Derrida, Heidegger, Blanchot: Sources of Derrida's Notion and Practice of Literature

by Timothy Clark

Jacques Derrida is undoubtedly one of the foremost figures in the development of twentienth-century literary theory. The school of 'deconstruction' that has grown out of his work has been either absorbed into the corpus of modern literary theory, or criticized for its departures from the original texts of Derrida in whose name it is practised. Timothy Clark's innovative book traces instead sources of Derrida's practice of 'literature' as a form of philosophical thinking, in the work of Heidegger and Blanchot. It offers a welcome stylistic clarity in a field beleaguered by its philosophical and linguistic difficulty. Clark gives close readings of key texts including Heidegger's Conversation on a Country Path, Blanchot's L'attente l'oubli, and Derrida's Pas and Signsponge, and widens the scope of his discussion of philosophical cultivation of 'literary' forms to include in addition the issues of creativity, influence and responsibility as they appear in the work of Lyotard and Levinas.

236 pages, Hardcover

First published July 31, 1992

About the author

Timothy Clark is a specialist in the environmental humanities and deconstruction.


Professor Clark's current work is engaged in the ways in which many environmental issues could be said to deconstruct some of the bases of modern Western thought. Crucial questions are: whether it makes sense to extend notions of "rights" beyond humanity; the challenge of representing environmental issues that elude the normal scales of human thought and perception; the status of personification, metaphor, emotive language and the literal in environmentalist writing; the possibility or impossibility of thinking or writing non-anthropocentrically; the limits of modes of oppositional politics for addressing environmental issues; the evasion of climate change in ecocriticism itself; the question of whether the predominantly liberal and seemingly "progressive" modes of current literary criticism are still tied to an essentially destructive understanding of the human species....?.

Clark has been a leading figure in the development of new modes of literary criticism engaged with the intellectual revolution inseparable from thinking of climate change. His recent The Value of Ecocriticism (Cambridge University Press, 2019) was "Book of the Week" in the "Times Higher Educational Supplement" for June 20th 2019.

Professor Clark has published many articles in literary and philosophical journals and eight monographs. These are Embodying Revolution: The Figure of the Poet in Shelley (Oxford UP, 1989); Derrida, Heidegger, Blanchot: Sources of Derrida's Notion and Practice of Literature (Cambridge UP, 1992, 2008); The Theory of Inspiration: Composition as a Crisis of Subjectivity in Romantic and Post-Romantic Writing (Manchester UP, 1997, 2000); Charles Tomlinson (Northcote House, 1999); Martin Heidegger, Routledge Critical Thinkers Series (Routledge, 2001, second ed. 2012); The Poetics of Singularity: The Counter-Culturalist Turn in Heidegger, Derrida, Blanchot and the Later Gadamer (Edinburgh UP, 2005); The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment (Cambridge, 2011); Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept (London Bloomsbury, 2015). He has recently edited a special of The Oxford Literary Review (38.1; July 2016) on the controversial issue of overpopulation.

Professor Clark's work has been translated into Turkish, Swedish, Hebrew, Japanese, Chinese and Arabic.