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A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds

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Such a title is both purple and cliched and only appropriate to Derrida if heard as a kind of true joke. Derrida is surrounded by his myths as the cartoon character "Pig Pen" is by a cloud of dust. This is the first barrier to reading him since he always appears characterized in advance by his enemies. The next barrier is that he writes "against" those standards of logic and fact that are everywhere taken thoughtlessly for granted: this means his stance is "irrational." Such a perspective is, once again, that of his antagonists or those who are simply ignorant and so think with the herd. Derrida is, in fact, hyper-rational or post-rational: he has thought about and studied the history of thinking to the degree that its problems are clear to him. Most of us live in banal rationality as a goldfish in a bowl: the person is outside is both distorted and by definition, crazy. A third problem is that Derrida wishes to stimulate, not clarify: his mission is not to bring the novice from the first questions of philosophy to its ends nor should we expect this any more than we hope that a president is instructing children on 9-11. Finally, Derrida's conviction in the contingent nature of normal logic means that his form of composition, not just his ideas, is non-normative. He is best read as a philosophical poet with all the word play, punning, and allusion that marks that genre. In short, he is very hard and the selections here are brief and so suffer from the disorientation brought by displacement. Still, if you stay, you will grow.

by far this is the most accessible introduction tothe forbidden threshold of Derrida's thought. Peggy Kamuf mounts the fairly limitless edifice of his work through seasoned selected excerpts,If you are fascinated forever by the conceptual,the literary,or analytic,the performative or philosphic focus,Derrida's work is like an alive moment that touches each in between elements of text,of ideas.All sometimes in simultanaeity or in context to each.If you come to Derrida it must from some place(time,geographic/cultural)some discipline,and sadly enough that acts to skew and blind,to opaque-ify Derrida's virtuoso,contextual,cross-referencing,overdetermined,overanalyzed modes of thought. But if you have scoured literature(Blanchot,Ponge,Jabes) not for its own sake,or thought,looked at ideas(Plato) (Heidegger) retrogressively yet with a committment to subversion(Genet) (Marx) of the Western canon,Derrida work serves these realms quite admirably.I humbly request you gander and pass time at this collection, peak between the blinds(Kamuf's metaphor)before you proceed directly to an original work. Derrida's work has that element of throwing forward a growth of petrified thought finding new conceptual life in the present, or not so distant past. So wherever you begin in Derrida it is like a timeless warp to be repeated some place,some time to come or had come,or had been,or will not ever be.

Peggy Kamuf offers a well organized anthology of Derrida's varied contributions.

It's unfortunate that Derrida has carried on the Western philosophical tradition of unnecessarily turgid, convoluted, and just plain bad writing inaugurated by the inflated Hegel and exemplified by Sartre and a host of other heady hacks. On the plus side, this is a solid collection of Derrida's most important pieces and enumerates some of his best ideas: difference, logocentrism, the trace, etc. Not for beginners, but if you're determined to read an important thinker, this may be required reading...some of it anyhow.