Derrida Jacques - Jacques Derrida opening lines

Jacques Derrida

Of the very many books on Derrida that have already appeared, Marian Hobsons must surely count as one of the most challenging and the most stimulating. Her own text interacts with those which she discusses in ways that are truly illuminating of both not least in the very fact and nature of their interaction. Hobson displays a remarkable sense for the main deeply underlying themes of the philosophical-cum-literary tradition within and through which Derrida is working, themes which continue to work themselves out in his and indeed her writing.

Alan Montefiore, Emeritus Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford

In this exceptionally sophisticated book, Marian Hobson has done what no other book to date on Derrida has done: to explore the relation of argument to the mode of writing. By exhibiting the patterns of organizations, filaments of construction, micromovements, circuits of argumentation, which constitute the undercurrent of his writings from which, like the tips of icebergs, Derridas coinages of individual terms, positions, and determined arguments, including deconstruction, emerge to be thematized, Hobson succeeds in demonstrating the rigor of Derridas work, more precisely, the unheard kind of consistency that characterizes it. Above all, this superb study on the question of language in Derrida, and Derridas language, by emphasizing his writerly strategy of sketching links, reinforcing connections between words, themes, arguments, and providing for extensions into other texts, shows Derridas work to stage incalculable possibilities of connection from whence future commentaries are allowed to proceed.

Rodolphe Gasch, Eugenio Donato Professor of Comparative Literature,

State University of New York at Buffalo

Marian Hobson is Professor of French at the University of London, Queen Mary and Westfield College. She is the author of The Object of Art (1982) and co-editor of Reappraisals of Rousseau (1980) and Rousseau et le dix-huitime sicle (1993).

Critics of the Twentieth Century

General Editor: Christopher Norris

University of Wales, Cardiff

Northrop Frye

The theoretical imagination

Jonathan Hart

A. J. Grimas and the Nature of Meaning

Ronald Schleifer

Christopher Caudwell

Robert Sullivan

Figuring Lacan

Criticism and the cultural unconscious

Juliet Fower MacCannell

Harold Bloom

Towards historical rhetorics

Peter de Bolla

Julia Kristeva

John Lechte

Geoffrey Hartmen

Criticism as answerable style

G. Douglas Atkins

Introducing Lyotard

Art and politics

Bill Readings

Ezra Pound as Literary Critic

K. K. Ruthven

F. R. Leavis

Michael Bell

Deleuze and Guattari

Ronald Bogue

Postmodern Brecht

A re-presentation

Elizabeth Wrght

The Ecstasies of Roland Barthes

Mary Bittener Wiseman

Paul Ricouer

S. H. Clark

Jrgen Habermas

Critic in the public sphere

Robert C Holub

William Empson

Prophet against sacrifice

Paul H. Fry

Antonio Gramsci

Beyond Marxism and postmodernism

Renate Holub

Kenneth Burke

Rhetoric and ideology

Stephen Bygrave

Roman Jakobson

Life, language, art

Richard Bradford

First published 1998

by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada

by Routledge

711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Transferred to Digital Printing 2011

1998 Marian Hobson

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Hobson, Marian.

Jacques Derrida: opening lines / Marian Hobson.

p. cm. (Critics of the twentieth century)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Derrida, Jacques Language. I. Title. II. Series: Critics of the twentieth century (London, England)

ISBN 0-415-02197-9 (hbk)

ISBN 0-415-13786-1 (pbk)

Publishers Note

The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original may be apparent.

For AB, JB, MGC, KE, JK, MJ, MNJ, RP, SP, AS, MW.

Contents

Acknowledgements

A debtor may not always be conscious of debts contracted. I have tried to record what I owe in footnotes and references, but I am aware of being a great deal more endebted than can easily be flagged, both to the writings and to the conversation of Geoff Bennington, Rodolphe Gasch, Chris Johnson and Sam Weber. Without Peggy Kamufs generosity in reading several draft chapters and in responding to queries, this book might still be on the word processor. Terence Cave, Alan Montefiore and Margaret Whitford, each with a variety of dour kindness, helped me clarify the argument at certain important points; I owe a great deal to their patience. I owe thanks to Chris Norris, the editor of the series, for commissioning what was in the first stages of its composition a very different book, and for helping the finished manuscript through its last stages. At various points, I have been very grateful for comments or advice on problems I encountered from Tom Baldwin, Nick Denyer and Simon Glendinning. Sidney Allen has over a long period supplied me with philological detail which would have taken a long time to constitute unaided. I am grateful to Marianne Ronfl-Nadaud for her help in locating and in translating some of the quotations, and in constructing the bibliography. Finally, the book would not exist in a final form without Rodney Laing, Nick Higgins, and the NCCU at Addenbrookes Hospital, Cambridge; nor without a group of friends, whose unsentimental visits, whose chatter over, across, round and at me when comatose, kept the unconscious on the move and body and soul together. The book is dedicated to them.

As a writer Derrida is both productive and difficult. This creates material and psychological difficulties in writing about his work. The library of Trinity College, Cambridge has made some matters of bibliography a great deal easier than they might otherwise have been, and I owe thanks. I am enormously grateful to the French Department of the Johns Hopkins University for the visiting professorship which allowed me the time I needed to finish the book. Writing in a case like this, where attempting to get things right is more than a matter of rectitude (in itself quite important enough) because the object of study can read and react, is a strange enterprise. The work studied is in the public domain, but has a live connection back to the private concerns of its author. I am grateful to my books subject for an approval of the project which remained general and forebearing of further enquiry.

Abbreviations

The edition referred to appears under the date and title in the bibliography; italicized abbreviations refer to the translation (see under the original edition for details of the translation)