Chapter 1 - Life
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Summary
Few philosophers, in the latter half of the twentieth century, so profoundly and radically transformed our understanding of writing, reading, texts, and textuality as Jacques Derrida. The scope of Derrida's thinking is prodigious. It explores with extraordinary inventiveness and originality some of the most pressing practical and theoretical challenges of recent times, in philosophy, politics, ethics, literary theory, criticism, psychoanalysis, legal theory, and much else besides; it articulates a fresh and rigorous account of the complex cultural, philosophical, and religious legacy of the West, its achievements and its silences, its exclusions and unfulfilled promises; and it develops a new style of reading scrupulously adjusted to the general implications and intricate singularity of philosophical and literary texts, to their relevance within the history of thought and the question of their enduring but always fragile future. The scale of Derrida's published output is similarly imposing. In the course of an intellectual career spanning five decades, he published well in excess of 100 volumes, including sustained monographs on key themes or topics, a wealth of lecture, seminar, and conference presentations brought together in a series of wide-ranging collections of essays, many other more localised interventions, including a stream of interviews, prefaces, prepared and unprepared responses to different audiences and to other thinkers, not to mention numerous other autobiographical or other writings impossible to categorise in conventional terms.
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- Information
- The Cambridge Introduction to Jacques Derrida , pp. 1 - 11Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007