Writing and Difference

⚖The case for it

Start with “Structure, Sign, and Play,” the 1966 lecture that turned a Johns Hopkins symposium into a turning point and remains the most accessible thing here. “Violence and Metaphysics,” on Levinas, is the essay readers return to most. The Descartes-and-madness piece is Derrida arguing head to head with Foucault, which is what started their feud and what makes it legible: a named opponent, a specific text. The Freud and Bataille essays get called mind-altering by name. The Jabès piece is closer to literature, gnomic and given to flourish. Bass’s introduction is a real doorway.

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

Eleven essays written across eight years, uneven essay to essay rather than a ramp, and readers report following sentences while losing whole arguments. Husserl, Heidegger, Hegel, Levinas and Lévi-Strauss are glossed rather than summarized, so the citations obscure what Derrida is adding. The charge readers make is bluntness itself: “It is the job of an academic to simplify concepts, not shroud them.” Foucault’s own word for him, obscurantist, gets quoted back approvingly. Several admit understanding almost nothing outside the one accessible essay. Most people arrive here after Of Grammatology.

— the honest librarian

9h

honest hours

13

sittings