Synopses & Reviews
Throughout his long career, Jacques Derrida had a close, collaborative relationship with Critical Inquiry and its editors. He saved some of his most important essays for the journal, and he relished the ensuing arguments and polemics that stemmed from the responses to his writing that Critical Inquiry encouraged. Collecting the best of Derridaandrsquo;s work that was published in the journal between 1980 and 2002, Signature Derrida provides a remarkable introduction to the philosopher and the evolution of his thought.and#160;These essays define three significant andldquo;periodsandrdquo; in Derridaandrsquo;s writing: his early, seemingly revolutionary phase; a middle stage, often autobiographical, that included spirited defense of his work; and his late period, when his persona as a public intellectual was prominent, and he wrote on topics such as animals and religion. The first period is represented by essays like andldquo;The Law of Genre,andrdquo; in which Derrida produces a kind of phenomenological narratology. Another essay, andldquo;The Linguistic Circle of Geneva,andrdquo; embodies the second, presenting deconstructionism at its best: Derrida shows that what was imagined to be an epistemological break in the study of linguistics was actually a repetition of earlier concepts. The final period of Derridaandrsquo;s writing includes the essays andldquo;Of Spiritandrdquo; andand#160;andldquo;The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow),andrdquo; and three eulogies to the intellectual legacies of Michel Foucault, Louis Marin, and Emmanuel Landeacute;vinas, in which Derrida uses the ideas of each thinker to push forward the implications of their theories.and#160;With an introduction by Francoise Meltzer that provides an overview of the oeuvre of this singular philosopher, Signature Derrida is the most wide-ranging, and thus most representative, anthology of Derridaandrsquo;s work to date.
About the Author
Jacques Derrida (1930and#8211;2004) was director of studies at the and#201;cole des hautes and#233;tudes en sciences sociales, Paris, and professor of humanities at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of many books published by the University of Chicago Press.Franand#231;oise Meltzer is the Edward Carson Waller Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, where she is also professor at the Divinity School and in the College, and chair of the Department of Comparative Literature. Meltzer is the author of five books, most recently of Seeing Double: Baudelaireand#8217;s Modernity, and a coeditor of the journal Critical Inquiry.