Of Grammatology

by Jacques Derrida, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Translator), Judith Butler (Foreword by)

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:	9781421419961
Publisher:	Johns Hopkins University Press
Publication date:	01/29/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	560
File size:	1 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 by Judith Butler
Acknowledgments
Translator's Preface
Foreword
Part One
Exergue
1. The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing
The Program
The Signifier and Truth
The Written Being / The Being Written
2. Linguistics and Grammatology
The Outside and the Inside
The Outside Is the Inside
The Hinge [La Brisure]
3. Of Grammatology as a Positive Science
Algebra
Science and the Name of Man
The Rebus and the Complicity of Origins
Part Two
Introduction to the "Epoch of Rousseau"
1. The Violence of the Letter
The Battle of Proper Names
Writing and Man's Exploitation by Man
2. ". . . That Dangerous Supplement . . ."
From/Of Blindness to the Supplement
The Chain of Supplements
The Exorbitant. Question of Method
3. Genesis and Structure of the Essay on the Origin of Languages
I. The Place of the Essay
Writing, Political Evil, and Linguistic Evil
The Present Debate
The Initial Debate and the Composition of the Essay
II. Imitation
The Interval and the Supplemen
The Engraving and the Ambiguities of Formalism
The Turn of Writing
III. Articulation
"That Movement of the Wand . . ."
The Inscription of the Origin
The Neume
That "Simple Movement of the Finger." Writing and the Prohibition of Incest
4. From/Of the Supplement to the Source
The Originary Metaphor
The History and System of Scripts
The Alphabet and Absolute Representation
The Theorem and the Theater
The Supplement of (at) the Origin
Afterword, by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Notes
Index

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

The translation is a noble job, and we should be gratdful to have this distinguished book in our hands. -- New York Review of Books

Michael Wood

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

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

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

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

About Education

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

New Republic

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

J. Hillis Miller

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