Preface

Summary

The implications, range, and sheer volume of the work of Jacques Derrida are huge. They far exceed by any calculation what it is possible to discuss adequately in a modest introductory volume of this kind. For this, and other reasons, I have limited myself to only one of the multiple, variegated threads running through Derrida's writing: his reading of that body of texts known to audiences the world over as ‘literature’. This book, then, is addressed primarily, though I hope not exclusively, to students of literature with an interest in literary theory, and, more generally, to readers wishing to know more about the already lengthy, infinite conversation between literature and philosophy as it is both interrupted and prolonged in Derrida's work.

Derrida, as many will be aware, places demands on his readers. This is not only because his writing is dense and at times elliptical; not only because it presupposes at least a degree of familiarity with the main tenets of some of the key texts in the Western philosophical tradition, from Plato, Kant, and Hegel to Husserl, Freud, and Heidegger; not only because his work is deeply informed by a particular philosophical, intellectual, and literary context that has its own complex and specific history, aspects of which may be unfamiliar to Derrida's non-francophone readership; and not only because it exploits the resources of French language and idiom in ways that border at times on the untranslatable. All this is true.