By Leslie Hill
Few thinkers of the latter 1/2 the 20 th century have so profoundly and significantly reworked our figuring out of writing and literature as Jacques Derrida (1930-2004). Derridian deconstruction continues to be some of the most strong highbrow hobbies of the current century, and Derrida's personal cutting edge writings on literature and philosophy are crucially proper for any realizing of the way forward for literature and literary feedback this day. Derrida's personal demeanour of writing is complicated and hard and has usually been misrepresented or misunderstood. during this booklet, Leslie Hill offers an available advent to Derrida's writings on literature which presupposes no earlier wisdom of Derrida's paintings. He explores intimately Derrida's courting to literary concept and feedback, and provides shut readings of a few of Derrida's top recognized essays. This creation can assist these coming to Derrida's paintings for the 1st time, and indicates extra instructions to soak up learning this highly influential philosopher.
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Additional info for The Cambridge Introduction to Jacques Derrida (Cambridge Introductions to Literature)
Sample text
In a way, the two texts were oddly reversible. At the same time, their appearance on the same page in contrasting fonts, as well as emphasising similarity, also drew attention to their differences. Moreover the two quotations were presented not as two exactly counterposed specimens, but asymmetrically, with Plato occupying more space than Mallarm´e, and with Mallarm´e making inroads on at least some of the space Plato might otherwise have assumed to be his own. There was on Derrida’s part a point to all of this.
Was it inside Plato’s thought or outside it, inside Mallarm´e’s poetry or outside it? And might it not turn out, as Derrida had argued in the mysterious case of those infelicitous or failed performatives, that what appeared to be outside was in fact already inside (M, 387; 325), and that neither inside nor outside could therefore be opposed (as text v. reality, language v. world, essence v. context, necessity v. chance) in the manner assumed to be self-evident by traditional metaphysics along with most conventional literary criticism and theory?
There was on Derrida’s part a point to all of this. It marked a refusal to endorse that long-standing conception of ‘philosophy’ and ‘literature’ that treats them as adversaries: with the one being devoted to the proper pursuit of original, authentic truth, while the other is forced to make do with those second-hand copies of truth, the false, the fictitious, the inauthentic, and the counterfeit. Admittedly, this was a hierarchy Derrida was not about to reverse, since to do so without dismantling its structure would serve merely to confirm it.