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“... wouldn’t give the time of day to. In much of Barthes’s writing, as in much of Foucault and Derrida, the effect is the idea, and the idea is extreme, exorbitant: it has no prior, sensible, ‘English’ form which could be worked up into an exaggeration. This is not to say that the writing doesn’t mean anything, or that form and content are identical ...”

“... the difficulty of his writing, although his essays are certainly no more difficult than those of Jacques Derrida, or than every third article in the Journal of Philosophy. They are, however, difficult in a different way from both Derrida and technical analytical philosophy, and his book calls on one to formulate a ...”

“... Narrative degenerates into mere chronicle. Samuel Weber’s The Legend of Freud is dedicated to Jacques Derrida. Foucault’s name occurs on his first page and Lacan’s on his second. Given such auspices, one expects a certain amount of posturing and foolery, but there isn’t any, unless a weakness for puns counts as such (Fliess/fleece). While there ...”

“... much more intimate our conversations would have been if I had spoken their language’. (As Jacques Derrida, a Jew from Algeria, put it: ‘I have only one language, and it is not my own.’) Memmi escaped the camp, and after the war went to Paris to study philosophy at the Sorbonne. When a rumour spread that, as a Tunisian ‘native’, he might ...”

“... ways of the divine author. I hope it is clear, however, that when a contemporary critic like Jacques Derrida says that ‘there is nothing outside of the text,’ he is not advocating the isolated, unhistorical reading of books, but precisely the opposite – a reading of books that sees them in the context of an infinite web of textual ...”

“... minds. And whether directly philosophical or essentially equivocal, as it is in the writings of Jacques Derrida or Richard Rorty, Scepticism often leaves things just the way it found them. The Sceptics, according to Sextus, end up leading their lives as nature, need, law and custom, art and science, dictate. Thales, who along with Pythagoras and ...”

“... extremist network’, linking the IRA, Channel 4 journalists, radicalised junior doctors and Jacques Derrida. The piece was silently disappeared shortly after it emerged that it had been sourced from white supremacist and neo-Nazi websites. No senior journalist condemned it; Newton Dunn remains welcome on TV sofas.Loughborough University’s Centre ...”

“... one of the foremost critics of the Yale School, whose strongest philosophical allegiance was to Jacques Derrida. In 1987, it came to light that in his twenties, de Man, a Belgian, had written for Le Soir, then a collaborationist newspaper. Schlink’s narrator seems not just to be aligning himself with those of de Man’s accusers who suggest there ...”

“... of irony between model and imitation, that rests, in this respect, in a hesitation of meaning’. Jacques Aubert writes about the first word – if ‘riverrun’ is a word – of Finnegans Wake. Jean-Michel Rabaté’s essay is a study of bits of the Wake as performative language, correlated with the idea of magical power: it is more in touch with Austin and ...”

“... thinkers of postwar France directed at each other – Lévi-Strauss v. Sartre, Foucault v. Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari v. Lacan, to pick out just a few – the theoretical stakes were high, and the political implications seemed momentous. One could talk, seriously, of the ‘politics of theory’, and many of us distant onlookers did so. But that was ...”

“... without violence, through trust and understanding and other moderate exchanges, through what Jacques Derrida, glossing this passage, calls ‘the culture of the heart’. But Benjamin doesn’t appear to believe that either politics or theology can do without violence.For him, Niobe is a person whose ‘arrogance calls down fate upon her not because ...”

“... contemporary French theorists who are difficult but interestingly difficult – with Lacan or Derrida. He is awfully serious about literature, and awfully hard to enjoy. He must be conceded one great virtue, on the other hand: utterly unlike such bravura performers as Lacan and Derrida, he is magisterially ...”

“... but Empson himself would have none of it. When Christopher Norris sent him some writings by Derrida and others, Empson said he thought ‘those horrible Frenchmen’ were ‘so very disgusting, in a simple moral or social way, that I cannot stomach them’. He also managed, perhaps unintentionally, to invent a new Frenchman: ...”

“... French intellectuals and the cultured French public need new toys every ten or 15 years.’ When Jacques Lacan drew on his ideas to argue that the unconscious was ‘structured like a language’, he recoiled. Lacan had been a friend – he had introduced Lévi-Strauss to his third wife, Monique, his partner for the rest of his life – but he claimed not to ...”

“... recent feminist writing has been crucially influenced by male theorists like Foucault, Barthes, Derrida and Lacan. Then again, further back, there is the shining example of Mill’s great essay ‘The Subjection of Women’, one sentence from which – quoted by Juliet Mitchell – makes exactly the point that Ruthven is stressing. ‘What is now called the ...”