The French Connections of Jacques Derrida - Softcover

"This is a supple and thought-provoking book that caught my interest and kept it alive. It contributes a fresh understanding of Derrida's philosophy." -- Jean-Michel Rabaté, University of Pennsylvania

"What a great topic: just the sort of background book that courses in contemporary poetics, French and other, might use. No one but Jacques Derrida has done such a stunning job of changing the way we see, think, read, and (don't we wish) write." -- Mary Ann Caws, Graduate School, City University of New York

The French Connections of Jacques Derrida offers stimulating and accessible essays that address, for the first time, the issue of Derrida's relation to French poetics, writing, thought, and culture. In addition to offering considerations of Derrida through studies of such significant French authors as Mallarme, Baudelaire, Valery, Laporte, Ponge, Perec, Blanchot, and Barthes, the book also reassesses the development of Derrida's work in the context of structuralism, biology, and linguistics in the 1960s, and looks at the possible relationships between Derrida's writing and that of the Surrealist and Oulipa groups. Derrida is introduced as one whose work is as much poetic as it is philosophical, and who is strikingly French and yet not unproblematically so.