Throughout his long career, Jacques Derrida had a
close, collaborative relationship with "Critical
Inquiry" and its editors. He saved some of his most
important essays for the journal, and he relished the
ensuing arguments and polemics that stemmed from the
responses to his writing that "Critical Inquiry"
encouraged. Collecting the best of Derrida's work that
was published in the journal between 1980 and 2002,
"Signature Derrida" provides a remarkable introduction
to the philosopher and the evolution of his thought.
These essays define three significant "periods" in
Derrida's writing: his early, seemingly revolutionary
phase; a middle stage, often autobiographical, that
included spirited defense of his work; and his late
period, when his persona as a public intellectual was
prominent, and he wrote on topics such as animals and
religion. The first period is represented by essays like
"The Law of Genre," in which Derrida produces a kind of
phenomenological narratology. Another essay, "The
Linguistic Circle of Geneva," embodies the second,
presenting deconstructionism at its best: Derrida shows
that what was imagined to be an epistemological break in
the study of linguistics was actually a repetition of
earlier concepts. The final period of Derrida's writing
includes the essays "Of Spirit" and "The Animal That
Therefore I Am (More to Follow)" and eulogies for Michel
Foucault, Louis Marin, and Emmanuel Levinas, in which
Derrida uses the ideas of each thinker to push forward
the implications of their theories. Gathering a small
but crucial portion of the oeuvre of this singular
philosopher, "Signature Derrida" is the most
wide-ranging, and thus most representative, anthology of
Derrida's work to date.
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