Re: misc responses

Hi Angus,

You might want to navigate around
http://www.hydra.umn.edu/derrida/index.html. It's a wonderful collection of
excerpts, thoughts, recent writings, film clips and a bunch of other stuff
related to Derrida's work. There's some excellent stuff at the *Glasweb*
there. It's not exactly introductory, but it's entertaining and provocative.

For the purely general introduction, there are two small but fun books --
*Introducing Derrida* by Jeff Collins and Bill Mayblin, from Totem Books and
*Derrida for Beginners* by Jim Powell from Writers and Readers Publishing.
Both of them have good basic information and lots of fun drawings.

For a clear and fairly introductory, first hand explication of Derrida's
relationship to reading literature, check out his interview with Derek
Attridge, entitled "This Strange Institution Called Literature" in *Acts of
Literature*, published by Routledge in 1992. This volume also includes some
(though not all) of Derrida's readings on Joyce and his provocative reading
of Kafka's "Before the Law."

Daniel,

Your mention of "his original thesis" called to mind Derrida's early essay on
origins and sources, "Qual Quelle: Valery's Sources." It's in his *Margins
of Philosophy*, U. of Chicago, 1989. In some ways, Derrida's work actually
begins with the question of origins -- his first extended philosophical work
is a reading of Husserl, focusing particularly on that philosopher's *The
Origin of Geometry* and the question of signs and beginnings. It's called
*Speech and Phenomena* and was published in 1973 by Northwestern University
Press. His first major work, *Of Grammatology,* includes a lengthy reading
of Rousseau's "Essay on the Origin of Languages." And finally, and much more
recently, the question of origin is rethought in terms of culture and
language education in his "Monolingualism of the Other or The Prosthesis of
Origin," published in book form by Stanford University Press in 1998. Check
it out.

Jim,

Of course, I was not treating "decon." like any sort of trick with my
throwaway line (borrowed from Gayatri Spivak) about deconstruction (and
reading) being interminable, like housework. I was simply making a point
about it being an ongoing process of thought. Indeed, as Derrida says often
concerning "deconstruction" nowadays, it is a word whose fortunes have
disagreeably surprised him. His thesis defense -- "The Time of a Thesis:
Punctuations" given on June 2, 1980 at the Sorbonne -- spells out the history
of his own much more diverse project quite clearly and speaks strongly in
terms of his thoroughgoing relationship to reading literature as well as the
history of philosophy.

Thanks all,

--John

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Received on Wed Dec 11 18:06:06 2002