“... of linguistic change. The issue is a large one: of what, after years of letting the arguments of Jacques Derrida sink fully in, we now know as phonocentrism. Phonocentric is what we almost all of us are but none of us should be, according to Derrida: we look on the written language simply as the representation of the ...”

“... Derrida likes to surprise, and the first surprise of this book is the title itself. The common assumption that the French Post-Structuralists abandoned the interest of their phenomenological predecessors in consciousness, subjectivity and the entire philosophical vocabulary including words like ‘spirit’ and ‘soul’ is challenged by the titles of the two recent books by Derrida, De l’esprit and Psyché, both published in France in 1987 ...”

“... is, for instance, pretty suicidal for embattled minorities to embrace Michel Foucault, let alone Jacques Derrida. The minority view was always that power could be undermined by truth: that it was unjustly distributed, that its holders wanted this overlooked and purchased all sorts of intellectual disguises for the purpose, that it would be an uphill ...”

“... our un-speakable selves and the impersonal signs we have to resort to to publicise them which Jacques Derrida has argued for so devastatingly. Those who have objected to Derrida on this ground should reflect on what we experience when we use a so-called foreign language and explain how that might differ in kind ...”

“... James, Life of Hawthorne But, first of all, is there a history of silence?    Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference Literary history? Can there still be people who believe in it – or them: literature, history, literary history? Are not all texts on the same level, just texts? Is history not something synchronic, merely a different ...”

“... of the most original and creative modern philosophers (including Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and Derrida) have been discovering rhetoric and using its wiles against blundering one-eyed theoretical reason,’ she tartly retorts that she ‘would rather back analytic philosophy against rhetoric’. But her own way of thinking philosophically is not ...”

“... de France were the prototype in intellectual chic for the barnstorming Parisian ‘seminars’ of Jacques Lacan in the Sixties and Seventies, even if the topics that the fashionable came to hear were as dry as the lecturer’s podium manner: ‘The Evolution of Theories of Memory’, ‘Theories of the Will’, ‘The Nature of Mind and Its Relation to ...”

“... meaning and then be able to divert, to alter it.’ Bois also learned this approach directly from Jacques Derrida, whom he read in high school and met during his studies in Paris: ‘First overturn a hierarchical opposition, then dispel its binarism by the introduction of a new concept.’ Derrida commissioned the ...”

“... locks. Discussing Freud’s captivation in the 1920s by the possibility of thought transference, Jacques Derrida remarks that it is ‘difficult to imagine a theory of what they still call the unconscious without a theory of telepathy’.3 Derrida also allows himself to wonder, as most of us have done, how it is that ...”

“... spirit, shorn of his rancid politics, that lies behind the thought of post-structuralists like Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, as well as shaping the entire postmodern landscape. A lot of postmodern types are Nietzscheans without being aware of it. In Nietzsche, Hegel’s thought meets its nemesis: truth is now a convenient fiction, the unity of ...”

“... anyway, because ‘some familiarity’ is not entirely nothing. I take comfort from the fact that Jacques Derrida manifestly (in ‘Deux mots pour Joyce’) put himself in this category, and for such a reader the scepticism about grand schemes or total understanding that we find in the best recent criticism is very attractive. John Bishop, for ...”

“... Roman Jakobson, Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, J. Hillis Miller, Hélène Cixous, Jacques Derrida: all of them are admirably close readers. Marxist critics like Jameson are among the more notable targets of this bit of intellectual indolence, which is the reason he once remarked that they have a particular responsibility to come to terms ...”

“... opposite: ‘I consciously came across “deconstruction” for the first time in the writings of Jacques Derrida’; ‘Derrida used the term and put it on the map.’ And still less did he, in Evelyn Barish’s words, ‘create a new philosophy, a way of looking at the world that redefined America’s cultural point ...”

“... is also predictably philistine about literary theory. He seems, for example, to believe that Jacques Derrida declared that there was nothing outside the text, a myth as widespread as the claim that the Inuit have a great many words for snow. Nor is he greatly enamoured of feminist criticism, which receives one rather surly reference. American ...”

“... neither Jacoby nor Jameson mentions the latest Jewish thinker to inherit this tradition, Jacques Derrida. Theodor Adorno, whom Jameson does discuss, is another distinguished figure in this lineage, a philosopher for whom pessimism was more utopian than optimism because it kept faith with a suffering so unbearable that it cried out for ...”