Influential enough to have affected the entire French critical scene, Jacques Derrida has been hailed as the most important philosopher in France today. His ideas of reading and writing, his notion of de-construction, his reinterpretations of phenomenology, of psychoanalysis, and of structuralism have profoundly influenced the vanguard of European and American criticism and have occasioned lively controversy. "Without a knowledge of Grammatology the American scholar has a simply inaccurate view of the French critical advance-guard,"Spivak writes". For in the final analysis, Derrida, even as he questions the notion of 'correction', corrects the common assumption of the two mutually opposed French critical tendencies-phenomenology and structuralism. He argues that both spring from the view of time fostered by the necessarily unscientific metaphysics of presence. This role of exposing the common assumption shared by combatants in a controversy raises Derrida's importance above merely the French scene. Derrida finds his place in the most clear-sighted European intellectual atradition of the 'critique' in the Kantian sense." As his work progresses, Derrida elaborates the risk that even his own work would be questioned by the most radical elements of his thought. Derrida's philosophical background baffles some literary critics. The translator's long critical preface places him within the lineage of Hegel, Neitzsche, Husserl, Freud, and Heidegger and illuminates his relationship with illustrious contemporaries like Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault. It also explicates some terms that have passed into the common currency of Derridean criticism. Review "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." --Roger Poole, Notes and Queries"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." --Michael Wood, New York Review of Books About the Author Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) taught at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Texas at Austin.
