Of Grammatology

by Jacques Derrida, Gayatri Spivak

Overview

The deconstruction bombshell that rocked the Anglophone world.

Jacques Derrida’s revolutionary approach to phenomenology, psychoanalysis, structuralism, linguistics, and indeed the entire European tradition of philosophy—called deconstruction—changed the face of criticism. It provoked a questioning of philosophy, literature, and the human sciences that these disciplines would have previously considered improper. Forty years after Of Grammatology first appeared in English, Derrida still ignites controversy, thanks in part to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s careful translation, which attempted to capture the richness and complexity of the original.

This fortieth anniversary edition, where a mature Spivak retranslates with greater awareness of Derrida’s legacy, also includes a new afterword by her which supplements her influential original preface. Judith Butler has added an introduction. All references in the work have been updated. One of contemporary criticism’s most indispensable works, Of Grammatology is made even more accessible and usable by this new release.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781421414720
Publisher:	Johns Hopkins University Press
Publication date:	10/17/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	456
File size:	2 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) taught at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris and the University of California, Irvine.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is University Professor at Columbia University.

Judith Butler is the Hannah Arendt Chair at the European Graduate School.

Table of Contents

Introduction Judith Butler vii

Acknowledgments xxv

Translator's Preface xxvii

Foreword cxiii

Part 1 Writing Before the Letter Exergue 3

1 The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing 6

The Program 7

The Signifier and Truth 11

The Written Being/The Being Written 19

2 Linguistics and Grammatology 29

The Outside and the Inside 32

The Outside Is the Inside 47

The Hinge [La Brisure] 71

3 Of Grammatology as a Positive Science 80

Algebra: Arcanum and Transparence 81

Science and the Name of Man 88

The Rebus and the Complicity of Origins 94

Part 2 Nature, Culture, Writing

Introduction to the "Epoch of Rousseau" 105

1 The Violence of the Letter: From Levi-Strauss to Rousseau 109

The Battle of Proper Names 115

Writing and Man's Exploitation by Man 128

2 "…That Dangerous Supplement…" 153

From/Of Blindness to the Supplement 156

The Chain or Supplements 166

The Exorbitant. Question of Method 171

3 Genesis and Structure of the Essay on the Origin of Languages 179

I The Place of the Essay 179

Writing, Political Evil, and Linguistic Evil 182

The Present Debate: The Economy of Pity 186

The Initial Debate and the Composition of the Essay 208

II Imitation 212

The Interval and the Supplement 212

The Engraving and the Ambiguities of Formalism 217

The Turn of Writing 235

III Articulation 250

"That Movement of the Wand…" 250

The Inscription of the Origin 264

The Neume 269

That "Simple Movement of the Finger." Writing and the Prohibition of Incest 278

4 From/Of the Supplement to the Source: The Theory of Writing 293

The Originary Metaphor 294

The History and System of Scripts 305

The Alphabet and Absolute Representation 321

The Theorem and the Theater 329

The Supplement of (at) the Origin 341

Afterword Gayatri Chakravorry Spivak 345

Notes 369

Index 429

What People are Saying About This

J. Hillis Miller

One of the major works in the development of contemporary criticism and philosophy.

— J. Hillis Miller, Yale University

Editorial Reviews

One of contemporary criticism’s most indispensable works, Of Grammatology is made even more accessible and usable by this new release.
—About Education

We should be grateful to have this distinguished book in our hands. Very lucid and extremely useful.
—New York Review of Books

There is cause for rejoicing in the translation of De la grammatologie.
—New Republic

Reading Derrida was the shock of a decentering, the critical shift into a world of the interminable movement of difference, the crisis of any closure. Of Grammatology was and remains the most tightly worked . . . and exemplary . . . demonstration of the science of this shift and crisis.
—Canto

The tool-kit for anyone who wants to empty the 'presence' out of any text he has taken a dislike to. A handy arsenal of deconstructive tools are to be found in its pages, and the technique, once learnt, is as simple, and as destructive, as leaving a bomb in a brown paper bag outside (or inside) a pub.
—Notes and Queries

One of the major works in the development of contemporary criticism and philosophy.
—J. Hillis Miller, Yale University

From the Publisher

"There is cause for rejoicing in the translation of De la grammatologie."

New Republic

"Reading Derrida was the shock of a decentering, the critical shift into a world of the interminable movement of difference, the crisis of any closure. Of Grammatology was and remains the most tightly worked... and exemplary... demonstration of the science of this shift and crisis."

Canto

"We should be grateful to have this distinguished book in our hands. Very lucid and extremely useful."

New York Review of Books

"The tool-kit for anyone who wants to empty the 'presence' out of any text he has taken a dislike to. A handy arsenal of deconstructive tools are to be found in its pages, and the technique, once learnt, is as simple, and as destructive, as leaving a bomb in a brown paper bag outside (or inside) a pub."

Notes and Queries

"One of the major works in the development of contemporary criticism and philosophy."

J. Hillis Miller

"One of contemporary criticism’s most indispensable works, Of Grammatology is made even more accessible and usable by this new release."

Teresa Burga

There is cause for rejoicing in the translation of De la grammatologie... Just as Derrida discloses in Rousseau a writer who distrusts writing and longs for the proximity of the self to its voice, so Spivak approaches Derrida through the structure of his diction; no ideas but in the words themselves.

New Republic - Denis Donoghue

The tool-kit for anyone who wants to empty the 'presence' out of any text he has taken a dislike to. A handy arsenal of deconstructive tools are to be found in its pages, and the technique, once learnt, is as simple, and as destructive, as leaving a bomb in a brown paper bag outside (or inside) a pub.

Notes and Queries - Roger Poole

The translation is a noble job, and we should be grateful to have this distinguished book in our hands... [Spivak's] situating of Derrida among his precursors—Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, Husserl—and contemporaries—Lacan, Foucault, and the elusive animal known as structuralism—is very lucid and extremely useful.

New York Review of Books - Michael Wood