A Derrida Reader

Rating:
Summary: probes from concepts on high as a bird in flight looking
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: good ideas, tedious excursion
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: One of the best anthologies I have read during recent years.
Review: Peggy Kamuf offers a well organized anthology of Derrida's varied contributions.