Starting with Derrida

by Sean Gaston

How does one start with Derrida? In this exciting and accessible book, Sean Gaston presents a new kind of introduction to Jacques Derrida, arguably the most important and influential European thinker of the last century. Derrida claimed that 'However old I am, I am on the threshold of reading Plato and Aristotle ... we need to read them again and again and again.' In Starting with Derrida, Gaston introduces all Derrida's major works and ideas by tracing Derrida's reading (and re-reading) of Plato, Aristotle and Hegel throughout his writings.

Starting with Derrida argues for the importance of the relationship between philosophy, literature and history in Derrida's work and addresses all the key concepts in Derrida's thought, including his work on time and space, being and the soul, sensation and thought, history and literature, the concept and the name. The book encourages the reader to enter Derrida's varied and complex legacy through the moments in Derrida's work that are concerned with the question of origins and beginnings. By actively engaging with Derrida's ideas in this way, Gaston reveals a new and highly original reading of Derrida's work and provides a useful introduction to his entire corpus. This exciting new book is essential reading for students of philosophy and literary theory and, indeed, anyone interested in the work of this hugely important thinker.

Genres: Philosophy, Literary Criticism

234 pages, Hardcover

First published November 22, 2007

Reviews

[Chris Kaiser · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting approach to an often obscure theory. This is not a "Derrida for Beginners," as the title probably suggests. Instead, the author takes us through Derrida's method of always starting again with the philosophical texts that came before (i.e., before = earlier as well as what lies ahead). The book is a primer in many ways, but for Derrida novices (like me), don't expect to digest each page fully and with ease. This is dense stuff, and Gaston's conversational (indulgent) style sometimes obscures more than it assists. Highlight: chapters covering form and substance in Aristotelianism, and De Anima.

[Christine Cordula Dantas · Rating 2 out of 5]

A confusing text about the obscure work of Derrida. The book was interesting in the first chapters and did offer some insights. Getting back to the beginning again and again in novel directions was a somewhat helpful way to approach Derrida's work by using his own "method". However, the book become increasingly confusing and obsure as I progressed. There are good pointers to references. The best introductory book about poststructuralism (that I know of) is by James Williams.

[Vijayendra Acharya]

Reading a book called "Starting with Derrida" by Sean Gaston (chk out www.continuumbooks.com) I have always seen him (Derrida) as a methodological thinker than a substantive philosopher per se.
The linguistic churn he brought to bear in the post-modern philosophies has opened up a Pandora's Box - indeed, far from trimming down the text to its context or go into geneology of its "traces", the deconstruction project has actually given a new lease of life to textual narrativity, as if it were embodying much more than it may, on its own, lay its claim to. I wish I could say more than just point to this link to a biography of Jacques Derrida, which apparently has just been published and has fired up discussions, that I am only observing as an outlier.

In very layman terms terms, I think Derridian wisdom can be summed up as an articulate ability to read in-between the lines of a text/narrative.

He is big-gun philosopher and with his mastery of strip-tease (read deconstruction) of most narrators and narratives of Western philosophy, I think he has brought whole edifice of Western philosophy to a point of self-reckoning; in a way returning it back to its most formative impulses and constitutive elements. For him textual narratives, indeed written language per se was essentially a certain regress from the fidelity of a "speech-act".

His espousal of the rules of grammatology, the foundational linguistics that formed the basis of deconstruction of text for me has some faint echoes of the labours of ancient Sanskrit grammarians in India like Panini and Yaska, though such comparisions may be somewhat odious for some of his readers.