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Throughout his long career, Jacques Derrida had a close, collaborative relationship with Critical Inquiry and its editors. He saved some of his most important essays for the journal, and he relished the ensuing arguments and polemics that stemmed from the responses to his writing that Critical Inquiry encouraged. Collecting the best of Derrida’s work that was published in the journal between 1980 and 2002, Signature Derrida provides a remarkable introduction to the philosopher and the evolution of his thought.

 

These essays define three significant “periods” in Derrida’s writing: his early, seemingly revolutionary phase; a middle stage, often autobiographical, that included spirited defense of his work; and his late period, when his persona as a public intellectual was prominent, and he wrote on topics such as animals and religion. The first period is represented by essays like “The Law of Genre,” in which Derrida produces a kind of phenomenological narratology. Another essay, “The Linguistic Circle of Geneva,” embodies the second, presenting deconstructionism at its best: Derrida shows that what was imagined to be an epistemological break in the study of linguistics was actually a repetition of earlier concepts. The final period of Derrida’s writing includes the essays “Of Spirit” and “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow),” and three eulogies to the intellectual legacies of Michel Foucault, Louis Marin, and Emmanuel Lévinas, in which Derrida uses the ideas of each thinker to push forward the implications of their theories.

 

With an introduction by Francoise Meltzer that provides an overview of the oeuvre of this singular philosopher, Signature Derrida is the most wide-ranging, and thus most representative, anthology of Derrida’s work to date.

In Speech and Phenomena, Jacques Derrida situates the philosophy of language in relation to logic and rhetoric, which have often been seen as irreconcilable criteria for the use and interpretations of signs. His critique of Husserl attacks the position that language is founded on logic rather than on rhetoric; instead, he claims, meaningful language is limited to expression because expression alone conveys sense. Derrida's larger project is to confront phenomenology with the tradition it has so often renounced--the tradition of Western metaphysics.

Nietzsche has recently enjoyed much scrutiny from the nouveaux critiques. Jacques Derrida, the leader of that movement, here combines in his strikingly original and incisive fashion questions of sexuality, politics, writing, judgment, procreation, death, and even the weather into a far-reaching analysis of the challenges bequeathed to the modern world by Nietzsche.

Spurs, then, is aptly titled, for Derrida's "deconstructions" of Nietzsche's meanings will surely act as spurs to further thought and controversy. This dual-language edition offers the English-speaking reader who has some knowledge of French an opportunity to examine the stylistic virtuosity of Derrida's writing—of particular significance for his analysis of "the question of style."

Nietzsche has recently enjoyed much scrutiny from the nouveaux critiques. Jacques Derrida, the leader of that movement, here combines in his strikingly original and incisive fashion questions of sexuality, politics, writing, judgment, procreation, death, and even the weather into a far-reaching analysis of the challenges bequeathed to the modern world by Nietzsche.

Spurs, then, is aptly titled, for Derrida's "deconstructions" of Nietzsche's meanings will surely act as spurs to further thought and controversy. This dual-language edition offers the English-speaking reader who has some knowledge of French an opportunity to examine the stylistic virtuosity of Derrida's writing—of particular significance for his analysis of "the question of style."

Strategies of Deconstruction was first published in 1991. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

In the past two decades, the "movement" of deconstruction has bad tremendous impact on a number of academic, disciplines in the United States. However, its force has been rather limited in the field of philosophy, despite the fact that in Europe the practice of deconstruction emerged in the work of philosophers. Although the reasons for this can be debated, two of the more obvious explanations are the mainstream Anglo-American philosophers rarely studied the German and French philosophical traditions in great detail, and deconstruction's focus on discourse and interpretation has made it more attractive to the literary and humanistic disciplines.

With this context, Strategies of Deconstruction focuses on the early work of Jacques Derrida, the French philosopher who introduced deconstruction in Speech and Phenomena,his study of Edmund Husserl, and Of Grammatology, and whose philosophical reputation stems in no small part from his work on Husserl. In examining the philosophical import of Derrida's theories of reading, text, and language, specifically as they related to Speech and Phenomena,J. Claude Evans makes careful reference to Husserl's own texts. His analysis indicates that there are many systematic irregularities in Derrida's study and that without those irregularities Derrida's conclusions cannot be substantiated.