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A radical reappraisal of Jacques Derrida’s work is necessary, this book contends , if Derrida studies are to remain a viable field of scholarly inquiry in the future and if the humanities, more generally, are to have access to a replenishing source of living theoretical concerns. Valuable alternatives to the largely historicist practices regnant today in the humanities have been missed due to the inability to arrive at truly global interpretations of Derrida’s thought, as well as that of other “foundational” French thinkers. After all, even today, it can be argued, the most basic questions concerning Derrida’s work remain unanswered. Is Derrida a friend of reason, of philosophy, or rather the most radical of skeptics? Are language-related themes—writing, semiosis—Derrida’s central concern, or does he really write about something else, at best catachrestically related to these? Does Derrida’s thought find its own locus in untold “systems” and “logics,” or does it primarily consist of commentaries on individual texts? No settled answers to these questions exist in the literature. Nor, more crucially, do viable accounts exist of how these competing alternatives relate, or of how they might both be true—for each doubtless gets something right. Instead, two different strands of Derrida interpretation have largely been pursued from the onset of deconstruction’s reception, without ever finding a way to combine in a single, comprehensive outcome .1 One version takes its focus to be language, and sees it as arriving at what is essentially a new, more radical form of skepticism. The editors of the 2001 Norton Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, to take one recent significant example, hold this view of deconstruction, emphasizing language’s importance above all else to Derrida’s project in the headnote to their section on Derrida.2 Clearly, this version of deconstruction has been the one most influential on literary studies. With its doubts about the validity of theoretical knowledge, and a standpoint bordering on linguistic determinism, it is the direct precursor of much current historical and cultural work in this field, even though many today take “deconstruction ” and “historicism” (or “cultural studies”) to be opposed.3 Another school of thought has long insisted that Derrida’s work would be ill defined by any sort of skepticism; it deems language at best Introduction xv an ancillary concern of Derrida’s, and it views deconstruction overall in much greater proximity to traditional philosophy. For Rodolphe Gasché (the first major proponent of this view) and those who follow his lead, deconstruction sets out conditions of possibility and impossibility of philosophy .4 Here, though deconstruction does finally articulate what brings philosophical thought into doubt through its talk of impossibility (part of which indeed pertains to language and inscription), nevertheless, philosophy ’s traditional claim to authority over all other knowledges is said to be maintained by deconstruction, and Derrida’s own themes can come into view only after the discourse of philosophy has been traversed. The present book aims to address this rift, first and foremost by returning to the ground of Derrida’s project in phenomenology. A deep acquaintance with the phenomenological projects of both Husserl and Heidegger is required, I will show, in order to mount new, more inclusive interpretations of Derrida that are able to take both sets of reference points into account. In particular, I emphasize Husserlian phenomenology throughout, this being the philosophical milieu in which deconstruction was first forged. This milieu remains largely foreign to many readers of Derrida, however. In particular, the complex and distinctive stances Husserl took toward questions of meaning, language, and truth remain absent from the majority of discussions of Derrida’s work to date, including those of his early writings.5 It was thanks to these positions, however, that Derrida was led to believe, even as he broke with phenomenology, that he could navigate between the outcomes thought to be implied by those who see his work on language as central (truth’s outright denial, radical skepticism) and what is required by those who stress Derrida’s philosophical and transcendental concerns (truth’s affirmation, the truth of philosophy in particular). Derrida ultimately managed this complex navigation, still to be successfully grasped in full, thanks to the resources provided him by Husserl’s thought. Hence Essential History turns first to the factual ground of Derrida ’s project, his early, pre-deconstructive writings, in order to establish a broader working context than has hitherto been available in which to view Derrida’s best-known...

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