Derrida: A Critical Reader

by David Wood

Jacques Derrida's prolific output has been the delight (and sometimes the despair) of philosophers and literary theorists for over twenty years. His influence on the way we read theoretical texts continues to be profound. No serious contemporary thinker can fail to come to terms with deconstruction and there have been a number of monographs devoted to his work. Very few, however, have combined a critical edge with a detailed knowledge of his writing. The contributors to this volume were each asked - in the most positive sense - to take just such a critical approach. There are substantive papers by Jean-Luc Nancy, Manfred Frank, John Sallis, Robert Bernasconi, Irene Harvey, Michel Haar, Christopher Norris, Geoff Bennington, John Llewelyn and an introduction by David Wood.

311 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1991

About the author

David Wood teaches Continental Philosophy at the University of Warwick, where he is Director of the Centre for Research in Philosophy and Literature. He is the author of Exceedingly Nietzsche (1988) and The Provocation of Levinas (1988), editor of Writing the Future (1990), and co-editor of Philosopher's Poets (1990), all published by Routledge.

Reviews

[Ioana Fotache · Rating 1 out of 5]

Philosophy is a rabbit hole in which one critiques another in an endless series of referentiality. How far down the rabbit hole can one go before producing entirely incomprehensible language? How much can one quote philosophers and mental exercises in foreign languages before the text loses all traces of linguistic unity and comprehensibility? How many critics to criticism can an academic make before one cannot know what he is even referencing anymore.
This book(or should I call it meta-book) is a brilliant thought exercise in this direction. Unfortunately, its brilliance is its own demise, as the reader is left entirely perplexed - if anything, he finishes this text knowing even less about it than he did before he started.