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Derrida, Jaques [1997 (1967)]: of Grammatology

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Derrida, Jaques [1997 (1967)]: of Grammatology JAQUES DERRIDA OF GRAMMATOLOGY Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Derrida, Jacques [1997 (1967)]: Of Grammatology Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press Back-Cover ....................................................................................................... 2 Boken starter ........................................................................................................ 3 Contents ..................................................................................................... 5 Acknowledgments ............................................................................................................. 7 Translator’s Preface .............................................................................................................. 8 I ............................................................................................................... 12 II ........................................................................................................................ 18 III ................................................................................................................................. 46 IV ......................................................................................................... 57 V ............................................................................................................................... 66 VI ......................................................................................................... 74 Preface ............................................................................................................................. 74 I. Writing before the Letter ......................................................................... 75 Exergue ..................................................................................................... 75 1. The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing ............................... 77 The Program ................................................................................................................ 77 The Signifier and Truth ..................................................................................... 80 The Written Being/ The Being Written ......................................................... 88 2. Linguistics and Grammatology ............................................................................ 94 The Outside and the Inside* ........................................................................................... 97 The Outside [Is med kryss] the Inside .............................................. 108 The Hinge [La Brisure] ................................................................................... 126 3. Of Grammatology as a Positive Science ............................................................... 133 Algebra: Arcanum and Transparence ................................................................. 134 Science and the Name of Man .............................................................. 139 The Rebus and the Complicity of Origins ........................................ 144 II. Nature, Culture, Writing ........................................................................................ 150 Introduction to the “Age of Rousseau” ............................................................... 150 1. The Violence of the Letter: From Lévi-Strauss to Rousseau ..................... 152 The Battle of Proper Names .................................................................................. 158 Writing and Man’s Exploitation by Man ........................................................................ 168 2. “...That Dangerous Supplement . .” .................................................... 186 From/Of Blindness to the Supplement ................................................................... 189 The Chain of Supplements ................................................................................. 196 The Exorbitant. Question of Method .................................................... 200 3. Genesis and Structure of the Essay on the Origin of Languages ................... 206 I. The Place of the “Essay” ................................................................ 206 II. Imitation ........................................................................................... 234 III. Articulation .............................................................................................................. 266 4. From/Of the Supplement to the Source: The Theory of Writing ............ 301 The Originary Metaphor ....................................................................... 302 The History and System of Scripts .................................................... 312 The Alphabet and Absolute Representation .................................................... 325 The Theorem and the Theater ................................................................. 332 The Supplement of (at) the Origin ............................................................... 342 Notes ......................................................................................................... 344 Translator’s Preface ...................................................................................................... 344 Preface ....................................................................................................................... 353 Exergue ............................................................................................... 353 Part I: Chapter 1 ........................................................................................... 354 Part I: Chapter 2 ........................................................................................... 356 Part I: Chapter 3 ........................................................................................... 363 Part II: Chapter 1 .................................................................................................... 371 Part II: Chapter 2 .................................................................................................... 375 Part II: Chapter 3 .................................................................................................... 378 Part II: Chapter 4 .................................................................................................... 390 Index .................................................................................................................................. 396 Back-Cover “The translation is a noble job, and we should be grateful to have this distinguished book in our hands ... [Spivak’s] situating of Derrida among his precursors—Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, Husserl—and contemporaries—Lacan, Foucault, and the elusive animal known as structuralism—is very lucid and extremely useful.”—Michael Wood, New York Review of Books “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 stu-dents to ask questions of their disciplines that had previously been consid- ered 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. “Of Grammatologg is the tool-kit for anyone who wants to empty the ‘presence’ out of any text he has taken a dislike to. A handy arsenal of deconstructive tools are to be found in its pages, and the technique, once learnt, is as simple, and as destructive, as leaving a bomb in a brown paper bag outside (or inside) a pub.”—Roger Poole, Notes and Queries “There is cause for rejoicing in the translation of De la grammatologie . Just as Derrida discloses in Rousseau a writer who distrusts writing and longs for the proximity of the self to its voice, so Spivak approaches Derrida through the structure of his diction; no ideas but in the words themselves.”—Denis Donoghue, New Republic Jacques Derrida teaches at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. The Johns Hopkins University Press Baltimore and London Cover design: Omega Clay Cover illustration: Thoth, the advocate of Osiris, writing on his palette. From the Papyrus of Hunefer. ISBN 0-8018-5830-5 Boken starter ((i)) Of Grammatology ((ii)) ((iii)) Of Grammatology BY Jacques Derrida Corrected Edition Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak The johns Hopkins University Press Baltimore and London ((iv)) Copyright © 1974, 1976, 1997 by The Johns Hopkins University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper First American edition, 1976 Originally published in France under the title De la Grammatologie Copyright © 1967 by Les Editions de Minuit Johns Hopkins Paperbacks edition, 1976 Corrected edition, 1997 9 8 7 The Johns Hopkins University Press 2715 North Charles Street Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363
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