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Loading... Derrida: A Biography (2010)by Benoit Peeters
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. Full disclosure: I didn't read this cover-to-cover, but dipped into it based on topics. Derrida is a highly-influential figure in 20th century philosophy and literary studies. Whether his influence will last is debatable -- post-modernism and deconstruction both owe a lot to his work, but are coming under increasing criticism. But Derrida himself was an interesting figure: a French Jew from Algeria who always felt like an outsider in French university circles. He was intensely loyal to his family and friends (some of whom he probably should have ditched.) This biography is a good introduction to his life and work. no reviews | add a review
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This biography of Jacques Derrida (1930?2004) tells thestory of a Jewish boy from Algiers, excluded from school at the ageof twelve, who went on to become the most widely translated Frenchphilosopher in the world ? a vulnerable, tormented man who,throughout his life, continued to see himself as unwelcome in theFrench university system. We are plunged into the different worldsin which Derrida lived and worked: pre-independence Algeria, themicrocosm of the École Normale Supérieure, the cluster ofstructuralist thinkers, and the turbulent events of 1968 and after.We meet the remarkable series of leading writers and philosopherswith whom Derrida struck up a friendship: Louis Althusser, EmmanuelLevinas, Jean Genet, and Hélène Cixous, among others. Wealso witness an equally long series of often brutal polemics foughtover crucial issues with thinkers such as Michel Foucault, JacquesLacan, John R. Searle, and Jürgen Habermas, as well as severalcontroversies that went far beyond academia, the best known ofwhich concerned Heidegger and Paul de Man. We follow a series ofcourageous political commitments in support of Nelson Mandela,illegal immigrants, and gay marriage. And we watch as a concept? deconstruction ? takes wing and exerts anextraordinary influence way beyond the philosophical world, onliterary studies, architecture, law, theology, feminism, queertheory, and postcolonial studies. In writing this compelling and authoritative biography,Benoît Peeters talked to over a hundred individuals who knewand worked with Derrida. He is also the first person to makeuse of the huge personal archive built up by Derrida throughout hislife and of his extensive correspondence. Peeters? bookgives us a new and deeper understanding of the man who will perhapsbe seen as the major philosopher of the second half of thetwentieth century. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)194Philosophy and Psychology Modern western philosophy French philosophersLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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One holiday season in another lifetime I bought a biography of Henry Miller for my best friend Joel. Being weedy undergrads we had dashed through the Tropics and were prone to crass public pontifications on the Sublime: oh brother. Just before that New Year's Joel told me he would never be a writer, not after reading the letters of Miller reproduced within the biography. I felt a similar awe this week when devouring Peeter's massive treatment of Derrida and the inclusion of the wide ranging correspondence the philosopher painstakingly ground out seemingly day after day. The tome is a bit fawning and there is a great deal of repetition.
What remains puzzling about the Derrida Mystique is how he struggled from outside the Academy to gain entry, and was instantly disavowed by it once inside, even as his acclaim was peer recognized just as quickly. Such is a spur to an inquiry on the University as bulwark or some such. Indeed an entire Derrida-as-Aporia surfaces in protean detail, many divergent and somewhat elusive. How did he feel about his image? Why did he brand it? Why then was he disappointed? The same goes his sense of Friendship and Secrecy; these were two major concepts for him. Their application is likewise fascinating.
There will no doubt be better, more informed approaches in the future, once more letters are released and matters become less immediate.
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