Of Grammatology |  | Author: Jacques Derrida
Creator: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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Rating:  28 reviews
Sales Rank: 67367
Media: Paperback
Edition: Corrected
Pages: 456
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 8.9 x 5.7 x 1.1
ISBN: 0801858305
Dewey Decimal Number: 401
EAN: 9780801858307
ASIN: 0801858305
Publication Date: January 8, 1998
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Product Description
"One of the major works in the development of contemporary criticism and philosophy." -- J. Hillis Miller, Yale University Jacques Derrida's revolutionary theories about deconstruction, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and structuralism, first voiced in the 1960s, forever changed the face of European and American criticism. The ideas in De la grammatologie sparked lively debates in intellectual circles that included students of literature, philosophy, and the humanities, inspiring these students to ask questions of their disciplines that had previously been considered improper. Thirty years later, the immense influence of Derrida's work is still igniting controversy, thanks in part to Gayatri Spivak's translation, which captures the richness and complexity of the original. This corrected edition adds a new index of the critics and philosophers cited in the text and makes one of contemporary criticism's most indispensable works even more accessible and usable.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 28
 Incomprehensible Gibberish January 6, 2010
A. Knepper (Maryland)
4 out of 6 found this review helpful
It's okay to not understand Derrida. He's not saying anything in particular. He writes to make himself look impressive and to stroke the egos of those who pretend to understand him, not to clarify or reveal. Alas, I cannot even review the meaning of the text, because if we are to believe Derrida, texts have no stable meaning. So what's the point? Read into it what you want to.
The original idea behind deconstruction is somewhat intriguing and dates back at least to Plato's Euthypro, where Socrates "deconstructs" in so many words the meaning of virtue. But he never denied that it could be defined: only that we too often use words arbitrarily and that we ought to watch out for that.
But while Socrates tried to elucidate, Derrida tries to obfuscate. Don't worry if you can't understand a word Derrida is saying: he's not saying anything. As a writer, I have learned that rule #1 of professionalism is that if your reader doesn't know what you're trying to say, it's always your fault. Derrida's intellectual clique won't approve of the rest of us calling out his sophistry, but that's what it is, kids: nonsense.
Highly recommended as a crash course in how not to write.
 Magnificent July 3, 2009
Mr. Steiner (New York)
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
Gayatri Chekravorty Spivak has done justice to this famous (some would say infamous) work of philosophy and literary theory. Derrida's Grammatology exploded like an intellectual bomb in American and European literary circles upon its publication, and it has remained the source of considerable debate and often vituperative outrage within the halls of academe. Derrida questions the Western privileging of speech over writing through a deconstruction of modern structuralism. A sustained and nuanced reading of Saussure, Levi-Strauss, and Rousseau reveals an ethnocentrism and logocentrism determined by a classical metaphysical understanding of being as presence. But Derrida proposes the centrality of the play of absence and presence as the horizon of significance and meaning, of 'Differance.' With a collapsing of the clean Saussurean distinction between the signifier and the signified, Derrida presents the 'gramme,' the mark, as a productive force in signification. "A writing that breaks with the phone radically is perhaps the most rational and effective of scientific machines; it no longer responds to any desire or rather it signifies its death to desire. It was what already operated within speech as writing and machine. It is the represented in its pure state, without the represented, or without the order of the represendted naturally linked to it." 'Of Grammatology is a crucially significant development in 20th century thought. A knowledge of Heidegger, Freud, Nietzsche, Plato, Rousseau, Saussure, and Levi-Strauss is assumed.
The problematization of writing March 30, 2007
Flubjub (South Bend IN USA)
6 out of 9 found this review helpful
Derrida's thought is the primary reason why I inevitably feel an urge to put quotation marks around so many of the conceptual labels in my own writing; he initiates a needful misgiving: Do we really know what we are speaking about when we attempt to speak philosophically? Or is our language so subverted, displaced, and otherwise (blindly) ideological that a lot of the theoretical malarkey that academics put forth just seems to beg the age-old questions of knowledge, truth, meaning, etc.? But wait. We shouldn't lose sight of the fact that Derrida's writing shies away, almost essentially, from authoritative positioning in such matters because his own writing is subject to the same blind alleys and provisionalism that all writing is. In this respect, his writing is always, in a way, winking and playful, but admittedly in an rigorous and sometimes difficult way.
Is this book difficult? Yes, you bet it is! But I assure you that it's is as close to entry-level Derrida as any other book written by him. I first encountered the thinking of Derrida in a very watered-down gloss on his theory in postmodernist primer; this intrigued me to pursue him further, to read such things as Beginner's Guides and Short Introductions (which I definitely recommend to those who have either no prior experience with him or no great familiarity with the other thinkers he addresses in Of Grammatology--Saussure, Rousseau, etc.). Of course, you'll discover that these tidy little intros can be oversimplifying in places, but they at least get you to the general neighborhood before your set out on your own.
Derrida's writing, because of its inherent need for argumentative clarity and rigor, can at times be difficult to decipher; therefore, do not obsess over every sentence; the overall meaning of the argument is much more important and often becomes clearer if you just plow through difficult passages.
Every writing, especially philosophical writing, and even of course Derrida's, is by nature ideological; it works outward from a set of assumptions. There is no other alternative. We cannot start from scratch, from some dreamed-of ground zero where there is no preceding meaning and out of which we may deduce all the truths of the universe. Derrida's ideological vantage is then what appealed to me about him; perhaps never in black and white, but always and everywhere his thinking seems to question authoritative accounts, seeks to expand upon the marginalized element in any discourse, and foregrounds the difficulty in making large and almost mathematical pronouncements in philosophical and other supradisciplinary affairs. These are certain dispositions which align with my own particular perspective, and if they have some resonance with you, and if you come to Derrida having completed a little homework and bringing along a good dose of patience and effort, then you'll likely find this book rewarding as well.
A final note on the opposing opinion: Although there is no one camp of thinkers or philosophers which opposes Derrida's thought for one and only one reason, some of the most vocal of his detractors (and I will temporarily assume their voice here) regard him as a proponent of relativism or an attempted (but miserably failed) assassin of the western philosophical tradition. They are less skeptical of a fundamental faith in the general structures of meaning and in the rudimentary capabilities of the rational mind to attain to some variety of truth, however limited. Also, opponents often regard Derrida as a kind of interloper in the field of philosophy, that he should putter around with his obscurantist games in the narrow field of literary theory where he belongs. Therefore, if Plato, Descartes, and Locke seem like more feasible philosophical pursuits, Derrida probably (1) won't convert you and (2) won't be to your liking. He doesn't put forth a philosophical system, and neither does he assert an epistemological framework, so you won't find the kind of concrete, axiomatical philsophical claims common to pre-modern and early modern philosophy.
Push through it January 28, 2005
BoMoKo (JHB, South Africa)
14 out of 30 found this review helpful
When I first tried to tackle this book I was a first year undergrad philosophy and logic student - I declared Derrida my arche-enemy.
Three years later I am devoted to Derrida.
I eventually managed to push down the frustration (and at times, the blind rage) I felt at reading his stuff and took my time to follow him where he wants to take us.
Derrida is important for thinking, whether or not you agree with what he is saying.
Derrida's greatest lesson is forcing us to look closer, he wants us to pay attention to what is really going on (or at least, to pay attention to other possibilities that may be at work)
 A Celebration of Incoherency December 23, 2004
Avid Reader (Franklin, Tn)
26 out of 77 found this review helpful
The importance of Derrida and his movement is monumental - not for the term "deconstructionism" (heard frequently without a clue to its true meaning) but for how he has influenced (Western) society. Derrida, like Marcuse, Chomsky, Foucault and others, has moved from his original study to a broader agenda and, like many intellectuals, considers his mastery of one subject transferrable to another. He managed to survive the embarrassing Paul de Man fiasco and has since wisely avoided mention of the "Hitler in all of us". He has remarked on the authoritarian anti-democratic nature of deconstructionism, treating the subject ironically.
This is, allegedly, a textbook of post-Modern thought on language but reads like a didactic, out-of-focus Proust. The writing is nebulous, self-referential, unreadable. He speaks in Orwellian terms equating opposite qualities and words. It is so ephemeral as to lack certitude and for this very reason many commentators fear definitive statements on the subject. Deconstructionism is, despite all the twaddle, inherently subjective. He muses on expression, anxiety, emotions, signs and existentialism, finding meaning and interpretation where there is none. His popularity rests entirely on academia and like-minded camp followers in the media. I mean, how many Iowans care about the "ultimate" meaning of allusions? The problem with the ouevre is that when taken seriously, it literally make mountains of molehills.
Such as, well, equating fairy tales to S&M sagas, symphonies to invitations to rape, skyscrapers to phallic power trips, signs of "white" recycled paper as racism and stuttering as aggression. Allusions are, in Derrida-speak, fraught with deep meaning. To accomplish this one must divorce words from their sources and stated intent. The critic has been necessarily elevated above the author since only he can provide a "true" meaning. It is so outrageous that few outside of the Ivory Towers give it credence. That would be a mistake. Language is perhaps the most human of all abilities and its interpretation affects our personal and collective consciousness. His method has been called the "language of cultural Marxism" and is a necessary component of modern leftist ideology. At any time I expect Jacques Derrida to announce, like Alan Sokal, that it has all been a collosal joke on both the true believer and the reader.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 28
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