Margins of Philosophy

by Jacques Derrida

Essays discuss Plato, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, linguistics, metaphor, and literary theory

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Theory, France, 20th Century, Literary Criticism, Essays

330 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1972

About the author

Jacques Derrida was a French philosopher best known for developing deconstruction, a method of critical analysis that questioned the stability of meaning in language, texts, and Western metaphysical thought. Born in Algeria, he studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he was influenced by philosophers such as Heidegger, Husserl, and Levinas. His groundbreaking works, including Of Grammatology (1967), Writing and Difference (1967), and Speech and Phenomena (1967), positioned him at the center of intellectual debates on language, meaning, and interpretation.
Derrida argued that Western philosophy was structured around binary oppositions—such as speech over writing, presence over absence, or reason over emotion—that falsely privileged one term over the other. He introduced the concept of différance, which suggests that meaning is constantly deferred and never fully present, destabilizing the idea of fixed truth. His work engaged with a wide range of disciplines, including literature, psychoanalysis, political theory, and law, challenging conventional ways of thinking and interpretation.
Throughout his career, Derrida continued to explore ethical and political questions, particularly in works such as Specters of Marx (1993) and The Politics of Friendship (1994), which addressed democracy, justice, and responsibility. He held academic positions at institutions such as the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and the University of California, Irvine, and remained an influential figure in both European and American intellectual circles. Despite criticism for his complex writing style and abstract concepts, Derrida’s ideas have left a lasting impact on contemporary philosophy, literary theory, and cultural criticism, reshaping the way meaning and language are understood in the modern world.

Reviews

[Geoff]

I wasn't going to add this to the shelves, because I don't really have any intention of reading it any time soon, especially because I'm not at all in any way prepared to read Derrida. Fine. But then I saw it was on that "Pompous Books to Read in Public" listopia - and well, if there's anything that's gonna make me add a book it's to spite that fuckin' Pompous Books to Read in Public list, which in and of itself is a pompous list. Any case, look what's on there - Thucydides? Mrs. Dalloway? Little Fucking Dorrit by Charles Dickens?! Chekhov? Rilke? Musil? Valeria Luiselli?? Tolstoy and Dostoevsky for fuck's sake?? Paradise Lost? Motherfuckin' Madame Bovary is pompous?!? Solzhenitsyn? WEB Du Bois? Rebecca West? Goddamn Homer??!! These are pompous "hipster" reads?? I am truly baffled. Anyway, I won't be reading Margins of Philosophy in the near future, but fuck you, PBTRIP list.

[Rickeclectic · Rating 5 out of 5]

Contains one of the two most important writings by Derrida, "White Mythology." this essay is a little less accessible than "Plato's Pharmacy" from the book Dissemination, but still fairly clear.
Requires a bit of reading on Aristotle, but fairly accessible parts.
The notion is that philosophy is really a kind of mythology that has been bleached of its context and so becomes "pure."
This essay has an extended discussion of metaphor and how metaphors play in philosophical texts. The goal is to show that philosophy, while aiming at truth, uses metaphor in the extreme to not only attempt to strip language of context (and therefore contextual meaning) but by doing so to create its own mythology (or truth) totally devoid of context.
The essay is a very effective criticism of any ability to provide "philosophical" truth and a strong criticism of Western philosophy, at least up to Kant.
The essay questions our ability to do philosophy at all and yet shows how everything we do is embedded in metaphor.

[hayatem · Rating 3 out of 5]

يعيد جاك دريدا قراءة ونبش التراث الفلسفي- الفكري، اللغوي-اللساني عن طريق التحليل والتفكيك المستمر لحركة الاشتقاق التكويني الذي يمضي من مرحلة الحس البسيط والإدراك الحسي الحاضر، إلى البناء المعقد للتمثيل: أي "من الحضور الأصلي إلى لغة الحساب الأكثر شكلانية."
لا يقوم التفكيك على الانتقال من مفهوم لآخر وإنما على قلب وتغيير النظام المفهومي، كما يقوم أيضاً وبنفس القدر على قلب وتغيير النظام غير المفهومي الملحق بالنظام المفهومي التقليدي.

كتاب متخم بالمعرفة الإقصائية -التحليلية.

[Preetam Chatterjee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mission 2026: Binge reviewing (and rereading on occasion) all previous Reads, I was too slothful to review, back when I read them.

If philosophy often aspires to clarity, Derrida insists on complexity. Not chaos—complexity. Meaning is not destroyed; it is shown to be relational, deferred, and haunted. And once you’ve glimpsed that instability, the old certainties feel almost quaint. You enter this text expecting "essays", perhaps arguments with footnotes. Instead, you get detonations. Derrida circles concepts—presence, speech, writing, meaning—and then quietly asks: what if the centre never held? What if the margins were doing the real work all along? I remember feeling both exhilarated and mildly attacked. Derrida’s prose doesn’t guide you; it provokes you. Words split open. Terms that philosophy treated as stable—logos, origin, truth—start trembling under scrutiny. The famous meditation on différance (that almost-word, that deferral and difference entwined) feels like a philosophical mic drop delivered in slow motion. You can’t quite paraphrase it without betraying it. And maybe that’s the point: language always slips, always exceeds intention. What would fascinate you, reading it today, is how playful the text is beneath its density. Derrida is mischievous. He stages philosophy as performance, exposing its rhetorical seams. The “margins” are not peripheral; they are sites of productive instability. Footnotes threaten the main text. Supposed supplements reveal themselves as foundational. It’s structural Jenga, and he keeps pulling blocks with alarming calm. Of course, it’s not easy reading. There are moments where you reread a paragraph and feel like the paragraph has reread you. But the difficulty is generative. It trains you to distrust binaries, to question inherited hierarchies, and to notice what discourse excludes in order to function. After this book, even everyday conversations feel suspect—what suppositions are hiding inside ordinary words?

Most recommended.

[isabela baldini · Rating 5 out of 5]

dessa vez, li apenas o texto "différance"

[Iris · Rating 2 out of 5]

I want to like this book more than I do. It just feels so much more dated and less articulate than some of Derrida's other work . The book follows dead ends as often as it follows invigorating insights; it reads more like a notebook en route to a book, rather than a final product.

Maybe this was a deliberate choice, seeing how much the text emphasizes philosophy's incapacity to enclose itself and establish its disciplinary boundaries. While he performs the failure, though, he doesn't take a single step away from it.

He gestures toward a world outside the bounds of philosophical discourse, in which it would be embedded but not isolated, but the text remains entrenched within the philosophy he critiques.

The intense, careful concern with philosophy's inadequacy just feels like the sterile mirror of its fantasy of adequacy. Derrida doesn't really look beyond the philosophical domain he dwells within, he just highlights all its shortcomings.

There are gems within the book, to be sure. Even if a notebook, it is the notebook of an insightful and careful mind. If you care about the specific topics he is addressing (be it metaphor in Aristotle or sense and meaning in Husserl), he says smart things that are worth taking under consideration. In the long run, though, I just feel like there are better and more fruitful avenues of development than those Derrida takes here.

[Shakhla · Rating 5 out of 5]

Одна из редких книг, которую можно и нужно перечитывать

[ananena]

"la differánce" para o escritura: linguagem e pensamento (mas foi nas coxas, tenho muito que ler direito ainda)

[Stuart Macalpine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant work on Plato for example - takes quite a lot of re-reading, but brilliant in the insight of its thought - once you get there!

[Egor xS · Rating 5 out of 5]

Marvelous. Jackie is incredible. I wish I could read with the same delicacy and penetration

[Phillip · Rating 4 out of 5]

Margins organizes itself in large part around the idea of the metaphorical consistency of metaphysical thinking as a repetition of physics; metaphysics metaphorically uses physis to give itself consistency, or a consistently present body. While metaphysics might understand itself as based in and dealing with concepts or to be occurring only at the level of ideas, in actuality, it is constantly deploying physical metaphors to guarantee the continuity of its presence. Presence would be a metaphorically continuous body which would constitute the consistency of truth conceived of as metaphysically certain. At the same moment metaphysics presents itself as being nothing but an ideal and conceptual proposition. Metaphysics appears to be practiced purely at the level of concepts and ideas, however in using metaphors in the constitution of its sense, it actually and covertly relies on a fabricated, metaphorically physical continuity or presence. This presence underwrites the continuity of the truth of its ideas. Because of this Derrida argues philosophy has always based itself in an exclusion of the metaphorical, as a way of thinking not compatible with concepts. Metaphors are the other of concepts, metaphysical thinking, and metaphysical ideality cannot be seen to be implicated with them. In Derrida's reading however, it constantly is, as it is the concept's location in metaphysical space, which allows one concept to be intelligible from another. That is, in the last instance it isn't the internal coherence of the idea or concept which distinguishes it from other concepts or ideas but rather just the metaphoric, corporal continuity which it is secretly presumed to possess. In this sense, metaphysics is “white mythology”, the mythology practiced by the white man, as that culture which understood as eminently 'rational' and defined by the absence of mythology in its thought. All of Derrida's thought takes place in a kind of 'reprojected space', or he derives the sense of his ideas in terms of a conceptual space where the events which define the the pre-understood coherence of metaphysics would be taking place. This space is like the unconscious of metaphysics, but thinking this space and its objects as a type of insubstantial model is the basis for the practice of deconstruction. So while there is the conceptual level of metaphysics in which for instance nature and culture, or even concept and metaphor itself, conducts themselves as a series of opposed tropes or concepts, there is a 'hidden', sublimated conceptual background which metaphysics both disavows but uses. For Derrida then thinking the problem of metaphysics involves thinking this relationship between a consciously represented conceptual level and a disavowed, unconscious, substantial metaphor.

[Alyosha · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very important collection of essays from Derrida.
The play of words, themes, and ideas disseminated and disseminating across these essays and his other works, linking them through the progressive enaction of deconstruction is well highlighted through this collective text.
'Differánce' is, perhaps, a good place to begin reading Derrida. As good as one may get, perhaps, for deconstruction plays throughout our thought, and we find ourselves always already familiar with Derrida, though never now.

[Conor Slattery · Rating 5 out of 5]

Derrida's essay on differance is, in my opinion, his single greatest acheivement. The way that he addresses the ontological differance and follows the trace even to that "original genesis" is truly something to behold. This is not the place to start for Derrida, but if you are interested in Derrida and Heidegger, this is the place to go.

[Giuseppe · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Articolata in una serie di saggi apparsi tra il 1967 e il 1971, con l'eccezione di due inediti, l'opera affronta alcune questioni fondamentali:
la natura dello spazio e del tempo, il significato della filosofia di Hegel in generale e della semiologia hegeliana in particolare, il problema dell'umanesimo e della fine della metafisica, la linguistica e la sua storia, la scrittura, la fenomenologia.

Avvertenza del Curatore

1. Timpano
2. La différance
3. Ousia e grammé. Nota su una nota di Sein und Zeit
4. Il pozzo e la piramide. Introduzione alla semiologia di Hegel
5. Fini dell'uomo
6. Il circolo linguistico di Ginevra
7. La forma e il voler-dire. Nota sulla fenomenologia del linguaggio
8. Il supplemento di copula. La filosofia innanzi la linguistica
9. La mitologia bianca. La metafora nel testo filosofico
10. Qual quelle. Le fonti di Valéry
11. Firma evento contesto

Traduzione italiana dal francese di Manlio Iofrida"

[Diego · Rating 4 out of 5]

Derrida fiel a su análisis deconstructivista analiza la filosofía desde Aristoteles hasta Husserl. la estructura del lenguaje y su importancia para la filosofía, desde la gramática, etimológia hasta la metáfora.

El libro es una serie de ensayos, el mejor en mi opinión "White Man Mythology" un libro muy interesante pero no de lectura fácil.

[Ryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is alright. It contains the essay "Differance" which is key to the development of poststructuralism. Not as interesting as others.

[Alamgeer]

here derrida examines the thought of saussaure, rousseau, kant , hegel. nietzche. husserl and others in deconstructive way

[sologdin · Rating 2 out of 5]

more or less translucent essays on hegel, heidegger, austin, et al. some are cited fairly often, contrary to all sense & decency.

[VAle]

Lo devo dire? Lo dico. In realtà di questo libro ci ho capito poco o niente.
Ecco l'ho detto!

[Doug Pohlner · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well, after having taking a class by the man, "Derrida on Derrida", I thought this would be nostalgic. It wasn't. If anyone else has read any deconstructionism and wants my snarky review lemme know.

[David Markwell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Derrida goes to the edges of philosophy to do fundamental philosophy.

[Abdel Hernández San Juan]

Major Book of jacques Derrida, pivotal inspiration to my research, specially interesting the chapters on Husserl and Hegel, while interesting in general, discussions on the origin of language around condillac, the vienna circle, paradoxes between linguistic and philosophy around Benveniste and Aristóteles as well as comments on austin, secound chapter on oussia and gramme contain significant moments around spatiality, less interested in the chapter about differance which miss understand saussure throught certain pos lacanian catastrophic reading of the signifier, chapters on methaphore in philosophy and valery as well are less of interest to me, first chapter around margins and leiris must be considered as an attitude which seems to be atractive. A deeper book significant red under focussed readings

Abdel Hernández San Juan

[Jonatan Södergren · Rating 4 out of 5]

While “Of Grammatology” is a more formal philosophical text, in many ways I prefer “Margins of Philosophy.” The texts are more stylistic, particularly the first one where Derrida plays around the formatting to illuminate how the philosophical work quite literally takes place in the margins of the text. I should also point out that the text ”Signature, Event, Context” which originally was published here was one of the first academic texts I read (in his response to Searle), which I have used in my own work on speech-act theory, so of course it’s very dear to me.

[Luke · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Every sign, linguistic or nonlinguistic, spoken or written (in the usual sense of this opposition), as a small or large unity, can be cited, put between quotation marks; thereby it can break with every given context, and engender infinitely new contexts in an absolutely nonsaturable fashion. This does not suppose that the mark is valid outside its context, but on the contrary that there are only contexts without any center of absolute anchoring. This citationality, duplication, or duplicity, this iterability of the mark is not an accident or anomaly, but is that (normal/abnormal) without which a mark could no longer even have a so-called “normal” functioning. What would a mark be that one could not cite? And whose origin could not be lost on the way?”

[Jared]

I spoke of a letter but it's infinitely deferred so mind your business and let me do my silly little philosophy

[Asma Djezzar · Rating 4 out of 5]

لا بملك دريدا الا ان يسحرك ويشدك بقوة عبر منهجه التفكيكي ذي الإيقاع المتفرد

[Michael Roth · Rating 5 out of 5]

A classic.

[Carol Arap]

and now i have a headache. what an annoying man (my entire thesis is Derridian and i love him).

[M. MUSEEM · Rating 4 out of 5]

You have to be a mad man to read this book at the age of 27 when you are just trying to make a sense of life and post college professional life.

I guess that means I am a mad man.

PHEW! What a book. It took me more than 3 years to finish the book. I had to re-read some of the pages just to get a grasp of how JD was trying to postulate a perspective.

Do I have regrets reading this book? No
Will I read it again? No
Will I remember it's contents in some context of my life? Yes.

[wally · Rating 2 out of 5]

it was okay