The Derrida Reader: Writing Performances [Hardcover]

I hate Derrida. Violently. He's an etymological sophist and an anti-foundationalist who expressly denies the law of non-contradiction and employs proving a negative (like Heidegger) as a valid speculative technique. He generally has very little of any consequence to say - but lots to say about it. Rather unfortunately for me, given one of my fields, I often have to respond to his work or followers of it.

This review is not an attempt to review Derrida's work contained in the volume. My opinion of that should be quite clear. Rather, it's a review of the reader and the job of editing and commentary ably done by Mr. Wolfreys and how well it represents the major currents of D's work, with which I'm quite familiar.

In my opinion, this is the best reader I've seen. It nicely contextualizes D's work without lots of jargon or psychobabble common to many of his expositors in the introduction (you can skip directly to p13 though, before that the editor just talks about introductions). It's an intro written by someone familiar with Heidegger (who D is heavily indebted to) and Continental philosophy, which is sadly not common knowledge among the "Deconstruction" school.

The reader picks Derrida's most lucid moments and uses them to illustrate key themes of his work. It almost makes him seem sane by focusing more on the ontological and hermeneutical currents of his work than on his knack for etymological sophistry for which he became popular in America amongst the Deconstruction school.

Somewhat surprisingly, that's also my major criticism. While this work ably presents the major philosophical themes of Derrida in their most cogent form (logocentrism in "Scribbles", the return to Hegel in "Spectres of Marx", etc) , it skimps a bit on where he's probably most influential - lit crit. "Structure, Sign, and Play from the Discourses in the Human Sciences", from "Writing and Difference" isn't included - which is a bit of an oversight.

While this essay gives me migraines due to its abstruseness, suspension of non-contradiction and generally poor reasoning - it is his most popular one (with that whole "center is not the center" bit) and really should be in any work representative of his thought since it's more or less the foundation of the Deconstruction school of thought.

On the whole, a very lucid and even-handed treatment of Derrida. Recommended as an introduction for the interested novice or as a desk reference for the scholar who deals with aspects of French Post-structuralism involving Derrida.

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