt, paradoxically, closer to Austin [prominent analytic philosopher] than to a certain Continental tradition from which Searle, on the contrary, has inherited numerous gestures and a logic I try to deconstruct. I now have to add this: it is often because "Searle" ignores this tradition or pretends to take no account of it that he rests blindly imprisoned in it, repeating its most problematic gestures, falling short of the most elementary critical questions , not to mention the deconstructive ones. It is because in appearance at least "I" am more of a historian that "I" am a less passive, more attentive and more "deconstructive" heir of that so-called tradition. And hence, perhaps again paradoxically, more foreign to that tradition. I put quotation marks around "Searle" and "I" to mark that beyond these indexes, I am aiming at tendencies, types, styles, or situations rather than at persons.
Crucial readings in his adulescence were Rousseau's Reveries of a Solitary Walker and Confessions, André Gide's journal, La porte étroite, Les nourritures terrestres and The Immoralist; and the works of Friedrich Nietzsche.
Other influences upon Derrida are Martin Heidegger, Plato, Søren Kierkegaard, Alexandre Kojève, Maurice Blanchot, Antonin Artaud, Roland Barthes, Georges Bataille, Edmund Husserl, Emmanuel Lévinas, Ferdinand de Saussure, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Claude Lévi-Strauss, James Joyce, Stéphane Mallarmé and J.L. Austin.
Derrida and His Peers more less
Derrida's philosophical friends, allies, and students included Paul de Man, Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Blanchot, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-Luc Nancy, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Sarah Kofman, Hélène Cixous, Bernard Stiegler, Alexander García Düttmann, Joseph Cohen, Geoffrey Bennington, Jean-Luc Marion, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Raphael Zagury-Orly, Jacques Ehrmann, Avital Ronell, Samuel Weber, and Simon Critchley.
Derrida wrote on both of them, including a long book on Nancy: Le Toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy (On Touching...Jean-Luc Nancy, 2005).
Shortly after de Man's death, Derrida authored a book Memoires: pour Paul de Man and in 1988 wrote an article in the journal Critical Inquiry called "Like the Sound of the Sea Deep Within a Shell: Paul de Man's War". The memoir became cause for controversy, because shortly before Derrida published his piece, it had been discovered by the Belgian literary critic Ortwin de Graef that long before his academic career in the US, de Man had written almost two hundred essays in a pro-Nazi newspaper during the German occupation of Belgium, including several that were explicitly antisemitic.
Derrida complicated the notion that it is possible to simply read de Man's later scholarship through the prism of these earlier political essays. Rather, any claims about de Man's work should be understood in relation to the entire body of his scholarship. Critics of Derrida have argued that he minimizes the antisemitic character of de Man's writing. Some critics have found Derrida's treatment of this issue surprising, given that, for example, Derrida also spoke out against antisemitism and, in the 1960s, broke with the Heidegger disciple Jean Beaufret over a phrase of Beaufret's that Derrida (and, after him, Maurice Blanchot) interpreted as antisemitic.
Having started as a student of de Man, Gayatri Spivak took on the translation of Of Grammatology early in her career and has since revised it into a second edition. Alan Bass was responsible for several early translations; Bennington and Peggy Kamuf have continued to produce translations of his work for nearly twenty years. In recent years, a number of translations have appeared by Michael Naas (also a Derrida scholar) and Pascale-Anne Brault.
Bennington, Brault, Kamuf, Naas, Elizabeth Rottenberg, and David Wills are currently engaged in translating Derrida's previously unpublished seminars, which span from 1959 to 2003. The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume I, which presents Derrida's seminar from 2001 to 2002, has appeared in English translation; further volumes currently projected for the series include The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume II (2002—2003), Death Penalty, Volume I (1999—2000), Death Penalty, Volume II (2000—2001), Perjury and Pardon, Volume I (1997—1998), and Perjury and Pardon, Volume II (1998—1999).
With Bennington, Derrida undertook the challenge published as Jacques Derrida, an arrangement in which Bennington attempted to provide a systematic explication of Derrida's work (called the "Derridabase") using the top two-thirds of every page, while Derrida was given the finished copy of every Bennington chapter and the bottom third of every page in which to show how deconstruction exceeded Bennington's account (this was called the "Circumfession"). Derrida seems to have viewed Bennington in particular as a kind of rabbinical explicator, noting at the end of the "Applied Derrida" conference, held at the University of Luton in 1995 that: "everything has been said and, as usual, Geoff Bennington has said everything before I have even opened my mouth. I have the challenge of trying to be unpredictable after him, which is impossible... so I'll try to pretend to be unpredictable after Geoff. Once again."
Whatever the outcome of these discussions, Derrida was often left in the unappealing position of too often having the opportunity for the last word, as he outlived many of his peers. Death and mourning are foundational to the analysis which led Derrida to his understanding of inheritance, interpretation, and responsibility. Beginning with "The Deaths of Roland Barthes" in 1981, Derrida produced a series of texts on mourning and memory occasioned by the loss of his friends and colleagues, many of them new engagements with their work. Memoires for Paul de Man, a book-length lecture series presented first at Yale and then at Irvine as Derrida's Wellek Lecture, followed in 1986, with a revision in 1989 that included "Like the Sound of the Sea Deep Within a Shell: Paul de Man's War". Ultimately fourteen essays were collected into The Work of Mourning, which was expanded in the French edition Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde (literally, The end of the world, unique each time) to include essays dedicated to Gérard Granel and Maurice Blanchot.
Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe
Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe were among Derrida's first students in France and went on to become well-known and important philosophers in their own right. Despite their considerable differences of subject, and often also of method, they continued their close interaction with each other and with Derrida, from the early 1970s.Derrida wrote on both of them, including a long book on Nancy: Le Toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy (On Touching...Jean-Luc Nancy, 2005).
Paul de Man
Derrida's most prominent friendship in intellectual life was with Paul de Man, which began with their meeting at Johns Hopkins University and continued until de Man's death in 1983. De Man provided a somewhat different approach to deconstruction, and his readings of literary and philosophical texts were crucial in the training of a generation of readers.Shortly after de Man's death, Derrida authored a book Memoires: pour Paul de Man and in 1988 wrote an article in the journal Critical Inquiry called "Like the Sound of the Sea Deep Within a Shell: Paul de Man's War". The memoir became cause for controversy, because shortly before Derrida published his piece, it had been discovered by the Belgian literary critic Ortwin de Graef that long before his academic career in the US, de Man had written almost two hundred essays in a pro-Nazi newspaper during the German occupation of Belgium, including several that were explicitly antisemitic.
Derrida complicated the notion that it is possible to simply read de Man's later scholarship through the prism of these earlier political essays. Rather, any claims about de Man's work should be understood in relation to the entire body of his scholarship. Critics of Derrida have argued that he minimizes the antisemitic character of de Man's writing. Some critics have found Derrida's treatment of this issue surprising, given that, for example, Derrida also spoke out against antisemitism and, in the 1960s, broke with the Heidegger disciple Jean Beaufret over a phrase of Beaufret's that Derrida (and, after him, Maurice Blanchot) interpreted as antisemitic.
Derrida's translators
Geoffrey Bennington, Avital Ronell and Samuel Weber belong to a group of Derrida translators. Many of these are esteemed thinkers in their own right, with whom Derrida worked in a collaborative arrangement, allowing his prolific output to be translated into English in a timely fashion.Having started as a student of de Man, Gayatri Spivak took on the translation of Of Grammatology early in her career and has since revised it into a second edition. Alan Bass was responsible for several early translations; Bennington and Peggy Kamuf have continued to produce translations of his work for nearly twenty years. In recent years, a number of translations have appeared by Michael Naas (also a Derrida scholar) and Pascale-Anne Brault.
Bennington, Brault, Kamuf, Naas, Elizabeth Rottenberg, and David Wills are currently engaged in translating Derrida's previously unpublished seminars, which span from 1959 to 2003. The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume I, which presents Derrida's seminar from 2001 to 2002, has appeared in English translation; further volumes currently projected for the series include The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume II (2002—2003), Death Penalty, Volume I (1999—2000), Death Penalty, Volume II (2000—2001), Perjury and Pardon, Volume I (1997—1998), and Perjury and Pardon, Volume II (1998—1999).
With Bennington, Derrida undertook the challenge published as Jacques Derrida, an arrangement in which Bennington attempted to provide a systematic explication of Derrida's work (called the "Derridabase") using the top two-thirds of every page, while Derrida was given the finished copy of every Bennington chapter and the bottom third of every page in which to show how deconstruction exceeded Bennington's account (this was called the "Circumfession"). Derrida seems to have viewed Bennington in particular as a kind of rabbinical explicator, noting at the end of the "Applied Derrida" conference, held at the University of Luton in 1995 that: "everything has been said and, as usual, Geoff Bennington has said everything before I have even opened my mouth. I have the challenge of trying to be unpredictable after him, which is impossible... so I'll try to pretend to be unpredictable after Geoff. Once again."
Relationships and mourning
Derrida's relationship with many of his contemporaries was marked by disagreements and rifts. For example, Derrida's criticism of Foucault in the essay "Cogito and the History of Madness" (from Writing and Difference), first given as a lecture which Foucault attended, caused a rift between the two men that was never fully mended. In an appendix added to the 1972 edition of his History of Madness, Foucault disputed Derrida's interpretation of his work, and accused Derrida of practicing "a historically well-determined little pedagogy [...] which teaches the student that there is nothing outside the text [...]. A pedagogy which inversely gives to the voice of the masters that infinite sovereignty that allows it indefinitely to re-say the text." Others, like Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Blanchot, found in his critical engagement with their work an invitation for further discussion.Whatever the outcome of these discussions, Derrida was often left in the unappealing position of too often having the opportunity for the last word, as he outlived many of his peers. Death and mourning are foundational to the analysis which led Derrida to his understanding of inheritance, interpretation, and responsibility. Beginning with "The Deaths of Roland Barthes" in 1981, Derrida produced a series of texts on mourning and memory occasioned by the loss of his friends and colleagues, many of them new engagements with their work. Memoires for Paul de Man, a book-length lecture series presented first at Yale and then at Irvine as Derrida's Wellek Lecture, followed in 1986, with a revision in 1989 that included "Like the Sound of the Sea Deep Within a Shell: Paul de Man's War". Ultimately fourteen essays were collected into The Work of Mourning, which was expanded in the French edition Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde (literally, The end of the world, unique each time) to include essays dedicated to Gérard Granel and Maurice Blanchot.
Works By Derrida more less
Selected translations of works by Derrida
- “Speech and Phenomena” and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973).
- Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore & London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976) (hardcover: ISBN 0-8018-1841-9, paperback: ISBN 0-8018-1879-6, corrected edition: ISBN 0-8018-5830-5).[1]
- Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978) ISBN 978-0-226-14329-3.
- Nietzsche's Styles, trans. Barbara Harlow (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1979, ISBN 978-0-226-14333-0).
- Reading Condillac, trans. John P. Leavey, Jr. (Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press, 1980).
- Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981, ISBN 978-0-226-14334-7).
- Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981, ISBN 978-0-226-14331-6) [Paris, Minuit, 1972].
- Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1982, ISBN 978-0-226-14326-2).
- Signsponge, trans. Richard Rand (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984).
- The Ear of the Other, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press, 1985).
- Glas, trans. John P. Leavey, Jr. & Richard Rand (Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press, 1986).
- Memoires for Paul de Man (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986; revised edn., 1989).
- From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1987, ISBN 978-0-226-14322-4).
- The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoffrey Bennington & Ian McLeod (Chicago & London: Chicago University Press, 1987, ISBN 978-0-226-14324-8).
- Limited Inc (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988).
- An Introduction, trans. John P. Leavey, Jr. (Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press, 1989).
- Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington & Rachel Bowlby (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1989, ISBN 978-0-226-14319-4).
- Cinders, trans. Ned Lukacher (Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press, 1991).
- Acts of Literature (New York & London: Routledge, 1992).
- I. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1992, ISBN 978-0-226-14314-9).
- Reflections on Today's Europe, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault & Michael B. Naas (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992).
- Aporias, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993).
- Jacques Derrida, co-author & trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago & London: Chicago University Press, 1993, ISBN 978-0-226-04262-6).
- The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault & Michael Naas (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1993, ISBN 978-0-226-14308-8).
- The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York & London: Routledge, 1994).
- A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1995, ISBN 978-0-226-14367-5).
- The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1995, ISBN 978-0-226-14306-4 ).
- On the Name, trans. David Wood, John P. Leavey, Jr., & Ian McLeod (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995).
- Interviews 1974-1994, trans. Peggy Kamuf and others, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995) (see also the footnote about ISBN 0-226-14314-7, here) (see also the [1992] French Version entretiens (ISBN 0-8047-2488-1) there).
- Chora L Works, with Peter Eisenman (New York: Monacelli, 1997).
- Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London & New York: Verso, 1997).
- Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Patrick Mensah (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).
- Resistances of Psychoanalysis, trans. Peggy Kamuf, Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).
- The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud, with Paule Thévenin, trans. Mary Ann Caws (Cambridge, Mass., & London: MIT Press, 1998).
- To Emmanuel Levinas, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault & Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).
- Rights of Inspection, trans. David Wills (New York: Monacelli, 1999).
- Fiction and Testimony, with Maurice Blanchot, The Instant of My Death, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).
- Of Hospitality, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).
- The Sydney Seminars (Sydney: Power Publications, 2001).
- On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, trans. Mark Dooley & Michael Hughes (London & New York: Routledge, 2001).
- A Taste for the Secret, with Maurizio Ferraris, trans. Giacomo Donis (Cambridge: Polity, 2001).
- The Work of Mourning, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault & Michael Naas (Chicago & London: Chicago University Press, 2001, ISBN 978-0-226-14281-4).
- Acts of Religion (New York & London: Routledge, 2002).
- Filmed Interviews, with Bernard Stiegler, trans. Jennifer Bajorek (Cambridge: Polity, 2002).
- Ethics, Institutions, and the Right to Philosophy, trans Peter Pericles Trifonas (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002).
- Interventions and Interviews, 1971—2001, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002).
- Right to Philosophy 1, trans. Jan Plug (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002).
- Without Alibi, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002).
- Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, with Jürgen Habermas (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 2003, ISBN 978-0-226-06666-0).
- The Problem of Genesis in Husserl's Philosophy, trans. Marian Hobson (Chicago & London: Chicago University Press, 2003, ISBN 978-0-226-14315-6).
- Counterpath, with Catherine Malabou, trans. David Wills (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004).
- Right to Philosophy 2, trans. Jan Plug (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004).
- A Dialogue, with Elisabeth Roudinesco, trans. Jeff Fort (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004).
- Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault & Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004).
- On Touching...Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. Christine Irizarry (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005).
- Paper Machine, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005).
- The Poetics of Paul Celan, trans. Thomas Dutoit (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005).
- That Is to Say..., trans. Laurent Milesi & Stefan Herbrechter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006).
- The Secrets of the Archive, trans. Beverly Bie Brahic (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006).
- The Last Interview, with Jean Birnbaum, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault & Michael Naas (Melville House, 2007).
- Inventions of the Other, Volume I (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007).
- Inventions of the Other, Volume II (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008).
- The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008).
- The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume I, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009, ISBN 978-0-226-14428-3).
- A Conversation on Photography, ed. and trans. Gerhard Richter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010).
- The Photographs of Jean-François Bonhomme, trans. Michael Naas (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), forthcoming.
References (works Cited) more less
- Caputo, John D. (ed.) (1997) Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida.New York: Fordham University Press. Transcritpt (which is also available here) of the Roundtable Discussion with Jacques Derrida at Villanova University, October 3, 1994. With commentary by Caputo.
- Derrida (1967) interview with Henri Ronse, republished in Positions (English edition by Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1981).
- Derrida (1971) interview with Guy Scarpetta, republished in Positions (English edition by Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1981).
- Derrida (1976) Where a Teaching Body Begins and How It Ends, republished in Who's Afraid of Philosophy?
- Derrida (1988) Afterword: Toward An Ethic of Discussion, published in the English translation of Limited Inc.
- Derrida (1989) This Strange Institution Called Literature, interview published in Acts of Literature (1991), pp.33-75
- Derrida (1990) Once Again from the Top: Of the Right to Philosophy, interview with Robert Maggiori for Libération, November 15, 1990, republished in Interviews, 1974-1994 (1995).
- Derrida (1992) Derrida's interview in The Cambridge Review 113, October 1992. Reprinted in Points...: Interviews, 1974-1994 Stanford University Press (1995) and retitled as Honoris Causa: "This is also extremely funny," pp. 399—421. Excerpt.
- Derrida (1993) Specters of Marx
- Derrida et al. (1994) roundtable discussion: Of the Humanities and Philosophical Disciplines Surfaces Vol. VI.108 (v.1.0A - 16/08/1996) - ISSN: 1188-2492 Later republished in Ethics, Institutions, and the Right to Philosophy (2002).
- Mackey (1984) with a reply by Searle. An Exchange on Deconstruction, in New York Review of Books, 2 February 1984
- Searle (1983) The Word Turned Upside Down, in The New York Review of Books October 1983
- Searle (2000) Reality Principles: An Interview with John R. Searle Reason.com February 2000 issue, accessed online on 30-08-2010
Further Reading - Works on Derrida more less
Introductory works
- Culler, Jonathan (1975) Structuralist Poetics.
- Culler, Jonathan (1983) On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism.
- Descombes, Vincent (1980) Modern French Philosophy.
- Deutscher, Penelope (2006) How to Read Derrida (ISBN 978-0-393-32879-0).
- Jameson, Fredric (1972) The Prison-House of Language.
- Leitch, Vincent B. (1983) Deconstructive Criticism: An Advanced Introduction.
- Lentricchia, Frank (1980) After the New Criticism.
- Norris, Christopher (1982) Deconstruction: Theory and Practice.
- Thomas, Michael (2006) The Reception of Derrida: Translation and Transformation.
- Wise, Christopher (2009) Derrida, Africa, and the Middle East.
- Agamben, Giorgio. "Pardes: The Writing of Potentiality," in Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, ed. and trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005. 205-19.
- Beardsworth, Richard, Derrida and the Political (ISBN 0-415-10967-1).
- Bennington, Geoffrey, Legislations (ISBN 0-86091-668-5).
- Bennington, Geoffrey, Interrupting Derrida (ISBN 0-415-22427-6).
- Caputo, John D., The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida.
- Coward, H.G. (ed) Derrida and Negative theology, SUNY 1992. ISBN 0-7914-0964-3
- de Man, Paul, "The Rhetoric of Blindness: Jacques Derrida's Reading of Rousseau," in Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, second edition, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983. 102-41.
- Foucault, Michel, "My Body, This Paper, This Fire," in Michel Foucault, History of Madness, ed. Jean Khalfa, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa, London: Routledge, 2006. 550-74.
- Gasché, Rodolphe, Inventions of Difference: On Jacques Derrida.
- Gasché, Rodolphe, The Tain of the Mirror.
- Habermas, Jürgen, "Beyond a Temporalized Philosophy of Origins: Jacques Derrida's Critique of Phonocentrism," in Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990. 161-84.
- Magliola, Robert, Derrida on the Mend, Lafayette: Purdue UP, 1984; 1986; rpt. 2000 (ISBN 0-911198-69-5). (Initiated what has become a very active area of study in Buddhology and comparative philosophy, the comparison of Derridean deconstruction and Buddhist philosophy, especially Madhyamikan and Zen Buddhist philosophy.)
- Magliola, Robert, On Deconstructing Life-Worlds: Buddhism, Christianity, Culture, Atlanta: Scholars P, American Academy of Religion, 1997; Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000 (ISBN 0-7885-0296-4). (Further develops comparison of Derridean thought and Buddhism.)
- Marder, Michael, The Event of the Thing: Derrida's Post-Deconstructive Realism, Toronto: Toronto UP, 2009. (ISBN 0-8020-9892-4)
- Miller, J. Hillis, For Derrida, New York: Fordham University Press, 2009.
- Mouffe, Chantal (ed.), Deconstruction and Pragmatism, with essays by Simon Critchley, Ernesto Laclau, Richard Rorty, and Derrida.
- Norris, Christopher, Derrida (ISBN 0-674-19823-9).
- Park, Jin Y., ed., Buddhisms and Deconstructions, Lanham: Rowland and Littlefield, 2006 (ISBN 978-0-7425-3418-6; ISBN 0-7425-3418-9). (Several of the collected papers specifically treat Derrida and Buddhist thought.)
- Rapaport, Herman, Later Derrida (ISBN 0-415-94269-1).
- Rorty, Richard, "From Ironist Theory to Private Allusions: Derrida," in Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. 121-37.
- Roudinesco, Elisabeth, Philosophy in Turbulent Times: Canguilhem, Sartre, Foucault, Althusser, Deleuze, Derrida, Columbia University Press, New York, 2008.
- Sallis, John (ed.), Deconstruction and Philosophy, with essays by Rodolphe Gasché, John D. Caputo, Robert Bernasconi, David Wood, and Derrida.
- Smith, James K. A., Jacques Derrida: Live Theory.
- Sprinker, Michael, ed. Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx, London and New York: Verso, 1999; rpt. 2008. (Includes Derrida's reply, "Marx & Sons.")
- Stiegler, Bernard, "Derrida and Technology: Fidelity at the Limits of Deconstruction and the Prosthesis of Faith," in Tom Cohen (ed.), Jacques Derrida and the Humanities (ISBN 0-521-62565-3).
- Wood, David (ed.), Derrida: A Critical Reader.
Archival collections
- Guide to the Jacques Derrida Papers. Special Collections and Archives, The UC Irvine Libraries, Irvine, California.
- Guide to the Saffa Fathy Video Recordings of Jacques Derrida Lectures. Special Collections and Archives, The UC Irvine Libraries, Irvine, California.
Online texts and excerpts
- Excerpt from Of Grammatology
- Excerpt from Archive Fever
- "Speech and writing according to Hegel"
- Excerpt from "Différance"
- "Letter to a Japanese Friend"
- "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences"
- Excerpt from "Signature, Event, Context"
- Excerpt from "Plato's Pharmacy"
- Excerpt from "Psyche"
- La Différance
- Signature, Événement, Context
- Béliers
- Fichus
Interviews
- "9/11 and Global Terrorism: A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida," excerpt from Philosophy in a Time of Terror — Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida by Giovanna Borradori
- "Excuse me, but I never said exactly so"
- Interview with Nikhil Padgaonkar
- Interview with Michael Ben-Naftali, Shoah Resource Center
- Interview with Jean Birnbaum
- Interview with Didier Éribon
- Interview with Jean-Luc Nancy
- Derrida: Artaud et ses doubles. Interview with Jean-Michel Olivier
- Interview with Robert Maggiori
About
- BOOKS AND CONTRIBUTIONS TO BOOKS (up to 2001), Bibliography and translations list Compiled by Eddie Yeghiayan
- Derrida's Garden by Eleanor Morgan in Fillip
- Jacques Derrida Faculty profile at European Graduate School Biography, bibliography, photos and video lectures
- Entry by Leonard Lawlor in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Entry by Jack Reynolds in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- All Derrida in French and Spanish
- Passings: Taking Derrida Seriously
- Jacques Derrida, Stanford Presidential Lectures in the Humanities and Arts
- Jacques Derrida, Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory
- Jacques Derrida as a Philosopher of Education, Encyclopaedia of Philosophy of Education
- Jacques Derrida on Rhetoric and Composition: A Conversation, JAC
- Site Jacques Derrida in French
- Nietzsche y Jacques Derrida, la voluntad de ilusión y la metafora blanca, by Adolfo Vasquez Rocca
- Derrida and Dua by Ali Altaf Mian
- German Law Journal Special Issue on Jacques Derrida
- Blair, Jonathan. Event, Politics: Recovering the Political in the Work of Jacques Derrida ". TELOS 141 (Winter 2007). New York: Telos Press
- " Derrida the DVD," by Said Shirazi
Media
- New York University. New York Remembers Derrida New York University. Video. January 21, 2005
- Mitchell Stephens. Deconstructing Jacques Derrida Los Angeles Times Magazine. July 21, 1991
- Mitchell Stephens. Jacques Derrida and Deconstruction New York Times Magazine. January 23, 1994
- Facsimile of Theodor W. Adorno Prize for Prof. Dr. Jacques Derrida. Frankfurt am Main (Germany), September 22, 2001
- Jacques Derrida in Memoriam
- Carole Dely. Jacques Derrida : The perchance of a Coming of the Otherwoman. The Deconstruction of Phallogocentrism from Duel to Duo Sens Public International Web Journal (tr. Wilson Baldridge) 2006
- Alexandra de Hoop Scheffer. Philosophy in a Time of Terror : Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida Sens Public International Web Journal. 2007
- Scritti Politti A song on the album Songs to Remember August 1982
This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Jacques Derrida", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0
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