Jacques Derrida of Grammatology

by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Influence enough to have affected the entire French critical scene, Jacques Derrida has been hailed as the most important philosopher in France today. His ideas of reading and writing, his notion of de-construction, his reinterpretations of phenomenology, of psychoanalysis, and of strucuralism have profoundly influenced the vanguard of European and American criticism and have occasioned lively controversy.Derrida`s philosophical background baffles some literary critics. This role of exposing the common assumption shared by combatants in a controversy raises Derrida`s importance above merely the French scene. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is professor of English and Comperative Literature at the University of Texas at Austin.`Gayatri Spivak`s authoritative translation of Jacques Derrida`s De La Grammatologie is an event of great importance for humanistic studies in the English-reading world. One of the major works in the development of contemporary critism and philosophy is available at last in English.