Rating: 
Summary: Imcomprehensible Silliness
Review: I have no idea why this book is so influential. The critique of "logocentrism" is flat-out boring and basically a rehash of Plato's critique of the shift in society when the written word came into play. Derrida is certainly not a new nor a creative thinker, and he really does not write very well. There is a certain stylistic flow to his prose, but the book is filled full of gobble-de-gook that makes little sense. Okay, so Derrida is celebrating the play of language and the creative aspects of miscommunication -- writing of the margins and white-space so that he calls into question the standards of written prose. So what? Is this useful? Is it accurate? Does not making sense make any sense? Even when one breaks through to the few segments of writing that are even remotely understandable, the arguments that Derrida makes are really dated. They are drawn from obsolete and racist theories of unilinear cultural evolution that has been discarded by reputable anthropologists for well over 70 years. There are no "traces" of grammatological signs hidden in the unconscious. The book is little more than a pseudo-intellectual excursion and descent into the etymological fallacy.
Rating: 
Summary: juggling the (extra)ordinary
Review: In the context of Derrida's early project - to provide a critique of the foundational human science - linguistics - Of Grammatology is an essential book. In it he develops ideas about "writing" and about the "trace", ideas which illuminate much about the modern science of linguistics. His work is an astringent when applied to other more "analytical" philosophers of language (e.g. John Searle).Derrida's writing style may seem difficult at first, until one realizes that it embodies two other important ideas - play and undecideability. Of Grammatology is not exactly a book of philosophy, and not exactly a book on linguistics, and not exactly a literary work but one which rests uneasily among these three disciplines. By not drawing conclusions, by keeping in play many concepts at once, Derrida manages to provide provocative ideas on mental representations while at the same time instantiating these ideas in the ebb and flow of the work itself. Because of its kalidescopic style, the book can be read for the pure enjoyment of a rambunctious entertainment, and as an important philosophical text, and as a satire, and as profoundly serious. As the academic furor over "decontruction" dies down, Derrida's work perhaps can begun to be read for its human importance. Those who value an insistent questioning will find a champion here.
Rating: 
Summary: Proceed with Caution
Review: Jacuqes Derrida, like many of his cacique clique, had what I would call a conditional aura of possible brilliance. Similar to what can be found around the works of his contemporaries such as Foucault,Lacan or Barthes, Derrida is only brilliant, only mind-numbing if you believe in, and follow the structure that he has created for you. This was a similar form in the writings of Foucault, his ideas of knowledge/power/discourse/domination, while attractive when you're hope is to jingoistically numb and verbally gibberish language til the point where you have philosophically altered all beyond repair control or hope of restoration, and then can claim to of attained a hidden or shourded apex of monumental brilliance through the elite code speak which you just created, facilitated and were a willing participant to. In other words, Derrida is only as smart as you think he is. Regardless of what any number of critics proclaim, he, just like all like him (including Barthes) fall into the traps which Barthes so proudly outlined in his Myths texts. The problem with each philosophes of this mettle is that they claim a strucutre, while consistently creating their own around this unknown and unfathomable structure. This is best exemplefied through the Derridian claim that speech and writing belong to the same form of communication he terms "arche-writing." This is mind blowing if you follow his logic and play the game within the rules he deans you. However in any other discipline on any other field with different rules, his logic is as flawed as his hairstyle. My favorite deconstruction of Derrida is a post-colonial one, which I don't think anyone has really made yet (at least to my satisfaction). It is so very interesting that in page after page of grammatology, Derrida caresses the visage he creates, lathering it down in imagined/partial/ridiculous freedom, announcing his feats, while falling into his own logic traps, which by his rules and mine, he can never actually escape. To someone such as me, who thankfully(hopefully) sits somewhere outside the Centre Derrida is ridiculous not because he is difficult (which he really isn't), but because he never truly realizes that his liberation is just as false as The French Revolution or The Emancipation Proclamation. By giving us notice of what he sees as a crime against humanity, the marginality of writing from Speech in Western Civilization, he locks back up the non-European nations/ non-first world and non-industrialized nations within that context, by speaking for them, by speaking about writing and speech as if Grand Europa controlled all the cards in this hidden structure the world is organically connected by. Derrida once attacked Foucault for speaking for the mad, from a point outside of madness. I make a similar point for this text.
Rating:
Summary: The perennial postponement of signification
Review: Of grammatology is a tour-de-force of Derrida's ideas about reading and writing; it encapsulates his view of de-construction, and his reformulation of such complex issues as phenomenology and structuralism. I have to admit that there were times when I felt that I was just turning the pages. I needed to go back several times just to get a sense of what I had just read. Spivak's introduction is a gem as she makes Derrida more accessible. Reading Derrida places a real strain on the reader because he assumes the reader is well informed and has an academic sense of the writers he engages in like Ferdinand de Saussure, Claude Levi-Strauss, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. For Derrida, structuralists - particularly Levi-Strauss take for granted that speech is more direct than written script. Derrida critiques this sense of logocentrism that privileges the spoken word where the sound and meaning exist side by side. On the other hand, writing for Derrida creates an interstice between the sign and its meaning. Logocentricism and the accompanying phonologism are the seed of Derrida's deconstruction. Derrida sense of grammatology is that it is a soft science, one of writing. In this really complex mélange of engagements by Derrida, he problematizes Saussure's structural linguistics and goes to town on the notion of 'presence' that he feels has dominated the West since the Greeks, down to Heidegger and eventually culminating in the structuralism of Levi-Strauss. The notion of deconstruction is, for the most part attributed to Derrida. Deconstruction feeds into a much larger and more involved intellectual school of thought commonly known as poststructuralism. Postructuralism's genesis appeared with Derrida's exegetical critique on Strauss's the notion of, 'structure.' Taking the Saussure's lead, Levi-Strauss took structuralism into the field of structuralist anthropology - of which Levi-Strauss is said to have pioneered. In Of grammatology, Derrida portrays structuralism as the culmination of a tradition of structuralities, and reduces all to a fixed point of presence. This fixed point is effectively its center - calling for Derrida to move to de-center. To return to the issue of the sign, Derrida sees signs as random, in that they are defined not by essence but by or in comparison to something else. The solidity of the binary opposition between signifier and signified, which binds the sign, cannot be sustained unless we are prepared to grant that there exists some form of transcendental signified which would kill the play of signification. Derrida's analysis compels us to be aware that every signified is also in the position of a signifier. According to Derrida, the meaning of words is really dependent on how they are used. Derrida claims that everything is what it is, based on what it is not, - or difference. In a nutshell, Derrida is positions himself on the notion of the perennial postponement of signification - or "differance" -- or the outcome by which an opposition constantly repeats itself inside each of its component terms. In French, the word is in a liminal space between "to differ" and "to defer," as if saying there is yet one more thing to consider one more difference to account for. Moreover, Derrida seeks to de-construct claims of fixed truths. However, as a caveat, the critique on logocentrism, the practice of deconstruction, is really aimed at language, and to use it within and around other areas without really understanding Derridian de-construction is dangerous.
Miguel Llora
Rating:
Summary: Dear reader
Review: Of Grammatology is somewhat of its time, but it has cast a long shadow. The book's language is dense and vertiginous by turns, often rhetorically masterful even as it probes the resources of such mastery. A particular difficulty for many readers is the way in which Derrida mingles commentary and paraphrase, restating and reshaping the texts under discussion; it's interesting to see how many different opinions are attributed to the author by different commentators (he is either the very spit of Rousseau, or of Plato, or a poor Algerian knock-off with a curdled prose-style tacked on like a fake moustache). Actually, Of Grammatology is a marvel of idiosyncratically reverent close reading, incisive and eccentric, which honours the era from which it detaches itself and prefigures in its concerns much of what is now worried at under the headings of cybernetics and information theory. I'm dubious about its value as an instrument of undergraduate curricula; it wants a different kind of attention to the kind paid by all but a few students, and tends to make the few in question rather conceited. But this is autobiography. Why not try mingling it with yours?
Rating: 
Summary: Where Were You The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down?
Review: Or, *Of Grammatology* As A Guide To Theoretical Criminology Jacques Derrida's *Of Grammatology* is one of the most infamous theoretical works of recent decades: from its initial reception as a Rosetta Stone of a new literary history to Derrida's famous snubbing by Cambridge dons, it was reputed to be all kinds of mind-expanding. But although Derrida has settled into a more philosophical metier, the theory presented in this book has a character which is rarely remarked upon: in reality, it is all but a highly adequate theory of criminal investigation built upon the non-substantial character of the trace. Traces of evidence are not exactly anything, including the intended meanings or effects of the words or actions which serve as the subject of judicial inquiry: and Derrida's ruminations upon Levi-Strauss, Saussure, and Rousseau -- concerning their "lines" with respect to the amount of structure which can be uncritically attributed to language at the popular, "unpopular", or personal level -- "desediment" a theory of language which relies heavily upon Freud's evocation of the magnetic-writing pad as metaphor for a "graphological" unconscious which brooks no imagistic guff. In this he is not very distant from Richard Montague's concern with "disambiguation" as a ground for linguistic meaning, but those who consider Derrida's work beyond the analytic pale have perhaps been snookered by theories of linguistic meaning which assume that institutions forming an integral part of language must not play any significant role in the formulation of a theory of meaning. As Derrida will tell you here museums are no myth, but perhaps a certain amount of *elan* as regards the restrictions placed upon us by such things is actually a condition of adequacy for such work (as it certainly would be for any such social theory -- one might also not be amiss in considering earlier confrontations with "positivistic" criminologists as an intellectual benchmark for this book). In other words, although in considering deconstruction/desedimentation we are also not far from the concerns of anti-realism finely spun there is really nothing "spectacular" about this book: by the standards of its time -- and that is saying something -- it is a careful analysis of classic works, the product of an "honest *Ordinarius*". However, those having a passing acquaintance with Derrida's French will recognize in Gayatri Charkravorty Spivak's translation an able attempt to "estrange" the reader from what could otherwise be an all-too-familiar text: the "Translator's Preface" is a device for working a "logic of disintegration" upon Derrida's text, such that his more speculative comments "appear to have" the same grade of theoreticity as his borrowings from social scientists (perhaps the event of this book's translation deserves more attention from translation theorists than it has traditionally gotten). Whether or not such "evenness" gave people ideas as to the character of the printed word, this was certainly one of the more important texts of the 20th Century; and if people talking about "deconstruction" strikes your ear wrong, here is an easy and earnest way to remedy that.
Rating:
Summary: Fantastic Book
Review: Really deep. The preface by Spivak is a great introduction to deconstruction.
Rating: 
Summary: A Celebration of Incoherency
Review: The importance of Derrida and his movement is monumental - not for the term "deconstructionism" (heard frequently without a clue to its true meaning) but for how he has influenced (Western) society. Derrida, like Marcuse, Chomsky, Foucault and others, has moved from his original study to a broader agenda and, like many intellectuals, considers his mastery of one subject transferrable to another. He managed to survive the embarrassing Paul de Man fiasco and has since wisely avoided mention of the "Hitler in all of us". He has remarked on the authoritarian anti-democratic nature of deconstructionism, treating the subject ironically.
This is, allegedly, a textbook of post-Modern thought on language but reads like a didactic, out-of-focus Proust. The writing is nebulous, self-referential, unreadable. He speaks in Orwellian terms equating opposite qualities and words. It is so ephemeral as to lack certitude and for this very reason many commentators fear definitive statements on the subject. Deconstructionism is, despite all the twaddle, inherently subjective. He muses on expression, anxiety, emotions, signs and existentialism, finding meaning and interpretation where there is none. His popularity rests entirely on academia and like-minded camp followers in the media. I mean, how many Iowans care about the "ultimate" meaning of allusions? The problem with the ouevre is that when taken seriously, it literally make mountains of molehills.
Such as, well, equating fairy tales to S&M sagas, symphonies to invitations to rape, skyscrapers to phallic power trips, signs of "white" recycled paper as racism and stuttering as aggression. Allusions are, in Derrida-speak, fraught with deep meaning. To accomplish this one must divorce words from their sources and stated intent. The critic has been necessarily elevated above the author since only he can provide a "true" meaning. It is so outrageous that few outside of the Ivory Towers give it credence. That would be a mistake. Language is perhaps the most human of all abilities and its interpretation affects our personal and collective consciousness. His method has been called the "language of cultural Marxism" and is a necessary component of modern leftist ideology. At any time I expect Jacques Derrida to announce, like Alan Sokal, that it has all been a collosal joke on both the true believer and the reader.
Rating:
Summary: Derrida Tries But Fails To Charm Us
Review: The problem with this book like Derrida's other books is that it's hard to read. Derrida thinks he is saying something so deep but he can't say it right, he always uses strange words that I don't know the meanings. I can't find them in my dictionary and I even have a French one. If he knew what he was talking about then maybe we could start talking, but he never makes his point. For example a real philosopher like Kahlil Gibran (remember "The Prophet?) never wastes time but gets to the point. I think Derrida would like to be like Kahlil Gibran but he's going to have to work at it.
Rating:
Summary: Great fun, but I differ with the conclusion
Review: There are a number of books on the market whose titles begin with "Of" ("Of Mice and Men," "Of Course I Can Cook") and I have generally enjoyed them. This particular work is less satisfying on a number of levels, not the least of which is its rather uncompromising use of the letter "P." Still, the plotting is exciting, the characters vivid and their portraits poignant. But in the end, can it really be said that the structures of perception inherent in our language can reveal parallel structures of domination and oppression in the political world? More importantly, can it really be said without using the letter "P" quite so much? Readers who are interested in this subject matter may want to investigate some of the later works of Sean Hannity and Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose treatises on language and morality used a much richer selection of hard consonants.
|
