Of Grammatology by Jacques Derrida

“Reading Derrida was the shock and the crucial shift into a world that is inexorably moving of difference, the crisis at any closure. Grammatology is the best and most exemplary demonstration of the science and art of this crisis and shift. Canto is the tool-kit for anyone looking to remove the ‘presence’ from any text they dislike. It contains a handy set of tools for deconstructive work. Once you have mastered the technique, it is as easy and destructive as leaving a bomb outside (or inside) a pub. Roger Poole, Notes and Queries. The translation is a noble task, and we should be thankful to have this book in our hands… Spivak’s [Spivaks] placing of Derrida among his precursors — Freud Freud, Heidegger and Husserl — and contemporaries (Lacan, Foucault and the mysterious animal known as structuralism) is very clear and extremely useful. “The tool-kit that anyone needs to get rid of the ‘presence,’ of any text they dislike. It contains a handy set of tools for deconstructive work. Once you have mastered the technique, it is as easy and destructive as leaving a bomb outside (or inside) a pub. Roger Poole, Notes and Queries. The translation is a noble task, and we should be thankful to have this book in our hands… Spivak’s [Spivaks] placing of Derrida among his precursors — Freud Freud, Heidegger and Husserl — and contemporaries (Lacan, Foucault and the mysterious animal known as structuralism) is very clear and extremely useful. “The tool-kit that anyone needs to get rid of the ‘presence,’ of any text they dislike. It contains a handy set of tools for deconstructive work. Once you have mastered the technique, it is as easy and destructive as leaving a bomb outside (or inside) a pub. Roger Poole, Notes and Queries. The translation is a noble task, and we should be thankful to have this book in our hands… Spivak’s [Spivaks] placing of Derrida among his precursors — Freud Freud, Heidegger and Husserl — and contemporaries (Lacan, Foucault and the mysterious animal known as structuralism) is very clear and extremely useful. “The tool-kit that anyone needs to get rid of the ‘presence,’ of any text they dislike. It contains a handy set of tools for deconstructive work. Once you have mastered the technique, it is as easy and destructive as leaving a bomb outside (or inside) a pub. Roger Poole, Notes and Queries. The translation is a noble task, and we should be thankful to have this book in our hands… Spivak’s [Spivaks] placing of Derrida among his precursors — Freud Freud, Heidegger and Husserl — and contemporaries (Lacan, Foucault and the mysterious animal known as structuralism) is very clear and extremely useful. “The tool-kit that anyone needs to get rid of the ‘presence,’ of any text they dislike. It contains a handy set of tools for deconstructive work. Once you have mastered the technique, it is as easy and destructive as leaving a bomb outside (or inside) a pub. Roger Poole, Notes and Queries. “The translation is a noble task, and we should be thankful to have this book in our hands… Spivak’s] placing of Derrida among his precursors — Freud Freud, Heidegger and Husserl — and contemporaries (Lacan, Foucault and the mysterious animal known as structuralism) is very lucid and extremely helpful.” –Michael Wood (New York Review of Books)
Jacques Derrida is a French philosopher who has had a profound impact on the French critic scene. His ideas on reading and writing, his idea of de-construction, his reinterpretations and interpretations of phenomenology and psychoanalysis, as well as structuralism, have had a profound influence on the American and European critics. This has prompted lively debate. “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. Both stem from the unscientific metaphysics that is present in time, he argues. Derrida’s role in exposing common assumptions shared by litigants raises the importance of this role.
This is not the French scene. Derrida is able to find his place in the most lucid European intellectual atradition, the ‘critique’ as it exists in the Kantian sense. As Derrida’s work progresses, he explains the possibility that his own work might be challenged by the most radical aspects of his thought. Some literary critics are baffled by Derrida’s philosophical background. The long, critical preface of the translator places him in the Hegel, Neitzsche and Husserl lines. It also explains his relationship to illustrious contemporaries such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan. It also explains some terms that have been incorporated into Derridean criticism.