First published in 1967, Writing and Difference, a collection of Jacques Derrida
's essays written between 1959 and 1966, has become a landmark of contemporary F
rench thought. In it we find Derrida at work on his systematic deconstruction of
Western metaphysics. The book's first half, which includes the celebrated essay
on Descartes and Foucault, shows the development of Derrida's method of deconst
ruction. In these essays, Derrida demonstrates the traditional nature of some pu
rportedly nontraditional currents of modern thought-one of his main targets bein
g the way in which "structuralism" unwittingly repeats metaphysical concepts in
its use of linguistic models.
The second half of the book contains some of De
rrida's most compelling analyses of why and how metaphysical thinking must exclu
de writing from its conception of language, finally showing metaphysics to be co
nstituted by this exclusion. These essays on Artaud, Freud, Bataille, Hegel, and
L‚vi-Strauss have served as introductions to Derrida's notions of writing and d
iff‚rence-the untranslatable formulation of a nonmetaphysical "concept" that doe
s not exclude writing-for almost a generation of students of literature, philoso
phy, and psychoanalysis.
