The arrival of Jacques Derrida’s work lit the American intellectual landscape ablaze. For many American academics and critics in the 1970s and thereafter, the charismatic Algerian-born Derrida was the face of “French Theory,” and virtually synonymous with postmodernism itself. Declaring, in his landmark collection Of Grammatology, that “there is nothing outside the text (“il n’y a pas de hors-texte”), Derrida proved not only immensely controversial, but also tremendously influential throughout the American academy. In this course, we will sample Derrida’s wide-ranging engagements with a variety of thinkers and fields (from Plato to Rousseau, linguistics to psychoanalysis, and beyond) and explore foundational Derridean ideas—including différance, logocentrism, deconstruction and more—while situating Derrida as the key thinker in the transition from structuralism to poststructuralism.
How can we understand Derrida’s critique of the very foundations of Western metaphysics? What does it mean to “deconstruct?” What is structuralism, and how did Derrida’s work help inaugurate the shift to what we call “post-structuralism?” And what are we to make, nearly 60 years after the publication of Of Grammatology, of Derrida’s ideas today? Readings will include seminal essays such as “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the human Sciences,” “Différance,” “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” and “Signature, Event, Context,” alongside selections from Of Grammatology, On Forgiveness, and more.
