Limited Inc
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IV. Special Area: Literary
Social Criticism
4. Secondary Readings
Jacques
Derrida. Limited
Inc.
Key Terms (tags): structuralism,
poststructuralism, philosophy, science,
Supporting References:
- Halion, Kevin. “Deconstruction and Speech Act Theory: A Defence of the Distinction between Normal and Parasitic Speech Acts” http://www.e-anglais.com/thesis.html
- Cohen, L. Jonathan. "philosophy and science." The Oxford Companion to Philosophy. : Oxford University Press, 2005. Oxford Reference. 2005. Date Accessed 3 Sep. 2013
- “Revolutions That as Yet Have No Model: Derrida's Limited Inc”
Limited Inc:
A B C by Jacques Derrida
Review by: Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak
Diacritics
, Vol. 10, No. 4 (Winter, 1980), pp. 29-49
Published by: The
Johns Hopkins University Press
Article Stable URL:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/464864
[The revolutions have no model because they must grow organically out
of whatever constituent parts contribute to the process, like an
organic system (ecology).]
- Blackburn, Simon. "Derrida, Jacques." The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy. : Oxford University Press, 2008. Oxford Reference. 2008. Date Accessed 3 Sep. 2013
Derrida,
Jacques (1930–2004). Controversial French postmodernist
and leader of the deconstructionist
movement. Born in Algeria, Derrida was a
philosophy teacher for more than twenty years at the École Normale
Supérieure in Paris. The notion of deconstruction was first
presented in the introduction to his 1962 translation of Husserl's
Origin of Geometry. Derrida urged the importance of the
unconscious rhetorical aspects of works, arguing that attention to
the incidentals often subverts the principal doctrines of a text: the
process of deconstruction is one of showing how the author's
ostensible message is undermined by other aspects of its
presentation. In De la grammatologie (1967, trs. Of
Grammatology, 1976), Derrida argued against the ‘phonocentrism’
that privileges speech above writing by imagining that the presence
of the author affords a fixed point of meaning and intention. This
desire for a ‘centre’ generates familiar oppositions
(subject/object, appearance/reality, etc.) which need to be overcome
and dismissed. Instead the endless possibility of interpreta-tion and
reinterpretation opens up a receding horizon within which meaning is
endlessly deferred, although the reader as much as the author is a
creator of any provisional sign-ificance that is eventually found
(see also Gadamer).
Derrida's work emerged from the
tradition of Husserl
and Heidegger,
and although it has proved catching in some circles, it is not easily
assimilated by people used to normal expressions of thought. In an
article ‘Reiterating the Differences: A Reply to Derrida’ John
Searle gave an exasperated deconstruction of a tissue of confusions
he found in one of Derrida's most famous essays ‘Signature Event
Context’. Derrida replied with a blizzard of text which did little
to clarify the issue in Limited Inc. (1977). See also
deconstruction,
différance,
poststructuralism.
- "Derrida, Jacques." Who's Who in the Twentieth Century. : Oxford University Press, 1999. Oxford Reference. 2003. Date Accessed 22 Aug. 2013
The following
focuses on the author and not the text.
“Derrida, Jacques (1930–2004) French philosopher of
poststructuralism, who introduced the philosophical and literary
method known as deconstruction. Like his contemporary Althusser,
Derrida was a native of Algiers who found his intellectual awakening
among the philosophers of Paris and made the École Normale
Supérieure his main base. Unlike Althusser, however, he also studied
abroad – at Harvard – and taught at the Sorbonne, Johns Hopkins,
and Yale. Derrida's first book, a prize-winning translation of
Husserl's
Origins of Geometry (1962), was followed by three
interrelated texts published in 1967 that set out the essentials of
his philosophical method – Speech and Phenomena, Writing
and Difference, and Of Grammatology.
“Derrida's
overriding concern was to evolve what he termed a strategy of
deconstruction to reveal and subvert the assumptions and rules of
thought underlying any text. According to Derrida and his disciples,
the idea that any text has a fixed and determinate meaning –
indeed, the idea that there can even be such a thing as ‘meaning’
– is based on metaphysical assumptions that can never be
substantiated. From the late 1960s onwards these radical, some would
say nihilistic, ideas had a deeply unsettling impact on university
departments of literature and philosophy alike – initially in
France, later in the USA, and latterly in Britain. In 1992 the award
of an honorary degree by Cambridge University prompted an unusually
undecorous attack on both the decision and the recipient by academics
who thought it ludicrous to acclaim a person whose major objective
was to undermine the very idea that objective intellectual analysis
was attainable.
“Derrida's later publications include two books on Freud,
a work on Heidegger,
Of Spirit (1987), and a study of Marx, Spectres of Marx
(1993).”
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